The lay person and the sangha--Can I be valued if I don't seek transmission?

Friends,

As Diane (Musho) and I have opened our new City Center and welcomed an eclectic mix of visitors to the space, a question constantly stirring just below the surface is what should we build in this space?  What will be the culture of this sangha?  We have a space, but we have not in place a set of forms beyond simply lighting incense, sounding the gong, and sitting silently, with regular Dharma talks and occasional daisan.  In effect, we have a blank sheet of paper and have drawn very little on it at present.  There is a lot of open, white space.  What should go there?  What will the Dharma practice limned there look like?

In the three post-Ameland blogposts I put up in February, I sketched out what seems to me to be the imperatives for a healthy sangha.  Those posts are very conceptual.  They don't reflect any particularity.  But our new space, in which people are coming to sit and to interact, demands the particular.  So, how much should we emphasize ritual, what ritual, how much chanting, reciting and taking of vows, how important is it to offer Jukai, Shukke Tokudo, use Japanese language and terms, forms?  

My aspiration for our City Center is that it becomes a place that is comfortable for lay people, for house- holders with jobs and children who are seeking a refuge, a place where they can work with the causes of the stress of their lives and with their existential dissatisfactions through Zen practice, primarily zazen augmented by koans.  That refuge and workspace is what I sought when I came to the Kanzeon Zen Center as a widower and a single parent with a full lay life.  I suspect that this is what many coming to the City Center will be seeking.  It is not my aspiration that the City Center become a pale shadow of a monastery, a place oriented toward "monks" who have day jobs only to support their dharmic aspirations.  Rather, I envision a place for people whose lay lives are honored and valued, and who want support for a practice that enhances the totality of their lives.  I remain a lay person.  I am a priest, a "monk", but fundamentally a lay person, a lawyer with an active law practice, who spends hours a day in the zendo and loves making it available to others.  I know how Zen practice has enhanced my everyday life and has also softened, widened my sense of self so as to permit me to more honestly face my family, my life and my death.  I want to make that available to others, to people who are committedly lay people.

To develop the welcoming and yet deep culture we envision will require consciously addressing what seems to be a relatively common but unspoken Zen center model in which a pseudo-monastic hierarchy unreflectingly mimics the rituals and practice environment in which our Asian predecessors were trained, one that implicitly values most those who have dedicated their career lives to the Dharma, often while turning away from secular life and even family.  This may be an entirely natural model but I do not think it is one well-designed to accomodate most of the audience we seek at the City Center.  Such a sangha culture has a high potential to make the center a place that actually denies support for lay practice, that has a climate that can make lay practitioners feel valued only to the extent they manifest an aspiration to become what the sangha culture inherently values--the overtly religious, ultimately the teacher.  Instead of creating a psychological refuge, a place of safe questioning in the midst of a world of material and social wants, we create one more place where people feel somehow "not enough," judged, needing to adopt others preferences in order to be valued.  

The challenge of building a welcoming lay sangha is how to minimize the emphasis on individual spiritual attainment, which can manifest as monastic mimicry that implicitly demeans lay life, while stressing the ways that practice leads to an awakening that eases attachments and the suffering which inevitably follows, an awakening that ripens into an equanimity that can be deployed in a daily lay world filled with preferences and that ultimately leads to a profound peace.  This is our task and our opportunity.  

With palms together,

Mugaku

Maps and Terrain: Beliefs and the Wondering Mind.

The group discussed Stephen Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs".  A wide-ranging discussion about beliefs, and how they serve us as guides, as maps, and how they have the potential to limit experience by freezing permissible perspectives on reality.

It seems to me that Batchelor's preference for what he refers to as "agnosticism" is motivated by his desire to eschew belief and to embrace a not-knowing that allows, no, requires that I keep a wondering mind.  A wondering mind is one that he finds most open to an interaction with reality that eliminates the separation between the perceiver and the perceived, resulting only in perceiving.  To use another metaphor, a map held agnostically, without attachment, has the potential to dissolve in the user's encounter with the terrain, leaving only the sacred encounter and its consequences.

Whatever the value of maps, of beliefs, it seems to me that Batchelor exquisitely touches the need for every map to have a large space marked "terra incognita", the unknown land, to remind us that maps need always to be held loosely if they are not to separate us from the terrain that is our lives.

Future readings: "Instructions to the Cook" and "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism."

Friends:

In the Tuesday night group, we decided to pick two more books so that people could be reading ahead once they finished the current selection, "Buddhism Without Beliefs", set to be discussed on March 15th.  So, the April selection will be Bernie Glassman's  (Tetsugen Roshi's) book, "Instructions to the Cook", which brings us into touch with socially engaged Buddhism in America against the framework of Dogen Zenji's classic work by the same name.  For May we will read Chogam Trungpa Rinpoche's book, "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism", which addresses the tendency to use spirituality as just one more thing to accomplish, to achieve, to attain. 

