9

ZEN IN THE MODERN WORLD

IN ANCIENT times, the people of the Ganges plain believed the world to be a multilayered place roughly the shape of the Indian subcontinent. This world sat at the foot of the great Mount Meru, whose lapis lazuli splendor was reflected in the blue sky. But in the modern era, the world became both larger and smaller. The world is physically larger than the Ganges plain people knew. But vast distances were being traveled more quickly, and far-flung peoples and cultures became entangled in ways both beneficial and oppressive. The modern world can seem very small sometimes.

The story of Zen in the modern world is, in part, the story of how the tradition left Asia and smacked into Western culture, for better or worse. It is also the story of how cataclysmic events and the influence of Western philosophies affected Buddhism, including Zen, in Asia. This part of our story will be an increasingly bumpy ride around the globe, so do hang on.


Although the the British Raj officially began in 1858, the British had been a substantial presence in India for a long time before that. As early as the seventeenth century, British traders in India took notice of ancient, monumental pillars with unreadable engravings. Local legends explained them only as the walking sticks of a giant or a god; all knowledge of their origins was lost. By the eighteenth century copies of the engravings were circulating among a few European scholars. In the 1830s, after long and dedicated effort, the British East India Company official James Prinsep deciphered the words engraved on the pillars, as well as on cliffs and in caves throughout India. The story of Ashoka the Great was told to the world at long last.

In those days someone like Prinsep was called an “orientalist,” a term that today is used disparagingly to refer to the way Westerners stereotype Asian culture. But some of the European orientalists were genuinely captivated by Asia and sincerely wanted to learn more about it. Although European colonial powers in Asia justifiably are remembered as exploiters and oppressors, the early orientalists in India saw themselves as devotees of India’s people, culture, and history.

After Prinsep unlocked the script, other European orientalists found and identified long-lost or misidentified sites associated with the life of the Buddha—Lumbini, where the Buddha was born; Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha was enlightened; Sarnath, where he gave his first sermon; Kushinagara, where the Buddha died and entered final nirvana—as well as the ruins of Nalanda.

The orientalists were influenced by the intellectual movements of their time, such as the Age of Enlightenment (or Reason) that swept Europe in the eighteenth century. This was the same movement that inspired Thomas Jefferson in 1776 to declare that all men are created equal and which motivated the French Assemblée nationale constituante to adopt “The Rights of Man and of the Citizen” in 1789. We note that these same worthy persons did not always live up to their own ideals.

Another movement, European Romanticism, followed closely on the heels of the Enlightenment. Where the Enlightenment valued reason, science, order, and knowledge, Romanticism valued beauty, nature, sensuality, and imagination. Some European philosophers associated with Romanticism, such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), were intrigued by Asian religions and philosophies, and they absorbed some teachings of Buddhism as they understood them into their own views. An Asian Buddhist scholar would have had issues with Schopenhauer’s understanding of Buddhism, but it was a start.

In North America, the Enlightenment and Romanticism would fuse together into Transcendentalism. Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) promoted, among other things, the idea that religious truth transcended doctrine and didn’t belong to any one religious tradition or institution. The Transcendentalists were the prophets and patron saints of all those today who call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Many of the Transcendentalists, including Emerson, were influenced by the work of the orientalists in India and devoured the translations of Asian philosophical and religious texts that were available at the time.

The World’s Parliament of Religions

All of these movements came together in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. The parliament was part of the World’s Columbian Exposition, also called the Chicago World’s Fair, which featured such wonders as belly dancing, the world’s first Ferris wheel, and exhibits of cutting-edge technology by Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Like the fair itself, the parliament was a display of the most modern ideals of its day, albeit with a presumption of the superiority of Anglo-Protestant Christianity. Transcendentalism was on full display in the program, with talks such as “Conditions and Outlook for a Universal Religion” by Professor Albert Réville, DD, of Paris and “The Essential Oneness of Ethical Ideas among All Men” by the Rev. Ida C. Hultin of Moline, Illinois.

The parliament was the world’s first organized interfaith gathering, or at least the first such gathering anyone could remember. There, for the first time, representatives of non-Western religions presented their own traditions to a Western audience. There were lectures by Shinto priests and Confucian scholars and a presentation of Zoroastrianism by “the Parsees of Bombay.” Swami Vivekananda of India began his talk on Hinduism with “Sisters and brothers of America!”

Of the Buddhists, the twenty-nine-year-old Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) of the British Crown colony of Ceylon—today’s Sri Lanka—was a standout sensation. Press reports glowingly described his flowing white robes and his gentle, refined face. It didn’t hurt that he spoke excellent English, thanks to his education at British Christian missionary academies. “His peroration was as pretty a thing as a Chicago audience ever heard. Demosthenes never exceeded it,” raved a reporter from the Dubuque, Iowa, Times . 1

Dharmapala drew upon his British Christian missionary education and gave two talks that wrapped Buddhism in the highest ideals of Western humanistic philosophy, especially the ideals of tolerance and moral purity. Further, at a time when the new sciences of psychology and evolution were roiling conservative branches of Christianity, Dharmapala declared that Buddhism was entirely compatible with both.

Rinzai Zen was represented by Soyen Shaku (1860–1919), the abbot of Engaku-ji in Kamakura. One of his talks, “Buddha’s Law of Cause and Effect,” stressed the Buddha’s teaching that natural law, not divine intervention, orders the cosmos. There is no first cause, no original act of creation, he said. While avoiding use of the word karma, Soyen Roshi emphasized that Buddhist morality also is rooted in the natural law of cause and effect and that our lives are forged by our own actions. “Be kind, be just, be humane, be honest, if you desire to crown your future!” he said. “Dishonesty, cruelty, inhumanity, will condemn you to a miserable fall!” 2

Other Buddhists at the parliament picked up the European Enlightenment and Transcendentalist themes and ran with them. For example, the Rev. Sumangala of the Southern Buddhist Church of Ceylon said,

The Tathagata Buddha has enjoined his followers to promote education, foster scientific inquiry, respect the religious views of others, frequent the company of the wise, and avoid unproductive controversy. He has taught them to believe nothing upon mere authority, however seemingly influential, and to discuss religious opinions in a spirit of love and forbearance, without fear and without prejudice, confident that truth protects the righteous seeker after truth. 3

These claims made for Buddhism were all based on the Buddha’s teachings from the Pali canon, although some might argue that these teachings were not always emphasized in Asia. Even so, the way Buddhism was introduced to the West in the nineteenth century has influenced Western pop-culture views of Buddhism to this day. They also impacted the development of Buddhism in the West.

Anyone receiving a standard Western education has had her or his thinking shaped by the European Enlightenment and Romanticism, even if he couldn’t describe those movements on an essay test. Many Western social and cultural movements—such as early feminism, the 1950s Beat Generation, and the 1960s counterculture—evolved from Transcendentalism. As the heirs of those Western movements engaged with Buddhism, they brought their worldview with them and fit their understanding of Buddhism into it. This no doubt is at the root of the persistent belief in the West that the historical Buddha must have been a mashup of Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe that Asians never properly understood.

Likewise, as Western scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took an interest in Buddhism as a topic of academic study, they formed a consensus that Theravada was closer to the “pure” and “original” protoscentific Buddhism they imagined must have once existed. Mahayana, with its diversity of schools and practices and rich iconography of transcendent buddhas and bodhisattvas, was judged to be an idol-ridden corruption not worthy of scholarly respect.

