No Zen in the West

Ok.  I am over it, right?

I know that we’re not in Japan, and I’m glad not to be in Japan.  I understand and appreciate that we have our own ways of practice, and that it is beautiful and essential that we do.  I know that a lot of the pomp of Japanese high ceremony just isn’t appropriate here:  we don’t need all the swoops and swooshes, and we can do fine with about half of the folds and creases.

Beyond that, I know that the forms are fundamentally just something to do.  They are just some place to put a body that needs to be somewhere; they are something to do with a body that needs to do something.  I know that the true form of Zen is just this present activity:  washing or typing or touching.  Like Toni Packer I’ve seen through the veil of religious forms.  They too often intoxicate us with false spirituality, rob us from the actual life that’s always right before us.

So why does it make me so crazy?  Why can’t I just get over it and join wholeheartedly in the newly mandated shashu bow?

Please indulge some slightly technical backstory (ok, back-rant), and then I will get to my point.  As of today (and who knows how long this will last) the form at Green Gulch for entering the zendo – for service, not zazen – is to come to your place, turn to face the altar, bow with the hands in gasshō, face center, and bow in shashu.  I can accept that – it is the “real” form.  My body knows it from Japan, my robes know it.  The fabric, muscle, and bone delight in the deep bow and the graceful quarter pivot, the slight bow – even slightlier answered by the monk standing across.

Furthermore, however, as of today, when we enter the zendo to perform this service-time form, we are no longer to offer a gasshō bow, but instead a shashu bow.  This, to my regret and consternation, causes me great regret and consternation.  I “so willingly reimmersed in American Zen”;  I so “over” the formal bickering of narrow-minded trainees.

Why this one point?  Why would this particular minor detail send me spinning off into “No Zen in the West”?

One story is that to sometimes enter the zendo in gasshō and to other times enter the same zendo in shashu creates a feeling of arbitrariness.  But, you say, the whole damn thing is arbitrary!  Yes.  And no.  The more we import Japanese Zen forms out of their contexts, the more we create a feeling that the Zen forms are arbitrary, when in fact they are efficiencies and elegances and coherencies of worship and respect and practicality.  That you enter the sōdō (for zazen) one way and the hondō (for service) another way is not made up, is not a fabrication but a response to the space and a dance with the environment.  The sōdō is a room set apart, and the hōndō is better described as a temporary widening of a hallway.  In Zen temple layout, the spaces imply a different treatment – not arbitrary but studied, even intuitive.  Architecturally determined. 

(And I understand again the vigor with which some Japanese insist that a temple needs to be built in America.  No matter that there are many Zen temples in the U.S., each replete with dedicated practitioners – what they mean is the roof, the layout.  They mean a physical temple.  If Idaten in the kitchen isn’t geometrically across from Manjushri in the distant sōdō, how could you call it a temple?)

Deeper than my theory about the logic of this particular form, though, is a deep and fragile nostalgia, a feeling about the futility of all of our best quasi-monastic efforts.  All of our sincere attempts to coordinate and perfect our ceremonial forms seem suddenly doomed to be flimsy and out of context. 

For example, to begin our shuso intiation ceremony we follow the ceremonial instruction to strike the wooden han three times.  But what does that mean to us?  It has no context; it’s basically just to make a sound before the ceremony.  But monastic life is all context:  the sequence signifies an arrival, the three hits that announce a new guest, a returning monk.

In a life of monastic observance, each piece fits seamlessly into a whole, a mandala suffused with reference and meaning.  To snip here and there and pull out a piece here and there, as we inevitably do in our semi-formal, part-time Zen, the integrity and the rich texture of each act is broken.  Rather than unify and create layers of meaning, as it would in a monastic context, it implies this arbitrariness, or worse, a mysticism where disembodied bell sequences somehow hold special spiritual power.  The forms are not arbitrary, nor are they supernaturally potent – they are rather the alphabet and language of a whole way of life.

It’s not that I am giving up on the struggle to maintain the life of these ancient Zen forms.  However clumsy and out of context, they do make up the shape and the sound of our American temple life, and they do find their way into our bodies and hearts.  I’m glad that we keep striving to shed some and maintain some of our monastic ceremonial heritage.

But I’m struck tonight with a sadness, a nostalgia, that the three han hits before the shuso enters go from here forward into history as “just how it’s done,” isolated from its matrix of meaning.  Like a dying language, so much is lost.  What will we find to replace it?

Really – what will we find to replace these forms whose syllables are no longer coherent?