As a note to those in the group:  Musho Sensei suggested to me that rather than discussing a book on only one evening, it might make more sense to discuss sections of each book each week during the month it is assigned.  It would change the nature of the Tuesday night group a bit, but it would also bring more depth to the discussions and more focus, while incentivizing everyone to be up to speed on the reading each week.  Please consider this suggestion for next week's meeting. 

Gassho to all for coming. 

Mugaku

"Buddhism Without Beliefs"--a critique

For those reading Buddhism Without Beliefs for the Tuesday night group, I suggest these critiques.  One presents a more traditional view of some of the issues discussed by Stephen Batchelor in his book, the other is more supportive of Batchelor and surveys several different critiques.  These may be helpful to readers in considering the broader issues arising from the Dharma's coming into Western culture.   http://www.darkzen.com/Articles/critiquez.htm; http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/msthesispreface.htm.

-Mugaku

Barry Magid, "There is No Zen, Only Zen Teachers"

Barry Magid, a successor of Charlotte Joko Beck, wrote a thoughtful piece about Zen that is well worth reading.  In the context of the current discussions which attempt to separate teacher "misconduct" from Zen, he suggests that there is no separating Zen from Zen teachers, and no separating the good from the bad in teachers.  They are to be taken whole, like life.  We cannot expect Zen without any harming because Zen is a human artifact;  we should not anticipate an "Enlightenment" that will free us from our human existential dilemma.

His piece rings true to me.  Wanting Zen teachers to be magicians will not make them so, but it will certainly make the students seeking an escape disappointed when the curtain is inevitably pulled back.  And wanting the impossible may seduce both the teacher and the student in the process.  See http://sweepingzen.com/2011/02/25/there-is-no-zen-only-zen-teachers/

-Mugaku

History and the White Plum Asanga

George Santayana said, "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it".   To avoid repeating history, one has to know it first.  The current situation surrounding Genpo Roshi suggests that the Salt Lake City Kanzeon Zen Center community did not know its history, through the fault of no one in particular.  That lack is being cured, if painfully.

There has been much fervent commentary on the web following Genpo's public revelation, some of it obviously the settling of old scores that are obscure.  To me, the most sober and helpful exchange, one that brings the lessons of history crisply into focus, is that between Chozen Roshi and the eldest daughter of Maezumi Roshi, Mimi. Their exchange is posted at sweepingzen.com.  It started with Mimi's initial letter to Chozen, detailing how the open sexual atmosphere at Zen Center of Los Angeles in the 70's affected her family.  (In the most recent Genpo Roshi situation, Chozen was a prime mover behind the letter to Kanzeon's board from 44 Zen teachers, which together with the board's reply is posted at clearviewblog.org.)  Chozen then responds, and Mimi rejoins.  I recommend a reading of these exchanges as well as the letter from the 44 Zen teachers and Kanzeon's response.

If we are going to develop a healthy sangha at The Boulder Mountain Zendo along the lines that I wrote of in my Ameland Reflections, then we have to know our history and learn from it.  We cannot flinch when confronted with our lineage's past.

-Mugaku

New book to read--Stephen Batchelor, "Buddhism Without Beliefs"

Friends,

At our last Tuesday night group, we discussed Steven Hagen's "Meditation--Now or Never".  Most people there seemed to like the clean quality of his emphasis on simply following the breath and letting things arise and pass away.  Straight Soto sitting meditation.  No bells, whistles, no big deal about openings, about kensho.  Just gradually transforming as we see more clearly what arises and passes away, as we experience the one who sees.  While quite different in praxis that the modern version of Theravadan practice described in "Unlimiting Mind", the feeling is much the same.  The intensity of attention, the rigor of the mental and emotional awareness, the focus on non-judgment, and the importance of others.

For the next book, I have settled on Stephen Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs".  This is a book I first read in 1997, shortly after it came out.  It made a big impression on me then.  Here was a modern Buddhism, a "liberal" Buddhism with which I could feel comfortable.  In the years since, I have attended two retreats with Stephen at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe.  I enjoy him personally, and I enjoy his skeptical, his "agnostic" Buddhism.

I selected this book because as I browsed my bookshelf and paged through it, I noticed in it some of the same rigor, the same precision of thought and expression, the same emphasis on the simplicity of practice that I found in Hagen and in Olendzki.  Here is someone from yet another part of the Buddhist tradition who can help us triangulate in on the soul of the Buddhadharma--not its ideas, but its enactment.  Hagen is Soto Zen,  Olendzki is Theravadan, and Batchelor spent years in the Tibetan and then Korean Zen traditions.  While all three have different perspectives on the practice, and nominally different praxis, their approach feels quite similar.  What I come away with from all three is a comfortable feeling that we are all on the same path, even if we describe it in different terms.

We'll discuss this book on the evening of March 15th.  Join us.

Warmly,

Mugaku