Q&A with Peter Coyote at
Grinnell College
October 2015
The actor, writer, and countercultural icon talks
about life, learning, and Zen.
by Elise Hadden
When Peter Cohon Coyote and I met for our interview
in Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, I was recovering
from a weeklong illness. As he introduced himself
and reached out his hand, I clasped my hands behind
me and said “I’d shake your hand, but I’m a little
sick today and I don’t want to infect you.” He said,
“Ok, well how about a hug?” then embraced me like I
was an old friend.
This casual charm, along with a healthy dose of
thoughtfulness and clarity, pervaded the rest of our
conversation. As we sat outside in the Bucksbaum
courtyard, occasionally ruffled by the fall breeze,
Coyote spoke candidly with me about his Grinnell
experience, love of learning, and the value of Zen
Buddhist practice.
You came to Grinnell at a time when the College was
starting to admit more students from the East Coast.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like
for you here?
PC: It’s hard to describe,
because it was all new, and I didn’t have anything
to compare it to. I had a train ride out here, and I
had two suitcases, one of which was filled with
records with a record player strapped to it. I had
my guitar and one suitcase of clothes. And I met one
of my best friends on the train, Ken Schiff [’64],
who’s a novelist. I met Terry Bisson [’64] the first
day of school. He was whistling a John Coltrane tune
while walking across the Quad, and I called out the
title. Fifty-five years later, we’re still friends!
It was very exciting, particularly because I wasn’t
a sports guy in high school, and I wasn’t
necessarily one of the cool guys. I was interested
in a lot of political, Beatnik, and counterculture
stuff. And I came to Grinnell and had the same
experience I had when I went to Martha’s Vineyard,
which is that I met a lot of kids who were
interested in the same things. They had read the
same books, they were thinking about the same ideas.
I had that heady experience of sitting down and
talking to people for six hours and finding out
there were other people seeing the world the way I
was.
That experience carried over to faculty as well. I
made a lot of friends on the faculty that I stayed
friends with until they died. And because I was
older than a lot of the kids, the faculty really
took me under their wing, and I used to bartend
their parties because they knew I would keep my
mouth shut [chuckles]. I got a sense of the
humanized faculty with their hair down, not from the
other side of the desk. I really came of age here. I
was supported, it was a safe environment to
experiment, and I had every tool that I needed to
mature.
EH: I’ve read both of your
books, and what strikes me about you is that you’ve
had such a huge variety of experiences in your life.
It almost seems like it’s too much for one person!
Looking back, what inspired you to move through all
those phases? Were you looking for something?
PC: Because I’m the Zelig
of the counterculture [laughs]. You know, when I
look back on it, it’s kind of mysterious. All I was
doing was following what interested me. When I was a
kid and I misbehaved and they stood me in the
corner, I’d get interested in the wallpaper. Kind of
like an idiot savant [chuckles]. When I was 10, I
went to stay at someone’s house who had a huge folk
music collection. And I started recording the
records into a tape recorder, because their names
were curious — Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell,
Cripple Clarence Lofton, Pinetop Smith. Well, four
years later folk music was the rage and I was
something of an expert. And the people that I met
turned out to be stars in that world. Tom Rush was
dating my sister; Bill Keith, a great banjo player,
was my friend. I don’t know how that happened.
I don’t know how it was that I went to California to
be a writer and I dropped out of graduate school
because I thought I was too stupid, and then wound
up living with all the poets that I had read here at
Grinnell. Our “Bible” had been Donald Allen’s book
Modern American Poetry 1945–61. I met so many of
those people and actually my life became entwined
with theirs. It was not a plan; it was never a plan.
And then at about 45, I stopped being hip. I just
dropped off the edge. And I don’t know why that
happened either. From 14 to 45 it just seemed that
everything I was interested in, the country got
interested in. And everybody I met that I liked was
somebody who was achieving something. And then
around 45, I looked back one day and I thought, “I
don’t know the people on the covers of the
magazines. I don’t know the music. I’m off the
cutting edge of the moment.” But it didn’t bother
me. So that’s when I started to write, to look back
and try to make sense of it.
EH: From the sound of it,
you’ve had a lot of really important mentors in your
life. Can you speak to how you found those mentors
and how you were able to truly learn from them?
PC: There is something
about me that my fundamental intention is to learn
and to share, to learn, and to teach. And, again, I
don’t know why that is. But that’s the way I am, so
that when I meet people, I’m always looking for what
they know that I don’t, whether they’re sincere,
what their intentions are — because once I can
figure out their intention, I don’t have to think
about them again. It may take a long time, but then
I’ll know.
