Memories of Sensei Koan

by Mark Shogen Bloodgood

I met Sensei Koan in the fall of 1999 when I first stepped through the Temple Gates at ZCLA. At the time, Sensei was commuting from Santa Barbara on the weekends, which became my own pattern for the next 20 years.

He was a role model for me in those early years with his calm demeanor and steadfast practice. Koan helped inspire my own calling to the priesthood. When Roshi Egyoku had him begin offering face-to-face (daisan), I was his first “guinea pig.” I’ll never forget it; we met in the Southeast room above the zendo.

It was through our prison work that we really bonded. Koan mentored me from the start. For many years, he and Nagy (Rev. Daniel Nagacitta Thich Minh Nhat Buckley, Jr.) would come up to San Luis Obispo monthly to join me in visiting inmates at the California Men’s Colony (CMC). They would spend a night or two at our home. Our friendship deepened. They also befriended my wife, Karla, always a gracious host. She is also an avid gardener and Koan was a certified Master Gardener. So they hit it off immediately. Now Nagy was a character, often spinning one corny joke after another. He’d have us in tears laughing. Koan, who had to listen to Nagy on the four-hour drive to SLO in addition to the time spent with us, would often say, “Stop it, Nagy…you’re killing me!” A profound teaching from Koan regarding the prison sangha was to “Just show up.” I’ve used that teaching not only in the prison work but through all of my practice. Just show up.

Early on, Karla met Koan’s wife Jill Genji Yeomans, and, like Koan and I, they became fast friends. To this day, the two of them talk on the phone almost every day of the week!

At Dargon’s Pub in with Genji, Karla, and Shogen.

Sensei Koan married Genji in April of 2015. Nagy officiated and I was his best man. Karla helped plan and coordinate the wedding. Much later I found out that Koan’s neurologist in Santa Barbara had told Genji and Koan that they should marry soon and get his affairs in order. The doctor scheduled an appointment with the University of San Francisco’s Neurology department for the month after their wedding. So symptoms were manifesting even back then. Ultimately a diagnosis was made: Multiple System Atrophy (MSA)—Parkinson’s. This is a rare neurogenerative disease. After two years, as the disease progressed, Jill wasn’t able to care for him at home. He kept falling and it was becoming impossible for her to get him up. Eight years ago, following one such event, he was hospitalized, then sent to a skilled nursing home and finally moved into Vista Del Monte—a retirement community. Here he spent time in their Independent Living and Assisted Living facilities and finally was moved to their memory care unit.

Throughout these years, I was able to “just show up” as my schedule allowed. I would bring Sensei’s rakusu. We would chant and sit zazen and talk. We went out to lunch until he could no longer leave the facility. These were special times. Often Karla would join me and we would stay at Jill’s house to also support her.

Over our years together, notwithstanding the 5th precept, some of my favorite memories of Koan were the pub crawls we did in Santa Barbara for many years on his birthday, December 24. Friends and family would join us along the way. We’d always end up at Dargan’s Irish Pub. In 2024 when Koan was too ill to leave the facility, Jill, Karla, I, and others had a meal there to celebrate his birthday. (Their vegan Shepard’s pie is to die for!) And this year, after he passed, family and friends once again gathered at Dargan’s on his birthday. It was the same day we spread his ashes around trees he’d planted in Santa Barbara.

As Roshi Egyoku shared in her remembrance, Koan first started practicing at ZCLA as a result of listening to a talk by Sensei Daishin at the University of Santa Barbara. In that talk, Sensei Daishin spoke of emptiness. Koan told me, it was this that so intrigued him that he began his Zen journey. Shortly before Daishin died in 2022, I was able to orchestrate a cell phone call between Daishin and Koan. That day, they were both “with it” enough, cognitively speaking, and able to share some stories and memories and say their goodbyes. It was so moving.

Shaving Shogen’s head before his Tokudo 2012

In 2018 Koan wrote an article for the Water Wheel “Watching the Universe Come and Go.” It started “I was sitting on my back deck a couple of days ago, when an orange fell off the tree and landed in a compost bin.”

Later it reads:

…Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. The process by which this happens is the mystery of the universe. I don’t expect that the former orange will become a new orange, but it will become something. When an orange blossom or a human egg is fertilized, they begin to draw upon the storehouse of materials available to them. Emptiness becomes form. The extent to which I can see and appreciate form and emptiness, as well as space, is the degree to which I am able to appreciate my own mortality as well as my own eternity…

Roshi Shogen is the guiding teacher at San Luis Obispo Zen Circle.