Zen™

Yesterday at Sweeping Zen, Adam Tebbe posted a video of Jun Po Denis Kelly, head of the Hollow Bones Order and the creator of Mondo Zen™, laughing about a sesshin in which he “terrified” a whiny participant by grabbing him by the chest, throwing him against a wall, and growling, “Wake up. People are dying.” Jun Po uses this as an illustration of the “ferocity” of Rinzai Zen, and ends by saying that though that ferocity needs to be maintained, it also has to be used skillfully. Adam’s question was, Does this kind of violence have a place in Zen? There’s a lot to be said about it — I understand the concern, but I do think there’s a place for a kind of ferocity, an intensity, even if we don’t often see it in the Soto world.

So I’ve been trying to sort out my thoughts about it, but I’m finding that it’s hard to separate out the question at hand from the fact that I feel predisposed to distrust Jun Po Denis Kelly. I have never met him. I like his photographs — he has a powerful look about him. And his resume is pretty great — he’s worked hard to be where he is, and I don’t doubt at all that a deep sincerity has been behind that work. I would say that he comes off as arrogant in the video, but that aside, I actually like that he seems to take a hardline, my-way-or-the-highway view of training. That can be a good thing, assuming other factors are in place. So this distrust I feel may be completely unreasonable; the reason may be too simple to be legitimate. But here it is: it’s the little ‘ ™ ‘ after Mondo Zen™.

The official description of Mondo Zen™ begins as follows:

Mondo Zen™ is based on Japanese and Chinese Zen, updated for the 21st Century. Mondo Zen™ transcends the hierarchical/authoritarian, gender-biased and constraining monastic aspects of traditional Zen in favor of practical, experiential “in the world” engagement. Relying only on direct personal experience – as taught by the Buddha himself – it does not allow mythic constructs to complicate its philosophical orientation. This includes ideas such as reincarnation, soul as personality, bardo realms, past lives, a creator deity, or other faith-based beliefs. It is important that in our practice of Mondo Zen™ we consciously choose to set aside all such ideas at least until we have experienced, tested and evaluated for ourselves a simpler and stronger way of knowing. Why is this important? Because those beliefs and concepts force our immediate experience into a container of pre-defined understanding, robbing us of the experience of deeper insight. By letting go of our attachment to our beliefs and mythologies, at least while we are actively doing this practice, we remove a barrier to insight caused by our attachment to those views.

It keeps going: Mondo Zen™ is “a transmission of Correct Understanding,” “a full heart-mind collaboration between ‘student’ and ‘teacher,'” and so on.

I have trained exclusively in traditional Japanese monasteries, and I would describe Zen in the same way. Of course Zen relies on direct personal experience. Of course it does not allow mythic constructs to complicate its philosophical orientation (though I would add that it also doesn’t allow its philosophical orientation to complicate its philosophical orientation!). Of course it transcends the hierarchical, gender-biased and constraining monastic aspects of traditional Zen — it transcends all containers, and fills them too. This is a strawman argument. This is packaging the obvious as something revolutionary. There is no “update” to be found here. If anything, this stinks of Boomeritis, the term coined by Ken Wilber (a brilliant philosopher, and colleague of Jun Po’s) to describe baby boomers’ inclination to believe that they are the first ones to see things as they really are, and that they will be the ones to establish the new paradigm.

In short, this is just cynical marketing. And though I understand it, I think it’s a crime.

The more famous example of the ‘ ™ ‘ is Genpo Merzel’s Big Mind Process™ (“Big Mind®: The gateless gate to boundless perception”). In some ways, Genpo is too easy a target. His activities had been the object of private derision by Zen teachers for years, then last year, after various scandals were made public, he became an object of public scorn. Much was made of his indiscretions, and along the way, some critics also laid into Big Mind Process™ itself, mostly labeling it a scam, something with no connection to Zen. But in its marketing, Ken Wilber referred to it as “arguably the most important and original discovery in the last two centuries of Buddhism. …With the Big Mind Process, a genuine kenso can occur in about an hour — seriously.” It was called “the third turning of the wheel of the Dharma.” In reality, it’s Voice Dialogue repackaged for a Buddhist audience. And as a tool of inquiry, I have no problem with it; like many others, I am, however, uncomfortable with the over-the-top claims made about it (among other things, if realization is just an experience in your brain, that’s a reductive re-definition of realization).

To be fair, in one important way, Mondo Zen™ and Big Mind Process™ are not really in the same category. Mondo Zen™ describes Zen exactly the way just about everyone would describe Zen, then claims that it’s new and improved. Big Mind Process™ takes something that has almost no relationship to any historical understanding of Zen, then says that Zen has evolved into this. Both arise from the assumption — always confusing to me — that Zen and Buddhism are somehow fundamentally irrelevant to “ordinary life,” that they’re broken and have been waiting for someone to come along and make them meaningful again. But each is trying to sell something very different from the other.

Both, I suspect, offer something fairly valuable. I’ve watched videos of Big Mind™ workshops — it looks like a nice therapeutic tool, one that many could benefit from. And I suspect I would like Mondo Zen™, because it appears to be exactly like, well, Zen.

But it’s this “selling” that does not sit well with me.

