CHAPTER 7 MIND-BODY THOUGHT AND PRACTICE IN EARLY AND LATE AMERICA

Most forms of complementary and alternative medicine can be seen to draw on a “mind-body” connection. The complementary medical approaches described in this section explicitly make use of physiological mechanisms by which mental states are reflected in direct biological responses. Likewise, although “bioenergy” is invoked in many complementary modalities and alternative medicine therapies, energy medicine itself uses this energetic property as the sole means and primary mode of cure. Ultimately, mind and energy may be reflected in the “consciousness” approach of many complementary and alternative medicine forms of traditional healing.

Thinking and practice regarding mind-body approaches dates to early American history and has continued until its resurgence in late, or “postmodern,” American history. This thinking and practice did not originate from early physiological medical studies nor from the current recognition of psychoneuroimmunology in medical science (the topic of the next chapter in this section). Like complementary and alternative medicine in general, it arose in the popular consciousness from nonmedical cultural and spiritual movements based on experiential and existential (not experimental) thinking, studies, and philosophies.

OVERSEAS BEGINNINGS

It is possible to date a European intellectual connection to Asian spiritual thought and practice to as early as the ancient Greek histories of Herodotus, Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign in 327 to 325 bc (Hodder, 1993), or Petrarch’s mention of Hindu ascetics in his Life of Solitude, written 1345 to 1347 (Versluis, 1993). A more substantive start, however, would be 1784, which marks the founding by British scholars and magistrates of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, from which quickly flowed first translations of Hindu scriptures directly from Sanskrit texts into English. Sir William Jones was the preeminent member of the group. His tireless work included translations of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala (1789), Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda (1792), and the influential Institutes of Hindu Law (1794). His early tutor in Sanskrit, Charles Wilkins, holds the distinction of making the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (17 85). In 1788, the group founded a journal, Asiatik Researches, that was widely circulated among the intelligentsia, including the second U.S. president John Adams, an enthusiastic subscriber (Hodder, 1993; Versluis, 1993). The effect of this flow of scholarly and objective information about Indian culture and religion began a profound shift in Europe’s view of the East—“from the earlier presupposition of the East as barbarous and despotic, to a vision of an exotic and highly civilized world in its own right” (Versluis, 1993, p. 18).

The new language, ideas, images, and narratives embedded in such texts immediately touched something in poets, philosophers, and artists, particularly in England and Germany—powerful influences on the development of American culture. In England, the Romantics embraced all things “Oriental” as a celebration of the irrational and exotic. Their use of the scriptures, stories, lyrics, and images becoming ever more available to them from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam was not discrete, but rather an amalgam. Their drive was not for a practical use of these new elements of discourse in expressing some tacit knowledge heretofore inexpressible; to the contrary, as Versluis (1993) notes, “their Orientalism was not serious but rather a matter of exotic settings for poems” (p. 29). The latter confounding of international relations by “Orientalism” (Said, 1978) was an unforeseen serious consequence. Johann Gottfreid von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the Romantics who followed them in Germany found “Oriental” thought a refreshing alternative to the stifling rationality (and then nationality) of their time. Yet, again, their usage of the new material available was not entirely pragmatic. Their philosophical and poetic insights could have been expressed in the preexisting discourse of Christian mysticism, Neo-Platonism, and Hermeticism and the charismatic movement. What the use of Oriental religious discourse by a poet of spiritual power such as Novalis (Freidrich von Hardenberg) did do was to suggest that the full range of Eastern and Western religious expression pointed to a Transcendent reality, and that all—in essence—offered truth (Versluis, 1993). It is this last point that brings us to America, to the Transcendentalists, and, at last, to the pragmatic use of the Eastern discourses to better understand and express a personal tacit knowledge.

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS

In writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and in the utopian vision of the Transcendentalist Old Concord Farm and other communities, the influence of Eastern thought is evident (Brooks, 1936; Hodder, 1993; Versluis, 1993). Through the Dial, their journal that did much to shape American Transcendentalism, they brought out translations of Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian texts, and of the Sufi poets, such as Hafiz, Rumi, and Saadi. In these “transcendentalations” a new, rich brew began to find ways to give voice to tacit experience.

It is possible to see both Emerson and Thoreau as natural (and learned) contemplatives whose entwined literary and spiritual lives reflect experiences that demanded a larger discourse than the West provided for more explicit understanding and more elaborated communication. Emerson’s early (1836) essay “Nature,” written before his deep engagement with Eastern thought, contains a description of such an experience:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear I think how glad I am. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and a sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

As Emerson began reading the amalgam of Oriental writings in earnest, which consumed him for the rest of his life, his enterprise became the essentialization (distillation) and integration of the insights that supported his experience and vision on both a personal and a cultural scale. Versluis notes that, “For Emerson . . . the significance of Asian religions—of all human history—consists of assimilation into the present, into this individual here and now” (1993, p. 63). He was reading and feeling and thinking his way toward a universal, literally Unitarian religion. (Imagine if the early New England settlers had not thought to provide “commons” as the centerpieces of their settlements as spiritual practices evolved from Puritanism to Congregationalism to Unitarianism.)

It seems Thoreau had a different enterprise underway, using the same materials. Where Emerson was grappling with universals and theory to make sense of the world, Thoreau was intent that particulars and practice would make sense of his own world. Though he had only the translated texts to guide him, he did more than just imagine himself as an Eastern contemplative practitioner. He wrote to his friend, H.G.O. Blake, in 1849, “rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. . . . To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin” (quoted in Hodder, 1993, p. 412). Thoreau offers descriptions of his experience, such as this from the “Sounds” chapter of Walden:

I did not read books that first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller ’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were for me far better than any work of my hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.

Like Emerson, Thoreau read the “Orientals” back into his own experiences, to help express that which was inexpressible without them. A journal entry from 1851 states, “Like some other preachers—I have added my texts—(derived) from the Chinese and Hindoo scriptures—long after my discourse was written” (quoted in Hodder, 1993, p. 434). That original inarticulate discourse of ecstasy in nature was capable of transformation with the insights he found in the translations of Jones and Wilkins. It was the here-and-now value of the new language, images, and stories that counted. An emphasis on the moment-to-moment particulars of nature and his own experience was the central concern of his later life. He became, in his own words, a “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms,” which is, perhaps, as cogent a description of an alternative practitioner as any from the Eastern traditions.

Although India and, particularly, Hindu thought have taken the prime place in the discussion so far, America’s engagement with the East by the middle of the nineteenth century also included East Asian culture, with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese arts, literature, and religion—including the Buddhism of these areas—shaping the intellectual direction of an emerging American modernism. For example, the work of Ernest Fenollosa, American scholar of East Asian art and literature, and convert to Tendai Buddhism, brought this spirit into wider intellectual discourse (Bevis, 1988; Brooks, 1962). Fenollosa represents a more specific, scholarly, but no less engaged, use of the East by an American. A few lines from Fenollossa’s poem “East and West,” his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1892, reflect a growing need of Western thought for contemplative space. Addressing a Japanese mentor, Fenollossa says, “I’ve flown from my West / Like a desolate bird from a broken nest / To learn thy secret of joy and rest” (quoted in Brooks, 1962, p. 50).

At Fenollossa’s death, his widow gave his unpublished studies of the Chinese written language and notebooks of translations from the classical Chinese poet Li Po to the American poet Ezra Pound, for whom a whole new world opened. Pound’s Chinese translations drawn from Fenollossa’s work radically transformed the art of the time. Indeed, Pound had arguably the most powerful influence of any single poet in shaping the poetry, not only of his modernist contemporaries, but of the generation that would come to maturity in the middle of the twentieth century.

Although Pound’s use of Eastern influences was mainly stylistic, a very different sort of poet, Wallace Stevens, used his own encounter with the East—studying Buddhist texts and translating Chinese poetry with his friend the scholar-poet Witter Bynner—to better understand and express his tacit experience (Bevis, 1988). Perhaps “The Snow Man,” an early poem (written in 1908 and first published in 1921), suggests this (Stevens, 1971, p. 54).

