Today marks 30 years since Taizan Maezumi Roshi died. He was one of the handful of Zen pioneers who brought the practice to the West and, directly or indirectly, fathered hundreds of sanghas around the world. He was Bernie’s teacher.

I, too, attended a few of his retreats and once spent an entire summer with him at Zen Mountain Center in California. I see him in my mind now, 30 years after his death: the very slender and elegant man walking towards me with his customary grace, a smile playing around his lips.

For Bernie, there was only one Roshi; he never referred to him in any other way. Even in discussing some of the issues related to Maezumi Roshi and the bringing of Zen to the West, he spoke quietly and thoughtfully about him, reflecting a bond that was indissoluble.

It didn’t matter that Bernie went in a whole other direction, emphasizing social needs and ills, working alongside bakers and construction workers who did not do zazen, who were not going to come to sesshin in a zendo. In 1991 I visited Roshi for the first time in California and he asked me: “What is Tetsugen doing?” while shaking his head.

But my guess is that he knew that Tetsugen, his first dharma successor, was breaking through barriers other than those described in the Gateless Gate. That with his Brooklyn Jewish ingredients, Bernie stood at that dharma kitchen like a great chef in one of those reality food shows, wielding knives and pots, a big grin on his face as he cooked his version of the Supreme Meal. I remember Roshi coming to the opening of Greyston’s first housing complex for homeless families, the AIDS center, and giving a talk on top of the old Greyston Bakery after looking around and laughing: “What a funky zendo!”

Today I’ve been exploring inside what it means to me to have ancestors. Ancestors are not outside of this writer, they didn’t live in some grand old past, they’re in my blood, in my bones and marrow. A famous story of a Zen ancestor, Bodhidharma, talks to his successors one by one, saying: “You’re my skin,” to one, and to another: “You’re my flesh,” and to another: “You’re my marrow.” They were in him and he in them, no one was a separate self.

This is how I feel about ancestors, be they Maezumi Roshi, Bernie, my parents, and others. They’re never gone, they’re completely me. If anything, there’s less and less of me and more and more of them.

We say that we want our students to be clearer and deeper than we are, and for good reason. They’re dealing with different things from us, or different versions of the same things. There’s AI, there’s the ubiquitous phone screen, and the preference for on-line meetings rather than in-person. Last night I heard over dinner with friends that their son is interviewing with Silicon Valley companies that send solar-powered blimps to take you from one place to another like helicopters, along with other means of transportation that aren’t in use yet but will be soon. Wars exist that didn’t exist before, the culture is changing.

New teachers will have to navigate their practice and teaching through more and more complexity. That’s why they must be better teachers than us—and probably will be. And maybe one day we will be in their blood and marrow, just as I bowed this morning to the photo of Roshi, his relics in a small urn close by, and took a deep breath, recognizing his presence as I breathed in and as I breathed out.

The more you take in of your ancestors, the less of you remains, or what you thought was you when you were working hard to differentiate yourself. Little by little, dead or alive, they continue to reflect back more and more Eve fragments, that stubborn, arrogant, self-centered me.

So grateful to Roshi for how he laughed at me: “Eva [he refused to call me by my dharma name], you are the worst koan student I have seen. Usually, women are better than men at koan study, but not you.” And he laughed so hard I couldn’t possibly take offense. To feel like I failed in my encounter with him felt way better than to make a big impression on anyone else. Even as I made space for failure after failure, failure and success meant less and less.

Not a day passes when I don’t talk to Bernie this way: How come you’re not here now? There were 11 years between us in chronological time, much more in dharma time, but as I’ve gotten older, I understand more and more of what you often said. I share your reservations about the dharma in the West, I see clearer and clearer the narrow silo we fall into in a culture that adulates the individual, I resonate with your old impatience. Now we could really have a conversation—so where are you?

And maybe one day, too, I’ll take in the peace he felt in the last years of his life, the gratitude he had for its fullness, the multitudes of ancestors he had inside him, no need to teach much more, no need to rush at life like a social reformer. In those last years there was laughter and also stillness around him, serenity being the other side of patience.