I want to be perfectly clear: I have no problem with Zen priests trying to make money. A lot of people, in my experience, take a puritanical view that priests should live in poverty, and they begrudge them any income at all. But the fact is that in most cases, even the famous ones live with very little, and the obscure ones barely scrape by. I’m sure Genpo Merzel has a comfortable personal income, but I also know that much of the income generated by his work has gone to support his center. Brad Warner has been very forthcoming about how little he makes from selling so many books, and I have no reason not to believe him. Zen priests struggle. In Alaska, the members of the center, for all their sincere efforts, couldn’t completely support me on their own, so I took another job — that job, in very real ways, was what made much of the activity at the center possible, because that non-priest job gave me the basic security to stay in Anchorage and do my work as a priest. That scenario is playing itself out all over the country, at centers big and small. I know priests who want to retire but can’t, because they know that shaking things up in even the slightest way will cause the center to collapse completely, and they don’t want that to happen. I know another priest who has worked for years as an airline attendant — his community would benefit tremendously if he could be with them all the time, but who will support that? So when a priest takes on another job, or when they get second billing on the yoga retreat circuit, or when they pursue book deals, I think, congratulations. When Zen centers make the decision to flat-out charge for events instead of sticking to a donations-only policy, I sympathize — I’ve been part of those conversations, and those decisions are never, never easy. They’re painful. It’s never about money, never just that, not as an end in itself. It’s about creatively supporting a place of practice and your own work as a priest when, in this culture and in this economy, others can’t or won’t. There are rich, fat-cat Zen priests, but not in the US, not as far as I know.

So if Jun Po and Genpo have money coming in, that’s fine. If it’s because they’re creative, forward-thinking teachers, that’s fine. If it’s even just charisma, that’s fine. I’m not concerned about teachers being successful on that level. In any case, that kind of success is rare.

However, both Jun Po and Genpo are making claims that they have discovered a revolutionary way of sharing the Dharma, one that is uniquely suited to our time and our culture, one that offers a kind of insight and authenticity that is otherwise not available. Then they’re trademarking it so that no one else can steal it. It’s so completely out of place in a tradition like this one that when you first hear about something like this, I think the normal response is not outrage but incredulity. You’re kidding, right?

When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, he knew what a gift it was to the world. His only thought was to make it available to everyone, as quickly as possible. He didn’t sell it; he saw it as the property of all. When asked who owned the patent, he replied, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

The Dharma, to me, is the sun. It shines on everyone equally — it is always ever-present, always available. For centuries, we’ve turned to teachers to help us to see that light, to feel that heat on our faces directly. to realize that it was always there. Some teachers are amazing in that role; others are not. Some in our history have been innovators, while others have taken a more conservative approach. Some have taken on that role gladly, with a confidence that can be both powerful and unsettling; others have tried their best to remain invisible. But in 2500 years of teachers, how many have said, “I have found the better way to introduce others to their own true nature, to guide them to true seeing, to awaken them to limitless experience. And no one is allowed to teach this way but me”? Before the turn of this century, I suspect that the number was zero.

Buddhist teaching is a deep sea of plagiarism. Teachers shouldn’t pass off another teacher’s words as their own — that kind of direct stealing benefits no one. But the reality is that if we immerse ourselves in these teachings, if we listen to others with an open heart, if we chew on something we heard for months and years, we lose track, not only of who first said what, but of the more basic question of whether the ideas in our heads are really ours at all. I have thought, “This is the perfect analogy to describe such-and-such,” and thought I was really clever, only to find that the analogy appears in a book I read fifteen years ago. It was just worming its way into my head all that time. I’ve also come up with things that felt like something I’d heard, but after years of reflection have decided, no, that really is my own phrasing, my own illustration of that point. It has to be this way, because we have to bring everything to the table every time. If I love the way my teacher teaches, I will try with every bone in my body to embody that way of teaching. I can’t help but make it my own, but when I sit in the role of teacher, my teacher is also teaching, and so is his, and so are the authors of my favorite books, and so on. “My” style is born of something borrowed, stolen, absorbed, imitated. None of this is mine. It’s not mine to withhold. It’s not mine to begrudge.

And it’s not mine to trademark.

 

Keeping It Real

Entering a traditional Zen monastery is a strange thing.  Let’s say you enter on a Tuesday.  You arrive at the gate in your full robes, arranged for traveling — skirts slightly hiked up for mobility, sleeves tied back, white covers on your shins and forearms.  On your head, a wide bamboo hat that nearly obscures your face; on your feet, rough, straw sandals that (if you’re not used to them, and few people are) cut into your skin.

On this Tuesday, you stand at the gate and wait.  And wait.  After a while, a monk comes out to greet you.  He bows and asks what you want.  You say something obvious, something sincere, but you can see on his face that it’s not the right thing. This scene repeats, and you’re finally let in after an hour, or two, or ten.  And from that moment forward, you are a monk, living the schedule of a monk, meditation morning and night, chanting, eating in the same ritualized way that monks have for centuries, wearing these clothes, using these bowls, saying these words, walking just so.  Standing just so.  Sitting just so.