One can also cite a description of an alternative, meditative stance, using an image from the poet’s Connecticut landscape, and rhetoric from his East Asian studies, perhaps. Yet it is possible that this is also an articulation of personal experience. Stevens did not study meditation formally, but, like Thoreau, he was a prodigious walker. In any season or weather, a perambulation of 15 miles or so—in a business suit—was a common prelude to writing (Bevis, 1988). This is neatly captured in a few lines from “Notes for a Supreme Fiction”: “Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake, // A composing as the body tires, a stop / To see hepatica, a stop to watch / A definition growing certain and // A wait within that certainty, a rest / In the swags of pine trees bordering the lake” (Stevens, 1971, p. 212).

A transparent eyeball. An inspector of snowstorms. A mind of winter. These are powerful metaphors to describe experiences that sought and found elaboration through encounters with Eastern thought. For these individuals, there was a willingness to use whatever comes to hand—from whatever culture or tradition suggests itself or is available—to understand what is happening in the here and now. This stance reflects a perennial American pragmatism, which endures today in much of the discourse of complementary and alternative and “integrative” medicine: Hatha Yoga mixes with Buddhist meditation, whereas Sufi poetry and Native American stories illuminate teaching points, and the expressive language of the Christian and Jewish contemplative traditions hovers in the background.

In the same early time frame, a more specific connection to Buddhism began developing, as well. Of the major traditions in the Oriental amalgam, Buddhism appears to have been the least understood and the most scorned during the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Reasons include Christian defensiveness and hostile reporting from the mission field; a portrayal of Buddhist doctrines as atheistic, nihilistic, passive, and pessimistic; and even the contagious anti-Buddhist biases of the Hindu scholars themselves who taught Sanskrit to the English translators of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Tweed, 1992; Versluis, 1993). The “opening” of Japan to the United States in the 1850s commencing with Commodore Matthew Perry’s visit, and the subsequent travels, study, and writing of American artists, scholars, and sophisticates, including Ernest Fenollossa, Henry Adams (great-grandson of the aforementioned John Adams), John LaFarge, and Lafcadio Hearn (all had direct contact with Buddhism) did much to increase interest and sympathy for Buddhism. Then, the 1879 publication of The Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold’s poetic retelling of the life of the Buddha, drawing parallels with the life of Jesus, turned interest into enthusiasm. Sales estimates of between 500,000 and a million copies put it at a level of popularity matching that of, say, Huckleberry Finn (Tweed, 1992) or the number one bestseller of that time, Ben Hur, by retired Civil War General and adventurer Lew Wallace.

Buddhism became a new possibility for those at the bare edge of the culture who intuited the tidal shift of Christian believing that Matthew Arnold had poignantly articulated in the final stanzas of “Dover Beach” in 1867.

And for some, Buddhist belief became a formal identity. Madame Olga Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott, founders of the Theosophical Society (and the alternative practice of Theosophical medicine), were long engaged with Buddhism. In Ceylon in 1880, they made ritual vows in a Theravada temple to live by the five precepts and take refuge in the Buddha, the teachings, and the community. The most powerful event, however, was the face-to-face encounters with Buddhist masters afforded by the Parliament of World Religions, particularly the Theravadin Anagarika Dharmapala and the Rinzai Zen Master Soyen Shaku. Both of these teachers continued to raise interest in Buddhism through subsequent visits. In fact, Soyen Shaku bears significant responsibility for the popularization of Buddhism through the present day. The vision of Buddhism that he presented fit perfectly with the early modern scientific and moral outlooks. The themes he presented— “an embrace of science combined with the promise of something beyond it, and a universal reality in which different religions and individuals participate, but which Buddhism embodies most perfectly” (McMahan, 2002, p. 220)—still resonate. (These themes resonate with contemporary reconciliation of ancient, traditional Ayurvedic precepts with quantum mechanics and fundamental particle physics in the formulations of Maharishi Ayurveda.) He also had a “second-generation” impact through the 1950s and 1960s, as he encouraged his student and translator for the Parliament visit, the articulate Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, to maintain a dialogue with the West through visits and writing (McMahan, 2002; Tweed, 1992).

It is important to note that the character of Buddhist “believing” during this period was an engagement with philosophy and doctrine, a search for a replacement for the Judeo-Christian belief system that some felt was no longer sustaining. Consider that two other Buddhist “bestsellers” beside Arnold’s Light of Asia were Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism and Paul Carus’s Gospel of Buddha, whose titles even reflect a Christian, belief-oriented approach to Buddhism. In the best Evangelical Protestant tradition comes the story of the first “Buddhist conversion” in America. In Chicago in 1893, Dharmapala was speaking on Buddhism and Theosophy to an overflow crowd in a large auditorium. At the end of the talk, Charles Strauss, a Swiss-American businessman of Jewish background, stood up from his seat in the audience and walked deliberately to the front. One can imagine the hush and expectancy. As planned in advance, he then—to use an Evangelical Protestant phrase—“accepted” Buddhism, repeating the refuge vows for all to hear (Obadia, 2002; Tweed, 1992).

The connection of most of the 2000 or 3000 Euro-American Buddhists and the tens of thousands of sympathizers at this time (Tweed, 1992) was, with a few exceptions, intellectual. The popular appeal of Buddhism was as a form of belief, not as a form of spiritual practice. According to Tweed (1992), the fascination with Buddhist believing reached a high-water mark around 1907 and declined precipitously thereafter. A small nucleus of Euro-Americans interested in the academic or personal study of Buddhism maintained organizations and specialized publishing, but few Asian teachers stayed in the United States, and impetus for growth was lost. Dharmapala, in 1921, wrote in a letter to an American supporter, “At one time there was some kind of activity in certain parts of the U.S. where some people took interest in Buddhism, but I see none of that now” (In Tweed, 1992, p. 157). Charges by the status quo religious and cultural powers that Buddhism was passive and pessimistic—terrible sins in a culture fueling itself on action and optimism—drowned dissenting Buddhist voices (Box 7-1).

BOX 7-1 Three Buddhisms in America

It is important to note that the narrative that has shaped the discourse of alternative medical professionals today sidelines the story of ethnic Asian Buddhism in America. Religion scholar Richard Hughes Seager (2002) describes three Buddhisms in America:

1. Old-line Asian-American Buddhism, with institutions dating back into the nineteenth century

2. Euro-American or convert Buddhism, centered in the Westernized forms of Buddhism—often generically parsed as Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada (or Vipassana or Insight), which are centered on meditation practice; and Soka Gakkai International, an American branch of a Japanese group, which with a rich mix of Asian Americans, Euro-Americans, and substantial numbers of African Americans and Latino Americans is the most culturally diverse group and is centered on chanting practice rather than meditation

3. New immigrant or ethnic Buddhism, which is most easily parsed by country of origin

In the aftermath of World War II the applications of Eastern thought to Western experience developed a powerful momentum. Western soldiers, many drawn from professional life into active duty, were exposed in great numbers to Asian cultures, from India, Burma, and China. In Japan, physicians, scientists, and artists and intellectuals who held posts in the occupation forces were exposed to a culture that included the aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual manifestations of Japanese Buddhism, particularly its Zen varieties. Some stayed to study, and East-West dialogues that had been suspended were resumed, such as with D.T. Suzuki and Shinichi Hisamatsu. Most important for the discourse of mind-body medicine and psychotherapy, American military psychiatrists were exposed to Japanese psychotherapy, particularly that developed by Shoma Morita, which is based on a paradox that had enormous repercussions in Western practice. Instead of attacking symptoms as in Western approaches, Morita asked his patients to allow themselves to turn toward their symptoms and fully experience them, to know them as they are (Dryden et al, 2006; Morita, 1928/1998).