After the Parliament

Thanks to the parliament, Anagarika Dharmapala became a sought-after speaker. He traveled much of the world, lecturing on Buddhism and sometimes establishing viharas, Theravada monasteries. He also was a leader of a Buddhist revivalist movement in British Ceylon that became an independence movement.

Soyen Shaku lacked Dharmapala’s proficiency in English; his talks had been written in Japanese and then translated into English by one of his lay students and read aloud at the parliament by its chairman, the Rev. Dr. John Henry Barrows. Even so, the roshi’s paper on cause and effect impressed the influential writer and editor Paul Carus (1852–1919), who invited the Zen teacher to his home in La Salle, Illinois.

Carus was the managing editor of Open Court Publishing Company, and he needed a translator for a new series of Asian religious and philosophical texts. The roshi recommended the student who had translated his parliament papers, Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966), who had studied Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and several European languages at the University of Tokyo and seemed right for the job.

So it was that D. T. Suzuki left Japan for America. For eleven years Suzuki lived in an apartment in Carus’s house in La Salle, polishing his English and translating Asian texts, beginning with the Dao De Jing and an unfortunately poor rendering of Awakening of Faith.

The First Western Buddhists

Buddhism had been in the West, practiced by Chinese immigrants in California, for a few decades before the parliament opened in Chicago. Many of these immigrants were from Guangdong Province, where the port city of Guangzhou was a major entry point for the opium that was destroying China to enrich Europeans. Meanwhile, the discovery of gold in California in 1848 created a boom economy with an insatiable need for workers.

The first Chinese temple was built in San Francisco in 1853. This and other early temples were not exclusively Buddhist but reflected Chinese popular religion at the time, offering a mix of Daoism, Confucianism, and Pure Land Buddhism. There is no record of Chinese Buddhist monks immigrating to attend the temples, however.

The Chinese temples commonly were called “joss houses” in English. “Joss” is believed to have been a corruption of the Portuguese deos, “god.” Racist mobs occasionally burned joss houses to the ground, and cowboys thought it great sport to ride a horse into a joss house and shoot a few bullets through the figures on the altar.

The Meiji Restoration made it possible for Japanese commoners to leave Japan in the 1880s. A common destination was Hawaii, where work could be found on sugar plantations. Many Japanese soon decided the work was dreadful, and they either returned to Japan or moved to Honolulu. But as the Japanese population in Hawaii grew, Shin priests came to minister to their spiritual needs.

Eventually Japanese workers came to the mainland. By 1890 there were just over two thousand Japanese immigrants in the United States, census records show. These were mostly young men who seemed uninterested in religion. But in 1898 the first two Japanese Buddhist missionaries from the Nishi Hongan-ji branch of Jodo Shinshu arrived in San Francisco. Taking a cue from the popular Young Men’s Christian Associations that were active across the United States, the two missionaries established a Young Men’s Buddhist Association, or Bukkyo Seinenkai, on Market Street.

Soon members of the San Francisco YMBA wrote to the main Nishi Hongan-ji organization in Japan requesting priests. “Our burning desire to hear the teachings is about to explode from every pore in our body,” the letter said. In 1899 the first Shin temple opened on Polk Street in Francisco, and shortly after, branches were opened in Sacramento, Fresno, and Vacaville. For the most part the priests were careful to interact only with ethnic Japanese so as not to draw the wrath of the Christian majority. Even so the San Francisco temple held an English-language service and lecture on Monday evenings that drew a few white participants. The Monday night group eventually published an English language newsletter called The Light of Dharma.

In time the Nishi Hongan-ji mission on the North American mainland reached into Canada and Mexico as well as the United States. It was organized under the name Buddhist Missions of North America. The BMNA temples strove to assimilate into North American culture and modeled themselves on Christian churches. Pews replaced tatami mats, and some liturgy was set to hymn-style music.

Late in the nineteenth century, plantation owners in Peru and Brazil began to recruit Japanese farmworkers, and some Chinese found jobs in South America also. Many Asians remained in South America when their contracts expired. Some Buddhism is practiced among their descendants today, but there has been very little published about how Buddhism was kept alive in these immigrant groups.

Korea: Wars, Occupation, and a Buddhist Revival

In the late ninteenth century, Korea had become the prize in a three-way contest among China, Russia, and Japan. In 1895 Japan defeated China in a war over trade dominance of Korea, and this brought about the end of Korea’s Joseon dynasty along with its suppression of Buddhism.

As the twentieth century began, Russia built a Trans-Siberian railway in Manchuria, and Japan thought the Russians should not be there. The subsequent Russo-Japanese War began in February 1904 with a surprise naval attack by Japan on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur, which is today’s Lüshunkou District, China. The war was bloody and costly for both Japan and Russia, but a decisive Japanese victory in May 1905 persuaded Russia to submit to peace negotiations.

At Japan’s request, the peace treaty between Russia and Japan was mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt. The victory gave Japan control of Korea, which Japanese troops had occupied during the war. The Japanese also took a portion of Manchuria, including Port Arthur and the trans-Siberian railway, plus half of Russia’s Sakhalin Island. On Russia’s part, the defeat fueled a revolution that failed to depose Czar Nicholas II. Of course, there would be more revolutions.

After 1905, Korea was a protectorate of Japan. In 1910, Japan annexed Korea, making it a colony of the Japanese Empire. “Japanese colonial rule in Korea was unusually harsh and destructive, producing virtually no benefit for the Korean people,” writes the historian Jinwung Kim. “The objective of the Japanese colonial administration was always to rule and exploit the colony to serve only Japanese interests.” 4

By defeating China and Russia, Japan established itself as the dominant power in East Asia. And for the Japanese, a proud people still struggling with massive social and cultural change, the lesson seems to have been that military aggression was the key to the world’s respect.

A Rebirth of Korean Zen

By the end of the Joseon dynasty, Korean Buddhism seemed to be on its last legs. This Buddhism was mostly Zen. Temples were in decay; clergy were disorganized and badly educated. A Christian missionary in Korea predicted Buddhism would soon disappear.

Just before the Joseon dynasty ended, however, a reformer emerged to shake Korean Zen out of the doldrums. The monk Gyeongheo (1849–1912) had earned respect for his mastery of the sutras while still in his twenties. One day while traveling he was caught in a violent rainstorm and sought shelter in a village. Yet no one in the village opened a door to let him in. In one version of the story, people kept their doors closed because they were afraid of a plague spreading in the community. In another version of the story, everyone in the village was already dead.

Whatever happened, Gyeongheo was unsettled. He stopped lecturing on sutras and devoted himself to hwadu contemplation. After a powerful realization experience in 1887, he worked tirelessly to reinvigorate and purify Korean Zen. His several dharma heirs continued his work.

One of Gyeongheo’s heirs, Song Mangong (1871–1946), was the first Korean Zen teacher in modern times to support and guide the practice of nuns. His most prominent woman student was Myori Pophui (1887–1975), who received dharma transmission from Mangong in 1916. She was a trail-blazer in revitalizing the nuns’ order.

Joseon’s oppressive policies toward Buddhism ended when the dynasty ended, of course, so that was a help. The historian James Huntley Grayson writes that Korean Buddhism also benefited in some ways from the Japanese occupation. “With the absorption of Korea by Japan in 1910, the Japanese sought to implant their institutional form of Buddhism in Korea,” he wrote. 5 This might seem odd, considering that the Meiji government had kicked institutional Buddhism in Japan to the curb. But the Japanese supported and often controlled Buddhist temples in Korea to counter the foreign influence of Christian missions.