But on Monday, this was not your life.  You ate what you wanted for breakfast, maybe while watching TV, or talking with a friend on the phone.  You went where you wanted, when you wanted, and when you walked, you didn’t give it much thought.  The thought “How should I stand?” didn’t cross your mind.  Maybe you spent the day in pajamas.

So it’s natural that many monks, even after training for weeks or months, can wonder if perhaps they’re just play-acting.  After all, so much of monastic life is choreographed — in ceremonies, this bell signals this person to enter, which then becomes the signal for another person to follow, and so on.  There are even rehearsals.  Monks — many, in my experience — will speak of a moment (or moments) of looking around at everyone so earnestly putting on the show, and thinking, “Really?  Aren’t we just pretending to be something that no longer really exists?”  I asked myself this question, more than once.

I’ve heard from many people who knew him that Miyazaki-zenji, former abbot of Eiheiji (until his death a few years ago, at age 106), had an easy solution for those monks doubting their own authenticity:  fake it.  Don’t worry about being the real thing — instead, imitate a “real” monk.  Stand like a real monk stands.  Walk like a real monk walks.  Do zazen just like a real monk.  And repeat.

Forever.

“Imitate, imitate, imitate—imitate for your whole life.”  That’s the real thing.  It might at first sound like a flip response to a sincere question, but actually, this is a radical and direct explanation of Zen practice, a face of it which is easily misunderstood.

As one of my teachers is fond of asking, “How does one imitate a thief?”  By stealing.  What defines a thief?  That very same act.

It reveals our most basic concerns as human beings that even when immersed in the world of Buddhism — a body of teachings which unequivocally rejects the idea of a substantial, lasting, unchanging self — we become trapped by this question of authenticity.  “Yes, I’m bowing just as I was told to, but am I not just pretending?”  On one level, perhaps, sure.  But in that case, what you’re calling “pretend” has exactly the same ingredients as what is “real.”  One might even argue that what makes your actions inauthentic, if they are inauthentic, is this need to define their quality, this insistence on trying to view and evaluate them from a distance.

We all know someone who baldly separates what they do from their understanding of who they are.  Someone who plays piano every day might insist, “I’m not a pianist.”  Why?  Perhaps in that person’s definition of pianist, some particular skill level is required.  Or maybe public performances make a true pianist, or formal training, or a certain number of years of experience.  But when that person’s fingers press down on the keys, that’s piano playing.  Whether that’s a pianist or an imitation of a pianist is a question designed to take us out of that action into dissociation, where our actions are not defined by themselves, but by what we think of them.  “Pianist” is a story; “playing piano” is real.

Looking from another angle, it is not difficult to find someone who, in spite of being consistently unkind, insists that he’s a very kind person.

Who I think I am is not much more than a dream I keep having. If I am any one thing, it is this one thing that I am doing right now. If I give in this moment, I don’t have to worry about whether I am a generous person or not. If I trust in this moment, then the question of whether or not I am a trusting person is absurd. I am only my story to the extent that my story is limiting my ability to genuinely act.

And this is not just about how we view ourselves. We are also quick to judge others, to call them “false” or “two-faced” when they act in a way that we know does not come naturally for them. We say they’re posers. Traditionally, the world of Zen is a profoundly formal one, one in which a very refined etiquette dictates almost any encounter. That kind of interaction comes naturally to exactly no one — it’s something we choose, something we make real because we feel it has value, because it has the taste of generosity. It’s an attempt to offer a gift, to cultivate an atmosphere which we feel offers benefit. But when we see someone making an effort to be polite at that level, we too easily label it as a performance, a deception. We say they’re putting on airs. We miss what is right in front of us, which is that the person who is acting polite is also simply being polite.

What is it to be honest in one’s actions? If I act in a particular way to get something from you, or if I put on a particular persona specifically to deceive you, that’s dishonest. That seems clear. But what if I’m just trying to change the way I touch the world?

I used to walk with my toes pointed out at an angle — my mom told me I walked like a duck. It drove her crazy. She tried for years to get me to change my walk, to fix me, but I said, No, this is who I am. This, I thought, is the honest me. Then, in fifth or sixth grade, I checked out a book from my school library called How to Be an Indian. By any modern standard, it was a horrible, racially misguided book. It even included recipes for face paint — not for decorative face paint, but for paint to make your face the color of a Native American. I can’t find any trace of it online, and that’s good. But for all its failings, at least to a ten-year-old, the book depicted Native Americans as noble, skillful, resourceful people, people one might like to emulate. One page was about how to walk — it said that “Indians are so quiet in the forest” because they walk with their toes straight forward, not at an angle. I liked that. I wanted to be like that. So I started trying to walk that way. It took conscious effort at the start, and I’d often forget. But over time it became natural, and now, thirty years later, that’s still how I walk. Am I pretending to be something I’m not? Was I even pretending then? Or was I simply making a choice about how I want to move in the world? Was it ever a lie? If so, I can’t see it.

People value honesty. I do too. But in order to understand what honesty is, we need to clear our eyes a little and look very carefully at what constitutes a lie. I have to let go of who “I” am. I need to let go of who “you” are — I need to give you permission not only to embrace who you want to be, but also to be clumsy and unskillful in getting there. I need, at the least, to imitate someone with that kind of generosity. That’s enough.

It Really Is Who You Know

Bryan on the right, me on the left.