Morita therapy was of interest and intellectually available to those Westerners in Japan for two powerful reasons. First, it is a highly effective treatment for what Western practitioners would identify as anxiety-based disorders; reports of rates of cure or improvement of more than 90% are common (Morita, 1928/1998; Reynolds, 1993). Morita developed a diagnostic category of shinkeishitsu for the disorders he targeted, which he describes as anxiety disorders with hypochondriasis (Morita, 1928/1998). Second, Morita did not develop his work in cultural isolation. Working contemporaneously with Charcot, William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Gustav Jung, Morita read, referenced, and critiqued Western developments. He was particularly interested in the therapies that paralleled his own in certain ways, such as Freud’s psychoanalysis, S. Weir Mitchell’s nineteenth-century rest therapy (also rest cure, West cure, and nature cure), Otto Binswanger’s life normalization therapy, and Paul DuBois’s persuasion therapy (LeVine, 1998). It integrated East and West—from an Eastern perspective.

Although the entire regimen of Morita therapy, a four-stage, intensive, residential treatment has rarely been used in the United States—David Reynolds (1980, 1993) has adapted it and other Japanese therapies for the West—two of its basic insights had immediate and continuing effects. The first is the paradox of turning toward rather than away from symptoms for relief. The second is the insistence on the nondual nature of the body and mind. Although the influence of Zen is easily seen in his therapy, Morita did not wish to promote a direct religious association, fearing that the treatment might be seen as somehow less serious, exacting, and effective (LeVine, 1998). Paradoxically, perhaps the Zen connection actually drew the interest of the Westerners.

Morita Therapy: Mushoju-shin and the Stages of Treatment.

In the nutshell version of Morita therapy, the Zen term mushoju-shin points to the end, or the beginning. It describes a healthy attention. In Morita’s (1928/1998) metaphor, it is the attention you have when you are reading while standing on the train. You must balance, hold the book, read, remember the next station, and be aware of others. That is, you cannot focus on any one thing too tightly. You must be willing to be unstable, to be open to whatever happens, and to be able to respond and change freely. In short, you are not “self” focused; rather, mind-body-environment are one. “This is the place from where my special therapy begins” (p.31), says Morita. It is also the place that Morita therapists are required to inhabit as they work.

Zen had a double-barreled influence in America, particularly in the postwar “Zen boom” years of the 1950s and 1960s, touching both the intellectual community and the popular culture. With the first barrel, it had significant impact on the serious discourse of scholars, professionals, artists, and Western religious thinkers. One person was so profoundly influential in conveying the spirit of Zen that he epitomizes this impact: D.T. Suzuki. As a young man, you will remember, Suzuki had played a role in the Buddhist enthusiasm of the 1890s and 1900s as translator for Soyen Shaku. Suzuki had then lived for a time in the United States, working for Open Court, a publishing company specializing in Eastern thought, and had married an American woman. After the war, Suzuki returned to the West, where he continued to write books of both scholarly and popular interest on Zen and Pure Land Buddhism, traveled and lectured extensively in the United States and Europe, maintained a voluminous correspondence, and affected an incredibly varied range of thinkers. Three short examples involving Thomas Merton, John Cage, and Eric Fromm give a glimpse into the effects of Suzuki’s Zen on intellectual discourse.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton was greatly influenced by Suzuki’s work—which he had first known in the 1930s before entering the monastery. An engagement with Eastern religious and aesthetic thought—particularly Zen, and particularly through Suzuki’s work—shaped Merton’s conception of and practice of contemplative prayer, which has had a powerful influence on Christian spiritual practice to the present day (e.g., Merton, 1968; Pennington, 1980). Merton began a correspondence with Suzuki in 1959, asking him to write a preface for a book of translations of the sayings of the “Desert Fathers.” Merton’s superiors felt such collaboration in print was “inappropriate,” yet in practice, they encouraged Merton to continue the dialogue with Suzuki, one telling him, “Do it but don’t preach it” (Mott, 1984, p. 326). This stance represented a reversal of the earlier Buddhist fusion of belief without practice. The dialogue did indeed continue, with each endeavoring to explore and understand Christianity and Zen from their own perspectives. The relationship meant so much to Merton that, although his vocation had kept him cloistered in the Monastery of Gethsemane in Kentucky from 1941, he sought and gained permission from his abbot to meet Suzuki in New York City in 1964, Merton’s first travel in 23 years (Merton, 1968; Mott, 1984; Pennington, 1980). Suzuki summed up the burden of their two long talks this way: “The most important thing is Love” (Mott, 1984, p. 399).

The composer John Cage, who was deeply influenced by Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophy and practice, regularly attended Suzuki’s lectures at Columbia University in the 1950s. His statement that in choosing to study with Suzuki he was choosing the elite—“I’ve always gone—insofar as I could—to the president of the company” (Duckworth, 1999, p. 21)—suggests the value of Suzuki’s thought to him and to much of the avant garde. The Zen influence on Cage’s work is captured in his conception of his compositions as “purposeless play” that is “not an attempt to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord” (Cage, 1966, p. 12). Suzuki’s expansive sense of play is reported by Cage (1966) in an anecdote: “An American lady said, ‘How is it, Dr. Suzuki? We spend the evening asking you questions and nothing is decided.’ Dr. Suzuki smiled and said, ‘That’s why I love philosophy: no one wins’” (p. 40).

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (the author of Escape from Freedom, about the attraction of fascism before and during World War II) was one of many in the psychoanalytic community of the time to be drawn to Zen and Suzuki’s exposition of it. At a conference held in Mexico in 1957 entitled “Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis” and attended by about 50 psychoanalytically inclined psychiatrists and psychologists, Suzuki was a featured speaker and engaged in dialogue particularly with Fromm and the religion scholar Richard DeMartino. A book of the lectures was published after the conference (Fromm et al, 1960). Fromm suggests that psychoanalysis and Zen both offer an answer to the suffering of contemporary people: “The alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that one lives in the midst of plenty and yet is joyless” (p. 86). The answer, then, would not be a cure that removes symptoms, but rather “the presence of well being” (p. 86; Fromm’s italics). Fromm defines well-being as “to be fully born, to become what one potentially is; it means to have the full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in, and to be fully awake. If it is all that, it means also to be creative; that is, to react and respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists” (p. 90). For Fromm, the work was not just to bring the unconscious into consciousness, as Freud suggested, but rather to heal the rift between the two. What was most intriguing for Fromm in the possibilities Zen offered for such a project was koan practice—the use of paradoxical or nonrational questions, statements, and stories to back the student’s ego-bound intellect against a wall, until the only way out is through. This process of amplifying the root contradiction of ego-consciousness, leading to its overturning—satori, or enlightenment—was the subject of DeMartino’s contribution to the conference and book. Fromm drew a parallel between this process and the work of the analyst, suggesting that the analyst should not so much interpret and explain, but rather should “take away one rationalization after another, one crutch after another, until the patient cannot escape any longer, and instead breaks through the fictions which fill his mind and experiences reality—that is, becomes conscious of something he was not conscious of before” (p. 126).

Love, play, and well-being: it was not just Suzuki’s erudition that attracted so many, it was his embodiment of what he taught. Alan Watts, the scholar-entertainer to whom we shall turn next, who got to know Suzuki at the Buddhist Lodge in London in the 1920s, described him as “about the most gentle and enlightened person I have ever known; for he combined the most complex learning with utter simplicity. He was versed in Japanese, English, Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, French, Pali, and German, but while attending a meeting at the Buddhist Lodge he would play with a kitten, looking right into its Buddha nature” (Watts, 1972). Suzuki should have the last word on his way of being, and what he wished to communicate to others:

We cannot all be expected to be scientists, but we are so constituted by nature that we can all be artists—not, indeed, artists of special kinds, such as painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, etc., but artists of life. This profession, “artist of life” may sound new and quite odd, but in point of fact, we are all born artists of life and, not knowing it, most of us fail to be so and the result is that we make a mess of our lives, asking, “What is the meaning of life?” “Are we not facing blank nothingness?” “After living seventy-eight, or even ninety years, where do we go? Nobody knows,” etc., etc. I am told that most modern men and women are neurotic on this account. But the Zen-man can tell them that they have all forgotten that they are born artists, creative artists of life, and that as soon as they realize this fact and truth they will all be cured of neurosis or psychosis or whatever name they have for their trouble. (Fromm et al, 1960, p. 15)

Certainly, such a vision of unfettered creativity and immediate relief from the pains of living would be resonant in postwar American culture.

