John Crook was born in 1930 in Southampton into a moderately well-to-do family. He was educated at Oakmount School, a preparatory school in Southampton, and at Sherborne School, a boarding school in Dorset. At school he studied biology, physiology and physics. He frequently commented on the effect of the environment of “all male, firm discipline, a lot of sports especially Rugby football which I came to love, good academic class work and military training.”1 He then went to University College, Southampton, where he studied zoology. His undergraduate study of gulls led to his first publication in 1953, which helped him to gain a PhD place at Jesus College, Cambridge.
As a teenager he spent the war years evacuated to the New Forest with his mother and sister and it was here that he had for him a pivotal experience.
As the war gradually went our way, I explored the beautiful forest and the moorlands around our home. I had become a small but ardent bird watcher. Since I had no binoculars, I had to move very quietly among the trees and undergrowth. I learnt solitary field craft the hard way and an ability to still the mind in focussed attention undoubtedly developed at that time. One day I saw a squirrel pop out of a hole in a great beech tree. It looked at me from a few yards away and we gazed, motionless, at each other. Suddenly I was overcome by an extraordinary joy, all my concerns seemed to disappear and I found myself fallen to the ground uttering words of thanks to Jesus, tears falling from my face. That experience became a turning moment for my whole life: I had come across something that was altogether “other”.2
His academic studies were interrupted by National Service and the Korean War. He was stationed in Hong Kong, where he was a Second Lieutenant artillery officer specialising in radar. On the sea voyage over to Hong Kong, he read Christmas Humphrey’s book Buddhism and found that some of its themes could not be countered by the reductionist scepticism of his scientific training. His first active contact with Buddhism came in Hong Kong and is recorded in his autobiographical book Hill Tops of the Hong Kong Moon. He was introduced to Mr Yen Shiliang, a merchant who had ‘sat’ with the great Master Xuyun and John joined his evening classes held once a week in a traditional Chinese doctor's surgery. As a consequence of this contact John went on to explore Chinese monasteries on Lantau Island, where, on a visit to Baolin Monastery, he came across an inscription in English at the bottom of a stone arch:
To the great monk Sing Wai
There is no time:
What is memory?
This first confrontation with a koan created a sense of shock and a stopping of the mind: “A sudden silence was filled with the sound of the light wind and below the mists parted, to give a momentary glimpse of a small junk heading out to sea”. The question touched him deeply and became one of the foundations for a life-long love of Buddhism and especially for Chan.
After National Service, his early explorations took him to the Indian teacher Krishnamurti who was living in Poona. He went on to attend retreats at Samyeling Tibetan Centre in Scotland founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche and at Throssel Hole Priory, where he met the Revd. Jiyu Kennett. He commented:
In an interview she remarked on the erratic nature of my practice. “One two three four five,” she said “Not one eight three two five!” There was something so total about the way she prostrated before the Buddha that it brought tears to my eyes. I began to understand that wordless teaching could be the most profound.3
The early teacher that he came to regard the most highly was Lama Thubten Yeshe. John had attended many Tibetan retreats and taken a number of higher initiations. On one retreat he was fascinated by the lama going into meditation in front of a audience and felt drawn "deeply into a most profound silence". From Lama Yeshe and other Tibetans he learnt the power of mantra and other Tantric practices that remained of profound personal significance throughout his life.
In parallel with these early explorations in Buddhism, John, a student of Robert Hinde at Cambridge, was one of a second generation of ethologists, and after early research on weaver birds in West Africa, became a leading expert in primatology and animal behaviour. He was a pioneer in the fields known then as social ethology and socio-ecology, disciplines that later flourished as behavioural ecology. Following his PhD John took up a lectureship in the Psychology Department at Bristol University, later being promoted to a Readership in Ethology. He was the first scientist to try to tell the story of the Evolution of Human Consciousness in a groundbreaking book of that title published in 1980, at a time when, somewhat paradoxically, the academic discipline of psychology avoided the issue of consciousness almost entirely. He co-led two major Himalayan expeditions. In 1977 an anthropological research project into village life in Zanskar, resulted in the publication of Himalayan Buddhist Villages: Environment, Resources, Society and Religious Life in Zangskar, Ladakh, co-authored with Henry Osmaston.
In 1968-69 he spent a year as Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in California and it was here that he was introduced to the ‘Encounter Movement’ and the techniques of humanistic psychotherapy. On returning to Bristol he established the Bristol Encounter Centre where he passed on approaches that he had learned in California. He had also attended ‘Enlightenment Intensives’ in the US and these were to have a significant influence in his life. The enlightenment intensive process was invented by an American teacher, Charles Berner. It was based on ‘Zen principles’ but adapted to an entirely secular non-Buddhist context. John’s career as a Buddhist teacher can be said to begin in 1975 when he ‘re-consecrated’ the Enlightenment Intensive approach by integrating it into a traditional Sesshin format thereby creating a new type of Buddhist retreat, the fiveday Western Zen Retreat. He offered these retreats at Maenllwyd (Standing Stone) an old farm house in central Wales, a place which to this day does not have electricity and is in a magnificent and beautiful setting. They were very effective retreats and soon a small group of retreatants began returning to the Maenllwyd with it becoming a spiritual home for many. John’s approach was direct and non-theoretical, his aim being to guide people towards having a taste of the heart of what the Buddha “was on about”. John saw the importance of continuing his own training and here is another story of his encounters with teachers that relates to this time:
Layman John went up to London to see the nun Myokyo-ni. As they sat together he told her of his new retreat centre, the retreats he was running and his hopes for its development. He had come to ask for any advice she might have. As time went on Layman John found that Myokyo-ni was saying very little. She made no comment nor did she give any advice. So he spoke some more – and then, somewhat hurriedly, again some more. Still no comment. So he stopped and said, “I am wondering what response you have to what I am telling you”. Myokyo-ni looked at Layman John and said, “I have no response.” 4
This was a significant encounter that John mentioned many times: it taught him the importance of selfreliance and not seeking approval, a lesson that was to become vital in the years to come.
