The Zen Rancher

America’s history can be seen through the progression of its agriculture: first bison, then cattle, then grains. Reverend Bill Milton is an oddity in that history, and perhaps the only one of his kind: cattle rancher, conservationist, and Zen priest. Driving toward the Milton Ranch, outside of Roundup, Montana, I know that he has started today with 108 full bows as he does each morning.

Bill is a pillar of Montana’s Zen community. He regularly teaches at different Zen groups around the state, both in person and via Zoom. He is easy to talk to, laughs often, and fulfills the role of leadership in various sanghas. I am excited to speak with him about his life and practice, and what his unique experience of American Zen can teach others. However, it takes time for our conversation to turn toward him. Perhaps it’s simply not possible for a rancher like him to talk about himself before talking about his ranch. After all, he has many identities, and none of them makes sense without our surroundings.

Bill starts with grass.

We talk about decimated bird populations, the encroachment of forests on poorly managed grasslands, and intensive farming. We talk about groups working for solutions. In a characteristically Zen manner, Bill sees the universal in the granularly specific. It is in this context—the soils and grass that shape life here—that I start to hear about the details of his life.

“The land is constantly wrestling with your delusions.”

Bill grew up alongside the environmental movement. Born in 1949, he was raised by divorced parents, his mother living in Berkeley, California, and his father on a ranch near Wolf Creek, Montana. In the summers, he hung around cow camps, moving cattle between ranges and living among ever-present wildlife. “You’re imprinted by where you grow up,” Bill says. “Whether good, bad, or indifferent, those are formative years for how you are conditioned and look at the world.”

His father died when he was 17. He and his siblings, all self-described “hippies,” decided to challenge their family’s probate process and donate their father’s 39,000-acre ranch to a state agency—Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks—instead of selling to wealthy out-of-staters who planned on developing the land. Since the land occupies a prime spot of the Beartooth Mountains near Helena, the idea created controversy among corporations, ranchers, the Nature Conservancy, and the governor of Montana. Despite pushback, the siblings succeeded in donating the ranch to Fish, Wildlife, and Parks as a game range. In the following years, Bill entertained the “delusion” that he could return to the ranch. “When it became a refuge, we’d go back, and it was good, but it was weird psychologically and physiologically,” he says. “I just couldn’t find my balance.”

Bill started college at Montana State University, then transferred to UC Berkeley, studying English before switching into the newly founded Natural Resources program. At Berkeley, he was immersed in the thriving counterculture of the late sixties. His brother was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and part of the crowd of philosophers, architects, and Beat poets swirling around campus. There, he met his now-wife Dana. On school breaks, they traveled along the coast in his brother’s VW bus, working in bird monitoring, and regularly took part in activism. Eventually, he landed at Green Gulch Farm, a ranch that had been given to the San Francisco Zen Center with the help of Huey Johnson, who had also helped Bill sell his own family’s ranch.

By his senior year, Bill was frustrated with authority and the fact that his English courses wouldn’t transfer to his new major. Instead of graduating, he followed Dana to a rural ranching community in New Mexico. Living without running water and heating the house with wood, he worked for locals, read widely, walked everywhere, and became interested in grass. “It was paradise,” he says.

His drawing of three grasses decorated the invitation to their wedding, which took place back in California, at Point Reyes National Seashore, where Bill had counted birds, fallen in love, and stumbled across Zen.

After a few years in New Mexico, Bill returned to Montana and began a cattle ranch on a new plot of land. Bill and Dana have now farmed the Milton Ranch for more than forty-five years.

“In some ways, my initial connection with Zen can be directly attributed to [growing up on] the ranch,” Bill says. And though his formal Zen practice began while attending lectures at Green Gulch Farm, his practice flourished when he returned to Montana ranching. Bill found a teacher in Layla Smith Bockhorst, a Zen priest in the Bay Area who regularly returned to her home state of Montana. He participated in many extended retreats and received the bodhisattva precepts in 2004 in one of the first jukai ceremonies in Montana. Ten years later, he was ordained as a priest, another first in Montana, and began exploring his role as a teacher as well as a rancher.

“The land is constantly wrestling with your delusions,” he says. “You must be totally engaged” with its “wonderful, interconnected, interdependent reality.” That reality includes the human community.

This commitment to practice coincided with Bill’s involvement in working groups focused on conservation and ranching. When the conversion of his father’s ranch caused an increase in the elk population and affected neighboring ranches, Bill helped gather stakeholders. Though it took years, they eventually created a management plan. Ever since, he has worked with groups like the Audubon Society’s conservation ranching program and the Northern Plains Resource Council. “The key,” he says of his leadership role in these groups, “is creating a place where people feel welcome.”

At the Milton Ranch, Bill’s welcoming personality has helped maintain a pocket of the sixties vagabond energy. The stories of people who have drifted through to stay at the ranch for a time are eclectic and numerous, including those of college students, doctors, conservationists, and monks. One of them taught Bill his daily practice of 108 bows, which he completes before sitting on Zoom with the Bozeman sangha at 6 a.m.

Here, life centers on relationships. “Everything is Buddha,” Bills says, “whether it’s land or cattle or people or community.” Bill’s bodhisattva vow, and his sangha, is expansive. “If you realize how much the world is supporting you, it becomes self-evident what you’re supposed to be doing, which is taking care of other people.”

“Everything is Buddha, whether it’s land or cattle or people or community.” 

“Healthy grasslands,” Bill says, “are always shifting.” You do not build them up toward a state of finality. They are dynamic, and so is life on the ranch. Drought, soil, seasons, and wildlife are always in flux. The herd of five hundred cattle continually needs to be moved over the ranch’s fifteen thousand acres.

Part of this constant change involves the killing of his cows for beef. I ask Bill about the apparent contradiction between his vow of nonkilling and raising animals for slaughter. In Bill’s mind, we have spoken of little else for hours.

“It comes back to appropriate response,” he says. This is a habitat that evolved with grazing animals, where grass is eaten and fertilized. In the absence of livestock, it deteriorates. “It includes killing,” Bill says, “but so does almost everything we do.”

Bill’s name as a Zen priest translates as Continuous Practice, Beneficial Action, Buddha Field. In the run-up to becoming a priest, Bill spoke with the prominent teacher Sojun Mel Weitsman (1929–2021) at the Berkeley Zen Center about his ranch, his family, and how he had no idea how he could add priest to the list. Sojun Roshi’s response—“That’s a great problem to have”—still makes Bill laugh.