The Japanese occupation may have assisted Korean Buddhism in unintended ways. For example, Hyobong Hangnul (1888–1966) was the first Korean appointed by Japan to serve as a judge. He was troubled that he had to pass sentences on Koreans for acts of resistance to the occupation. The day came when he was required to hand down a death sentence, and he’d had enough. He left the court and his home and wandered the countryside peddling candy and reflecting on his life. After three years he sought monastic ordination, and as a monk he spent six years in intensive and sometimes isolated practice. Hyobong Hangnul became one of the most highly regarded Buddhist masters in Korea and the spiritual head of the Jogye order.

Zen in the West: Small Beginnings

Many individuals contributed to the spread of Buddhism in the West, a story beautifully told in Rick Fields’s book How the Swans Came to the Lake . 6 In the case of Zen, however, most of the story of the school’s early decades in the West revolves around just a handful of people. Let’s meet them.

The Mushroom Monk: Nyogen Senzaki

In 1905 Soyen Shaku returned to the United States at the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Russell of San Francisco. The Russells were a wealthy and civic-minded couple who hosted the roshi for nine months in their mansion overlooking the Pacific.

One of the roshi’s monks from Japan followed him to San Francisco and got a job working for the Russells as a houseboy. The monk, Nyogen Senzaki (1876–1958), liked to compare himself to a mushroom—“without a very deep root, no branches, no flowers, and probably no seeds.”

It’s not clear why Senzaki went to California, since he wasn’t there as Soyen Shaku’s attendant. It’s possible he was thinking of raising money for a kindergarten-style school he had founded in Japan. When Senzaki was fired by the Russells’s housekeeper, possibly because the monk struggled with spoken English, the roshi accompanied him into the city of San Francisco to find a hotel.

But as they were walking through Golden Gate Park, the roshi put down his student’s suitcase and suggested he not return to Japan. “Just face the great city and see whether it conquers you or you conquer it,” he said, adding that the monk ought to wait for seventeen years before attempting to teach Buddhism. Then teacher and student parted, never to meet again.

We can only speculate what was going on between the roshi and the monk, but Senzaki’s political opinions may have been a factor. “Shortly before arriving in California, Senzaki had…spoken out against the militant nationalism that had fomented the Russo-Japanese War and which the Zen monasteries had supported with as much patriotic fervor as the public sector,” notes Helen Tworkov. 7 The roshi may have thought that as the Japanese celebrated a victory, an outspoken antimilitarist like Senzaki might be safer outside Japan.

Nyogen Senzaki found work as a domestic servant, and in his spare time he read books, often on Western philosophy, at the San Francisco Public Library. Later he did farmwork, and then he got jobs in hotels. Sometimes he taught Japanese and wrote for Japanese newspapers. When the seventeen years were up, he rented halls to give lectures and teach Zen meditation, an arrangement he called the “floating zendo.” In 1919 he published a small book of Zen anecdotes, koans, and parables called 101 Zen Stories.

The Zen Teacher: Sokei-an Sasaki

In September 1906, a dharma heir of Soyen Shaku named Tetsuo Sokatsu (1870–1954, sometimes called Sokatsu Shaku) arrived in San Francisco with an entourage of lay Zen students. Sokatsu had established a Zen center for lay practitioners in Tokyo, and he planned something similar for San Francisco. After a spectacular failure at strawberry farming, the group found a place in San Francisco’s Japantown, a few blocks south of Lafayette Park. The urban Zen center attracted as many as fifty expatriate Japanese students and a few white students as well. But after four years Sokatsu and most of his entourage returned to Japan.

Those who remained were Shigetsu Sasaki (1882–1945); his wife, Tomeko; and their small son, Shintaro, who had been born in the United States. Tomeko also was a student of Sokatsu, who had arranged the marriage. In Japan Shigetsu had been an accomplished artist, and he found work repairing Buddhist statues for a Chinese import store. He also studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. At some point he met Nyogen Senzaki. But the Sasakis faced brutal racism in San Francisco; Tomeko was especially miserable.

The family relocated to Seattle. Shigetsu began writing about life in the West for Japanese newspapers. A daughter, Seiko, was born. But in either 1914 or 1916—sources disagree—a pregnant Tomeko decided to take the two children back to Japan. Shigetsu remained in the United States.

In 1916, Shigetsu moved to New York City. He got work carving, painting, and repairing art in a shop owned by another expatriate from Japan. He lived in various boardinghouses and rented rooms. He sent most of his earnings to Tomeko in Japan, but he kept enough to live as he liked. He was drawn to the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village and made friends with other writers and artists. He was once seen dancing in the moonlight under the Washington Square arch.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Shigetsu went to a recruiting office and tried to enlist in the US army. He had served as a draftee in the Japanese army in the Russo-Japanese War and thought he could be useful. But he was turned down.

In 1919, he returned to Japan to see his teacher Sokatsu and complete his Zen training. He made the journey from New York to Tokyo more than once; staying out of the United States for more than two years would have voided his visa. In 1928 he received transmission and Soyen Shaku’s fan and robe. His new dharma name was Sokei-an; Sokei is the Japanese name for Caoxi, a reference to Huineng. He also received a basic priest’s ordination, because he believed Americans would not take him seriously as a teacher without it.

He returned to New York with authority to teach. With some sponsorship from a Japanese businessman in New York, Sokei-an incorporated the Buddhist Society of America in 1931. Meetings, teachings, and meditation periods were held in Sokei-an’s two-room apartment on West Seventy-Third Street. By 1935, Sokei-an had fifteen students, both men and women, some Japanese and some not.

The Further Adventures of D. T. Suzuki

In 1908, D. T. Suzuki finally left the home and employment of Paul Carus to return to Japan. But first he went to London and then to Paris, where he spent time examining the Dunhuang cave library scroll collection in the Bibliothèque nationale.

In Japan Suzuki became a professor at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. In 1911 he married Beatrice Lane, a thirty-three-year-old Radcliffe graduate with an MA from Columbia, whom he had met in New York. In 1919 the couple moved to Kyoto, where Suzuki taught at Otani University, and in 1921 they began publishing an English-language quarterly journal, The Eastern Buddhist. It was during this period that Suzuki wrote many of the books that would make such an impression on Westerners, including his series Essays in Zen Buddhism as well as Introduction to Zen Buddhism and A Manual of Zen Buddhism.

The Matriarch: Ruth Fuller

Ruth Fuller (1892–1967) was from a wealthy Chicago family, and in 1917 she married a successful trial lawyer named Edward Warren Everett. In 1918 the Everetts had a daughter, Eleanor. In the 1920s Ruth Fuller Everett developed an interest in Asian religions and philosophies and began taking courses in Sanskrit and Asian philosophy at the University of Chicago.

In 1930 the Everett family, which was relatively unscathed by the Great Depression, spent three months as tourists in Japan, Korea, and China. Ruth was introduced to D. T. Suzuki, who gave her a copy of his second Essays book and a lesson in sitting zazen. Two years later she returned to Japan alone to study Zen. Suzuki introduced her to Nanshinken Roshi, the abbot of Nanzen-ji in Kyoto. She practiced under the roshi’s direction through a spring and summer. After a time, she was invited to join the monks in the zendo for the morning sitting and then for the full schedule of a sesshin, an intensive retreat. When summer ended, she returned to the United States, but she would participate in another practice period at Nanzen-ji about three years later. She was devoted to Zen for the rest of her life.