In the meantime, shasshu bow it is, as per the latest mandate, and forward to the next complaint…

First, from a Dharma web newbie, a couple of online things that just came to my attention:

–Dosho Port of Wild Fox Zen is doing a very interesting thing in actualizing online Dharma by leading what promises to be a fairly rigorous but completely online 90-day Ango/Practice Period.  It seems worth checking out if your life doesn’t allow for a 90-day retreat of the walking around, bowing kind.  It goes from 2/20-5/22 – follow these links for information or a video invitation.

–Open Buddha has a Dharma blog aggregator that I hadn’t known about, a noble attempt to contain the Buddhist blog sprawl into one site.  It’s at http://community.zen-sangha.org.

Last Sunday in my talk at Green Gulch (“Practice with the Life You Have” – an exceedingly “opiate of the masses” talk, however true it may have also happened to be) I scratched the surface of a theme that I want to pursue here and consider with you:  the relationship between “dissatisfaction” and “disillusion.”

The story in Two Shores of Zen is that I am dissatisfied with American Zen life and head to the Mystic East to find Real Zen.  Most of you know how that goes:  I cry, I laugh, I see Buddha, and ultimately I join the ranks of the many “Zen failures.”  That is, I end up just as dissatisfied with my austere Japanese Zen temple as I was with my decadent American Zen temple.  With dissatisfaction everywhere I turn, there’s really nowhere left to turn but my own heart, this present moment of my own mind producing my own dissatisfaction with whatever form my life takes.

In other words, my relentless, unproductive dissatisfaction led me to a gentler, more wholesome disillusion.  Not a disillusion with external conditions – with which we are all doomed to be forever dissatisfied – but disillusion with this dissatisfaction itself.

It isn’t then about being satisfied or dissatisfied with Western or Eastern Buddhism, but it’s about getting sick of, getting thoroughly disillusioned with, this all-pervading suffering itself.  Disillusion with this all-pervading suffering doesn’t mean that I should seek refuge some place it isn’t, but that I really have no recourse but to turn and face this suffering itself.

Dissatisfaction, or dukkha, is a turning and running away from what is.  It is looking or longing for some other option, some other more complete or more perfect life.  Disillusion on the other hand is a turning in, a turning towards the mechanism that creates suffering.  When dissatisfaction drives me, I dig deeper into samsara, endlessly cycling by trying to get out; when disillusion drives me, it’s more like stopping, more like seeing, more like surrendering to the life that I have and putting my energy into the deep work of letting go.

The Buddha invites and encourages us to grow disillusioned with samsara, with suffering.  We are to grow disillusioned equally with the agreeable and disagreeable.  To be disillusioned is not to simply be dissatisfied, but in a sense to give up on the whole realm of conditioned existence with it’s pervading dissatisfaction and its glimmers of transient satisfaction.  For me, that means to let my life be my life, let my circumstances be my circumstances, and shift my gaze to a subtler process by which I’m making the whole thing into a problem.

There may be a student of the Pali Canon out there who can help me with the words I am looking for, or who can clarify what the Buddha “really meant” when he taught “disillusion.”  In the meantime, I’ve found something in this framework that speaks to me at least.  It helps me to work with my dissatisfaction in a way that turns me towards my life.  Recalling that dissatisfaction won’t help but disillusion will, I can relax a little bit about getting that elusive satisfactory life circumstance, and just do the work of letting go completely of everything.

This is, of course, just a belated echo of what many of the first comments on “No Zen in the West” insisted – forget about East, forget about West, forget about monk, forget about layperson, and get to the real issue of settling your heart.

A couple of weeks ago I gave the weekly talk, as I occasionally do, at the San Quentin State Prison Buddhist group, the Buddhadharma Sangha.  My ordination teacher and the founding teacher of the Sangha, Seido Lee deBarros, asked me talk about Two Shores of Zen there, and I was a little hesitant.  What do those guys care about “Eastern versus Western Zen”?  My project seemed suddenly academic.  And as book tours go, state prisons are a little far afield.  But I’m used to saying yes, especially to Lee, and I did so even though I didn’t feel 100% behind it.

Maybe not until the moment that we volunteers and inmates sat down together in zazen did I notice the depth of the opportunity behind my resistance – the opportunity that our prison Sangha always offers me.  The opportunity to ask, not as luxury but with real suffering and real liberation at stake:  why does this matter?  Who cares?  And I remembered that I quite honestly don’t give a damn about Japanese Zen or American Zen as such.  I am of course happy to dissect them, read about them, think about them, and talk about them, but at the end of the day it’s maybe more a hobby than anything.  What’s beyond that?  What’s important about it?  Why would this matter to anyone at San Quentin?

