When Zen teacher Mitra Bishop was traveling in Japan, a Japanese woman, on seeing her shaved head, approached her shyly and asked in English, “Are you Obasan (a Zen nun)?”
“Yes,” replied Bishop.
“This is really funny,” said the Japanese woman. “I'm a Jehovah's Witness.”
Somehow, a remarkable thing has happened. Just as it occurred in ancient China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, the Zen teachings brought by Bodhidharma from India have, by some strange quirk of karma, taken root in twenty-first-century America. Estimates vary wildly, but it seems safe to say there are now over a million Buddhist practitioners in the U.S., a large number of whom are practicing Zen. The seeds brought by Sokei-an, Nyogen Senzaki, and D.T. Suzuki, and watered by Suzuki Roshi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Seung Sahn, and many others, are well on their way to growing into a great tree.
The transition has not always been easy. Questions of lineage and authentic transmission of the dharma have beset a number of teachers and centers, and controversy has sprung up in communities led by both Asian and American teachers, regarding issues of spiritual authority and ethical conduct. Though these growing pains have resulted in turmoil, they have also resulted in development. After all, traditional Zen Buddhism, being a monastic form, had little to say about worldly issues such as sexuality, relationships, and family, which are of tremendous importance in the West. But as it is quite a flexible form—being after all composed of emptiness—our American version of Zen seems to be expanding successfully to accommodate these new imperatives, and this period of rapid expansion and turmoil is settling down to a steady and reliable pattern of growth.
Social activism is just one of many issues that have risen to new prominence in Buddhism because of the influence of the West. Some changes, such as equal opportunity for women as practitioners and teachers, were part of Zen in America from the beginning, and are even beginning to exert an influence back in their countries of origin. Other factors, such as the intermingling of Zen practice with Christianity and psychology, and the dominance of lay practitioners, are still largely Western concerns. Some feel these developments will strengthen the practice; others fear that key aspects, such as the direct experience of realization, may be diluted or lost in the process. And what about the form—the “look” and feel of Zen ritual and costume; can it be Americanized without losing something essential? If it cannot, will Zen ever truly take hold here?
The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.
—Gary Snyder
“The whole notion of Engaged Buddhism,” says Cynthia Jurs, a Zen teacher in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh, “is about practicing deeply with the awareness of the problems we face, and not avoiding them, but really looking deeply, and addressing things directly. How are we ever going to arrive at peace out there if we're not cultivating it within ourselves?”
“[Social action] arises from the sense that ‘I include all others,’” explains Robert Aitken Roshi, one of the early American pioneers in the field. “It's an experience of inclusiveness, that I include the folks in Iraq that are being deprived. I don't see it as something that's ‘improving’ my realization. It's just that I'm oriented like that. And my Buddhism informs my social action.”
“All people, whether perpetrators or victims, are in the same family, like it or not, and how you treat people is pivotal,” says Hozan Alan Senauke, who at the time of this writing was director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, which was founded by Robert Aitken, Nelson Foster and others in 1978.
The bodhisattva path in Mahayana Buddhism, of which Zen is an outgrowth, has always insisted on the principle of liberating all sentient beings before oneself; but for most of the 1500 years or so of Zen's development, the majority of practitioners have been content to understand this teaching in spiritual rather than practical terms. With the rise of “engaged Buddhism” however, a movement that has come largely out of the collision of East and West, practitioners are increasingly feeling the need to bring these principles into the realm of social, environmental and political action.
Bernie Glassman, in his book, Bearing Witness, puts it this way:
If there's a gash in my left leg and blood is spurting out, my hands don't say, “Too bad, let the leg take care of itself, we're too busy to take care of it right now.” If my stomach is hungry my right hand doesn't say, “I'm too busy to put food in the mouth.” But that's what happens in life, in society. And it happens only because we have an illness called separation. If we don't see that the hands, legs, feet, head, and hair are all one body, we don't take care of them and we suffer. If we don't see the unity of life, we don't take care of life and we suffer.
A student once asked Philip Kapleau if the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokitesvara, also known as Kannon, or Kuan Yin, actually existed.
“To meet (her) face to face,” answered Kapleau, “All you have to do is perform a selfless deed.”