In 1933, Ruth Fuller Everett traveled to New York City to look for a boarding school for Eleanor. She also had an appointment with Sokei-an Sasaki. She had heard about a genuine Zen master teaching in the United States from several people, including her friend Dwight Goddard (1861–1939), an author of popular books and articles on Buddhism. In the apartment on West Seventy-Third Street, Ruth and Sokei-an had a long conversation, and a friendship began.

The Promoter: Alan Watts

In the 1920s Buddhism gained a foothold in Europe. Paul Dahlke (1865–1928), a German physician, in 1924 established what is considered to be the first Buddhist temple in Europe, a Theravada vihara in Berlin called Das Buddhistische Haus. Dahlke had been inspired to seek the dharma by reading Schopenhauer, and he made several trips to Asia to study with monks.

Also in 1924, a prominent barrister named Christmas Humphreys (1901–83) founded the London Buddhist Lodge. This grand-sounding establishment was set up in a room in the Humphreys’s apartment, and occasionally the only attendees at the Monday night meetings were Humphreys and his wife. But the Lodge did attract membership. At first, the Humphreys and their guests focused on Theravada Buddhism, because nearly everything published about Buddhism in English at that time was about Theravada. But in the late 1920s D. T. Suzuki’s books on Zen began to arrive, and new vistas into the dharma were opened.

In 1930, a fifteen-year-old boarding school student wrote the Buddhist Lodge for information, and a correspondence between the barrister and the schoolboy began. The schoolboy was Alan Watts (1915–73). When Watts was all of sixteen, he became the Buddhist Lodge’s secretary. About a year later, he began to correspond with Sokei-an Sasaki in New York.

At the Buddhist Lodge Watts rubbed shoulders with a number of interesting characters, few of whom were entirely Buddhist. Many were followers of Theosophy, a Western religious movement, originating in the mid-nineteenth century, that was roughly a fusion of Hinduism and Buddhism mixed with European Romanticism and a big dose of occultism. There were also followers of the Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and other assorted mystics and spiritualists. One assumes Christmas Humphreys guided discussions back to Buddhism now and then.

In 1936, Ruth Fuller Everett and her daughter, Eleanor, went to London where Eleanor was to study piano. Ruth gave a talk at the Buddhist Lodge about her experiences at Nanzen-ji. Eleanor Everett and Alan Watts met and fell in love. They married in April 1938 and moved to New York to be close to Ruth, who had also moved to New York. Ruth’s husband, Warren, had fallen into poor health and was in a nursing home in Connecticut. Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, Joan, in November.

Watts began koan training with Sokei-an, but after Sokei-an did not approve his first couple of answers, Watts became frustrated with it and quit. Resolution of the first koan usually takes years, not days. Watts had a keen intellect and was used to grasping philosophical concepts quickly, but koans aren’t philosophical concepts. That was the end of Watts’s formal Zen training; he decided to be an observer of Zen—a “philosophical entertainer,” as he would later say—rather than a student of it.

Ruth took charge of the Buddhist Society of America. She redecorated the two-room apartment on West Seventy-Third Street and provided proper meditation cushions so that people would stop sitting in chairs. She and Sokei-an began to work on translations together, including a translation of the Record of Linji. They grew very close.

In 1940 Ruth’s husband died. Watts’s fourth book, The Meaning of Happiness, was published to good reviews. In 1941 Ruth bought a four-story brownstone on East Fifty-Sixth Street, and the growing Buddhist Society of America moved into it. The first public meeting at the new temple was held on December 6, 1941.

Japan: Zen at War

When Brian Daizen Victoria published his book Zen at War in 1997, my teacher at the time, John Daido Loori, urged us not to look away from what Daizen had written. It is shocking; it is upsetting, Daido said. But we must not look away. We must fully admit this is what happened.

To grossly simplify complex history: In the first decades of the twentieth century the nation of Japan drifted down a rabbit hole of militaristic nationalism and right-wing totalitarianism. This process accelerated after the emperor Showa, better known in the West as Hirohito, was enthroned in 1926. By 1936, the government of Japan was being entirely run by military officers, and all liberal, prodemocracy voices had been suppressed.

In the 1930s Japan invaded Manchuria and then China. By the end of the decade much of China was occupied by Japanese troops, and it was a brutal occupation; there are estimates that as many as six million Chinese civilians were massacred by the Japanese before it was over.

Zen at War chronicles the way Japan’s Zen institutions and many prominent Zen teachers debased and perverted the teachings in service of Japan’s military aggression. Although Shinto was the official state religion, many elements of Japanese Buddhism—not just Zen—were co-opted into supporting war. Buddhist clergy took part in propaganda campaigns to cultivate obedience to the empire. They urged parishioners to enlist, sold war bonds, and diverted temple funds to the war effort. They ran officer-training programs and worked in occupied territories to “pacify” conquered people. In sermons and lectures, they mangled Buddhist doctrines in support of killing and conquest.

It must be noted that those clergy who spoke out against this corruption of Buddhism were subject to arrest and even execution. But there’s no denying that many Zen teachers supported Japanese militarism beyond what was necessary for their survival and that some very high-level Zen teachers harbored extreme right-wing nationalist views and enthusiastically supported war.

One of the worst offenders was one of Daido’s dharma ancestors, Daiun Sogaku Harada (1871–1961). For example, Harada wrote in 1939, “[If ordered to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of Enlightenment]. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [now under way].” 8 Here mushin, no mind, is not a liberated state of responding to situations naturally and spontaneously but a subjugation of mind and will to a totalitarian state.

By 1944, as the Pacific war was going badly for Japan, Harada published sermons calling on all Japanese, young and old, to be prepared to fight or commit suicide if the Allied Forces attempted a land invasion. “It is necessary for all one hundred million subjects [of the emperor] to be prepared to die with honor,” Harada wrote. 9

Harada, unfortunately, was not an aberration. Many Zen teachers “eagerly and enthusiastically endorsed some of the most excessive and reprehensible aspects of imperial ideology” to support Japan’s military conquests. 10 In doing so they misrepresented both the history of their own traditions and the dharma.

Harada’s dharma heir Haku’un Yasutani (1885–1973) also was a fanatical nationalist who twisted the life and writing of Dogen into a propaganda tool for Japanese militarism. 11 Again, Harada and Yasutani were high-level teachers. They are remembered today as the founders of the Sanbo Kyodan organization of Japanese Zen, which combined elements of Soto and Rinzai. A large part of Zen in the West today follows this tradition.

Zen teachers used the teaching of emptiness to justify slaughter, saying that no one would be killed. You might remember that this perversion of the teachings goes back at least to the seventeenth century, where we saw it in Takuan’s treatise for the shogun’s sword master. There also were arguments that, since nothing has intrinsic self-nature, war itself can be neither good nor bad. A war fought for a justifiable cause is righteous, it was said. This of course begs the question, what cause is so justifiable ?

And what does Buddhism teach about war? The first precept tells us to avoid taking life, period; it doesn’t list conditions. The rules for monastics attributed to the Buddha in the Vinaya—which the Japanese Zen establishment was no longer following—do allow monastics to use force in self-defense, but they must try to avoid harming an assailant as much as possible.

