Helen

Baba Center / South Carolina / digital / 2012

"Back in 1951 , when I prepared to leave the Ryutaku-ji monastery, Soen Roshi gave me a pottery tea bowl, one of a set of three of differing forms but similar glaze and pattern, made by the Tokyo potter Guro.  

The Roshi had already given one of the bowls to G. Ray Jordan during his first visit to the United States in 1949.  Whenever two of us meet, we bring our bowls and have ceremonial tea with them, as an expression of our brotherhood: the three bowls are known as the Brother Bowls.  

Only once in the over twenty-five years since the bowls were dispersed have all three brothers met together for such a ceremony, at the Ojai sesshin in 1968.  At that time, the three of us exchanged the bowls, so now I have a renewed symbol of our little sangha."

- Robert Aitken in A Zen Wave, circa 1978