An interviewer once asked Issan Dorsey about the relation between his work with the Maitri Hospice program and engaged Buddhism. Dorsey responded, “I don't understand this concept of ‘engaged Buddhism.’ If you fall down, I pick you up. If you cut your hand, I give you a Band-aid. This is not engaged Buddhism. This is how we take care of each other.”
Right Action, then, means sweeping the garden. To quote my teacher, Oda Sesso: “In Zen there are only two things: you sit, and you sweep the garden.” It doesn't matter how big the garden is.
—Gary Snyder
What happens in practice, and in bringing practice to people who are marginalized and suffering, is you realize that's you. That's certainly been my experience with men on death row. It requires such transparency, immediacy, and honesty. It's a world without consolation, but it's characterized by a lot of authenticity. The way I look at it is that I've matriculated in the best school in the world: the Penitentiary of New Mexico, and my teachers are the inmates and correctional officers who are there. I feel profoundly instructed by it.
—Joan Halifax
What is freedom? Is it dependent upon one's environment, on the conditions in which one finds oneself, or is it innate to the human condition and accessible anywhere? Questions such as these pose a more than theoretical dilemma to the growing population of Buddhist practitioners who maintain their practice behind bars.
The National Buddhist Prison Sangha had its origins in a letter sent to John Daido Loori of Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York from an inmate at the Green Haven maximum security correctional facility, requesting assistance in establishing a Zen practice group. Prison officials, having only the vague suspicion that Zen was associated with the martial arts, were reluctant to cooperate. The matter eventually went to court, with the outcome that Zen Buddhism was officially recognized as a legitimate religion to be practiced in the New York State prison system.
Fifteen years later, the Fire Lotus Sangha at Green Haven has become a large and vital group of committed practitioners. Zen Mountain Monastery has founded groups at several other prisons, and recently inaugurated the National Buddhist Prison Sangha, a nationwide network with the purpose of bringing together Buddhist inmates and volunteers. The program includes regular correspondence to guide inmates in their practice, donations and loans of books, audiotapes, and videotapes, and visits to area prisons for retreats, services, talks, and ceremonies. Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Sensei, a Dharma successor to Daido Roshi, now directs the program. During a conversation I had with him at Zen Mountain Monastery about his many years of work with prison inmates, he told this story:
I remember a prisoner came in to see me in a private interview. He presented a koan he was working on, but he wasn't clear on it. Then he told me about a guy in the shop where he worked who had really been getting on his nerves—the tension just kept building and building. Finally something broke, and he couldn't take it any longer. He went running across the room, lunging for this other prisoner.
This student has an immaculate record. He's on an honors block. He's done a tremendous amount of work in the prison, trying to build the life that he'll have once he's paroled. But as he was running across the room, he consciously decided that he was going to throw all that away. He was so angry it seemed worth it to him.
At the last moment, before he actually collided with this other inmate, he thought, “What the hell am I doing? This is crazy.” It was as though at that moment his mind of the dharma woke up, and he realized that he was in charge, he was responsible, and that what he was so upset about was really not that important. So instead, at the last second, he just sort of wrapped his arms around this other guy and hugged him—which completely freaked the other prisoner out, because it had been so obvious he was going to hurt him. But the fascinating thing was that what the student did was actually the correct response to that koan he'd tried to present—but in a real live situation. He showed me that he had actually realized that koan, by embodying it in a life situation.
Perhaps because the issue of personal freedom is so much more real to them than it is to the rest of us, many inmate practitioners take to the practice with an exceptional degree of dedication and sincerity. The taking of jukai, for instance—the formal commitment to uphold the moral and ethical Precepts of Buddhism—seems often to be a greater priority for them than for the average practitioner. Shugen Sensei explains:
Just a few weeks ago I went in to the prison, and there were two Sangha members who had just gotten into an argument the day before. The senior of the two, who had received the precepts, had really laid into this newer practitioner, and he felt badly about it.
I said, “Why didn't you apologize?” and he said, “Even though I know that's what I need to do, I'm afraid that if I do it right now I won't really be feeling that apology.” He didn't want to just say the words. He wanted the other guy to feel that he was really sorry for what he'd done, but he was still too angry to do that. Still, he was well on his way to taking responsibility for it, so I was encouraging.