It should be noted, however, that in the 1950s and 1960s, despite his tremendous stature, Suzuki was also criticized—accused by the academic Buddhist community of being a reductionist “popularizer” of Zen and dismissed by the practice community as one who did not sit in meditation with enough discipline and regularity. On the one hand, these may be valid charges, yet on the other, they may be significant reasons for Suzuki’s influence. This was a time when Western intellectuals were in search of new rhetoric and new philosophy to help express and ground their shifting experiences and intuitions; for many, it was a time of wide-ranging dialogue, of exploring possibilities, of framing a debate, rather than a time of grounding, of digging in, of focus on details. Indeed, the charges might simply be moot, when Suzuki’s enterprise is cast in the mode of his teacher Soyen Shaku, or even the mode of Ralph Waldo Emerson, of attempting to universalize spiritual experience. In his dialogue with Christian mysticism, for example, Suzuki (1957) found it possible that “Christian experiences are not after all different from those of the Buddhist” (p. 8).

Just as Suzuki epitomized the intellectual reach of the Zen boom, it may be possible to capture the more popular facets of the time and continue the story through the 1960s by focusing on a single character: the transplanted Englishman Alan Watts. Watts’s eccentric career as a scholar-entertainer travels a ragged arc from the 1930s to the early 1970s, along the way touching most of the important figures and movements in the meeting of Eastern and Western religious thought and practice, particularly as they offered insights that could be used in psychotherapy. The arc described here is drawn with the help of his autobiography, In My Own Way (1972), whose punning title suggests the paradox of sustaining a powerful public self to earn a living while discussing the dissolution of the ego, and Monica Furlong’s feet-of-clay biography, whose original title, Genuine Fake (1986), carries an ambiguous truth.

An intellectually precocious and sensitive religious seeker, Watts spent his early years at King’s School, Canterbury, which is next to the ancient cathedral. There, the history-steeped atmosphere and rich liturgical expression cast a spell and created a love of ritual that never left him. In his adolescent years at the school, he developed an interest in Buddhism, which he was able to defend on a very high level in debates with faculty. He wrote to Christmas Humphries, the great promoter of Buddhism and Theosophy, and the founder of the Buddhist Lodge in London, who assumed the letters were from a faculty member. When they finally met, Humphries became a mentor, providing guidance for reading and practice, and connecting Watts to other Asian scholars, including D.T. Suzuki. By 1935, having foregone an Oxford University scholarship to study what appealed to him, Watts published his first book, written at age 19, The Spirit of Zen, which was almost a guidebook to the densities of Suzuki’s Essays on Zen. Watts’s studies expanded, he came to read and write Chinese at a scholarly level, and he read deeply in Daoism, as well as Vedanta, Christian mysticism, and Jung’s psychology.

Through the Buddhist Lodge, he met a mother and adolescent daughter, Ruth Fuller Everett and Eleanor. Ruth had been a member of the ashram-cum-zoo, as Watts called it, of Pierre Bernard—known as “Oom the Magnificent”—who catered to the New York society ladies by teaching Hatha Yoga and Tantrism. Through that association, she learned of Zen Buddhism and, taking Eleanor as a traveling companion, set off for Japan. The two became the first Western women to sit in meditation in a Zen monastery. Years later, Ruth married a Zen teacher and eventually became a teacher herself. Watts and Eleanor courted, in a way, and attended meditation sessions together.

Watts’s practice at the time was simply to be in the present moment, learned from the independent spiritual teachers J. Krishnamurti (who called it “choiceless awareness”) and G.I. Gurdjieff (who called it “constant self-remembering”). He was becoming frustrated with his inability to concentrate on the present and discussed this with Eleanor on their walk home from a session at the Buddhist Lodge. Eleanor said, “Why try to concentrate on it? What else is there to be aware of? Your memories are all in the present, just as much as the trees over there. Your thoughts about the future are also in the present, and anyhow I just love to think about the future. The present is just a constant flow, like the Tao, and there’s simply no way of getting out of it” (Watts, 1972, pp. 152-153). That was it. He came to think of this as his true way of life and continued to practice in this way in various guises throughout his lifetime.

The couple married and moved to the United States, just ahead of the war in Europe. After all his resistance and protest, at this point in his development Watts felt drawn to try to fit himself into a vocation that made sense in the West. With his rich Anglican background, the logical choice was the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. Although he had no undergraduate degree, Watts proved the depth of his learning and entered Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago for a 2-year course of study. In his second year, his standing was so far advanced that he was excused from classes and undertook expansive theological reading in personal tutorials. His researches resulted in the book Behold the Spirit, which brought insights from the Eastern religions into profound dialogue with a Christianity he painted as in need of refreshment. Reviewers in and outside the church greeted it warmly. Ordained, he was made chaplain of Northwestern University, where his feeling for ritual, his skills as a speaker, and his ability to throw a great party brought quick success. Yet tensions in his growing family and his own tendency for excess ended his career; the church in 1950 did not take affairs and divorce lightly.

With a new wife and no job, Watts’s prospects were indeed uncertain as he began work on a new book, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951). An influential friend, Joseph Campbell, managed to get Watts a grant from the Bollingen Foundation, funded by one of C.G. Jung’s wealthy patients, to support research on myth, psychology, and Oriental philosophy. The book, fueled perhaps by the indigence and indignities of his situation, brought him to the directness and clarity of expression that characterize his work from here on. Here is a description of working with pain by trusting that the mind “has give and can absorb shocks like water or a cushion” (p. 96):

How does the mind absorb suffering? It discovers that resistance and escape—the “I” process—is a false move. The pain is inescapable, and resistance as a defense only makes it worse; the whole system is jarred by the shock. Seeing the impossibility of this course, it must act according to its nature—remain stable and absorb.

. . . Seeing that there is no escape from the pain, the mind yields to it, absorbs it, and becomes conscious of just pain without any “I” feeling it or resisting it. It experiences pain in the same complete, unselfconscious way in which it experiences pleasure. Pain is the nature of this present moment, and I can only live in this moment. . . .

This, however, is not an experiment to be held in reserve, as a trick, for moments of crisis. . . . This is not a psychological or spiritual discipline for self-improvement. It is simply being aware of this present experience, and realizing that you can neither define it nor divide yourself from it. There is no rule but “Look!” (pp. 97-99)

In no time, Watts landed on his feet, invited into a position at the founding of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, a precursor of today’s California Institute of Integral Studies. He also landed in creative ferment. Instead of business people and diplomatic and government officials learning Asian languages and culture that were the anticipated students, the academy drew artists, poets, and religious and philosophical thinkers who were open to the kind of exploration for which Watts and his faculty colleagues had prepared their whole lives. Students included the Beat poet Gary Snyder, with whom Watts struck up a deep friendship; Michael Murphy and Richard Price, who would found Esalen Institute; and Locke McCorkle, who would become a force in est (Erhard Seminars Training). As Watts added administrative duties to his teaching, he brought in an amazing range of guest lecturers, old friends such as D.T. Suzuki; his ex-mother-in-law Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who spoke on Zen koan practice; Pali scholar G.P. Malalasekera and Theravada Buddhist monks Pannananda and Dharmawara; and the Zen master Asahina Sogen. As the academy found its place in the community, local connections were made with Chinese and Japanese Buddhists. Through the academy, the Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki came to understand the need for a Western Zen institution, later creating the San Francisco Zen Center. Watts himself spoke and gave workshops up and down the West Coast and began a relationship with the Berkeley radio station KPFA, the first community-funded station in the United States, broadcasting regularly and appearing as well on the educational television station KQED. He was stirring what was fermenting and that would soon distill itself as a kind of renaissance.

The core of the Beat writers coalesced for a moment in 1956 in San Francisco, and Jack Kerouac captured it in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958). Its central character is the poet and Zen student Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder), whom the narrator Ray Smith (Kerouac) idolizes for his “Zen lunatic” lifestyle, combining Zen discipline and aesthetics with freewheeling sensuality. One scene in the novel recounts the Six Gallery poetry reading, at which Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia read, and Allen Ginsberg’s incantation of Howl did, indeed, scream for a generation about the agonies of 1950s fear and conformity (and fear of conformity, and conformity as a form of dealing with fear). The Dharma Bums, coming fast on the heels of Kerouac’s bestselling On the Road (1957), drew a huge readership of the young and aspiring hip, who saw in Ryder/Snyder a new template for living, a chance to go beyond the confines of suburban expectations. This fueled the Zen boom from the popular culture side, prompting complaints from the Western Zen community of practitioners and academics about the authenticity of the Beats’ Buddhism. Both the popular and elite outlooks drew a chastening commentary from Watts in his essay “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen” (1958/1960), as he showed that their differences arose from the same fundamental background and impulse:

The Westerner who is attracted to Zen and who would understand it deeply must have one indispensable qualification: he must understand his own culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its premises unconsciously. He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear or rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either “beat” or “square,” either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability. For Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting to foreign conventions, on the other. (p. 90)

Watts, already a friend and admirer of Snyder, whom he exempted from his criticisms due to Snyder’s level of Zen scholarship and practice, soon came to count the rest of the Beats as friends and accepted many of them as “serious artists and disciplined yogis” (Watts, 1972, p. 358). He had connections to many seemingly disparate worlds. There were old guard spiritual seekers, like expatriate friend Aldous Huxley; members of the highest circles of art, music, and literature; Asian meditation teachers from many different traditions and cultures; psychotherapists of every stripe; and the old guard bohemians, the Beats, and the students. All of whom, as the 1960s began, would come together to create a culture into which Watts was not fitted, but built.

A catalyst of the new culture in the revolutionary 1960s was the beginning of experimentation with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and other psychedelic drugs in the 1950s, and the publicity surrounding it. Aldous Huxley’s descriptions of his experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954) were illuminating, but for Watts, it was about embodiment—that his once ascetic and severe “Manichean” friend had been transformed into a more sensuous and warm man made the promise real. Watts’s own controlled experiments, in which he found his learning and understanding of the world’s mystical traditions and meditative practices extremely helpful, resulted in powerful experiences, followed (inevitably) by enthusiastic essays and broadcasts, as well as by a book, Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962). His position as a proponent of the drugs for experienced, disciplined explorers of consciousness helped fan an interest—the more so when Watts coincidentally was given a 2-year fellowship at Harvard just as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Das) were beginning their engagement with psychedelics. The spread of psychedelics beyond the specialists added a key facet to what Roszak (1969) dubbed the “counterculture”: “It strikes me as obvious beyond dispute, that the interests of our college-age and adolescent young in the psychology of alienation, oriental mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and communitarian experiments comprise a cultural constellation that radically diverges from values and assumptions that have been in the mainstream of our society since at least the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century” (quoted in Furlong, 1986, p. 143).

Just as the 1950s Zen boom can be captured in the Fromm-Suzuki meeting in Mexico in 1957, the 1960s can, perhaps, be captured in a meeting—admittedly much larger—the “Human Be-In” at the polo field in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in 1967. A procession led by Snyder, Ginsberg, and Watts, among others, circumambulated the field as in a Hindu or Buddhist rite to open the day. Tens of thousands found their way there, dressed in colorful finery, raising banners, dropping acid, listening to the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and digging the mix of the crowd—Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, political radical Jerry Rubin, Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki, and activist-comedian Dick Gregory suggest the organizers’ intention to unify “love and activism.” The be-in became a model for gatherings around the United States and the world. The color, light, and promise of the day were captured by Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane in “Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon” (Kantner, 1967). The soaring harmonies and instrumental arrangement convey a fuller experience; but if you cannot listen, try to visualize the following stanza:

And another shift had already begun. At the leading edge of cultural change, seekers had learned what was to be learned from psychedelic experience and were turning toward the practice of meditation. As Watts (1972) put it in his unique blend of the pontifical and the plain, “When one has received the message, one hangs up the phone” (p. 402). Where an infrastructure for teaching and practice of Zen Buddhism already existed, such as in San Francisco, seekers turned in that direction, following Watts and Snyder. Another infrastructure had also been building, since 1959, using a mass marketing model to encompass much of the Western world: the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation (TM). This was an adaptation of Hindu mantra meditation for Western practitioners, in which the meditator brought the mind to a single pointed focus by repeating a word or phrase—in TM, the mantra was secret, potently exotic, and specially chosen for the meditator (Johnston, 1988; Mahesh Yogi, 1963). The Beatles, among many other celebrities, discovered (or were “recruited” into) TM in 1967, which brought it to prominence on the world stage. (When the Beatles invited one of the Hindu yogis to visit London, he responded, “London? I am London.”) The connection seemed direct. Perhaps the psychedelic experience linked more directly to Hindu meditation than to Zen, as well. Watts (1972) describes this from his own experience: “LSD had brought me into an undeniably mystical state of consciousness. But oddly, considering my absorption in Zen at the time, the flavor of these experiences was Hindu rather than Chinese. Somehow the atmosphere of Hindu mythology slid into them, suggesting at the same time that Hindu philosophy was a local form of a sort of undercover wisdom, inconceivably ancient, which everyone knows at the back of his mind but will not admit” (p. 399). TM was able aggressively to take advantage of the publicity available to it. In 1965, there were 350 TM meditators in the United States, and by 1968, there were 26,000; by 1972, there were 380,000; and by 1976, there were 826,000. (Later Deepak Chopra was able to vault onto the New York Times bestseller list with appropriated ancient Ayurvedic wisdom by asking each of the TM meditators to buy 10 copies of his first book.) The marketing strategy targeted specific populations, giving the practice and its benefits a spiritual spin, a political change spin, or a pragmatic self-help spin depending on the target. The pragmatic approach, designed to reach the middle class, middle-management heart of the market, was given impetus through scientific research into TM’s physical and psychological outcomes (e.g., Seeman et al, 1972; Wallace, 1970), which subsequently captured the attention of the medical establishment. The result was development of and research on medicalized versions, such as the relaxation response (Benson, 1975) and clinical standardized meditation (Carrington, 1998). The factors at work here—translation into Western language and settings, popular recognition, adoption within scientific research in powerful institutions, and the use of sophisticated marketing and public relations techniques—represent a model for success in the building of new social movements (Johnston, 1988).

On both the substantive and popular levels, then, the market for Eastern and Eastern-inflected spiritual practices grew steadily. Looking from 1972 back to himself in 1960, Watts provides perspective on this growth:

In my work of interpreting Oriental ways to the West I was pressing a button in expectation of a buzz, but instead there was an explosion. Others, of course, were pressing buttons on the same circuit, but I could not have believed—even in 1960—that [there would be] a national television program on yoga, that numerous colleges would be giving courses on meditation and Oriental philosophy for undergraduates, that this country would be supporting thriving Zen monasteries and Hindu ashrams, that the I Ching would be selling in hundreds of thousands, and that—wonder of wonders—sections of the Episcopal church would be consulting me about contemplative retreats and the use of mantras in liturgy. (1972, p. 359)

At the turn of the decade of the 1960s, through political dislocations, waves of immigration, and economic opportunism, new teachers from many of the Eastern traditions became available to offer instruction in the W est. At the same time, Westerners of the post–World War II cohort who studied in the East, or with Eastern teachers in the West, began to find their own approaches and voices for teaching as well.

The 1970s were a time of institution building on an unprecedented scale, a time in which, for example, Buddhism in America took its essential shape. Watts only flashed on this, only saw the promised land from afar. He died in 1973, at age 58, of a heart attack. His health had been in decline for some time, due to overwork and problems with alcohol. And in that, his example was again prophetic—foreshadowing the revelations in the 1980s of many spiritual teachers’ feet of clay.

