[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Espen S. Ore]

Richard Hayes skrev:
>
> One way of helping Americans get over their attachment to American culture 
> might be to get them to do everything in a pseudo-Japanese way. Wear Japanese 
> robes, eat with chopsticks, chant in Japanese, bow at every opportunity, wear 
> plastic slippers to the toilet, eat noodles very noisily---that's the way to 
> get over one's attachments to the American lifestyle. More than one Zen group 
> seems to have tried that strategy out. It is not obvious that the strategy 
> works. It may work for some, but for others it may end up simply replacing 
> one set of addictions with another, like giving up one's addiction to cocaine 
> by becoming an alcoholic. So for some it may be very helpful to have some 
> sort of clone of Japanese Zen, and for others a form of Buddhism in more 
> familiar dressing may work better. Why not have both?
>
>   
As far as I know the style at Mount Baldy where Sasaki Roshi teaches 
belongs to clone-category. Our group in Oslo, Norway, had for some years 
one of Sasaki Roshi's students, Genro Osho as our teacher, so our style 
was similar to if not exactly the same as Genro's in Vienna and so in 
many ways following the Mount Baldy way of doing things. Now that Genro 
is not allowed by his doctor to go by plane to Norway we had as a 
visiting teacher so to speak another of Sasaki Roshi's students at our 
sesshin last year and he will come this year as well. We do not use 
plastic slippers for the toilet or eat noodles very noisily, but yes, we 
chant, not in Japanese but in Chinese the way it is done in Japan. (I 
remember the chanting of the Heart Sutra in the movie "Lost in 
translation" - it sounded very much like us.)

But we also believe that things can be changed. At certain times we 
chant the Heart sutra in Norwegian, we once added plastic spoons to the 
chopsticks for a sesshin since we thought that might make it easier to 
eat porridge for breakfast - but the spoons tended to break, and it is 
fairly easy to eat porridge with chopsticks, so we dropped that 
innovation. We have also added time for a walk/hike in the forest to our 
daily program for sesshin. This is probably a very Norwegian thing to do.

So does this Japanese clone-style work? For me it does. There are other 
zen groups in Oslo which explicitely wish to follow Western (or 
Northern) European customes and languages, and I believe that people 
join the group which works for them.

Espen Ore
Oslo/Holmestrand, Norway