This past Thursday I taught my first class, the price I’m paying for being given an apartment in Hyde Park. I can’t say if anyone else had fun, but I know I did. We had twenty-four students registered, which I gather is a relatively large enrollment here. Twenty-one showed up and one sent an apologetic email later in the day assuring me of prompt attendance at our next class.
What an adventure! Teaching Zen Buddhism in an academic environment is so different from what I’m used to. I have no doubt it’s a good thing for me personally. Among other things it’s forcing me to reflect on what I’ve been doing and saying at the Zen meditation groups I’m responsible for as well as at our sesshin (intensive meditation retreats), noticing the variances between my presentation of Zen and its historic antecedents. I know in the listing about me at Wikipedia there was a bit of a flapdoodle over whether or not I am a “liberal Buddhist.” I suspect one might find a hint as I’m a serving Unitarian Universalist minister. Still, as I notice how I’ve ordered the class and where I’ve given the most focus in the syllabus says a lot about what might otherwise be, and I think has simply been implicit.
Although not necessarily. For instance I see that I’ve given a lot of time to the precepts, the moral codes of Zen Buddhism. I suspect that’s a corrective one may find in most practicing Zen groups which all began with a rather fierce focus on meditation practice. Zen is always accused of having an antinomian inclination, and I suspect in the wake of people like Alan Watts and Jack Kerouac who were for most at least in my generation the first popularizers of Zen in the West, that’s an easy assumption to make. But this concern with Zen antinomianism was exacerbated, I feel, by the first generation of actual Zen teachers who for very good reasons focused heavily on meditation practice pretty much to the exclusion of ethical concerns. Which would be okay if it were all that Zen is about. But it’s not. Zen is very much concerned with how we act in the world.
So now we’re all paying more attention to the place of Buddhist moral codes and particularly the sixteen Bodhisattva precepts of Japanese-derived Zen. What may be a mark of my possible inclination to “liberal Zen,” however is how much time I see I give in my class to the ways these precepts might move from personal behaviors and go on to call one to social engagement. While legitimately implicit in the theory of precepts, social justice concerns haven’t really been historically a major part of the Zen enterprise, and are what I’ve come to think of as a principal mark of liberal Buddhism.
Of course, looking at the syllabus in the light of my first actual class has brought up other things, as well.
A significant mistake I feel I’ve made is that I didn’t give enough time in the coursework to exactly what Zen “wisdom” might be. The nondual perspective is so fundamental, it is ultimately what Zen is about, I seem to have assumed it as I prepared the class. Oh well, I’m strictly an amateur teacher, and I hope my students will forgive my having to adjust as I go along… Fortunately as only about half of the students – all graduate students I would like to underscore – seem to have done the expected reading going into our first class, so I suspect forgiveness will be a part of the experience for all of us.
Just like real life…
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