The closest thing to a “just war theory” in Buddhist scripture is in an obscure Mahayana sutra called the Arya-Bodhisattva-gocara-upayavisaya-vikurvana-nirdesha Sutra, 12 which is part of the Tibetan canon and may not have been known in Japan. According to this sutra, there is no justification for wars of aggression. If a nation is invaded, a ruler may use arms to defend his kingdom and protect his people, but he may only use as much force as is necessary to expel the invaders. Injuring and killing the invaders should be avoided if possible, although it is acknowledged that this may not be possible. Once the invaders are expelled, the ruler is not to pursue and punish them but must try to make peace with them.

In short, according to Buddhist teaching there is no cause so righteous that it justifies military aggression, but this teaching was not as often taught or internalized as it might have been. Buddhism was incorporated into the Japanese war machine, and the Zen establishment was complicit in this.

Since the publication of Zen at War and a subsequent book by Daizen Victoria, Zen War Stories (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), several of Japan’s Zen temples have issued apologies. At the same time, some details in the books have been challenged for being taken out of context. 13 Some of Victoria’s supporting facts have been disputed. 14 However, the basic findings in the books are broadly acknowledged to be true.

I can recommend another book on this same episode, Christopher Ives’s Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics , 15 which presents a more balanced view. Ichikawa Hakugen (1902–86) was a Zen priest and professor who spent the postwar years compiling chronicles and analyses of the collusion of Zen and war.

This leaves us with the question of how allegedly enlightened people could be so deluded. This will be addressed in this book’s conclusions; here I will just say that cultural conditioning is among the most stubbornly clinging delusions.

Why the March to War?

Exactly what was going on in Japan that would cause such corruption in the Zen establishment would take several more books to analyze properly; here I will only point to some very broad general factors. One obvious factor is that Japan in the early twentieth century was a conservative nation that still identified with and romanticized the lost culture of the samurai warrior. Much of that culture had come to be associated with Zen in ways that are only flimsily supported by history. For example, the famous codes of Bushido, the samurai rules of honor, often are cited as a Zen influence on Japanese militarism. But Bushido arguably is more Confucian than Zen.

Many of the military men who drove the march to war were descendants of the samurai class. Just as their ancient ancestors had restored their places in the aristocracy by taking territory from the Emishi, military officers were determined to expand Japan’s borders and imperial reach to secure its future and advance their own careers. 16 Of course, Japan was hardly the first nation to fall into the madness of thinking that war would be just the thing to restore collective manhood. Zen teachers who supported the war machine may have been similarly motivated.

It also must be said that Japan had legitimate reasons to be concerned about national defense and to be wary of Western hegemony. In the early twentieth century much of Asia was still carved up into exploited European colonies. Even nations that were nominally independent, such as China, had been massively damaged by European encroachments. World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had laid bare a treacherous instability around the globe. Anti-Western feeling in Japan was further exacerbated when the United States barred Japanese immigrants in 1924. But if national defense was the problem, wars of aggression turned out to be a poor solution.

In 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Germany, creating the nucleus of the Axis Powers of World War II. By then the United States had stopped supplying Japan with such materials as oil and steel that might serve its military campaigns. In July 1941 Japan invaded French Indochina in apparent coordination with Germany’s occupation of France. At the time Saigon was the principal port for international shipping in Southeast Asia, which was disrupted, and French Indochina was compelled to divert its resources to Japan. In response the United States, Britain, and the Dutch East Indies stopped all trade with Japan and froze Japanese assets. As a result, Japan lost access to most of its overseas trade, including 88 percent of its imported oil.

And this takes us to the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the entry of the United States into World War II.

Internments

The first Japanese American taken into custody after Pearl Harbor was the senior priest of Nishi Hongan-ji in Honolulu, on the afternoon of December 7. The arrests of more Buddhist priests followed. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s classification system branded Japanese Buddhist clergy A1—“dangerous enemy aliens.”

It was learned later that the FBI and military intelligence agencies had placed Buddhist temples and clergy under surveillance for some time before Pearl Harbor. By that time most schools of Buddhism practiced in Japan, including Zen, were represented in the United States. A Soto priest, the Rev. Hosen Isobe, in 1934 had established the Zenshuji Soto Mission in Los Angeles and Sokoji Soto Mission in San Francisco to serve Japanese American communities. And, of course, there was Sokei-an Sasaki’s Buddhist Society of America in New York.

That the authorities were targeting Buddhists was obvious enough that some Japanese Americans attempted to avoid arrest by converting to Christianity. The Buddhist Missions of North America changed its name to Buddhist Churches of America, hoping that sounded less intrusive. In the end, however, none of this made any difference. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated behind barbed wire in camps scattered throughout the country.

Love and War

Even before the FBI came for him, Sokei-an Sasaki’s health had not been good. His blood pressure was elevated; he could not walk as far as he once could. In June 1942 he’d had to be hospitalized for hemorrhoid surgery. Then he returned to the zendo on East Fifty-Sixth Street and addressed his students for the last time. The only thing that matters is to be a human being, he told them. The next day the FBI arrested him and took him to an internment camp on Ellis Island.

Ruth Fuller Everett consulted a lawyer, who assured her that there would be no problem getting Sokei-an released. The FBI had no evidence against him, after all. And they didn’t, but that didn’t seem to matter to the officials at Sokei-an’s hearing. He’d been writing articles about the United States for Japanese publications, in Japanese. The FBI decided Sokei-an was a propagandist, and they kept him locked up.

“The island is shrouded in drizzling rain,” Sokei-an wrote to Ruth. “Avalokiteshvara weeps over me today. I am waiting for Alice in the Wonderland to come.” 17

In October 1942, Sokei-an was transferred to Fort Meade, Maryland. His blood pressure climbed, and he was tormented with headaches and nausea. Some days he could not leave his cot. He had at least one mild stroke. Ruth hired a high-powered lawyer on Sokei-an’s behalf and called on everyone she could think of for help. A senior student of Sokei-an’s named George Fowler was a commander in the United States Navy, and he worked through military channels for his teacher’s release.

In August 1943, just as the Fort Meade inmates were about to board buses for Missoula, Montana, Sokei-an was taken out of line and released on parole. But all was not well; a few weeks later he was diagnosed with acute coronary thrombosis.

Since Ruth had been widowed, she and Sokei-an had talked about marriage, but Sokei-an was unable to get a divorce from Tomeko. The high-powered lawyer Ruth had hired suggested they establish residency in Arkansas, and then after six weeks Sokei-an could get a divorce in that state. A Congregationalist minister in Little Rock was willing to act as Sokei-an’s sponsor. They would also be able to see Sokei-an’s daughter, Seiko, who was being held in an internment camp in Mississippi.

While in Arkansas, Ruth and Sokei-an continued to work on translating the Record of Linji. When the divorce was granted, they found they could not marry in Little Rock, because mixed-race marriages were against county law. A judge in Benton, Arkansas, married them on July 8, 1944.

The newlyweds got on a train to Chicago, where Alan and Eleanor were living. But Sokei-an collapsed on the trip. He would spend the rest of his life in hospitals. Before he died on May 17, 1945, Ruth promised him she would finish the translation of the Record of Linji.

Heart Mountain

Nyogen Senzaki, the Mushroom Monk, had been living in Los Angeles. In 1931 he retired the floating zendo and established a permanent one on Turner Street in Little Tokyo with the improbable name Mentorgarten Meditation Hall. He had severed connection with the Japanese Zen establishment, which he considered hopelessly corrupt and, well, stupid. For example, he’d been told by a visiting priest that he could not ordain Americans without a license from the Japanese government, which Senzaki considered nonsense. Why not deal with the Buddha directly, without a middle man? he said.