I came to zazen through a series of fortunate accidents, the right encounters at the right times. Near the end of high school, my best friend’s dad was cleaning out his attic and found an old, dusty copy of Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zazen that he had read in college. He tossed it in a garbage can, but my friend thought I might like it, so he fished it out and gave it to me. I’d read some books about Buddhism by then, but they were dry series of lists — so dry that I wondered if anyone actually practiced Buddhism anymore, or if it had died out (growing up in Montana, one can wonder such things). Three Pillars of Zen was a revelation to me. It’s been so many years now that I remember almost nothing about it, so it’s difficult to explain, but reading that book was the rare experience of encountering my own unarticulated ideas, articulated for me by someone else. Years later, I suspect I would find much to disagree with in those pages, but at that moment in my life, my cup was just empty enough for me to swallow it whole, to let it seep through my skin. That book changed everything about what I thought I wanted to do.

The second happy accident took place about a year later, after I’d graduated (and probably read that book twenty times). On a trip out East to see my brother’s college graduation, I’d had the opportunity to visit the Rochester Zen Center, just for a few minutes (I showed up unannounced, but they were kind enough to give me a tour. Philip Kapleau was in the building, but I didn’t get to meet him.) I was telling the story to my high school English teacher, of all people, and he informed me that he had actually organized a zazen group there in my hometown, and invited me to join. A few days later I went to his house, where he gave me a 5-minute explanation of how to sit, then we went together to a tiny room, and he rang a tiny bell (one of the members was a psychologist; we sat in the waiting room of her private practice). It was just the two of us, that time and many times after. I remember that an ant climbed up my sleeve and took a leisurely tour of my arms, torso, and face for the next hour. I’d been told not to move, so I just tracked that bug. It wasn’t zazen, but it was exhilarating, and I wanted more.

I like to say that the little group in Helena, Montana, was basically the Zen version of Fight Club: I got in because I knew someone, but it was basically a secret. Once, in a supermarket, I bumped into one of the members — she was with friends, and though she smiled and said hello, her eyes pleaded with me not to mention how we knew each other. A couple years after I started, I tried to do a journalism project for a class, interviewing the members about how they each came to Zen. Some refused, and every single one that agreed to the interview did it on the condition that I not use their name. Things are changing. That group (now the Open Circle Sangha, with their own website and everything) has changed locations and faces over the last twenty years, but in the process, it has become not only more stable, but also more open. It’s a different time. But I suspect that across the US, especially in more conservative states and smaller towns, invisible little Zen fight clubs are everywhere. One of the pleasures of driving through rural America is knowing that I am at all times surrounded by closeted Buddhists.

In the years after I first sat, I was constantly re-negotiating my relationship to the practice. Like most beginners, I had bursts of sitting once or more a day followed by a month or more of nothing, just a dusty cushion. Zen and zazen informed my sense of self in all sorts of self-serving ways –whether I was really sitting that month or not, I identified strongly as a Zen person, a guy with the inside track on spirituality and discipline. And college being the confusing time that it is, friends were happy to reinforce this image I had of myself by coming to me with their problems, looking for some Zen wisdom. I handed it out freely. I sincerely believed that I was sincere, but I was just as interested in my story of myself as a Zen person as I was in Zen practice.

After college, I moved to Japan for the first time. Meanwhile, in a different tradition and across the world in Philadelphia, my older brother Bryan had been turned on to meditation. He was completely hooked. We’d talk about it on the phone, verbally high-fiving, congratulating each other on our discovery. Then he came to visit me in Japan. Twice a day, he would lock himself in the bathroom to meditate. It drove me crazy. We were arranging our schedule around it. And at some point, I complained a little, or at least suggested that maybe he could skip it once in a while. He thought about it, and looked at my little Buddha statue and relatively untouched zafu in the corner, and he said something like this: “The thing is, if you really believe these teachings are true, then by definition, you believe they’re the most important thing in the world. You have to respond. I have to meditate. If you don’t feel you have to act on these teachings, then by definition, you don’t really believe them.”  He raised his eyebrows and looked me in the eyes for a little too long. “Am I right?”

Bryan claims he doesn’t remember this conversation. But for me, it was a big moment, one I doubt I’ll ever totally shake off. By that time, I’d been identifying with Zen for about four years, and actually sitting for almost as long. But I had never once put myself in a situation where someone could call me on my self-serving approach to it all. I’d never once put myself and my ego in a situation that was the least bit unsafe, at least not in relationship to practice. I’d created a story about myself, and I liked it, and I invited no one to challenge it.

This is what teachers are for. We need to make ourselves vulnerable to that gaze, that honesty. We need to decide that we want that.

When I was twenty-one, I didn’t have a teacher. Only a few people could have said what needed to be said, and my big brother was one of them. Maybe he was the only one. It was perfect. It almost made up for all those times when we were kids and he sold me my own toys, or made me eat chocolate chips wrapped in American cheese, or left me to watch The Shining by myself in the dark at two in the morning.

But probably not quite.

“That’s Not Zen”

Not long ago, I was part of an e-mail exchange among Soto Zen priests about the possibilities surrounding a new monastery being built in the US. One prominent American teacher suggested it was a wasted effort, and when pressed on it, basically said, “To each his own, but a monastery has nothing to do with Zen.”

Laypeople in the US might be surprised to hear how much disagreement there is among American Soto Zen teachers — not just on this point, but on everything. Many aspects of Zen practice, from the bowing to the outfits to the chanting to the overall aesthetic, can seem foreign at first, so from the outside, it may seem that most Zen centers are embracing traditional forms, even to a forbidding degree. It can look as if everyone’s basically doing the same thing. But they’re not, not at all.

It’s a strange thing about Zen that we seem unable to define it to anyone’s satisfaction. The world of Buddhism is huge, and some directions it has taken can be surprising (to say the least), but removed from the question of this sect or that, I think that most informed people could sit down in a room and find remarkable agreement about what defines Buddhism. (What Makes You Not a Buddhist by Dzongsar Khyentse is one example of someone attempting a basic definition, and doing it quite well.) There would be dissent, but a majority could probably come together. Zen just isn’t like that.

The Buddhism section and the Zen section at the bookstore are so often not one and the same — I have many times ranted about how ridiculous that is, but it’s not hard to see how it happens. Even many people in the Zen world might not be able to see the connections. In high school, I wrote a paper about Zen in which I referenced the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, then showed it to an actual zazen-sitting person to get his opinion. The only comment I got was in the margin next to the Noble Truths part: “But in Zen, these don’t apply.” So we can’t even agree on something as seemingly basic as that.

For many people, Zen = zazen. Period. Everything else is window dressing — a support at best, a distraction at worst. It’s very seductive, this idea, except in order to say that Zen is zazen, we have to then ask, What is zazen? What is it? Is it a mental exercise? A physical one? Both? Neither? Some people say zazen includes everything, while others say that if you’re distracted during zazen, then that’s not really zazen. Is zazen something you do? Something you participate in? Something you express? What does it even look like? If you do it in a chair, is that zazen? When we talk about zazen reaching into every moment of the day, is that a kind of resonance, an influence, an echo? Or can ordinary activities themselves actually be zazen? We could probably get most people to at least agree that zazen is critical to any definition of Zen, but if we took that next step to define zazen, it would all fall apart.

There’s another strain of Zen people who talk less about zazen and more about “practice.” In the case of the teacher who said monasteries have nothing to do with Zen, part of his argument was that “everything” is Zen. It’s “everywhere.” I think what is meant by this is that Zen practice is always right under our feet, that practice is the practice of this moment, wherever we are. If so, I agree, completely. But how do we arrive at that? This is a huge idea, too huge to be accepted on face value. Even if Zen practice is always ever-present, implicit in that idea is the more complicated suggestion that Zen practice actually is something distinct, something we can learn to identify — in some kind of context — so that we can then recognize it outside of that place where we first discovered it. That is to say, even if we agree that Zen is everywhere, that does not mean that everywhere is Zen. Zen is something. Otherwise, why do we keep using the word?

I had a friend who used to complain — only half-jokingly — about how much she hated “dharma friends.” Dharma friends are a kind of Buddhist friend who is always jumping right over the relative to the absolute:

My friend: “My boyfriend broke up with me. I’m feeling so sad.”
Dharma friend: “Who is this ‘I’ who is sad, but an ever-changing aggregation of components which are themselves both impermanent and empty of inherent self? And what is this sadness? In attaching to this false idea that ‘I’ am ‘sad,’ you’re just perpetuating your own dualistic delusion. Here, I’ll lend you these great Dharma talks I just downloaded….”

To me, “everything is Zen” sounds like advice from the dharma friend — even if it’s true, it’s not useful, not right now. It’s too removed. It’s an insincere response to a sincere question.

When I first got interested in Zen, I would have used these kinds of words to describe it: cool, rational, simple, creative. (The only word I’d still use is cool. I still think Zen is pretty cool.) Even if I’d hit the mark, these are just adjectives — descriptors of a thing, but not the thing. Adjectives don’t mean that much (and “zen,” when used as an adjective, means even less than most).

The thing called Zen that I have found, through teachers and training and my own inquiry, is an immersive world of ritual enactment, one in which we sit not like the Buddha, but as Buddha (Taigen Leighton’s “Zazen as an Enactment Ritual,” from Zen Ritual should be required reading, along with the rest of the book). We don’t just chant the words of our teachers’ teachers, but we say those words as our own. We bow over and over again, offering ourselves — not symbolically, but literally, completely. We hold a teacup not as if we are holding all beings, but as a complete act, as our point of contact with all beings in that moment. It is a practice with no explicit goal except to do what we are doing without reservation, without hesitation, completely. It’s deeply physical, both in its requirements and in its expression. The things that we hope might come from practice — deepened compassion, awareness, mindfulness, concentration, whatever — are not goals. They are side effects. That’s a very different thing.

If this thing we call Zen (and more specifically, the Soto side of Zen) is definable, if it is a thing, then historically, it has been something like what I have experienced in monasteries. It has been the cultivation and preservation of that atmosphere and those traditions, mostly by monks. That doesn’t mean that Zen has not changed over time. It has, in significant ways. That doesn’t mean it won’t continue to change. It will. Nor does it mean that all the things we say about Zen being relevant in ordinary modern life are untrue, or that “Zen is everywhere” is missing the mark. But again, when we say that, we’re talking about something that starts somewhere, that has a shape, that is recognizable.

