Letters of Transmission

You hold in your hand a unique treasure. There are thousands of spiritual teachers, but true Zen masters-those who can transmit, who can midwife a student to awakening-are rare. Some may write books or essays, but their real work is done individually with students in person. Alfred Pulyan (1896-1966) was one of those rare Zen masters who can transmit, but his method of transmission came not through personal contact, but rather through an exchange of letters with his students. He worked primarily by mail and had notable success triggering enlightenment in serious students through the power and rapport of his letters. A fortunate side-effect of his method is that it is written down, and thus potentially available to others-providing one can find any of his letters.

           Those collected here are from a correspondence with Richard Rose in 1960 and 1961 and provide an invaluable look under the covers as a Zen master goes about his thankless work. 

           Rose was already awake when he heard about Pulyan's ability, having had a definitive spiritual experience in 1947 at age thirty. He contacted Pulyan for the purpose of learning how to transmit what he'd become, pretending to be a seeker while continually pressing Pulyan to reveal method. At times in these letters Pulyan seems to be onto him, but with unbelievable patience and incredible mastery he works to crack Rose's nut and at the same time tells him what he's doing and how and why he's doing it. 

           Pulyan wrote his letters in longhand, with extensive margin notes. For this book, I have edited them to include those notes in the main text, and made other minor edits to help the letters read more smoothly.  Rose's letters are not included in this book, except for his initial inquiry that kicks things off.

           Not much is known about Pulyan's life, and in fact he's somewhat of an enigma. Much of what is known he tells us himself in these letters. Conflicting reports have him being born either in New York or London, but at any rate he turned up in New York City sometime after World War I and lived most of his life there. He is of an age where he might have served in the war, but no record of it exists. From these letters we know he studied mathematics and worked as an accountant, office manager, and executive. In the late 1950's he and his wife Madeline bought 12 acres in rural Connecticut where they and some friends settled in. One of these friends was the young woman who was Pulyan's teacher and who was responsible for his realization. (He'll tell you the story in one of these letters.)

Pulyan's only known published writings are articles in The Aberree, a journal in circulation from 1954 through 1965. The best known of these, "The Penny That Blots Out the Sun," is included at the end of this book.