Then we went in to sit and I gave my talk, and I spoke about how you can never rest in your understanding, you can never just assume you've taken care of all the barriers, all the sticking places, and go to sleep. It's always possible to get lost in something, and to violate the precepts, to hurt somebody. At the very end—the guard was actually knocking at the door for us to leave—the student who'd told me about the argument said, “Wait a minute, I need to say something.”
Now remember, in a prison environment a basic principle is not to show yourself as vulnerable. That's a cardinal tenet, because to do that is seen as showing weakness. So there's always a lot of posturing, presenting one's invulnerability. That's the game everybody plays.
So this student gets up and walks across the zendo, and kneels down in front of the inmate he'd had the argument with, and he takes off his rakusu [a vestment that is the mark of having taken the precepts], and says, “I ask your forgiveness. When you can forgive me, please give this back to me.” And he puts the rakusu around the other guy's neck.
It really blew me away. To me, that's what it's all about. When it really counts, in a situation where in order to move forward you have to give something up that is very difficult to give up—that's the important thing. There have been many experiences like that, where I see that these guys understand much more about the dharma than they're aware they do.
Shugen Sensei comments on the heightened intensity of Zen practice in prison, where the triumphs, the moments of generosity, compassion and kindness are so vivid because they stand in such contrast to the environment:
In prison there's a tremendous emphasis on keeping things suppressed—to be vulnerable to one's feelings can mean opening yourself to a tremendous amount of misery and anguish.
There was an inmate who came to me one day and told me, “I've been in prisons a lot rougher than this one. I was in a prison where somebody got stabbed nearly every day.” He said, “you get so used to it, that you just notice it, and go back to your conversation. You don't feel it, you just sort of pass over it.”
But then he told me, “You know, I was in the yard the other day, and somebody got stabbed—and for the first time, it went right through me. In that moment I felt all the pain I carry, that this whole place carries.” He said it in the most beautiful way, with innocence, like a child discovering something for the first time.
I looked at him and smiled, and said, “Welcome back.”
For me, this was an incredible demonstration of how practice works. If you really engage it over time, you just naturally come back to your own humanity. It was one of those moments that make everything worthwhile.
“Your life is your practice,” Zen teacher Maurine Stuart used to tell her students. “Your life is your koan. Once I went to New York to see Soen Roshi. ‘How did you get here?’ he asked.
“‘I drove my car,’ I said.
“‘And how are you driving your life?’ he asked.
“That's the question.”
In the original Buddhist sangha, monks were not permitted to work, but were entirely dependent upon charity—the good will of the populace—for their daily sustenance. When Zen migrated to China, where the climate was more challenging, and the remoteness of many monasteries made relying upon the generosity of others impractical, monastics turned to raising their own food in order to survive. Ever since then, work—drawing water, carrying wood—has become inextricably associated with Zen practice.
In the West, neither charity nor self-sufficiency have proven, in the long run, to be a viable means for supporting Zen centers and practitioners. This condition is further complicated by the fact that the vast majority of Western practitioners are, for the first time in Buddhist history, laypeople rather than monks—a situation which raises not only the issue of work, but that of relationship and family practice.
Zen teacher Steve Allen was driving Robert Aitken Roshi from Green Gulch Farm to a wedding Aitken was about to perform, when he remarked to Aitken that he'd recently attended a meeting at San Francisco Zen Center that had focused on what the identity of a priest ought to be.
“It seemed to me that was the wrong issue,” Allen said to the roshi. “It seems the question ought to be not ‘what is our identity’ but ‘what is our responsibility?’”
At that, Allen reports, Aitken, who had always remained a layperson, bellowed out: “Yes—that is the question! What is our responsibility?”
That, says Allen, ended the conversation.
A student visiting with Thich Nhat Hanh asked after a meal if he might help out by doing the dishes.
“Go ahead,” said Thich Nhat Hanh, “but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them.”
“Do you think I don't know how to wash dishes?” replied the student.
“There are two ways to wash the dishes,” replied Thich Nhat Hanh. “The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes. The second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.”