THE WEST WENT A LONG WAY TO FIND WHAT IT LEFT AT HOME

The injunctions to relieve suffering and to live a more integrated, creative life by paying attention to what is arising in the present moment and turning toward discomfort—mindfulness and acceptance—are easily located within the three Abrahamic religions, the ones closest to home. But the encrustation of tradition and the carelessness of familiarity hide them quite well.

In Judaism, there is the marvelous text from Ecclesiastes (3:1-8), given here in the King James Version, which may ring in your ears with the “To everything turn, turn, turn” motion of the chorus of the song by Pete Seeger.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

There is also the tradition that everything should be blessed. Indeed, when one hears good news the blessing traditionally said is, “Blessed are you G-d, Sovereign of the Universe (who is) good and does good.” On hearing bad news such as the death of a friend or relative one says, “Blessed are you G-d, Sovereign of the Universe, true judge.” Such blessings acknowledge G-d as the source of everything, good or bad (Kravitz, 2008). In Christianity, the natural mode for many is to do for others, to focus outward. This “Letter to a Christian Lady” from C.G. Jung (who had carved over the doorway of his home in Zurich, “summoned or unsummoned, G-d will be there”), which was made into a text for speaking by Jean Vanier (2005, pp. 63-64), is a refreshing corrective:

The Christian contemplative teacher Richard Rohr (1999) suggests that, for him, Jesus’ refusal of the drugged wine as he hung on the cross is a model of the radical acceptance of what is happening in the moment (Box 7-2).

Growth and definition of Buddhism in America occurred as a great variety of teaching and practice became available as the turn away from psychedelic culture to more disciplined and thoughtful practice began as the 1960’s waned. There was a range of Eastern and Western teachers in Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, and the independent and occult traditions. There were new takes on Western traditions such as the Jesus People or Jesus Freak manifestation of Christianity, and the resurgence of interest in the mysticism of Kabbalah in Judaism. Yet, in tracing the discourse of mindfulness, by far the most influential tradition was Buddhism. This turn-of-the-decade moment is a fruitful place to focus, as all of the elements at play today came into view.

This was a time of growth. For example, the San Francisco Zen Center, which had been started for Western students under the teaching of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1961, expanded in 1967 to include a country retreat center at Tassajara Hot Springs, for which more than a thousand people had contributed money; and by 1969, the center had moved to larger quarters in the city and had established a series of satellite locations. The Zen presence in the United States was the most well established, whereas Tibetan and Theravada-derived teaching and practice infrastructures were in earlier developmental stages. It is these three traditions, generalized, that represent the shape that Buddhism in America has taken.

The task of characterizing and defining something that could be called American Buddhism is an enormous task, because it requires the parsing of, at a minimum, two phenomena under that title. Prebish (1999) suggests that identifying two divisions approximating “Asian immigrant Buddhism” and “American convert Buddhism” can be informative; it should be noted, however, that there is considerable disagreement among researchers about how and if such distinctions can be made. For our purposes it might reasonably be said that the former group is more interested in preserving religious and community traditions, whereas the latter is more interested in transforming religious traditions for an elite population.

That American convert Buddhism is the preserve of an elite is indisputable and is an extremely important factor in the development of the popularity of alternative medicine. The group is highly educated, economically advantaged, politically and socially liberal, and overwhelmingly of European descent. This was as true of the crowd at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, as it was of the students and intellectuals who made the shift from psychedelic experience to meditative experience, and as it is now of the medical, mental health care, and other professionals exploring the roots of alternative medicine. Indeed, there is a continuity not just of types, but of persons (Coleman, 2001; Nattier, 1998).

The signal characteristic of the American converts is a focus on meditation, almost to the exclusion of other forms of Buddhist practice and expression (Prebish, 1999). It is not surprising, then, that the expressions of world Buddhism they have “imported” for their use (as Nattier, 1998, would characterize it) are the meditation-rich Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada-derived traditions. A quick overview of the development and essential practice of each in the United States may be of value.

Zen was the first wave and the “boom” of Buddhism in America. In keeping with the elite nature of American interest, the highly aristocratic Rinzai sect, represented by Soyen Shaku and D.T. Suzuki, was influential until the 1960s. Rinzai emphasizes koan practice leading to satori or kensho—concentrating on a paradoxical question or story to heighten intensity and anxiety until a breakthrough occurs. This is central in the dialogues of D.T. Suzuki, Fromm, and DeMartino, for example. In the 1960s, however, the more popular Soto Zen sect began to reach out of the Japanese American communities to American converts. Two of the most important figures in this shift and in the development of Buddhism in America, are from this community: Shunryu Suzuki and Taizan Maezumi. Maezumi Roshi founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967 to reach Western students. He was in the Harada-Yasutani lineage, which includes koan practice and significant intensity and push for enlightenment. Two Western teachers were also part of this lineage and began their teaching at this same period: Robert Aitken founded the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii in 1959, and Philip Kapleau founded the Rochester Zen Center in 1966. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center was of a more traditional Soto lineage and presented an approach that must have clashed with what most of his students would have read or known about Zen. His focus was not on enlightenment but on what he presented as the heart of the matter, just sitting. That is, “Our zazen is just to be ourselves. We should not expect anything—just be ourselves and continue this practice forever” (quoted in Coleman, 2001, p. 71). Zen in its original Chinese form, Chan, as well as Korean (Son) and Vietnamese (Thien) forms, arrived much later in the United States. Yet, teachers such as the Korean Seung Sahn, and the Vietnamese Thich Nhat Hahn have had significant influences on Buddhism in America—particularly the genuine witness of “engaged Buddhism” advocate Thich Nhat Hahn, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr., for his peace work during the Vietnam War.

The foundational teachers mentioned here have authorized others to carry on their lineage of teaching. These others have often gone on to found their own centers. Some have hewn closely to their teachers’ approaches, whereas others have continued to make adaptations to bring Zen to more Americans. To suggest the flavor of this process, in the Maezumi line, John Daido Loori founded Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, keeping more toward traditional monastic training, yet creating a highly advanced computer-based communications and marketing infrastructure. Bernard Glassman Roshi, Maezumi’s heir, has extended not simply Zen training, but a deeply felt social engagement, from highly successful initiatives to bring education and employment opportunities to the homeless in Yonkers to the founding of the Zen Peacemaker Order (Prebish, 1999; Queen, 2002). In Kapleau’s line, Toni Packer, who had been his successor in Rochester, became disillusioned by the traditional hierarchy and protocols and left that all behind to form an independent center with a Zen spirit all but devoid of the tradition—including that of lineage (Coleman, 2001; McMahan, 2002).

If it were possible to characterize “typical” Zen practice, one might see most of the following (Coleman, 2001; Prebish, 1999): protocols for meeting teachers and entering and leaving meditation halls, including bowing; chanting, often in the original Asian language; ceremonial marking of changes in status, anniversaries of events, and the like; and a meditative engagement with manual work around the center. Central to Zen is the sitting practice, zazen, in which the adherence to correct physical posture is considered extremely important. Initial instruction may be to count one’s breaths—say, to 10—and, when the attention has wandered, just to notice that this has happened and begin the count again. When capacity for concentration has grown, one may begin shikantaza, “just sitting” with full awareness, without directing the mind (Coleman, 2001; Suzuki, 1970). Retreats, or sesshins, are intensely focused on sitting meditation, with short periods of walking meditation in between; retreats are rarely longer than 7 days.

Tibetan teachers began to leave Tibet in response to the Chinese repression in the 1950s that killed or drove more than a third of the population into exile. Buddhism’s central role in the culture made teachers and monastics a major target. While a few scholars had come to the United States in the 1950s—notably Geshe Wangal, Robert Thurman’s first teacher—it was not until 1969 that Tibetan teachers reached out seriously to American students. Tarthang Tulku established the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center in Berkeley. The basic approach was very traditional, with students asked to undertake hundreds of thousands of prostrations, vows, and visualizations before meditation instruction is given. Tarthang Tulku created the Human Development Training Program to teach Buddhist psychology and meditation techniques to a professional health care and mental health care audience, and created as well the Nyingma Institute to support Buddhist education and study. In 1971, Kalu Rinpoche, who had been asked by the Dalai Lama to teach in North America, came first to Vancouver to start a center and later created a center in Woodstock, New York (Coleman, 2001; Seager, 2002).

