by BISHOP KOSHIN OGUI
Buddhist Churches of America

My encounter with hippies bore many pleasant talks and memories. I recall it was the summer of 1964. I headed to Berkeley to teach Buddhist zasen meditation with a young Zen priest who had come from Japan.

The way hippies greeted people back then was to hug, and they would hold on to you for a moment. It was their expression of friendship, a way of exchanging energy between two people. When they did this to the young Japanese priest, he blushed and was clearly at a loss.

When the meditation was over, we were invited to join them and were treated to tea and cakes that had a mysterious odor. I thought they were tasty and after eating some of the cake for a while, my body started to feel as if it was floating in the air.

When I asked the girl next to me about it, she told me they had made a special marijuana cake for us.

Since I was in no state to drive back to San Francisco, we decided to stay and rest there for a while. Then they told us there was a Japanese-style bath in the garden and invited us to enter.

It was a giant bath made from branches they had gathered and as we were admiring it, two young white women and a black woman, all completely nude, entered the bath laughing with their arms raised in the air.

It was funny seeing them in their innocence, unabashedly covering neither top nor bottom, and then seeing the stuttering priest. I couldn’t help but enjoy myself. I had heard that American ladies cover their tops but not their bottoms. But flower children, as the hippies referred to themselves, they didn’t cover a thing. They laughed and and kindly showed us their friendship.

The assassination of President Kennedy and the horrors of the Vietnam War had a deep impact on this generation. I guess when unbelievable things occur in the world, people run to extremes. The hippies were like that, wandering and searching for love.

In the end, we managed to return back to San Francisco in one piece, and we laughed about the whole experience. After all, it had been us, not the hippies, that had been obsessed with the women’s nudity.

I was 23 then and to this day it is a precious memory. It was an experience that transcended right and wrong and greatly enriched my life.

Gassho

Translated by Lefteris Kafatos