In the 1980s John revisited Mr Yen in Hong Kong. After some years of exploration of Tibetan Buddhism in the Himalayas, he wanted to renew his acquaintance with Chan, but Mr Yen was now an old man, with very poor hearing and John realised he would need to find another teacher. In Hong Kong he came across a book by Chan Master Sheng Yen and decided to go on retreat with him in New York. This was the most significant encounter in his Buddhist life. After a number of retreats, John asked Master Sheng Yen about experiences he had had and Master Sheng Yen confirmed that these were ‘seeing the nature’ and gave John authority to offer Chan Retreats in addition to the Western Zen Retreats already being offered. In writing about his relationship with Shifu John said:
I have sat many retreats with Master Sheng-yen and I have written up my retreat reports into an article “Working with a Master” published in the journal New Chan Forum in 1999 (No 20). Shifu has become what the Tibetans call my “root teacher”. It is difficult to describe what I owe to him. “Everything”, I might say, but perhaps the most important thing has been the growth of Dharma Confidence. Without his faith in me, which I feel I can never justify, I could not now do the work of Dharma that I do.5
Some of John’s regular retreat participants took the initiative for forming the Bristol Chan Group in 1991, the forerunner of almost 20 groups in the country, and the first edition of The New Chan Forum was published in the same year. Then, in May 1993, to his great surprise John was given transmission as Master Sheng Yen’s first Lay Dharma Heir, with a responsibility to take the teachings back to Britain and Europe. John asked Master Sheng Yen for advice on how he should carry out this responsibility. Master Sheng Yen’s response was that he was Chinese, John was European; it was up to John to work out how to translate the tradition of Chan into a Western context so as to make it accessible to Western students. The Western Chan Fellowship was formed in 1997 and over the years a range of Chan retreats have been developed founded on the Linji (Rinzai) and Caodong (Soto) traditions of Chan, in addition to a Tibetan Mahamudra retreat offered annually following an empowerment John was given by a Ladakhi Yogin. Most of John’s teaching was at the Maenllwyd in Wales, but he also led retreats in Norway, Poland, Germany, Russia, Croatia, and USA and Sanghas in these countries have various degrees of affiliation with the Western Chan Fellowship. John clearly understood that the WCF is an unusual Chan Buddhist organisation in that whilst it is associated with Dharma Drum Mountain and has a friendly relationship with Throssel Hole Monastery in the UK, it is an authentic lay Chan Buddhist Sangha. John fully saw and took on the responsibility of the organisation he founded having a rather special and important role in translating a tradition that has been centred on monasticism into a form that can be adapted into western culture.
Over the years John led numerous Buddhist trips and pilgrimages to the areas he had been involved in academically particularly visiting Buddhist yogins who lived in caves and small temples in Ladakh. These meetings are recounted in The Yogins of Ladakh: A Pilgrimage Among the Hermits of the Buddhist Himalayas, co-authored with his travelling companion, James Low. John describes one of these encounters in The Koans of Layman John:
Layman John and Yogin James were drinking chang with the yogins Nochung Tse and Gompo up at the little, tree shaded monastery of the Tigress on the Hill in Zangskar…James said. “John and I have been talking about the mind and the yogins’ path to understanding. We want to ask you what you understand by the mind.” The two old yogin friends seemed to freeze in shock. Nochung Tse picked up his prayerwheel and begun entoning “Om mani padme hum” in a loud voice without pausing. Gonpo looked most uncomfortable, rocking from side to side as if trying to make up his mind. Then he said, “Since the two of you have had the benefits of training in meditation, why don’t you go and do it? Then you would have no need to ask such a stupid question!”6
John’s endeavour to synthesise ancient Buddhist insights and contemporary scientific and philosophical thought, culminated in his final work, World Crisis and Buddhist Humanism (2009). This book restates the Buddhist insight that there is a Middle Way between fundamentalism and materialism in modern terms. This makes a different type of world view possible, one that can inform the creativity and energy of the many people who seek cooperative solutions to global challenges that are on a scale not present during the Buddha's lifetime. The book places emphasis on the need for a fundamental change in the way we educate children and young people, as well as giving pointers as to how each person can discover for themselves what a ‘Middle Way’ approach to living really means.
Even at 80 John was very active and had many plans for the future for developments at his home in Winterhead and for the WCF. He died unexpectedly at home when alone and his body remained undisturbed for several days before being found on July 15th 2011. When a Great Teacher dies it is a sad moment, but over the last ten years, John and others have done a great deal of work that leaves us well prepared, so that whilst he is deeply missed and his particular approach can never be repeated, nevertheless we are able to move forward. John planned carefully and thoughtfully for continuity in the tradition he inherited from Master Sheng Yen and there is every sign that his work will continue to bear fruit, even though John’s bright spirit and luminosity of mind will be sorely missed.
Notes
- Crook, J. H (2001). The Circling Birds – Opening Insights on the Path of Chan, published in Chan Comes West 2002 and 2016, Dharma Drum Publishing, and in Chan Magazine Summer 2017
- 2001 ibid.
- 2001 ibid.
- Crook, J. H. (2009). The Koans of Layman John.
- 2001 ibid.
- 2009 ibid.
