[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 27 June 2007 14:22, Richard Hayes wrote:

> I am beginning to see a pattern here. Everything you say is silly, stupid
> or dumb. But this is probably the dumbest statement of yours I've ever
> read.

That certainly came out sounding much more categorical than what I was 
actually thinking when I wrote it. I meant to add the qualifying phrase "on 
this topic." The vast majority of what you say, Curt, is quite interesting 
and well said. But on this particular topic, the intelligence and insight 
that we have become accustomed to seeing in your writings vanishes. The 
result is something that sounds adolescent, emotional and poorly thought out 
and thus stands in stark contrast the the maturity of your writing on other 
topics. This observation of mine is by no means meant to be about you 
personally, Curt. It is about all of us when we get caught up in what 
Buddhists in India called prapanca, and which Buddhist scholars in the West 
often translate as obsession. 

What is behind this particular obsession on the topic of Western Buddhism is 
anyone's guess. Perhaps you gave us a clue when you observed, rightly, that 
cultural self-loathing and smug thoughts of cultural superiority usually go 
hand in hand. Those of us who do not see anything remarkably wise or foolish 
in any particular culture do not think in terms of either cultural smugness 
or self-loathing. It is people who are themselves caught up in smugness (and 
the inevitable concomitant of self-loathing) that tend to see it in everyone. 
Psychologists call this phenomenon projection.

As I mentioned earlier, I spent the first two weeks of this month at this 
year's seminar on Buddhism at Bodhi Manda Zen Center. It was a remarkable 
event in that Joshu-roshi (better known to some as Sasaki-roshi) talked for 
75-90 minutes every day. That in itself is a remarkable feat for a man who 
just turned 100 years old. These talks may eventually be published. This 
year's seminar was also remarkable in that every single scholar there (Robert 
Buswell, Lobsang Norbu Shastri, Bill Waldron, Michel Mohr and Hal Roth) 
interacted with Roshi's talks and offered interpretations of them and put 
them into context. Roshi speaks a bit like an oracle; what he says needs a 
fair amount of unpacking. Once unpacked, it ends up making quite a bit of 
sense.

One theme that Joshu-roshi returned to several times was his feeling that Zen 
is almost completely dead in Japan and, indeed, that Buddhism is almost 
completely dead in Asia. The hope for Buddhism, he says, is in the West. And 
the only way Buddhism can flourish in the West is by revitalizing itself into 
what he calls a new Buddhism (atarashii bukkyou). The kind of Zen that 
consists in rehashing 1000-year-old koans from China is a Zen that is bound 
to die. A Zen that addresses the problems and concerns of people now alive is 
a Zen that could not only revitalize Buddhism but also revitalize a Western 
culture that has in many ways grown moribund. Also sprach Roshi.

One striking image that Joshu-roshi uses is that it is only when a man and 
woman meet in a cemetery and jump into a grave together that they can find 
true love. True love is possible only when one's obsessions with oneself die. 
Western society and Buddhism can have a fruitful marriage only when Buddhists 
stop being obsessed with preserving true Buddhism and Westerners stop being 
obsessed with preserving true Western values. Buddhists who are obsessed with 
keeping Buddhism pure, he says, are doing religion. People who know how to 
discard religion have a chance of doing Buddhism.

In listening to Joshu-roshi saying these things, I was reminded many times of 
my former Zen teacher, Samu Sunim. He used to say that working on old koans 
is like eating vomit. They have very little nutritional value to the person 
who eats them the second time. What a vital Buddhism needs is a confrontation 
with the problems and issues in the culture in which it finds itself. Zen, 
said Sunim, grew out of problems in Song and Tang China, and it took root in 
Korea and Vietnam and Japan only insofar as the problems in those societies 
resembled problems in Song and Tang China. But time is marching on, and it 
might be wise to look very carefully at the things that are troubling people 
in the world today and to let new forms of practice and new institutions 
arise that will help people meet those troubles directly rather than trying 
to force their troubles into the mold of medieval China's troubles. When 
people described Sunim as a Zen Buddhist, he often stopped them and 
said "We're not doing Zen here. We're doing North American Buddhism." 

It was through Sunim that I first heard, in the mid-1980s, about a Buddhist 
teacher that Sunim found very exciting and refreshing. It was a guy called 
Stephen Batchelor. Perhaps not so strangely, this same Stephen Batchelor is 
spoken about with great enthusiasm by some of the key disciples of 
Joshu-sasaki. Superficially, Batchelor does not seem much like either Sunim 
or Roshi. Batchelor has hair and wears Birkenstocks.

Although I personally do not thrive in the essentially authoritarian and 
totalitarian atmosphere of Rinzai Zen practice, I see that that practice has 
done a lot of people a lot of good. I also see that many people who have 
benefited from it are wondering whether there might be some way of replacing 
the old authoritarian forms with something new and different. It is quite 
possible that Joshu-roshi himself is having such thoughts. Perhaps that has 
something to do with why he has never named a Dharma heir. Perhaps a 
roshi-less Zen is part of his vision of an atarashii bukkyou. Perhaps not.

In any event, I see a lot of really exciting and vital struggling taking place 
among Western Buddhists--struggles with the best koans of all, the ones that 
arise out of one's own life. To see all that as just a manifestation of smug 
claims of cultural superiority and as obnoxious clamoring for something that 
poses no challenges, as Curt apparently sees it, is to see far too little of 
what is actually going on and perhaps far too much of a vain imagining 
arising from some unresolved prapanca.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico