Hot Springs and Money

Yesterday I went out to Tassajara for the second time this season. It was my mother's sixty-second birthday and one of what the San Francisco Zen Center calls “locals' days”. The definition of who is a local and who is not, according to the Zen Center, is a little hard to swallow. Last year my friend Kua, who is one of the monastery's closest neighbors, called for reservations and was told they had all been taken. Mostly by people from San Francisco, which about 150 miles and several million people away. When another friend and neighbor of Tassajara, Michelle, called to make reservations, a well meaning receptionist started explaining to her how bad the road is. “I know,” said Michelle, “I grew up thirty minutes away.”

“No one,” said the receptionist, “lives thirty minutes away.”

Okay, it does take most folks closer to an hour to drive from Michelle's place to the Zen Center, but you get the picture.

The first time I visited this year, I stole a $20 water bottle from the office in a fit of pique. Something in me bridled at spending $30 just to soak in the springs. Mind you, I have a great deal of respect for the monks of Tassajara. I appreciate the rich heritage of DT Suzuki, the center's founder, and Tassajara's esteemed place in the role of spreading Zen in America. And the kitchen, birth place of the Tassajara Bread Book and many important contributions to the now robust organic foods movement, is an inspiration. But I needed a new water bottle and I felt it made the situation more just. 

I have been going to Tassajara since I was fifteen and would clear trails in the surrounding area. I certainly don't mind pitching in a few dollars for use of the kitchen's coffee and tea service, a few dollars to help with the work of the monks. But $30? To soak in a hot springs? Really, you espouse a life of non-attachment and simplicity but want to pay for yours by charging me a stiff fee to soak in hot water that comes to us all free of charge?

Tassajara, though it often feels like a world apart to visiting urban dwellers, exists with plenty of help from its proximal and societal neighbors. It sits at the end of a heavily travelled, improbably steep and rutted dirt road. County road grading, paid for by county tax revenues, makes it possible for the place to do business. When fires threaten the center, and they often do as it is situated in one of the most breathtakingly flammable locales imaginable, heavy federal, state and local resources are needed to help defend it.

And then there is the arrogance of folks visiting the monastery and the effect on our local community. Stories of pulling well-heeled bodhisatvas out of ditches and being thanked with no thanks are legion. Yes, many are just the well-yeasted gripes of rednecks and hippies who don't care for city-dwellers, but many are true. Humorless, self-important zennies are just really damned annoying.
So I think Tassajara owes us, the actual locals, something. And I think that something is low or no cost access to a soak in the hot springs that they did not create. No one owns a hot springs, it can only be taken care of. I think that even a monastery has neighbors, that we all depend upon each other, and basic access to such an important part of our mutual community should be shared, not exploited. Whatever the Zen Center wants to charge for actual services it provides to visitors—the great food, lodging in the cabins, instruction in zazen—is their own business and fine by me.

My own rudimentary sense of spirituality is literally based upon the existence of hot springs. Who needs samadhi or heaven or miracles when the earth itself spouts pools of soothing hot water out of the ground? Who can take seriously the search for personal purity in the face of such impersonal perfection? Who would charge other people for access to the heaven that actually exists right here and now? Unless the San Francisco Zen Center changes its approach to stewardship of the springs, I will continue to apply my own belief system to the situation. I will pay the exorbitant fee for using the springs, but I will recoup the cost to the extent I see appropriate.