Zen teacher Les Kaye worked in various capacities for a large corporation throughout his many years of Zen training. In his book Zen at Work, he describes how he applied the insights gained from Zen practice to his anxiety about trying to make a sales pitch: “I learned something very interesting about fear: it arose only when I thought about the possible negative impact on me—Will I fail? Will I make a fool of myself?—rather than about the work and the potential positive effect on the company. As long as I kept my mind on what I was doing, I was OK. As experiences with work and with Zen multiplied, I began to recognize a variety of similarities between these two presumably different worlds of practice. Starting at the personal level, I saw that the being-inthe-world qualities emphasized in Zen were no different from the character traits that [my company] emphasized in its people: integrity, morality, a capacity for work, self-discipline, willingness to learn, attention to detail, responsibility, and perseverance.”
“I remember,” says Dairyu Michael Wenger, the Dean of Buddhist Studies for the San Francisco Zen Center, looking back several decades to the early years of his practice, “I was working at Greens [Zen Center's vegetarian restaurant], and it was a very chaotic situation. You'd really be pressed, getting up very early in the morning and working very hard. At the time I'd started to study the Lotus Sutra and I thought ‘studying the Lotus Sutra—now that's what I really want to be doing.’ But instead I was working very hard at the restaurant.
“I was wanting to see the Lotus Sutra as this idealistic, religious thing—but the Lotus Sutra is about what is happening right now. And at a certain point, because this is a very sneaky sutra, I realized the restaurant was the Lotus Sutra—and that was a very big turning point.
“Have you ever heard the teaching of the Five Perfections? They're the Perfect Time, the Perfect Place, the Perfect Teaching, the Perfect Teacher, and the Perfect Student. The Perfect Time always means right now, and the Perfect Place is right here. Where else is there—Tang dynasty China? The Perfect Teaching means that whatever you're dealing with is the thing you're dealing with—there's nothing else. The Perfect Teacher is whoever you're learning from. Even if they mess up, that's teaching. And then the hardest thing for people to realize is the Perfect Student. That we're not inadequate. We can meet the situation.
“You see, Zen training is about learning to be anyone. It's not about getting the ideal temperature or the ideal food or the ideal job or the ideal environment. Most of the time people just develop the things they're good at—but they're held back by what they're not good at. But if you have to hit a drum in a certain way, and you can't hit that drum, you learn a lot.
“Zen, in some sense, isn't about outcomes.”
Brother David, a Viennese psychologist who came to the United States in the late Forties, became a Benedictine monk, and went on to practice Zen, was head dishwasher one summer at Tassajara Monastery. Afterward he sent the work foreman the following suggestions for future dishwashers:
We should listen to the sound of the water and the scrubbing, to the various sounds the dishes make when they hit each other. The sounds of our work tell us much about our practice . . . Most people dislike dishwashing. Maybe they can learn to appreciate the touch of the wooden bowls, the pots and mugs and everything they handle, the weight of what we lift up and set down, the various smells and sounds. St. Benedict, the Patriarch of Western monks, says that in a monastery every pot and pan should be treated with the same reverence as the sacred vessels on the altar.
There has never been an Enlightened Person.
There are only enlightened activities.
—Bodhin Kjolhede
During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh one participant told the story of how his three-year-old son had begged his parents to be left alone with his newborn brother. The adults overheard from the next room as the child asked the infant: “Quick, tell me where you came from and tell me about God. I'm beginning to forget.”
Although the Buddha provided guidance for laypeople—and some of his lay students were said to have realized themselves deeply—the traditional Buddhist teachings provided a minimal amount of direction in how to conduct oneself in relationship and family matters. The famous Layman Pang, who lived in Tang Dynasty China, and is perhaps the most common example set forth of an enlightened member of the laity, had unusual resources at his disposal, as his wife and young daughter were said to have both been enlightened as well. For most contemporary practitioners, however, the integration of family and practice remains an ongoing challenge as individuals develop new strategies to successfully balance these two apparently opposing realms.
Then again, maybe some of our family members are more enlightened than we think.