For myself, I am amazed when I hear, “Zen is everywhere,” and then, in the same breath, “monasteries have nothing to do with Zen.”

If you were to ask me what “dance” is, and I told you that dance has nothing to do with dance studios or stages, you might not bat an eye. After all, one can dance anywhere. But what if I told you it had nothing to do with the body? What if I told you dance was ineffable, and all-pervasive, and part of our ordinary experience, and also something that most people know nothing about? I can imagine someone with a deep feeling about dance making this kind of argument. But is it meaningful? In this case, even if this comes from a deeply felt sense by the teacher, the message is that dance is just that: a feeling. It’s something that lives only in the world of the mind, an aspect of experience we either recognize or we don’t. You don’t see dance in going to the toilet? You don’t see it in opening a bank account? Well, then, I guess you’re not a dancer yet. Keep working on it.

That’s not good enough.

I am hesitant to define Zen, to say that it is this. Any adequate definition will be complicated, and full of words like sometimes and but also and not just. Limiting it by saying what it is is not the point. But I will say that Zen is not what we think it is, which is to say, Zen is not the experience of Zen (just as zazen is not the experience of zazen).  It’s not our ideas about it. If it is something, then it really is something. It starts somewhere. It has a taste and a feel and a look. If I tell you that it’s the taste in your mouth right now, the feeling in your hands right now, the look of what is directly in front of you right now, in this moment– If I tell you that, I’m not lying. It’s all true.

But it’s also no place to start.

Zen and Cultural Preservation

I am an outsider to the Tibetan Buddhist world. But from where I stand, it appears that Tibetan Buddhism, in its various forms, is doing quite well in the US. I have met a few teachers, and quite a few students, and even visited a few groups, and almost across the board, I would say there is a seriousness about practice and a reverence for the teachings that goes very deep. It’s an impressive world. There are multiple (large and small) centers offering monastic-style practice and intensive retreat opportunities. In many cases, groups chant teachings in Tibetan; in some, they offer language classes so that students might better understand what they’re reading.

Of course, there have been reformers, like Chogyam Trungpa, who worked to find an authentically western expression of the tradition. Also, in many cases, teachers have chosen to downplay traditional preliminary practices for western students, letting them receive empowerments early on that might, in Tibet, have had a lot more prerequisites. I do not doubt that the question of how closely to adhere to the traditional practice and its cultural context is an active and pressing one almost everywhere. I would be surprised to hear otherwise.

But I sense (again, speaking very generally) that American Vajrayana students do not feel that the way Buddhism was practiced in Tibet was a sad, hollow shell of true Buddhism. They do not feel a sense of obligation to throw away all those aspects of the tradition that don’t easily fit into American culture; they don’t see their tradition as being broken; they don’t see themselves as the ones who will fix it. The students I have met hold their teachers — and other teachers of similar backgrounds — in the highest regard. They seem to want to do it the way their teachers did it, and if not that, they want to at least understand what it is that their teachers passed through to be who they are. It seems, from the outside, like a very respectful world.

In contrast, I’ve noticed, especially recently, that one of the defining characteristics of Zen culture is a tendency to speak negatively about Zen. It’s built in. It’s fashionable. I cannot count how many conversations I’ve heard in Japan in which priests lament the state of the tradition, of the priesthood, of the monasteries. Someone I know once asked her teacher (a very high-ranking and respected Japanese monk in his own right, a teacher of teachers), “Are there any Zen masters in Japan?” He thought about it and replied, “No, I guess not. Well, maybe that guy in…. No, well, no. Maybe not right now.” Older monks love to talk about how the young monks just don’t get it, and the young monks can see that a lot of the old monks seem to be all talk and no action*. Everyone knows that the monastic standards have gone lax — again, there are exceptions, but one doesn’t have to look far to find an authorized training monastery that is a monastery in name only, where even zazen practice is maintained at only the most basic, basic level (once a day, maybe).

If you’re new to Zen, this may all sound a bit shocking (or just sad), but it goes way, way back. 800 years ago, Dōgen (the founder of the Soto school in Japan) spent a good amount of ink complaining about how Buddhism has gone down the drain, how the people in authority have no idea what they’re talking about. Of course, Dōgen believed that the teachings he had received from his teacher, at least, were authentic; he just felt that he was more or less alone in what he was carrying.

Some of these complaints about Japanese Zen are absolutely real — I am deeply pessimistic about the trends I see here. But some of this way of talking is also cultural — in a country where self-deprecation is as fundamental as gravity, one shouldn’t be surprised that so few people are prepared to say, “This is the real deal.” I suspect that in his time, a lot of Dōgen’s enemies despised him not for what he was teaching, but for the unapologetic confidence with which he taught it.

In the West we see this too, but it’s a little different. In Japan, priests commiserate about the decay of Zen in Japan; in the West, priests commiserate about the decay of Zen in… Japan.