Part of what is consistently inspiring about going to San Quentin is that it strips away, or at least undermines, my idea that practice is all about the conditions of practice.  The simple fact of our being there attests to a faith that “real Zen” is available even in the most unsupportive environment.  By being there we are pointing to a practice that is beyond having the “right conditions” in place or holding the “wrong conditions” at bay.  It’s hard to spend the week thinking “I can’t practice at this lazy, unsupportive Zen temple, where people chat during meals” and then to go Sunday evening through the sallyport at San Quentin to tell a group of sincere men in blue that if they just apply their minds the Way is perfectly within reach exactly where they are.

The question for me then, amidst all of this nonsense about where or whether Zen is, is fundamentally about what kind of effort is needed for spiritual practice.  That is the underlying question of Two Shores of Zen, and of my whole life and study, and I’m grateful to the Buddhadharma Sangha for helping me to remember that.

How much do we need to work on our circumstances, and how much is practice-enlightenment just a matter of how we relate to our mind and our awareness?  To say it’s completely unconditioned miss something critical about cause-and-effect, and to say it needs special conditions cuts off the men of the Buddhadharma Sangha, and is in any case refuted by their genuine practice.  This question is present in the broad brush strokes of our life – how many retreats do we do, how often do we sit on the zafu and face the wall – and in the minute details of meditative effort.  How much control, how much intention, and how much surrender?

“Japanese Zen” then is maybe just a way for me to talk about discipline, those moments when we cut through extraneous thought and come back to our breathing, being body.  And “American Zen” likewise is simply shorthand for the wide-open, all-inclusive, all-accepting Buddha-mind that effortlessly surrenders and goes with the flow.  Understanding how the two work together, how the two shores need each other, is not a cross-cultural exercise but is precisely learning the art of zazen and the art of human life.

Thanks as always for joining this conversation.  I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness and depth of your comments (no pressure!), and I renew my intention to put more regular effort into maintaining this page in the midst of my other responsibilities.

Zen teacher Dosho Port raised some interesting questions about Sangha while reflecting on ”Two Shores of Zen” on his Wild Fox Zen blog.  Dosho wonders whether Zen Centers even warrant the designation “Sangha,” and explores refuge in the middle of unreliable everything.  It’s an interesting post with interesting comments, worth checking out.  I responded with some general comments on the Wild Fox blog – not the least of which was to clarify again and still that “No Zen in the West” (like “Yes Zen in the West”) is a position to take and get over, to take to encourage people, not to take and to make a nest in.

But here I want to focus on another point that Dosho makes.  Taking up an exchange in the book wherein the American Zen teacher scolds the young, idealistic American monk for “disparaging the Sangha” by calling the practice at his temple “bullshit,” Dosho writes:

“…to suggest that Jiryu’s earnest-sounding doubts about San Francisco Zen Center (and American Zen generally) – maybe like the kid who saw that the emperor had no clothes and was willing to call out – should not be raised because he’s breaking the precepts seems like both a way of repressing investigation in order to maintain the organizational status-quo and a missed opportunity for a full-out meeting.”

Or, as my friend Eleanor puts it:  “What an odd conundrum to be told you that if you criticize/form a critique you are breaking a precept. Red flag! Danger! Warning Will Robinson!!!!”

I muster to Eleanor some defense of the point of view that just nagging and cynically undermining is actually breaking a precept, not forming a compassionate critique, and that it’s counter-productive to just tear down without trying out/swallowing whole.  Eleanor’s agreement is devastating:  “Well yes, no one should talk before they’ve lived at SFZC for some amount of years. 2? 30?”

I can’t mean that!  Because just like Dosho notes that in American Zen 60 years old seems to be the new 40, for me at thirteen years of practice, ten years of practice is the new one year of practice.  There must be some notion of “membership” that admits a person into the conversation, but as soon as there is a cut off, as soon as “he’s been here long enough that he can speak” and “she just got here, so ignore what she has to say”, we’re on the slippery slope.  (Hierarchy is very much on my mind lately – a No Hierarchy in the West post will come soon.)

This feels very important.  As we shape and imagine and perfect this Western or American or Californian experiment – this experiment of a Sangha of us, not of better people – how do we “call out,” how do we say what we see and share what we think?  If we don’t have modes and mechanisms to do this, how will we grow better?  A person who isn’t open to feedback isn’t so likely to grow, and an institution is obviously the same.  It’s maybe easier to participate in this conversation and development of Zen in the ”provinces” than in the San Francisco Zen Center “Vatican” where by default things progress slowly (like an ocean-faring barge, as Norman Fischer says).  But maybe not.  Maybe wherever we are it is hard to give useful feedback.  Maybe wherever we are we have the opportunity to share what we think constructively, as part of the thing, or destructively as separate from the thing.