One of his Japanese students had shown Senzaki some poems by a Zen monk in Japan named Nakagawa Soen (1907–84). Soen also had distanced himself from the Japanese Zen establishment and was living alone on a mountain. Senzaki initiated a correspondence, and Soen planned to visit Los Angeles. But war put those plans on hold. Soen remained in Japan, and Senzaki was sent to the Heart Mountain camp in the Wyoming desert.

The floating zendo was reactivated, and Senzaki led a zazen group in the camp. “They are the happiest and most contented evacuees in this center,” he wrote to one of his non-Japanese students.

As the war continued, on the twenty-fifth of every month, Nyogen Senzaki and Nakagawa Soen faced each other from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean and bowed.

Zen Spirit Is Where You Find It

Before the war, Robert Aitken (1917–2010) decided to take a break from studies at the University of Hawaii to make some money doing construction work on Guam. Japanese troops overran Guam on December 8, 1941, and took US civilians there into custody. Young Aitken spent the years of the Pacific War in detention camps in Japan.

A guard loaned him a just-published book titled Zen in English Literature by Reginald Horace Blyth (1898–1964). Blyth was a British writer who had lived in Asia for many years. Before the war he had been living in Japan, teaching English. He had also befriended D. T. Suzuki, who had suggested the subject of the book—exploring the spirit of Zen in both Eastern and Western literature. Aitken found it fascinating and was sorry when the guard took the book back.

And then in May 1944 Aitken had a new roommate—R. H. Blyth. Like Aitken, Blyth had been detained as an enemy alien since December 1941. The two men were confined together for fourteen months, talking about many things, including Zen. When they were released in 1945, Aitken was determined to find a Zen teacher.

Homecomings

Nyogen Senzaki returned to Los Angeles in 1945 and restarted the Mentorgarten Meditation Hall in a small apartment said to be overrun with books. And the students returned also. It was Senzaki’s practice to teach Japanese and non-Japanese students separately. A typical English-language meeting featured a sitting period, in chairs, followed by a chanting of the four vows, a short talk, and then tea.

In 1947 Robert Aitken spent a semester at the University of California at Berkeley, studying Japanese language and literature. During a Christmas break trip to Los Angeles he met up with an old friend who told him about Nyogen Senzaki. Aitken went to Senzaki’s apartment, introduced himself, and became Senzaki’s student.

Beat Zen

Now the pieces are moving into place for what may be the most unlikely development in all of Western cultural history: Zen, a centuries-old foreign discipline associated with silence, simple living, monasticism, and a nation that had recently been an enemy, became cool.

Beat was a youth and literary movement that first emerged in post–World War II New York City. Many of the original Beats, including Allen Ginsberg (1926–97) and Jack Kerouac (1922–69), met each other as students at Columbia University in Manhattan in the late 1940s. They also gravitated to the Greenwich Village art scene.

The Beat movement was a backlash to the duty-honor-country regimentation of the World War II years and to the conformist, buttoned-down, gray-flannel-suit mainstream culture of postwar America. The art of Beat was spontaneous and unstructured, even primitive. Beats reveled in being shocking and unconventional, which in the hyperconformist postwar years wasn’t that hard.

By the 1950s the center of the Beat movement had shifted to San Francisco, where Ginsberg and Kerouac met the poets Gary Snyder (b. 1930) and Philip Whalen (1923–2002). Snyder had read some of D. T. Suzuki’s books, and soon he and Whalen also met Alan Watts, who in 1951 had moved to San Francisco to teach. The San Francisco Beat scene became a cultural phenomenon that drew scorn and condemnation from Serious Establishment People, which ensured the Beats were widely read on college campuses. The association of these men, who explored Zen together and separately and wove Zen—or, at least, their ideas about it—into their writing, became the stuff of legend. Through Beat Zen, Zen was absorbed into Western popular culture as something both modern and ancient, both enigmatic and revelatory, and as cool as West Coast jazz.

I suspect Ikkyu, at least, would have found this amusing.

Figure 13. Jack Kerouac reading from his work in New York City, 1958. Kerouac was a leader of the Beat Zen writers.

His 1958 novel Dharma Bums, a fictionalized account of his adventures with Zen, is considered by many to be his best work.

Phillip Harrington / Alamy Stock Photo.

Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen

The spring 1958 issue of the Chicago Review was a landmark in Western Zen history. It contained nine articles on Zen Buddhism plus an excerpt from the forthcoming novel Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road had been a literary sensation of 1957. After the Chicago Review issue, an article in Time magazine gushed, “Zen Buddhism is growing more chic by the minute.” 18

Alan Watts had published The Way of Zen , his eleventh book, in 1957, and having established himself as an expert, he contributed an essay to the Chicago Review Zen issue. The essay, “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” was something of a landmark in itself and laid bare both Watts’s strengths and weaknesses as a commentator on Zen.

What Watts got right was his analysis of why there was such fascination with Zen in 1950s America. In Zen, said Watts, people saw an antidote to the “anti-naturalness” of modern life. Zen offered a reintegration of human and nature, a release from anxiety, and an antidote to the compulsive armoring against everything that pervaded postwar America.

Beat Zen, however, was too often undisciplined whimsy, Watts wrote. The Zen of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry was too indirect and didactic, while Jack Kerouac’s definition of Zen—“I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference”—bristled with self-defense and missed Zen entirely.

What then was plain Zen? Here is where Watts mostly went wrong. He imagined “original” Zen, Chinese Chan, to be more like philosophical Daoism than Buddhism. Zen is natural and effortless, he said, and the Japanese had turned it into a discipline, with hierarchies, disciplines, and tests of satori—hence, Japanese Zen was “square.”

Watts quoted Linji as saying, “In Buddhism there is no place for using effort.” Whether Linji said anything attributed to him is always a point of debate, but regardless, what Watts didn’t see was the great paradox—neither difficult nor easy —that the Pang family had debated back in the eighth century. Zen is effortless—but clingy, needy, deluded people don’t do effortlessness very well. Hence, achieving effortlessness requires effort. And that was true in Tang dynasty China also.

Likewise, the hierarchies that Watts disliked—and which existed in China, in spite of what he imagined—disappear when one intimately realizes that “authority figure” and “submissive figure” are just projections. Until then, we cannot function freely; we are still bound to that duality no matter how obstinately we avoid hierarchies. But until the projection is seen for what it is, designating some as “teacher” and some as “student” does serve a useful function.

In spite of all the messiness and distortion, the literary output of Beat Zen, combined with Alan Watts’s and D. T. Suzuki’s books and lectures, drew the West’s attention to Zen and made what would have been an obscure Buddhist sect into a Big Deal.

Legacies

Beat as a literary movement faded in the 1960s, but not before it had laid the foundations of the 1960s counterculture. Jack Kerouac died in 1969, at age forty-seven, from liver damage due to heavy drinking. After the 1950s Allen Ginsberg’s spiritual journey led him to Hare Krishna and eventually to Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana. Philip Whalen became a formal student of Zen and received dharma transmission in 1987. From 1991 to 1996 he was abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center, a refuge and hospice for AIDS patients in San Francisco. Gary Snyder spent a large part of the late 1950s and 1960s as a formal Zen student in Japan. He has a home in the Sierra Nevada mountains and is still writing.

