The day he discovered this fact, Lynch tried to withdraw another $40,000 from Cohen's accounts. The songwriter then discovered several 'improprieties' with his accounts, including the fact that he had unknowingly paid Lynch's $75,000 American Express bill. 'I left my robes hanging on a peg/in the old cabin/where I had sat so long/and slept so little,' he wrote in his 2006 poetry collection 'Book of Longing,' adding, 'I finally understood/I had no gift/for Spiritual Matters.'Ĭohen was tipped off about the missing money by an 'insider' with loose ties to Cohen's longtime friend, former lover, and personal manager of 17 years, Kelley Lynch. He became a monk in 1996 but left the monastery a few years later. Cohen maintained that he was loyal to Judaism, and that he thought of Zen more as a discipline than a religion. Just on that level it's very valuable.'īeat poet Allen Ginsberg once asked Cohen how his devotion to Zen affected his relationship with Judaism.

It helps you endure, and it makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering. Whether it has a spiritual aspect is debatable. 'There are people who do, but they leave in ten minutes because the life is very rigorous.

'Nobody goes into a Zen monastery as a tourist,' Cohen told The New Yorker in 2016. He woke up at two-thirty in the mornings to shovel snow, light fires, and clean toilets, and he meditated for several hours each day. At the monastery, Cohen lived in a tiny cabin.

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