Perhaps the following story, related to me by a long-time practitioner and close student of Philip Kapleau, will serve to illustrate how family life and practice can serve to mutually inform and clarify one another:
I'd been studying Zen maybe eight years. I was a relatively advanced koan student, and one day my wife, who was also a practitioner, came to me and said: “You have a twelve-year-old son, and you're enjoying what you're doing very much, but if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll never know your son, and you'll have missed something that's irreparable.” Then she walked out.
She said it in a tone which really allowed me to hear it. So I took a hard look at myself, and I realized that very little of what I had experienced in Zen was actually being manifested in my life. I understood it all intellectually, but it wasn't happening directly from my practice.
During my next sesshin, in my first dokusan with Roshi Kapleau I explained what was going on. He said, “You can work on this from one of two perspectives. You can continue to work on your next koan and see what happens. Or you can work on the koan Who? Who is the one who is unhappy with their life? Who is that?” There's no such formal koan—it's related to the koan “Who is it that hears?” which is in The Three Pillars of Zen. But Roshi Kapleau suggested using it as a koan—and without hesitation that's what I decided to do.
And working on that koan, something opened in a way that changed my life. When I came to dokusan at the end of that sesshin, he didn't test me, as a teacher normally would. I knew what I had seen, he knew I was satisfied, and so he was satisfied. What I appreciated so deeply was that Roshi Kapleau did not say: “Well, we could investigate your problem using zazen.” What he did say was: “You can investigate who you are, and you can do it this way or you can do it that way.” He didn't give me permission to roll around and analyze it.
When I came home everything was different. My life turned. From that day on my relationship with my son totally changed—in terms of time spent, responsiveness, a willingness to be interested in what he was interested in even if I wasn't. I started mountain biking with him—at that point in my life I really didn't want to be riding through the mountains of Colorado at 10,000 feet—it's very exhausting. But I did it and, of course, enjoyed it. Something shifted that was important. My son is now twenty-four, and we're as close as can be. I also gained an enormous amount of respect for my wife, for what she did and how she did it. But that's what it's really about—to open your eyes and look around you at the people you're living with day to day and see what you create in each moment.
A practitioner in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh tells of discovering a dead baby squirrel in her yard with her young son.
“Feeling sad, we watched our breathing for a moment. I was on my way out but my son told me that he would bury the squirrel. When I returned home I saw a stick with a piece of paper attached to it propped next to one of our rosebushes. I bent down to look at it and on the paper read in my son's careful printing:
Here lays
a small dead squerl
ready to become
a Rose
A group of children attending a special weekend retreat at Zen Mountain Monastery were listening to stories around a fire one evening. They had been told they might receive a visit by a legendary local figure, the “Wizard of Mt. Tremper.” Sure enough, after some time a tall figure wrapped in a cowl materialized from the night and stepped into the firelight.
“I,” he intoned in a deep and resonant voice, “am the Wizard of Mt. Tremper!”
Speculation continues regarding the resemblance of the hooded figure to the monastery's Abbot, John Daido Loori.
“Oh, Wizard,” asked one of the children, “can you show us some magic?”
“Yes,” said the mysterious magician. “Breathe in.” The child did as instructed. “Now breathe out.” The child did so.
“That,” announced the Wizard, “is magic.”
During a practice period at the remote Tassajara Monastery in California, Zoketsu Norman Fischer and his wife, who were the only students there with children, shared the care of their twin six-month-old sons, each taking a turn while the other was in the meditation hall. Although he loved taking care of his sons, Fischer sometimes found it painful, in his words, to be the “only human being for fifty miles around who wasn't in the zendo.” As he tells it:
“I remember one day I had a powerful insight. I used to feed the children in a wheelbarrow because then they wouldn't run away, and plus they would make a huge mess, and all I had to do was hose it out. I remember feeding them one of these times, feeling very upset that I was missing the dharma talk, and seeing the roshi walk out of the zendo first, as he would do afterward—and I had this insight. I realized that if the dharma was really real, and it was as it is said in the sutras, then it must be that feeding my sons was the dharma talk. And if I really paid attention to what I was doing when I did that, I would get just as much benefit as I would from the talk.