Chogyam Trungpa, who had escaped from Tibet to India in 1959, came to the West to study at Oxford University; during the years he spent in the United Kingdom, he moved away from the traditional monastic teaching role and eventually gave up his vows. In 1970, as a lay teacher, he came to the United States, where he had an instant effect. He had arrived after the “boom,” after the Beats, but “Beat Zen” described him better than any type of Zen master. Allen Ginsberg became a student, and many of the original Beat contingent taught at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado, which Trungpa founded. The appeal to the counterculture was swift and far reaching. In a very short time, he created a thoroughgoing infrastructure, including a network of practice centers (now worldwide) and developed a “secular path” called “Shambhala Training,” to make the benefits of meditation practice and Buddhist psychological insights more available. Trungpa’s approach to teaching was not the traditional one, but an amalgam that included much that he had learned from his Oxford education in comparative religion as well as wide-ranging exposure to Western psychology, which flavor finds its way into the new translations offered by Shambhala Publications. He not only powerfully shaped Tibetan Buddhism in the West, he offered spiritual perceptions that had a much wider reach—particularly the idea of “spiritual materialism,” which he defined in this way: “The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit” (Trungpa, 1973).

Tibetan Buddhist practice in America is richly varied; characterizing it in a paragraph is a hopeless challenge. It is the most exotic and sensual of the three traditions under consideration. The iconography and rituals are complex; the teachers are often Tibetan, rather than Westerners as is common in the other traditions. There is considerable emphasis on textual study. The ritual relationship of student to teachers is hierarchical and devotional. Many of the difficult issues of “belief” that are subdued in the other traditions are right at the surface in Tibetan doctrine and practice—karma, rebirth, realms of supernatural beings. And the practices themselves are guarded, only revealed by initiation, face to face with an authorized teacher. Vajryana or tantric practice, roughly conceived, includes visualization by the meditator of himself or herself with the attributes of a particular enlightened being. Less traditional teachers work differently. Trungpa began his students with sitting meditation much like that of his friend Shunryu Suzuki. The dzogchen teachers have an approach that seems easily accessible to Western students, a formless meditation akin to shikantaza in Zen. Within the tradition, this is considered a high teaching, available only after years of preparation. In the West, however, it is offered differently. Lama Surya Das, a Westerner, explains: “One surprise is that people are a lot more prepared than one thinks. Westerners are sophisticated psychologically, but illiterate nomads (as in Tibet) are not” (quoted in Coleman, 2001, p. 109). Retreats in the Tibetan tradition may be adapted for Americans as day long or weeks long, or as more traditional lengths such as 3 months or 3 years.

Vipassana meditation is the latest tradition to flower in North America. It is drawn from Theravada Buddhist practice, the tradition most directly connected to the historical Buddha, and perhaps the most conservative. Theravada was an early and profound influence on the development of Buddhism in the United Kingdom and Europe, dating back to the nineteenth century, through colonial connections. In the United States, the connection came much later, in the Buddhist Vihara Society of Washington, DC, founded in 1966, with teachers Dickwela Piyananda and Henepola Gunaratana, and also as young Americans in the Peace Corps or traveling in southern Asia in the 1960s came into contact with Theravada teachers, such as Mahasi Sayadaw, S.N. Goenka, and U Ba Khin. The influential Vipassana or Insight movement in the United States can be said to have begun when two of those young Americans, Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, came together to teach Vipassana at Chogyam Trungpa’s request at Naropa Institute in 1974. Their connection, which also included Goldstein’s friend Sharon Salzberg, another of the travelers to become a teacher, deepened. In 1975, under their leadership, the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) was founded, in rural Barre, Massachusetts. IMS grew quickly into a major retreat center, as the Insight approach found broad appeal. In 1984, Jack Kornfield left IMS for California to found Spirit Rock Meditation Center, which quickly became a second wing in American Vipassana practice (Coleman, 2001; Fronsdal, 2002; Prebish, 1999).

The Insight movement is the most egalitarian and least historically conditioned of the three traditions under consideration. Ritual, ceremony, and hierarchy are deemphasized, and meditation is of central importance. In contrast to Zen orderliness and Tibetan richness, there is ordinariness and a very American democratic, individualistic atmosphere. Students and teachers alike wear casual clothes and are known by first names. Teachers are less authority figures than “spiritual friends,” and language is more psychological than specifically Buddhist. Vipassana is highly psychologized; in fact, many, if not a majority, of Vipassana teachers in the Insight movement are trained psychotherapists.

Meditation practice commonly includes two forms, concentration on the breath and open awareness (insight) of whatever is arising in the moment. Practices for cultivating loving kindness, as well as compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, are also a part of training. Retreats are commonly 10 days in length, with long days of intense practice in silence. A typical schedule would find retreatants rising at 5:00 in the morning and moving through periods of sitting and walking (walking periods are as long as sitting periods, in contrast to the short breaks in Zen) with breaks for meals, until 10:00 in the evening (Coleman, 2001; Fronsdal, 2002; Prebish, 1999).

Perhaps most important for the discourse is not the differences in these three traditions, but rather the essential similarities. Stephen Batchelor (1994) neatly summarizes:

The distinctive goal of any Buddhist contemplative tradition is a state in which inner calm (samatha) is unified with insight (vipassana). Over the centuries, each tradition has developed its own methods for actualizing this state. And it is in these methods that the traditions differ, not in their end objective of unified calm and insight.

If the 1960s and 1970s were the period of foundation and growth, the 1980s and 1990s could be seen as the painful passage to maturity. In the many Buddhist centers around the United States, large but intimate communities had grown up, often with charismatic leaders. In most instances, the sharp discipline of Asian monastic practice, with celibacy and renunciation at its core, had been replaced by more casual, worldly, “extended family” types of community. As Suzuki Roshi told the San Francisco Zen Center, and Downing (2001) construed as a warning, “You are not monks, and you are not lay people” (p. 70). There was no map, as communities sought ways forward. Perhaps the scandals around sexuality, alcohol, finances, and power that began to plague these institutions could not have been avoided and were necessary in catalyzing change. By 1988, Jack Kornfield could write, “Already upheavals over teacher behavior and abuse have occurred at dozens (if not the majority) of the major Buddhist and Hindu centers in America” (quoted in Bell, 2002). None of the three traditions was spared. A précis of a scandal from each will help illustrate the commonality of the problems and the importance of their aftermaths and resolutions.

At the San Francisco Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi appointed Richard Baker his successor, not just as abbot but as principal authority over the entire enterprise, which included associated meditation centers and successful businesses such as the Tassajara Bakery and Greens Restaurant. Following Suzuki’s death in 1971, Baker held a tight rein over the institution, with little input from board members or other authorized teachers. In 1983, the board called a meeting, and the outcome was Baker’s taking a leave of absence. This was precipitated by an incident in which it became obvious that Baker, married himself, was having a sexual relationship with a married female student—indeed, the wife of a friend and benefactor. This was not an unprecedented situation; Baker had a considerable history of infidelities with students. There was more: in a community in which the residents willingly worked long hours for low wages, Baker spent more than $200,000 in a year, drove a BMW, and had his personal spaces impeccably furnished with antiques and artwork. Further, Baker had surrounded himself with an inner circle of “courtiers” and failed to treat other senior members who had been ordained by Suzuki Roshi as valued peers. The most painful thing for the community was Baker’s reaction: he did not comprehend that he had done anything wrong. More than 10 years after “the apocalypse,” as it came to be known, he stated, “It is as hard to say what I have learned as it is to say what happened” (quoted in Bell, 2002, p. 236; Downing, 2001).

In Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s organization, excess was framed as “crazy wisdom” and accepted by many; in fact, failure to accept it was characterized as failure to understand the teaching. Trungpa’s sexual liaisons with female students, his destructive meddling in students’ lives and relationships, his drunkenness, and his aggressive, even violent outbursts were well known. He was both open and unapologetic about his behavior (Bell, 2002, Clark, 1980, Coleman, 2001). Trungpa chose a Westerner, Osel Tendzin, as his heir. When Trungpa died in 1987, Tendzin became what amounted to supreme ruler of the enterprise, holding untouchable spiritual and executive power. In 1988, it was revealed to members that Tendzin had tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus and that, although he was aware of his condition, he had continued to have unprotected sex with male and female members. Not only had Tendzin known of his condition, but board members had known as well and had kept silent (Bell, 2002, Coleman, 2001). Tendzin, at the urging of a senior Tibetan teacher, went into retreat and died soon after.

At the end of an IMS retreat taught by an Asian Theravada teacher, Anagarika Munindra, a woman came forward to say that she had had sex with the teacher during the retreat. The woman had been psychologically troubled, and this had traumatized her further. The IMS guiding teachers were divided as to how to handle the situation—how much to reveal publicly, and how to deal with Munindra, who had returned to India. Kornfield pushed for complete disclosure and an immediate confronting of Munindra. As he put it, “If parts of one’s life are quite unexamined—which was true for all of us—and something like this comes up about a revered teacher, it throws everything you’ve been doing for years into doubt. It’s threatening to the whole scene” (quoted in Schwartz, 1995, p. 334). Eventually, Kornfield was sent by the board to India to speak directly with Munindra, who agreed to apologize to the community.

In the aftermath and resolution of all of these incidents, American Buddhism lost its idealized self-image and came to the maturity it carries now. In this process common themes and practices arose. Leadership power moved away from the charismatic models and was rationalized and distributed more widely, with checks and balances, and boards accountable for oversight. Ethics were addressed formally with statements and policies. The model of teacher-student interaction was scrutinized, and methods for diluting intensity were developed and instituted, as possible. Of course, this remains the most difficult of all relationships to manage, because meditation training carries the teacher-student dyad into areas of intimacy and power differential analogous to those in psychotherapy.

A universalizing and secularizing discourse draws together four themes. The first theme is the need for an expanded vocabulary of words, images, and ideas with which to express tacit experience. As more experience comes into shared language—verbal or nonverbal—the possibilities for teaching expand. The second theme is the drive for universalizing of the experiences and language surrounding them. This may emerge as explicitly spiritual language, as with Emerson or D.T. Suzuki, or in more secular language, as in the mindfulness-based interventions. The third theme, more specific, is the discovery or rediscovery of the principle of turning toward suffering and taking on the attitude of acceptance. This is a universal insight that is both spiritual and psychological in nature, and suggests that such a distinction is of little expressive value. As the verbal and nonverbal discourse of mindfulness continues to expand, universalize, and secularize, the potentials for teaching expand as well. But this is only possible if the fourth theme is considered: the fact that this discourse is predominantly a product of an elite social group, with significant socioeconomic advantages and a level of education that is “right off the charts” (Coleman, 2001, p. 193). As professionals and members of an elite, we teach from our own experience and give voice to it in language that may reflect that elite position. Therefore, we must continually be sensitive to, and learn from, the language of our clients, patients, and students.

One window into the possibilities of expanding discourse is suggested in the work of the postmodern theologian Don Cupitt (1999), who undertook an exercise in “ordinary language” theology. He collected and analyzed more than 150 idiomatic expressions in English that use the term life. His hypothesis was that these idioms have arisen as the overall population’s reaction to the shifts in religion or spirituality from the mid-nineteenth century onward—the era of the development of the East-West discourse under consideration. He suggests that for a great many people, life has become the privileged religious object. Consider, for example, the switch since the mid-twentieth century from funerals oriented toward the deceased’s place in the hereafter to a “celebration of the life of” the deceased. It might be said of the deceased that “she loved life.” Phrases like “the sanctity of life,” “the value of life,” “the quality of life” have become current since the 1950s; in fact, in health care, there are scales to measure “quality of life.” And then there is the imperative phrase “Get a life!” that became so popular in the 1990s. What are its implications as a spiritual phrase?

The usual rhetoric about spirituality and religion in contemporary Western culture is that it has been secularized. Cupitt suggests just the reverse, that ordinary life has been sacralized. We can trace the roots of this shift back again to the mid-nineteenth century: Thoreau recorded this new attitude in Walden, as he went to the woods to “live deliberately,” as he put it. Says Cupitt (1999),

It is clear straightaway that Thoreau is not going to live in the wilderness for any of the Old World’s traditional reasons. He’s not going into the desert like Elijah or Muhammad to listen out for the voice of God; he’s not going like Jesus or Anthony to be tempted of the devil; and he’s not going, like Wittgenstein or Kerouac, in order to seek relief for his own troubled psychology. He’s going to try to find out for himself what it is to be a human being with a life to live. (p. 21)

This attitude is of considerable importance. For example, a poem such as Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” with the last lines “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?” dropped into the silence of a class creates a sacred space and a sacred pause for reflection. It is secular liturgy.

Another window into the further possibilities is suggested by the sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow. In After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (1998), he maps out three approaches to spirituality that may suggest language, images, metaphors, and assumptions that will promote connection of contemporary Americans to alternative practices. The approaches he names follow the arc of the narrative of this chapter: the traditional spirituality of dwelling, the contemporary spirituality of seeking, and the emerging spirituality of practice.

Dwelling spirituality dominates in settled times in history, when it is possible to create stable institutions and communities, when sacred spaces for worship can be inhabited. The metaphor of this spirituality is a place. In the narrative we’ve been following, the hundred years from mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century were dwelling times. In America, the overwhelming majority of the population identified with Jewish or Christian tradition. Towns were small, church buildings and synagogues were central, often “ commons” occupied the center of town, and one—and one’s entire family—simply belonged. Lives were spent from infancy to funeral within a community, a place. The few at the end of the nineteenth century who saw and felt the withdrawal of the tide of the sea of faith—the first Buddhists—were anomalous harbingers.

Seeking spirituality dominates in unsettled times, when meaning must be negotiated, and all that is on offer may be explored. Wuthnow notes that a major shift was beginning in the America of the 1950s, as the culture became more fluid, complex, and threatening to individual identities. The opening to new possibilities from the East, and from the culture of recovery and self-help, brought new products and perspectives into the spiritual marketplace. The seeking of the 1960s and 1970s was pervasive, and continues today, as the market becomes more fragmented and the culture more unstable.

The metaphor for seeking spirituality is a journey.

Practice spirituality is the new bright edge in the culture. In a profound way, it integrates both dwelling and seeking. It requires setting aside a sacred space-time for the practice, yet that space-time is potentially fluid. Further, practice spirituality begins to reconcile or mediate the split between dwelling and seeking. Practice encourages both discipline and wide-ranging exploration, and can be undertaken within the shelter of an organization and community or pursued independently. There is not a metaphor for practice, but rather an impulse and attitude to “live deliberately,” as Thoreau and Cupitt suggest.

It is here, now, in this emerging moment, with a democratic and ethical view of spiritual teacher-student relations, a secular spirituality of life, and a drive for the paradoxical fluidity and stability of spiritual practice that alternative medical interventions are growing and evolving. With 150 years of evolving discourse behind and within alternative thought and practice we may finally be ready to reap the rewards by a radical reorganization of our ideas and approaches to health care in America.

Chapter References can be found on the Evolve website at http://evolve.elsevier.com/Micozzi/complementary/

OVERSEAS BEGINNINGS

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS

First Stage: Isolation and Rest. (5 to 7 Days)

Second Stage: Light Occupational -Work. (5 to 7 Days)

Third Stage: Intensive Occupational Work. (5 to 7 days)

Fourth Stage: Preparation for Daily Living (5 to 7 days)

THE WEST WENT A LONG WAY TO FIND WHAT IT LEFT AT HOME