While still in Chicago Alan Watts had attended a theological seminary and was ordained an Episcopal priest, but an affair in 1950 ended his marriage to Eleanor and compelled him to resign from the ministry. He remarried and relocated to San Francisco. In time there would be many more books, a third marriage, and several more academic positions in other cities, none lasting very long.

Although Watts was far from a traditional Zen figure and struggled to hold his personal life together, he was a compelling writer, and his books and lectures pulled a lot of people into Zen centers in the 1960s and beyond. My teacher Daido Loori called Watts a dilettante but also said Watts’s books inspired him to seek the path of Zen.

The other great promoter of Zen in the West was D. T. Suzuki. After Beatrice Suzuki died in 1939, D. T. moved to Kamakura and remained in seclusion there until 1949. That year he traveled to Honolulu to attend an East-West Philosopher’s Conference, and the following year he taught at the University of Hawaii. In 1951 he began teaching a series of seminars on Zen at Columbia University in New York; his students included the composer John Cage and the psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and Karen Horney. During these years Suzuki’s books and lectures also had a profound influence on many Western intellectuals, including Carl Jung and Father Thomas Merton.

After the war, Ruth Fuller Sasaki returned to Japan twice. The second time, in 1950, she remained. She lived in a small house on the grounds of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, where she wrote and translated. She assembled a translation research team that included Gary Snyder; a doctoral candidate from Columbia University named Philip Yampolsky, who would later translate the Dunhuang library Platform Sutra; and Burton Watson, another excellent and prolific translator. The senior member and director of the team was Professor Iriya Yoshitaka of Kyoto University. The team produced several translations of seminal Zen works, including what is still the standard English version of the Record of Linji.

In 1958 Ruth Fuller Sasaki became the first Westerner and the only woman to date to be ordained as a priest at Daitoku-ji.

Robert Aitken also returned to Japan in 1950, where he studied with Nakagawa Soen. For a few years he divided his time between Hawaii, where he and his wife Anne mentored a meditation group, and Japan. He also studied with Haku’un Yasutani, who may have mellowed somewhat from his war years. In 1958 Aitken received dharma transmission from Yasutani’s heir Koun Yamada (1907–89). Aitken’s Honolulu Zen center, the Diamond Sangha, today has several affiliates in Australia, New Zealand, South America, other US states, and one in Germany. He also wrote several books that are still required reading among Western Zen students. Robert Aitken Roshi was an enormously respected patriarch of Western Zen.

Another patriarch—and I use the word respectfully—not yet mentioned was Philip Kapleau (1912–2002). After World War II Kapleau was the chief Allied court reporter at the Nuremberg trials of high-level Nazi leaders. Then he was sent to cover war crime trials in Tokyo. In Japan he attended some informal lectures by D. T. Suzuki and studied with Nakagawa Soen and Daiun Harada, eventually receiving permission to teach from Haku’un Yasutani. Yasutani and Aitken later had a falling out over several issues, one of which was Kapleau’s insistence that English-speaking students ought to learn the Heart Sutra in English and not Japanese. Kapleau established the Rochester (New York) Zen Center in 1966 and also authored several books. His widely read Three Pillars of Zen, first published in 1966, has become a modern Zen classic.

The Next Generation

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904–71) arrived in San Francisco in May 1959, to take charge of the Sokoji Soto Mission. He was greeted by a congregation of issei, immigrants born in Japan, and nisei, their US-born children. But 1959 was the peak of Beat Zen, and the Sokoji Soto Mission—in an ornate building on Bush Street that had once been a synagogue—was sitting on Beat Zen’s epicenter. Within a few days of his arrival, Americans who were neither issei nor nisei sought him out and asked for teachings.

The newcomers wanted to learn zazen. The roshi told them he sat at 5:45 every morning and that they were welcome to join him. On the whole the issei and nisei congregants did not practice zazen, and proper tatami mats and round zafu cushions had to be acquired. In time the roshi had the newcomers bowing and chanting sutras, as well as sitting. Eventually non-Japanese outnumbered the original congregation and were coming to regular services. At the request of the Japanese Americans congregants, the two groups were divided into separate sanghas. The San Francisco Zen Center, split off from Sokoji, was incorporated in 1962. 19

The Zenshuji Soto Mission in Los Angeles went through a similar metamorphosis and gave birth to a separate sangha for non-Japanese, the Los Angeles Zen Center, in 1967, headed by Taizan Maezumi (1931–95). This separation of Japanese American and mostly white American sanghas persists to this day. This seems a shame, since I suspect both groups would benefit from mutual association. Perhaps someday there will be a reintegration.

A Zen Boom

Before World War II the Japanese Zen establishment was little interested in promoting Zen outside Japan except to Japanese expatriate communities. Soyen Shaku and others who traveled to the West did so on their own initiative. But in the 1960s Zen officials realized that Zen had, however improbably, become a Thing in the West, and they saw opportunity. The formal organizations of Sotoshu and Rinzaishu became more supportive of sending enterprising teachers to North America, Europe, and elsewhere to reach non-Japanese students.

Dainin Katagiri (1928–90) came to Los Angeles from Osaka in 1963 to serve as a priest at Zenshuji, and in 1965 he transferred to Sokoji in San Francisco to assist Shunryu Suzuki. In 1972 he relocated to Minneapolis to found Ganshoji, better known as the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. 20

Kobun Chino Otogawa (1938–2002) came from Japan to California in 1967 to assist Shunryu Suzuki at the new Tassajara Zen Mountain Center that the San Francisco sangha had established in the Santa Lucia Mountains near Big Sur. Later in his life he established Zen centers in Los Altos and Santa Cruz, California, and at Arroyo Seco near Taos, New Mexico.

Other Japanese teachers who arrived in the 1960s and became prominent in American Zen included Eido Shimano (1932–2018), a dharma heir of Nakagawa Soen. Shimano led a Rinzai sangha in New York City and founded a monastery, Dai Bosatsu Zendo, in the Catskills. Joshu Sasaki (1907–2014) established a Rinzai sangha in Los Angeles and gained fame late in his life as the teacher of the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

Zen Busts

This part of the story falls far short of glorious triumph. In 1977 Maurine Myo-on Stuart (1922–90), one of Western Zen’s great matriarchs, broke with her teacher Eido Shimano over his treatment of women. Stuart received an informal transmission from Nakagawa Soen and taught at the Cambridge Buddhist Center until her death. In 1983 Charlotte Joko Beck (1917–2011), a dharma heir of Maezumi Roshi, left the Los Angeles Zen Center when it was revealed Maezumi had been having affairs with students. Joko Beck went on to found the San Diego Zen Center.

Although no scandal ever touched Shunryu Suzuki, his dharma heir and successor Zentatsu Richard Baker was compelled to resign as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center in 1984 because of sexual and financial impropriety. 21

Eido Shimano and Joshu Sasaki were both accused, credibly, of out-and-out sexual predation. Women complained to boards or senior monastics for years, and for years nothing was done about it. 22 This enabling behavior was supported by a number of factors—the desire to protect Zen’s reputation, the tendency to think that a Zen master must be some larger-than-life being who cannot be questioned, and a pervasive culture that winked at the shabby treatment of women.

Zen continued to grow in the West, nonetheless, and more teachers than not have managed to be scandal-free over the years. Today, most Zen teachers in the West are the first- to fifth-generation dharma heirs of Japanese and Korean teachers who taught in the West in the 1960s through the 1980s. There are also many Western teachers who trained and received transmission in Asia. A substantial percentage of Western Zen teachers are women.