Many of the teachers who came to the West from Japan were fed up with the state of things in their home country, both within the tradition itself and within the bureaucracy-heavy institutions being built up around it. They personally knew great teachers, but they could see that there were few in line to replace them. So when they made their way across the ocean, they told students that they had the opportunity (in the land of opportunity) to establish something pure, something authentic. There was even talk of how this newly-established, pure practice might turn around and re-inspire Buddhism in Japan. This was big thinking.

And for the record, I love that they held such huge aspirations. As with Dōgen, we can’t separate out that confidence and that sincerity from what they actually accomplished, which is remarkable. But the downside is that many people heard this talk and just took their teachers’ word for it that Buddhism in Japan had gone down the drain, or that it wasn’t relevant anymore. So western practitioners were handed — and embraced — the rather lofty challenge of fixing Zen Buddhism, either because it was fundamentally broken, or because it was too burdened by Asian cultural baggage to be of any use in the West.

I suspect that a major reason that Vajrayana practitioners embrace the Tibetan-ness of Tibetan Buddhism is that there is a sense of protection, a desire to preserve not just the Buddhist tradition of that culture, but also the culture itself; it also helps that Tibetan culture as a whole seems to be closely intertwined with Buddhism, going so far as to establish a role like that of the Dalai Lama that wields not just spiritual, but also political, authority. Preserving Tibetan Buddhism is a way of supporting and preserving a displaced culture, and that’s appealing.

Zen in the West doesn’t tap into that impulse to preserve — after all, Japanese culture is doing just fine on its own. The feeling, for years, has been that true Zen has been buried under Japanese cultural baggage, and we need to free it (“it” usually being zazen). There are dozens of teachers in the US who take it as a badge of honor that they don’t wear robes, or that they don’t do the ceremonies, or that they don’t put on airs, sitting on the high seat. They’re free from all that “Japanese” stuff. And the same attitudes are common among those who frequent Zen centers. I knew one man in Alaska who was genuinely concerned that the ceremonies we performed were designed to make him feel “less than” his Japanese counterparts, as part of an agenda to suggest that Asians are innately more spiritual. I suspect that his concerns, which he was able to describe very clearly, are actually common in Western Zen, even if they are not always so plainly articulated.

I want to propose, however, that American Zen, like American Vajrayana, can take refuge in this culture-preserving mind. It’s available, and in our evolution, I think it’s important. But I also want to clarify that the culture to be preserved is not Japanese culture — it’s Zen culture.

The fact is that even Japanese people, as a whole, know very little about Zen culture. Non-Japanese often feel so overwhelmingly out of place in a Japanese monastery that they cannot see that Japanese people, too, are completely out of their element. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to stand, how to sit, how to behave. It’s a new world for them.

Of course, much of Zen culture in Japan is informed by Japanese norms. For example, I would say that one aspect of what I’m calling Zen culture is a refined formality. In monasteries, people avoid casual speech; Dōgen went so far as to insist that monks only refer to vegetables using honorifics. Some of the shape that formality takes in Japan is, naturally, very Japanese — there is a sense, from samurai movies and centuries-old literature about how one addresses those in power, about how to speak and sit and gesture in a very formal way, and some of that certainly enters the monastery. But monastery formality is its own thing. Likewise, the insistence on very specific physicality (hold your hands like this, stand with your feet like so, and on and on) has some parallels in other aspects of Japanese culture (tea ceremony is an obvious example), but I have never seen a version as complete as what one finds in a temple. Each individual accepts responsibility for participating in, and thereby creating, a very specific atmosphere, one you won’t find anywhere else.

It can be difficult to sort all this out. I’ve known non-Japanese who came here and got it all wrong. They went home insisting, “This is how they do it in Zen temples,” when in fact, that’s just how Japanese people sit. Or the reverse — they say, “Oh, that’s just Japanese culture,” when what they saw was something specific to one temple, one lineage. It takes time and patience and humility to sift through these kinds of questions.

But that is exactly what we — especially those who represent a lineage — have been charged with doing. We can bring that beautiful formality into Zen in America. It need not be Japanese at all. We can explore the full depths of what it is to create a group practice, that sense of synchronicity, of singular movement. It need not be Japanese. Even now, it’s not. There is a language spoken by people who practice in a traditional way, but it’s a language of the body, a language of gesture, a language of delicacy and fierceness and “just so.” It is not the Japanese language.

It’s just Zen.

*For an excellent discussion of the current state of Buddhism in Japan and its potential directions, please take a look at the lecture by Noriyuki Ueda in the most recent edition of Dharma Eye. Click here for the pdf.

Eating for (more than) Two

There’s a lot of talk in Buddhism about “all beings”: we are connected to all beings, we strive to liberate all beings, we work for the sake of all beings….

It’s a huge idea, one that we can never fully wrap our heads around. Sometimes we run across the phrase “sentient beings,” but that’s meaningless — life is too short for us to work out what is and is not a being we should save, a being with which we have a connection. My friends are beings, the dog next door is a being, the rock in my shoe is a being, that moment of panic I feel when I think I overslept is a being. Differentiating, on that level, is precisely what this practice is not about.

