ON ASPECTS OF THE REFORMATION OF SOTO ZEN BUDDHISM IN NORTH AMERICA

An Open Letter to the Leadership and Membership
Of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association

And all care about the Zen Dharma in the West

James Myoun Ford, Osho
Senior Guiding Teacher’s Council
Boundless Way Zen

Dear ones,

We live in exciting and dangerous times. Perhaps you’ve noticed. We live in a time of economic disruption, where in North America a new normal seems to be settling in with a much smaller and less stable middle class and an increasingly large number of poorer people. The rich are definitely getting richer, and the poorer, poorer. We are also in a time where human development has actually disrupted the environment with uncertain consequences, but where none of the obvious options are good.

As the ancient Chinese curse goes, we live in interesting times.

Many have found Zen Buddhism, and specifically our Soto path a way to engage the world and our own lives. The ancient analysis of the Buddha, and the specific disciplines of the Soto Zen school have proven to be of use. And we within the SZBA are embarked upon a project that is needed in our larger community; we have perspectives and disciplines that can help in the healing of the great wound and many smaller hurts.

Now, I think we need to refresh ourselves a little on our history. I’ll try to avoid novelist James Michner’s setting up his books beginning at the up thrust of the continental shelf. But, we should go back a little to reclaim context.

Zen was formally introduced to the west at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Just shy of thirty years later, in 1922 the Reverend Hosen Isobe founded the first Soto Zen temple in the west. At first Soto Zen priests served Japanese immigrants and a few courageous non-Japanese souls seeking wisdom outside their cultural comfort zone. Then, gradually they attracted more and more people of European and some of African descent. The great flowering for Soto followed with a handful of missionaries who were willing to step away from their own cultural comfort zones serving Japanese-descent congregations to teach people of European and African descent, most notably Soyu Matsuoka, Shunryu Suzuki, Danin Katagiri, Kobun Chino Otagowa, Taizan Maezumi, and the convert Buddhist Jiyu Kennett. One could argue that another convert Buddhist Philip Kapleau belongs to this Soto founders list, as well.

I cover many of the details of these founding personalities in my study “Zen Master Who?” and I recommend it to people who would like to understand the various relationships and the field of an emergent convert North American Soto Zen Buddhism.

What is important for this reflection, at least as far as organization goes, among convert practitioners Zen in all its schools has been until fairly recently ad hoc, with individual missionaries often maintaining only nominal connection with their Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Korean institutions. This has been just as true with the Soto Zen, where the organizations founded by these Soto priests maintained limited connection to the Shumucho, the administrative headquarters in Japan. The exception being that small handful of temples that serve historic Japanese-descent congregations, which several of these teachers came to the West originally to serve. For the most part these missionaries trained people and gave them various authorizations, as they thought best, some very traditional in their training and others wildly experimental, and all with limited connections to Japan and the Japanese institutions.

Today there are many heirs within these lineages, including our own Soto Zen who see no reason for an institutional connection to bind us all together. In particular a number of us are concerned with anything that might interfere with or even possibly supersede the intimate relationships of Dharma transmission. Others see the ever-increasing diversity of training expectations as well as the lack of mutual accountability as contrary to the way Zen has actually existed throughout its history in East Asia. In China and on the mainland Zen is entirely in the hands of the Vinaya sangha, with strict expectations for its leaders. The same has been true in Japan with its non-celibate ordained sangha, where from the beginning the Sotoshu has had a complex institutional structure.

The question here almost certainly is not whether there needs to be an institutional structure, but only what organization will best serve our needs, in what ways replicating Japan and in what ways not? The two largest lineages in North America coming from Shunryu Suzuki and Taizan Maezumi have each dealt with these questions within their own organizations. However, there are many not in those lineages, and even many of those within the Suzuki and Maezumi lines feel there is a need for a larger continental organization of mutuality and accountability.

