Who Practices Zen? And Why? And to What End?

There have been three blog postings recently about Zen practice that particularly caught my attention. Jiryu Rutschman-Byler wrote a compelling reflection on the transmission of the Dharma from one culture to another, Dosho Port offered a reflection on the place of ordination within Zen practice, while Brad Warner opined in passing how perhaps the time for Zen clergy had passed.

Taken together I thought this demonstrated some of the creative energy going into our contemporary Western Zen practice, and together they sparked some thoughts rising in my own heart.

Jiryu offered a particularly important caution. He opened by citing the example of how when Buddhism came to China, the Chinese substituted their own words for many technical Dharmic terms. Without a doubt this changed things, particularly what people thought they were encountering in this new religion, actually it altered what people were encountering in some real ways. Using Dao to stand for Dharma (actually and Buddha) added layers of meaning not there when the tradition made its way from India to China. In my opinion as the dust settled, these were mostly useful enrichments. But, Jiryu was mostly concerned with how, particularly at first, these sometimes cavalier adaptations offered more confusion than assistance. I hope I’m accurately conveying his point here. Be careful of assuming you know something and can change it without damage to the deeper project. Perhaps your changes will be harmful to the tradition you care so deeply for.

I feel he was cautioning us here in the West as we go headlong into our own vision of the Dharma, or more properly visions. No doubt there’s a fair amount of bathwater sloshing about that isn’t at all necessary for the transmission of the great Way to our time and place. But, we do need to be careful about losing the baby as we pour off that water to make room for our own cultural engagement.

Then Dosho offered in response to my own earlier posting on how to pursue ordination with Soto Zen here in the West his own experiences as a young practitioner. He painted a vivid picture of a committed Zen student who mentions once that he would like to ordain, and how nothing came of it for years, and then out of the blue his teacher announces the ordination. For Dosho, if I correctly characterize his point, ordination was a step along the way of practice. It has its own currents, mostly going on beneath the waves.

He specifically questioned the point of a ministerial aspect to ordination.

Sort of, in a way, following this path of reasoning, Brad offered how we might not all, in fact, be better off without ordinations.

I’ve probably mischaracterized everyone’s points. But, lets let the straw men I’ve constructed stand for issues I think people do raise, and which are important.

First, a certain humility on the Way is of vast importance.

Only don’t know has endless layers of riches for us if we open our hearts wide.

And cautions about thinking we know things should be repeated often.

And, of course, of course, in this world of change we must act.

Second, the Way is open to everyone.

The essentials are in fact not all that hard to comprehend.

The heart of practice is found in the admonition to sit down, shut up, and pay attention.

The heart of that is intimacy.

There are two points for us to find as living truths within our own being as we walk this intimate way.

The first can be described in a couple of ways. The classic way, and in general my preference is that there are no essences, we are all at core wide open, boundless. The old technical term is shunyata. One can say shunyata is our family name. We can also say without too much damage to who we are that we are all one. Or, another way, it’s all not two. Indra’s web is a useful image for this.

And there’s one more point. There is a sense in which, of course, there are two. We, you and I, as our separate identities are not a dream, not an illusion, not fake. We are as real as real can be. But, and it is, I admit, a very large but, but we are temporary. Our reality is contingent. We are each of us a moment in a great wave of relationships, of constantly shifting causes and conditions.

The “I” of it all is passing.

In my experience precious, lovely. And, here today, and gone tomorrow.

The rest is upaya. (Actually even the preceding words are upaya, pointers…)

And I hope we’re cautious and understand these things said and done are not merely expedients, they are our lives.

As people of Zen the first thing to consider, I would say, is practice.

Our practices, all the stuff and bother of the transmission is to help us to come to find these descibed realities as genuinely our realities.

And, out of that to create our lives as graceful things, the birds of heaven.

In support of that there are just a million different things going on.

There are the currents of practice themselves, of formal disciplines like shikantaza and koan introspection.

And there are the currents of the discipline. Finding guides. Finding companions.

Historically this has been the province of Vinaya ordination, the province of ordained practice.

The ordained have also served, always, the larger community in various ways, mostly what we in the West would consider ministerial.

In Japan the focus of the ordained changed considerably, offering in addition to formal practice an increasingly clear ministerial function.

And here in the West two things follow.

First, practice is for everyone.

If you practice Zen you are a Zen practitioner.

Everything else is extra. Might be very useful, but it isn’t necessary to deepening the practice.

And, second, ordination continues to have value, if not so much to deepen practice (Not to belabor the point, thinking it a deepening of practice is to my mind a mistaken view), but as an adjunct to practice, opening a clearer way of ministry, of service to our sisters and brothers on the way.

The making of teachers is often bound up within the clerical life. And I have no problem with that so long as it is understood that it has nothing intrinsically connected to ordination.

And we do need the teachers. The community is important and provides much teaching. And it is actual human teachers who have practiced for years and years and who have received sanction first by their own teachers and then by the communities among whom they settle, that provide the necessary pointing along the way.

I’ve written a lot about how we need to let go of some of the high flown rhetoric around teachers. But, I hope I’ve conveyed how strongly I feel teachers are nonetheless critical to the Zen way.

There are good reasons, I feel, that the preparation of teachers in general is caught up with the preparation of ministers, of priests, of the ordained ways that we’ve inherited. And it need not be that way.

Okay.

My response to those responses to our current situation.

May all beings be well…