This talk of all beings has evolved over time. In the earliest Buddhist texts, it seems that we don’t see so much of it. Instead, we see teaching after teaching about the universality of experience, about our shared sameness. From the time of the Buddha, it has been taught that suffering, though it expresses itself differently according to each individual, is essentially the same for everyone. Happiness too, and anger. We may get upset for very different reasons and at different times, but that emotional experience of wanting the current situation to be other than what it is — we share that, intimately. (Much of the pain of adolescence, it would seem, is just an inability to recognize that fact. We feel alone, when the exact opposite is true.)

I suspect (and I would love for a Buddhist scholar to jump in and speak to this more authoritatively than I can) that much of the evolution of Buddhism has just been a thought exercise, a matter of people saying, If X is true, and if we factor in Y, then the logical ramifications of that must be Z. In this case, if our conditions (dissatisfaction, impermanence, the absence of an unchanging self) are universal, then just by that definition alone, we share a profound connection. If we are fundamentally the same, then we are not fundamentally different. If we are not different, then the distinction between you and me is a false one. If that’s true, then we are, in a manner of speaking, “one.”

If there is no line between you and me, then your suffering is mine, and your happiness is mine. And by extension, what’s mine is not mine, and what’s yours is not really yours. It’s out of this kind of math, I suspect, that Buddhism came to take such an interest in interdependent origination, and that it arrived at a figure like the Bodhisattva, someone who accepts responsibility for all beings. It’s a logical — and beautiful — development.

The difficulty with these kinds of wide-scale teachings, I think, is that they are so overwhelming as to seem unreal. It makes for great philosophy, but for many of us, it remains an abstraction, something fun to talk about but not something that is immediate and felt in our daily lives. Maturity and empathy can lead us to see, firsthand, that other people’s experiences are not foreign from our own, and that can make us much more skillful one on one. That is no small thing — working from that place of understanding is the foundation of almost any truly honest encounter. It’s something we all need to explore, and remind ourselves of, daily.

But extending that to this thing we call “all beings” is much more difficult. How do we interact with all beings? How do we take responsibility for all beings? We can start with the person we’re with. Following this math, the person in front of you is the face of all beings, so how you treat him or her is how you are treating the world. (This applies to objects as well, which I want to write about later.) On a practical level, if we can remember just that, maybe it’s enough. But I do think there’s value in exploring this heavy, looming abstraction of “all beings.” It’s there, so it’s there for us to confront.

When we’re alone, where is the confrontation? The person that is always in front of me is me. How do I treat myself? And does it matter? We don’t need to believe that all beings are one, or that we’re all connected on some invisible spiritual level, to find this worthy of our consideration. Even the skeptic can recognize that reality is made up of its parts. I am one of those parts. You are one of those parts, just as our organs and cells are our components. If one of my cells is unhealthy, even if I don’t notice that, even if it doesn’t have measurable repercussions throughout my body, still, that cell is one part of the picture that is me, of my health, of my functioning. However we frame this, it’s not that difficult for us to accept that what happens to me is happening to the universe; what I do is an extension of everything and everyone.

This is the basis of responsibility.

I started thinking about all this differently a few years ago, when my wife Tracy was pregnant with our first child. Tracy has always been careful about what she eats, but as soon as she knew she was pregnant, eating healthy foods became a serious matter. She read all the literature and knew what to eat and what not to. She was eating for two. She accepted responsibility for this other life, and in doing so, accepted that her body is not completely her own. To any mother, I think, this must seem obvious, but it’s not limited to mothers.  I suspect it’s also a well-known realization among people who dedicate themselves to others: firefighters, nurses on call, soldiers, and on and on and on. This body is not just mine — it is also part of a larger function. If I keep it healthy, that is in service of that function. If I let it get weak or sick or injured, then that hinders my ability to be skillful, to fulfill that mission.

Watching Tracy eat for two, I had this idea: What if I were eating for all beings? What would I put in my body? What would I refuse? If we take these teachings of connectedness and singularity to one extreme, then my body is the body of all beings; what I eat is the food of the world. I forget this little idea of mine often — old habits die hard, and I don’t always eat the healthiest thing on the menu. But when I do remember it, for example at the supermarket, it changes the way I shop. I can use all manner of twisted rationalization to let myself eat those chips, or get the big box of cookies. However, if I imagine, even for a moment, that by eating I am feeding others, then so-called “foods” with no nutritional value reveal themselves to be absurd. They are absurd, of course, but this frame helps me to see it. (One could completely misinterpret this whole idea in disastrous ways, I know: “All beings sure would like a beer right now,” “I think I’m going to treat the universe to a big piece of chocolate cheesecake,” and so on. We have to look with the eyes of an adult, or it all falls apart very quickly.)

Take this as a true understanding of the body, or take it as an exercise — in either case, the effect is the same. When we allow ourselves to feel the responsibility of caring for all beings, we intuitively know how to respond. If it’s just an idea, just a philosophy, we can get stuck on the seeming impossibility of it — how to save all beings? We stumble because we’re looking for the heroic act, the grand gesture. But if we take it to its logical end, if we imagine that when I eat, all beings eat, and when I talk, all beings talk, and so on, then we start to simply offer up the best of ourselves, of our best selves. We listen to those little voices in our heads telling us to sit up straight and floss and walk the three blocks to the post office instead of driving. We take care in our actions, and in doing so, we take care of something much, much bigger.

We know so much already. We know what to do. We know how to offer ourselves.

It’s good news, I think.