This week Roshi has been featured in the Liverpool Echo with this interview.
The founder of one of Liverpool’s most fabled bars is sending a message of acceptance, kindness and compassion in an ever polarised world. David Scott, who founded the original Everyman Bistro with business partner Paddy Byrne, runs the Stonewater Zen Centre, which aims to promote and develop the practice and transmission of Zen Buddhism through meditation, study, precepts, Buddhist psychology and stewardship of meditation centres.
It offers a regular weekly meditation schedule, several intensive retreats annually, and maintains city centre and rural training centres locally and nationally. Zen master Dave spoke to the ECHO last week, about the importance of Zen practice and his journey to where he is now.
Born in 1944 in a two-up two-down house in Bagwell Street, Anfield, Dave left home when he was 18 to study chemistry at university, later doing a PhD at Manchester University. The day after his oral exam in 1970, he and Paddy Byrne opened the Everyman Bistro on Hope Street. Dave said: “The Everyman Bistro remained a vibrant and important part of the city for the next 40 years.
“Four years into running the bistro, I went to Okinawa, Japan – the traditional birthplace of Japanese karate. I trained there for 15 months and returned to England with a black belt. When I got back, I opened the Uechi-Ryu Karate Dojo in Liverpool and founded the Uechi-Ryu Karate Federation of the United Kingdom, which still exists today.”
He continued: “I taught Karate for 25 years. Whilst I was in Japan, I wrote a book which, in retrospect, feels very presumptuous, called Recipes for Living. I was only young and it was self-published but there was a section in the book about Japanese cooking; an agent from London saw it in a shop window, got in touch with me and commissioned me to write a book about Japanese food. That began a career for me in writing about food and travel. I’ve published 30 books, later specialising in Buddhism and travel.”
Dave began training as a Zen Buddhist in 1982 and, in the year 2000, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk. It was that same year that he founded the Stonewater Zen centre in Liverpool and in 2019, he received Inka, a Japanese term meaning the ‘seal of enlightenment’ or certification by a Ch’an or Zen master of the authenticity and depth of a student’s experience of enlightenment.
Speaking about the teachings of Buddhism, Dave said: “Buddhism tells us that suffering or lack of ease arises because of our attachments and ongoing sense that something is lacking. This latter usually takes the form of experiencing a lack of a very basic feeling of security – a sexurity we all know consciously or otherwise life can never ultimately provide.
“Our ignorance is that we either do not know this and continue striving for a safe place to stand, or we know but continue to deny impermanence because we are so attached to the idea of a permanent ‘me’. Because it is trying the impossible task of fixing itself a secure home, the ego-self experiences a lack, a black hole that, despite everything we do, cannot be filled up.”
He continued: “One outcome of this is that we constantly defer to the future as a place where eventually, if we follow the right path, the right teacher, the right relationship, job and so on, we will finally find peace. In doing so we inadvertently distort reality – striving for a life free of problems where dogs don’t crap on the road and we are loved unconditionally by everyone.
“Nobody’s life, and I imagine not even the Buddha’s, is free of problems – being not okay is okay. Instead, liberation for me comes from embracing our lives as they are, including all our passions and delusions. This also involves appreciating our lives and recognising they are precious in and of themselves.”
In this day and age, Dave thinks the teachings of Buddhism are “more important than ever”. He said: “The essence of Buddhism is that everything is interconnected. Our particular place in life is dependent on where we were born, the religious and cultural life of our parents, the circumstances of the world but there isn’t any first cause. Everything arises out of cause and effect, meaning that all of us, and everything else on the planet, is connected.
“Without the sun rising and setting every night, without the trees, plants and animals, we wouldn’t be here, and it’s this sense of separation that causes people to make sure that the idea of one’s permanent self is looked after. This means people wish to take care of themselves and not other people and that is essentially a mistake.
“The idea of separation and uniqueness is much more pervasive right now; individuals are more polarised, life is more polarised, countries are more polarised, and it’s very difficult for young people because the market depends on creating specialness and a need for uniqueness and it is an impossible dream. The paradox is that we are all unique, but because each of us are unique, we are all the same – that’s the hard thing to get your head around.”
He added: “From a practice perspective, the most important quality which is encouraged is compassion and kindness. Be kind to yourself and be kind to the people you meet on a daily basis and acknowledge that for each person, their life is important – whether they are a homeless person or a very rich person – for each of them, their own life is the most important thing. And everyone’s lives are only the way they are because of the conditions that have created them, it’s as much a question of luck.”