“Obama is a war-mongering murderer and the so-called practice at this American resort/temple is a sham.”

R.H. Blyth sweetly and memorably says that people use Zen as an excuse to be rude.  I know I have!  I’d add:  peace as an excuse to be violent.  (Check.)  But I don’t want to let the masters of war off the hook and I don’t want to let my beloved temple and teachers off the hook and I don’t want to let myself off the hook.  But what then?  How do I relate my feedback to any of them/us?

The young idealist of “Two Shores” didn’t have other words, didn’t have another way to express his Way-seeking mind and to offer feedback to others than “bullshit.”  And that “bullshit” often made people defensive.  And Zen people – especially Zen teachers - when they are defensive often resort to “turning around the light” to shine in the student’s eyes.  Variations on the theme of “that’s your problem,”  “everything you see is yourself,”  etc.  People, especially young people who need to be heard but don’t necessarily have more subtle words, often pack their bags at that moment.  It isn’t genuine, and they feel that, whether or not they have the clarity to defy authority in the moment of meeting.

It is true that the student’s complaint is the student’s problem, but when the teacher leaps to the student side of the problem without first completely hearing, completely meeting, and completely “playing out” (in Dosho’s words) the attack, something really terrible happens.  The easy truth of the student’s suffering is used to obscure the hard truth of the disharmony, hypocrisy, or inefficiency that the student is trying to share.  This happens again and again and again.  I’ve seen it for years, and now – and this is the real horror – I see myself do it to others, even if subtly.

We can encourage each other not to separate from our own lives.  And we can point out to each other that complaining and cynically criticizing is fundamentally just cutting ourselves off and setting ourselves apart from our own lives.  But fear of separation, of losing our way, shouldn’t silence us, and speaking out against doesn’t mean we need to slip even a hairsbreadth from complete, wholehearted particpation in the community and one life that we’re speaking out against. 

I want to say: “We need to speak.  We need to listen.”  But that sounds like a cliche.  And it doesn’t sound very Zen.  Definitely not Japanese Zen.

But cliche or not, Zen or not, it seems right now like the most important thing.  We need to speak.  We need to listen.

Thank you for the comments posted in response to my last entry.  I’m touched by their depth and thoughtfulness.  Tempted as I am to try to get in some clumsy last word on each point, it feels best to resist that and keep the conversation open. 

I do want to take up a fundamental issue that has been raised in these first comments, though.  I appreciate in many of them being pointed back to the Zen that is actualized in this very moment, this very breath.  Not the Zen of East or West, not the Zen of Buddhism or the Zen of anything at all – but just this presence here now.  How wonderful to be reminded, and to remind each other of this single moment of life!  Nowhere to go, nothing to do, everything released into just as it is. 

This immediacy seems like a Zen that is beyond conditions – right here now there is no East, no West, no Zen, no breath, no sitter.  This presence is vital.  It is our awakening, our inspiration, and the bedrock of our vows.  But what then?

My moments of presence certainly trump my ideas of Zen.  It’s good to be reminded of that, and all of Zen discourse does – the old teachers redirect each exchange back to a presence that can’t get crammed into language and theories and views.  But we shouldn’t forget that Zen discourse also always does the opposite – it demands a return into language, into theories and views, into the mud of ideas and the mud of action.

So I know that I can drop all of my ideas, and that is my basic practice, but what happens when I pick them back up?  Should I just never pick them back up?  Maybe a good idea – but it turns out in my experience that “never pick back up” is also a pretty violent idea, and amounts to holding fast to a fixed view.  So I have been working a lot lately with the dimension of letting go that is a letting go into whatever is flowing from the moment, rather than a letting go away from the natural flow of things.  That is, letting go as letting go in the midst of participation in what is happening, as opposed to a letting go that blocks what might happen next.  Stillness as readiness, not stillness as stuckness.  Purity not as crystal clear water, but as the freedom to get muddy.  This seems like the real skill of Zen. 

When our experience goes beyond culture – unconditioned experience if such a thing could be spoken of – how quickly and under what motivation do we make it conditioned, cultured experience again?  The next morning, or the next breath (or at the very same moment, if we’re skilful enough) we put it into the language of Zen or some other language.  We identify with it and we look for ways to communicate and transmit it.  That effort has its problems (totally untenable, for one, and the cause of all suffering), but is basically wholesome and natural and necessary.  It is an expression of our vow, that comes from our appreciating that the spiritual depth we’ve found in our own lives we owe at least in part to the generosity of others who have descended into the mud to cram what’s beyond words into words.  To squeeze what can’t be practiced into a practice we can try to do.