In 1995 representatives of the Sotoshu encouraged a number of leading figures in North American Soto Zen to consider creating an organization specifically for the growing convert community. The following year the Soto Zen Buddhist Association was incorporated in New York State. The founding president was Sojun Mel Weitsman, abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center, as most of us know, a prominent priest within the Suzuki lineage. In 2003, the first time dues were collected, there were fifty-five full members, and an equal number of associates, people who were ordained unsui, but had not received Dharma transmission. As I write this we count one hundred, fifty-eight full members and one hundred, seventeen associate members.

General meetings, at first annual and now biennial grow each time we gather. This past meeting featured a hundred people including full and associate members. A critical step along the way was the establishment of the Dharma Heritage ceremony. While there appears to be little interest in replicating the complex licensure structures of the Sotoshu, a formal acknowledgment by the mahasangha following Dharma transmission along the lines of the Japanese zuise ceremony seemed critical. The first Dharma heritage ceremony took place in 2004, with Sojun Weitsman serving as doshi. I was honored to be part of that class of initiates. Today the majority of Soto Zen priests in the west have undergone this ceremony or plan on doing so.

In 2007 Charlie Korin Pokorny was engaged as the first paid director for the SZBA. In the same year an SZBA abbreviated ango was sponsored. The following year a document, “Guidelines for the Formation of Soto Zen Priests in North America” was published, and then formally adopted. In 2011 a women ancestor’s document was published. In the same year an association wide ethics code was adopted. In 2013 Domyo Burk succeeded Charlie with a new title Administrative Coordinator. Along the way various papers have been published, and, importantly, a successful list serv has been launched to help people keep in touch across considerable distances.

And now we are deep in a discussion of a membership standards document. The earlier Guidelines was just that, “guidelines.” This would be the first time a clear and unambiguous assertion of just what are the minimal things someone must do to be acknowledged as a peer among North America’s Soto Zen clergy was to be laid out.

I’m well aware of the fact that a survey shows fully three quarter of us are ready to embrace it. I’m asking we pause, and we reflect on this a bit more. And I believe it is critical we modify the document.

Now, in general I’m in agreement with it. Mostly it makes sense. And I believe should be adopted.

And, this is where I began to make all the noise that has landed me in the situation I currently occupy.

I have several concerns and consider one of these requirements a deal killer.

First the idea of fifteen days of sesshin per year for five years is in any way adequate preparation seems astonishing to me. Second the requirement of a single ninety day ango with the alternative of three one month residential retreats seem both vastly too little and at the same time too much.

I believe the current organization of the SZBA’s leadership is quite conservative, that is it leans heavily toward the traditional training patterns we’ve inherited from Japan. I think this is a good thing. I think on balance just such folk should be our leaders. Additionally, I believe we should be very cautious when considering innovations. But, it also causes us to not notice or be dismissive of emerging patterns here in North America. These are changes in training models that we ignore or dismiss at our peril.

There is no doubt intensive monastic style training has marked Japanese Soto Zen from the beginning. It is something to be cherished. And, we have been at it long enough in North America to see some additional patterns for training emerge. Most notably home-based practice affiliated with a temple and informed by regular intensive retreats, sesshin, over many years. An increasing number of people who identify as Soto Zen have trained in this manner. And we’re seeing this training works. They are insightful and mature practitioners fully capable of stepping into leadership.

And in the future, where people in the west who dedicated whatever period of their life to residential training, face at the end some significant difficulties. Remember those difficult days we live within. Unlike Japan there is no temple to go to where a living might be made. And we have to keep in mind the training expectations in Japan are almost always part of preparing to assume leadership of a temple, and with that a livelihood.

Instead for the foreseeable future our priests will be in the felicitous phrase of our Christian sisters and brothers “tentmakers.” They will have jobs or professions to support themselves, and in all likelihood, their sanghas. Extensive residential retreat, angos, are valuable. And for some of us they are what we must do. I personally recommend any one who can to do so, and particularly younger practitioners right after college. And, and. Fully functional priests are being formed over longer periods of time dedicated to retreat practice. And these people also are allowed to pursue family and profession, moving at rates appropriate to their specific situations. And at the end of the day, this training model may be more useful for the establishment of our way on this continent. It may be what allows us to sink roots here.