“After that, I never complained. I can say to people, and really mean it, that whatever their lives are can be the Dharma. If they really view it that way, and do daily practice—that's the bottom line, they have to do the practice of zazen—then it really is possible to make whatever is in their lives into a teaching. After all, Zen is a religion. And religion is about the turning of the heart. So I think that people can find a way to practice significantly, and turn their lives around deeply, in whatever situation they're in.”
A long time Zen practitioner was about to set off on a car trip with his five-year-old son to a lake in upstate New York.
“How long will it take us to get there, Daddy?” asked the boy.
“Oh, it's about three hours from here,” said his father.
“Well, where is it one hour from?”
“Hmm,” his father thought it over. “Albany, I guess.”
“Well,” suggested the boy, “Why don't we go from there?”
A life-long Catholic reported at the end of a Zen retreat: “I have spent my whole life trying to be Christlike. Now I realize: just be Christ.”
In his afterword to Zen: Dawn in the West, Philip Kapleau writes about how tired he had become of conventional religion and the “presumptuous statements” made by religious leaders such as “God is good,” or “God is almighty.”
“After having gained some Understanding,” says Kapleau, “I knew that God is neither good nor almighty nor anything else. In fact, God isn't even God!”
There is some controversy over whether Zen in particular, and Buddhism in general, qualifies as a religion. What, after all, is one to make of a tradition that refuses to conceptualize absolute reality, or hypothesize the existence of a divine force, much less a divine being? The position remains ambiguous enough that the more liberal elements in Catholicism and other Western religions have often seen no contradiction in practicing Zen alongside a theistic brand of religion. It is increasingly common to hear of Catholic priests, Rabbis, and Sufis becoming Zen teachers. Contrary to the old adage, the twain are meeting, in ways the Buddha himself could never have foreseen.
The Jesuit priest Father Robert Kennedy, who is also a Zen teacher, uses zazen to cultivate a state of deep silence in those present before performing mass. A Zen student who attended an interfaith retreat with him was heard to ask afterward:
“I have a much better feeling now for Christianity—but the one thing I still can't fathom is the doctrine of Original Sin. I mean, how can it be that the moment we come into the world we are already sinful?”
“Would it help you understand it better,” replied Father Kennedy, “if we called it Original Suffering?”
Former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who spent time in a Jesuit seminary before entering politics, was a visitor at Tassajara Monastery and the San Francisco Zen Center before and during his first term as Governor of California, and later spent six months in Japan pursuing the study of Zen. There he did retreats with Father Lasalle, a Jesuit Priest who was also a Zen teacher and held six-day Zen retreats combined with Catholic Mass. Brown studied too with Yamada Roshi, the lay Zen teacher and hospital administrator who was also Robert Aitken's teacher. Brown reports:
“Father Lasalle said contemporary theology had gone astray from the experience of Christ, that there was a lot of talk about Christ, but it didn't really provide a method for making contact with Christ—and that's what he saw Zen practice as offering. In the Jesuit retreats there would be dokusan with Father Lasalle, eight to ten hours of meditation daily and meals in silence. It was a traditional Buddhist practice room, except in the middle there was a rock with a crucifix on it and on that rock Father Lasalle would say mass. It was unusual, because by being silent all day the Mass had a power that it lacks when you just stop in a church in the middle of your busy activity. Mass in the context of a sesshin is qualitatively different—the words actually come alive. The central act, where the priest says “this is my body” has a power to it. The separation, the dualism breaks down.
“During the retreats with Father LaSalle, when he held up the host saying ‘this is my body’ I had a very clear sense that he could say that. The body of Christ . . . his body . . . There was not a distinction. That was something that I certainly never experienced in a church up to that time. If there's a way to go to Mass I would say it'd be after meditating ten hours a day in silence.”
Zen is simply the key that opens the door to our vast potential for goodness . . . . Opening the door means tuning in to what we are, how we think, what we say, and what we do with our bodies. We must be thorough; we must thoroughly be who we are in each moment throughout the day without expecting anything for it. Opening the door can be a difficult thing. But we must open the door in order to penetrate the thin layer of illusion that is blocking us from our unlimited, spontaneous, available goodness.
—Tenshin Reb Anderson