We say in Zen practice, “Put your cow in a big
field, and you’ll always know where it is.” If you
chain it up on a short chain, it’s going to get
tangled and you’re going to have to fuss with it. So
instead of trying to correct people, you just watch
them and you see who they are, and then you know
what they’ll do. You don’t have to worry about it.
So that was an abiding preoccupation.
EH: Has that innate desire
to learn and share influenced your life in Zen?
PC: Yes. It certainly has
something to do with my decision to ordain as a
priest and my willingness to visit various dharma
groups and teach and talk. I joke that I started Zen
practice 40 years ago, and I’m still looking to
discover the bullshit in it [laughs]. It’s just a
part of learning. I don’t know what it is; it could
be a Jewish gene.
If you think about it, that’s all the Jews had. This
is the year fifty-seven hundred and
seventy-something in the Judaic calendar. 57, not
2000! And with 5,000 years of being kicked out of
one country or another, the Jews who survived
carried knowledge and wisdom with them, because
their money and their liberty was taken away and it
was all they had left. So I grew up in a family that
respected knowledge. My father would never answer a
question. He’d say, “Go to the encyclopedia.” He’d
make me look it up. And I hated it! But you get in
the encyclopedia and soon you’d have a whole field
of knowledge.
EH: Do you have any advice
on how to keep a mind open to learning new things
and sharing that learning?
PC: Meditating is the most
effective way to go back to ground zero every day
and to become intimate with your mind and practice
detachment from it so that you’re not afraid of it.
You’re not running away from fear of failure or
toward grandiose fantasies. To be open is the same
thing as to be receptive. So to take some time every
day and kind of Windex your eyeballs and your ears
and your brain and just let the static run out —
that allows you to step outside into a new kind of
world. And I think that when the world feels new, it
feels engaging and interesting, and the learning is
more effortless. I think that what cuts off a lot of
learning is fear. I tell my kids that I never really
got my first job until I was 35. I just had faith
that somehow I was smart enough to be OK. And I
didn’t steal … often. [laughs]
I think the biggest thing, and another thing that
meditation helps you with, is seeing through the
endless realms of propaganda and bullshit that
culture [bombards] you with. You get lost in it,
until you take a quiet moment and realize that
you’re made by the same thing that made
hummingbirds, that made the Horse Nebula. It makes
you a little bit of an outsider, but it gives you a
center of gravity that you can control and rely on.
When you realize that the Earth itself is what’s
supporting you … what are you going to be lonely
for? What else do you need? Meditating allows you to
revisit that every day and live in the spacious
interior.
EH: A lot of people think
of Zen Buddhism as a very disciplined and removed
practice. Would you say that meditation is an
element of Zen that is more accessible to people in
their everyday lives?
PC: I understand why you
say that, and I actually harbor some of those
criticisms. There’s a cult in Zen practice in some
places that I call “Japanismo,” which is a kind of
slavish imitation of what we imagine Japanese people
are doing. And the people who do that forget that
our founder and teacher came here from Japan because
he thought that Zen had become moribund, strangled
in rituals. So on the one hand I’m critical of that.
On the other hand, there’s a part of the ceremonial
and the formal that I really love, because it takes
you out of yourself. You are stepping into a
2,500-year-long line of people and doing things the
way they did, putting yourself in conscious
continuity with them. You’re devaluing your own
value system for a moment. My teacher and my lineage
are trying to find the fine line that doesn’t throw
away the contributions of our forebears, but doesn’t
become so alien to Americans that it feels like a
cult.
I’m a lay practitioner. I don’t shave my head. Most
Buddhists don’t. Most Buddhists don’t even meditate.
When I identify myself to people, I say that I’m a
meditating Buddhist. Because if “Zen” is going to
sound weird or cultish, I don’t want to use it. I
grew up with ranchers and garage mechanics, and if I
can’t talk to them in a way that’s useful for them,
Zen is not going to flourish in America. So my
project is to make Zen practice vernacular to
America, to find ways to talk about it that don’t
seem strange, because these are human truths, and
they ought to be accessible to any human being.
In Zen Buddhism, we also encourage people to try
other teachers and traditions, to try to find
something that fits. I encourage people to try a
religion because you can find your spirituality,
which is the free-floating sense of the sacred. If
you can find it within a religion, it actually
shapes you up and it holds you down to earth.
Because if you’re just going across the surface of
life like a water strider, you’re not going deep.
Once you find a tradition, stop looking and dive
down. When people say they don’t like organized
religion, that’s their ego talking. Try it, and
criticize it from the inside, but don’t criticize it
with a cheap shot from the outside. The millions of
adherents are not all idiots!

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