What I fear is that we will pass this membership standard and then immediately begin to find exceptions. I’ve been assured informally my deshi none of whom have completed an ango following their unsui tokudo would all be admitted, either through grandfathering or by looking at the depth of their practice over many years. This is the shadow of our Japanese inheritance, where there are strict written rules but there are always ways around them. I hope we will not go in this direction. The newer generations of potential practitioners are already suspicious of institutions, and their noses are set to catch the whiff of hypocrisy. I suggest we do what we can to avoid this trap.

During the discussion of the standards at our last meeting, while I thought the matter was on balance well handled, I was troubled that the minority voice was characterized as being concerned with the standards being too strict. This is not at all my view. Rather, I think for the most part the retreat standards are almost ridiculously low. I find it nearly impossible to see someone formed who has sat seventy-five days of retreat, with an ango thrown in. What we’re seeing in this document, I believe, is what largely Japanese trained people think is a compromise. They’ve focused on the wrong things. And the net result is not useful to either the traditional training model, nor the newer training model that is emerging.

I believe we should have real standards representing what it takes to create priests that we can recognize as being adequately, even well trained in our central practice, zazen. (Among other things. Of course, among other things. As I said I support the larger part of the document.)

I served on the membership committee for the American Zen Teachers Association for a decade. During that time we were charged with admitting people that could be “seen” by the other teachers as being peers. The problem was there were no common standards. Members and potential members were ordained and lay, had trained in monasteries and through individual tutelage. What we slowly saw as a commonality was that all had sat more than three hundred days of sesshin, nine or ten hour days supervised by experienced practitioners.

So, here’s what I propose to replace the current draft in regards to practice expectations. At least the basis for a conversation.

That there be two routes to full membership.

One, the monastic training route. This would require nine full angos.

The other, the non-monastic, or priestly training route. This would require one year, three hundred, sixty-five days of sesshin, nine or ten hours, supervised by experienced practitioners, which could be accomplished in one, three, five, or seven day sesshin. Taking as long as it takes.

Do these lead to same sense of formation? No. Are they both valid? I unhesitatingly say, yes. And both can already be found within our forming North American Soto. I plead. Let’s not cut off the newer model because it doesn’t look like the old way.

In either case I believe we should count full training both prior to and following unsui ordination. I suggest this for several reasons. First, because the substance of the intensive practices is the same on either side of ordination, and second and related is that we stand in danger of falling into clericalism where what we do as priests is somehow deeper or truer or more committed. I’ll return to this briefly near the end.

What I’m asking of us, is not taking an easy way; rather that we preserve the spirit of our traditional training model with vastly more integrity than the draft document calls for. And we demonstrate that we are open to newer training models, so long as they are rigorous and meet the spirit of the need, proper preparation for our clergy.

Now, I have a basket of additional concerns. But, this is the first. And it is critical that we address it. I believe if we do not the SZBA is in serious danger of becoming a museum rather than the dynamic organization ready to take the leadership in charting the way for Zen come west it is posed to be.

I do believe the choices are that stark.

Once we have dealt with this, then I believe we need to take up several other critical aspects for a fully vibrant Soto Zen Buddhism in the west. We need to re-visit the place of lay teachers. And, I hope we will consider how to regularize the rise of koan introspection among us. My suggestion would be to acknowledge the Harada Yasutani curriculum as what it is, a Soto reform of the koan curriculum, designed for those among us attracted to that ancient Zen discipline. And a critical training mechanism for many of us. I also believe we would be enriched by making Denkai transmission the marker for full membership within the SZBA instead of Denbo. To expand on any of these suggestions would require much deeper exploration. I merely hold them up as part of what may prove to be a fruitful conversation.

There is much to do.

I believe we are up to it.

Let’s talk.

Respectfully submitted,

James Myoun Ford

7 November 2014