It may well be (logically and doctrinally) that there is no such thing as an unconditioned experience, that it is a mistake to think that we are ever outside of conditions, ever outside of culture or language.  If so, to speak of departing from and returning to the conditioned world is just a conditioned fantasy.  Painted rice cakes everywhere we turn. 

Whether we ultimately decide that our “spiritual moments” are truly unconditioned or just really really nicely conditioned, the question for me now is how they meet conditions.  Can this experience be carried into conditions, or is it obliterated immediately by them?

We grasp hold of this presence that we feel and touch through our meditation practice and we claim that it is beyond Zen or beyond culture, but is it really?  And even if we say it is, what do we want to transmit?  What will help others to touch it too?  What will help us to remember, again and again, to return?  Throw away all tools, or pick them carefully up?

So I’m inspired by direct pointing back to my present momentary experience, as the beginning and end, the alpha and the omega of the spiritual path.  I trust that deeply, and my faith in that continues to grow.  But how does it take shape, and how do I honor what has shaped it?

Returning to this conventional world to play and to help, what do we pick up and what do we put down?  Here the whole field is open to our full creativity.  But pure creativity can’t essentially teach, anymore than pure tradition can.  So how do we want to step forward?  What is real letting go, and what culture remains when we do?

“This crap about no Zen in the West, where do they get off? Who do they think they are?”

Of all the foreigners in the temple, Nengo and I had the most similar backgrounds; we both had trained and were established in Zen Sanghas in the States. Arriving in Japan, though, was for both of us like starting from zero, like being out at sea with no map, and no ship. We were being treated as though we had never heard a word of the teaching or sat a minute of zazen before in our lives, and I at least was starting to feel like it might well be true. The Dharma personas we had cultivated at home were now void—Roshi-sama, his magnetic wisdom and compassion aside, just berated us on our posture, and the monks, Japanese and Western alike, either totally ignored us or offered their unsolicited, candid assessments of “Western Zen” and “Western Zen teachers” (if even indulging the existence of such categories)…

People may think that all of my “No Zen in the West” and all of my ranting about ”spineless American Zen” with it’s ”pop-psychology and free-flowing peanut butter” add up to a Jiryu who’d basically rather be in Japan.  A Jiryu who is suspicious if not convinced that Western Buddhism has moved so fast ahead that the Buddhism part got left behind.  A Jiryu looking backwards.

By now, though, many of you have seen my book Two Shores of Zen, and hopefully it’s abundantly clear that for all of my lingering doubt and confusion, I am firmly in the Western Zen camp.  My journey to Japan, like most of our journeys, led me back to the home I left.  It uncovered a deep gratitude for our Western adaptations.  They are not failings but are genuine, wise efforts to meet and actualize a tradition that we can’t and shouldn’t try to swallow whole.  The Jiryu who returned says:  Women and men practicing together – yes!  Communication exercises – yes!  Peanut butter – yes!  And even online forums…

So why do I keep bringing it up?  Why do I keep mentioning Japan?  Why do I dwell on the austere clarity of the practice there?  Why do I keep turning over and struggling with the wrenching insults I heard (and sometimes offered) to our Western practice?  Why don’t I get over it and get on with it?  Hasn’t most everyone else in California Zen?

There are lots of reasons, and I hope that by interacting with this blog you can help me explore them. 

But for now it strikes me that to lose touch with where we’ve come from is to lose touch with the fact that we are creating something completely new, completely unprecedented, in what we call “Western Dharma.”  I’m looking backwards to look forwards.  I don’t just want to “get over” monastic-style practice – I want to understand how it illuminates lay life.  I don’t want to just ”get over” hierarchy – I want to understand how to organize institutions respectfully in a truly American way.  I don’t want to just “get over” harsh training – I want to study what it really takes to soften and open a heart.

So I don’t believe that Zen hasn’t arrived, but I don’t believe that it has either.  Precisely here in this middle, we find the incredible creative energy and work of our time and place.  Let’s not get lazy and lean too far either way.  If we think we’ve landed, we’re just stuck; if we think we’ve missed, we’re just lost.

It’s to find us and to unstick us that these days I want to keep reminding us that to most of the ”Right Views” of 2,500 years worth of Buddhists, what we call Buddhism in the West is completely and utterly unrecognizable.

Stay with me here for a while, in “No Zen in the West,” and let’s let each other know how we’re thinking about authentically actualizing the Dharma, and how we’re living out this American-ness of our Zen and this sometimes subtle Zen-ness of our American lives.