[Buddha-l] Re: How to help the Dharma grow in the USA

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

Richard, answering Pedro Vera's complex and crucial question, wrote

>> But I wonder if this ["unregulated industry" of Buddhism] is a Western
>> phenomenon, and perhaps in Asian countries with a long history of 
>> Buddhism
>> and Buddhist teachers, there might be some sort of council that keeps
>> things in check.
>
> No doubt there are. Like all such councils they probably do at least 
> as much
> to mute excellent teachers as they do to promote good ones. (Sounds a 
> lot
> like a PhD examination committee, eh?) For my taste, what makes Western
> Buddhism so vital (for now at least) is the lack of councils that hand 
> out
> imprimaturs and say "nihil obstat" to people who learn to mind their 
> p's and
> q's.

Indeed, religious institutions need to promulgate and protect their 
structures of authority, just as academic institutions do. The 
imprimaturs they grant are not, fundamentally, measures of insight or 
scholarship as much as they are measures of palatability to the 
imprimatur-granting institutions. God knows Michel Foucault must have 
written on this this specific topic, somewhere. If knowledge is power, 
it certainly will tend to conserve itself through exercising that power 
over its own students, turning them into its next generation of 
guardians. Sure works that way the the University of Chicago.

My impression is that in the lineage of Maezumi Roshi, teachers can 
avoid this committee hoop, but if they avoid it they cannot become 
roshis, fully sanctioned teachers in the Soto hierarchy. Maezumi 
Roshi's dharma heirs and grand-heirs make their own decisions about 
whether to pursue Soto sanctioning; still they all must please the very 
small council of the sanctioned teachers in the lineage.

In Asia, since there is more power to be had in Buddhism, there is more 
conservativism in the promotion of its teachers. Further, in Buddhist 
countries, Buddhism itself shapes the social mores. This tends to act 
as an external check on the behavior of Buddhist teachers. They are 
subjected to a general (and thoroughly appropriate) scrutiny based on 
the culture's awareness of the Buddhist precepts and it's own 
particular, partially Buddhist-derived, ethical standards. Since we in 
the West lack this external-and-yet-still-Buddhist check, we had better 
be even more vigilant regarding our teachers.

Caveat cultor!

Franz