Divisions in Korea

World War II ended the Japanese occupation of Korea, but not Korea’s vexations. At the war’s end Soviet troops occupied North Korea, and US troops occupied South Korea. The end result was the division of Korea into two countries, followed by the Korean War of 1950–53. The North Korean government suppressed most religion, although there are reports that a few small Buddhist temples still hold services. Whether any of them function as Soen temples I do not know.

Zen in South Korea also was divided. During the occupation it became common for Soen clerics to marry, as they did in Japan. After the occupation, Soen divided into two orders, Jogye, which is celibate, and Taego, which allows clerical marriage.

Taego is named for the fourteenth-century teacher Taego Bou, who has been elevated to the status of cofounder, with Jinul, of the Jogye order. You may remember that Jinul, for all his influence, never received dharma transmission, whereas Taego was the dharma heir of a Chinese Linji teacher. In recent decades there has been a movement within Korean Zen to emphasize “sudden enlightenment” and Taego’s Linji teachings over Jinul’s more scholarly and “gradualist” approach.

Korean Zen in the West

In the early 1970s the Jinul master Seung Sahn (1927–2004) began opening Zen centers around the United States. In 1983 he founded the Kwan Um school of Zen, which may be the largest school of Zen in the West today. The head temple, the Providence Zen Center, is in Cumberland, Rhode Island; there are affiliates throughout North America and Europe, as well as in South Africa and Israel. One can also find Taego teachers and Jinul teachers not affiliated with Kwan Um in the West these days.

Revolutions in China

A civil war in China followed World War II, and the People’s Republic of China, headed by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), was established in 1949.

Mao’s government established a Religious Affairs Bureau in 1951 to administer operations for the five officially sanctioned religions in China—Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestant Christianity, and Catholicism. Soon all Chinese Buddhism was organized into the Buddhist Association of China, managed by the bureau. Some temples were converted to secular use; others were allowed to function as temples with Communist Party supervision, with priests and monastics becoming employees of the state. All religions were required to support the party’s agenda.

Mao Zedong initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to strengthen his own position as leader of China. By the time it ended at Mao’s death in 1976, most of China’s Buddhist temples had been damaged or destroyed. Even the venerable Shaolin Temple was attacked and vandalized. The five monks in residence there were shackled and flogged and then pelted with garbage as they were paraded through the streets. There was never an official national tally of the loss of ancient art, scrolls, and artifacts, but of Beijing’s 6,843 registered cultural relics, 4,922 were destroyed. Monastics were tortured; books were burned. 23

Since then, Chinese Buddhism has made a comeback. In 2006 Bill Porter, who also writes under the name Red Pine, made a pilgrimage to the temples associated with the Six Patriarchs, including Shaolin, and found them mostly restored and inhabited with sincere monastics. 24 Temples still must be licensed by the government, these days through the Administration of Religious Affairs, and are subject to oversight by the Chinese Communist Party, which seems to appreciate Buddhism mostly as a revenue source. Yet practice continues.

Taiwan: Dharma Drum Mountain

I have not seen Taiwan mentioned in Zen histories, but today it is home to the headquarters of Dharma Drum Mountain, an international Chan organization with a growing number of global affiliates. Dharma Drum was founded by Master Sheng Yen (1931–2009, also spelled Shengyan), a fifty-seventh-generation dharma heir of Linji Yixuan and a fifty-second-generation dharma heir of Dongshan Liangjie.

Sheng Yen was born in China and emigrated to Taiwan during the civil war between Maoists and the older government. He taught in the United States for a time and gave transmission to Westerners as well as Asians. Sheng Yen is less well known outside of Zen circles than many others in this chapter, but there is boundless respect for him within all schools of Zen.

Conflagration in Vietnam

After World War II France attempted to maintain its colony of French Indochina but found itself embroiled in war with the Viet Minh, a nationalist independence movement organized by Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969). France was defeated by 1954, and a peace conference in Geneva determined that all of Indochina was free. The conference also stipulated that opposing Vietnamese troops would withdraw into designated northern and southern zones until the nation of Vietnam could be unified by elections that were scheduled for 1956 but never took place. Instead, North Vietnam was organized under a Communist Party government, and in 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem became the autocratic leader of the Republic of Vietnam in the South. Civil war ensued. Over the next few years the United States became increasingly invested in propping up the Diem regime.

Diem was Catholic, and his government gave extensive preferential treatment to the Catholic Church and Catholics despite their being a minority. Those who did not convert found themselves discriminated against in multiple ways; those who protested were arrested. In 1963, this situation blew up into the Buddhist Crisis, remembered in the West for the self-immolation of the monk Thich Quang Duc while sitting in meditation posture in a Saigon intersection. This act—which remains controversial within Buddhism—got the world’s attention, and it also caused Diem to declare martial law and order raids on Buddhist temples. This in turn inspired a withdrawal of US support for Diem, who was assassinated in October.

Thich Nhat Hanh

As these events were unfolding in 1963, a Vietnamese Zen monk named Thich Nhat Hanh (b. 1926) had recently returned from the United States, where he had studied comparative religion at Princeton University and lectured on Buddhism at Columbia University. As the United States became more entangled in the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hanh and some of his students at a private Buddhist college became peace activists. Early in 1966 Thich Nhat Hanh founded Tiep Hien, the Order of Interbeing, a community of laypeople and monastics.

In 1966 Nhat Hanh returned to the United States to lead a symposium on Vietnamese Buddhism at Cornell University. During this trip, he spoke out about the war on college campuses and met with US government officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, to ask them to stop the war. He also met with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and persuaded him to take a public stand against the Vietnam War. In 1966 the governments of both North and South Vietnam denied Thich Nhat Hahn permission to reenter his country. He was exiled.

Thich Nhat Hanh moved to France and continued peace and humanitarian activism. In 1982 he and the nun Chan Khong opened Village des pruniers, or Plum Village, a meditation center in Dordogne, France. Plum Village and the Order of Interbeing now have affiliates around the globe.

Thich Nhat Hanh became one of the most well known and respected Buddhist teachers of modern times. He has a gift for explaining difficult dharma teachings simply and clearly, and his many books have been invaluable assets to Zen practitioners of all schools. He also is crediting with popularizing the phrase “engaged Buddhism,” referring to social and humanitarian activism as an expression of the dharma.

Buddhism in Vietnam Today

In 1964, in the aftermath of the Buddhist Crisis, most sects of Buddhism in Vietnam formed an organization called the Unified Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam. After the unification of Vietnam, the government outlawed the Unified Buddhist Sangha and attempted to replace it with the Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam, putting all temples under government supervision. The Unified group refused to disband. Many of the Unified sangha’s leaders have been under house arrest for many years, and Unified temples are subject to raids and harassment from the government.

Japan Today

Just about any survey of religion in Japan today will tell you that the Japanese are the world’s least religious people and that Buddhism is struggling to survive there. Even the traditional Buddhist funeral—an essential revenue source for temples—has given way to less expensive nonreligious observances. Small, rural temples are fading away.

Larger temples increasingly rely on tourism to stay in operation. This hasn’t been a problem for temples in Kyoto, I understand, but out-of-the-way temples have to work at it. For example, the venerable Eihei-ji, Dogen’s temple of heavenly peace, in collaboration with provincial and local government, is building a hotel to encourage visitors. Of course, those prepared to follow the monastic schedule always have the option of a brief residency within the temple. 25