Waking Up in the West
A Reflection on Boundless Way Zen and the Emergence of a Western Zen Buddhism
A Paper Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Boundless Way Zen Sangha
6 June 2009
at the First Parish (Unitarian Universalist)
Framingham, Massachusetts
James Myoun Ford, Osho
Founding School Abbot
Boundless Way Zen
A special transmission outside the scriptures
Not based upon words or letters;
Directly pointing to the heart mind
Seeing into one’s true nature, attaining the Buddha way.
Attributed to Bodhidharma
In August 2000, when I arrived to serve the First Unitarian Society in Newton, I found a package waiting for me. It had been forwarded from the church I’d previously served in Arizona. Interestingly, the postmark showed it had started out in Somerville, which I believed was near Boston. It turned out to be a cache of books from Wisdom Publications along with a note from their acquisitions editor, someone named Josh Bartok, saying they were interested in writings from teachers in the Harada-Yasutani Zen lineage and inquiring if I might have a manuscript lying about.
I promptly sent Mr. Bartok a few chapters and a proposal. He promptly responded suggesting the manuscript was, well, crap. But, if I were free to talk, he would like to discuss the possibility of studying Zen with me. Josh and his friend and colleague at Wisdom, Rod Meade Sperry, had recently started up an unaffiliated sitting group in the Zen tradition in Somerville. Perhaps a week later Jan Seymour-Ford and I announced we were sitting on Monday nights at the UU Society in West Newton, and welcomed anyone with an interest in Zen. Such were the beginnings of the Spring Hill and Henry Thoreau Zen sanghas.
Soon we were a network; calling ourselves the Boston Zen Community. It couldn’t have been much later when Tom Schade, my Unitarian Universalist ministerial colleague at the First Unitarian Church in Worcester, contacted me. He mentioned he knew two Zen teachers who came to his church and that I should meet them. Their names were Melissa Blacker and David Rynick. David was near receiving transmission from George Bowman, an independent teacher who had been authorized by the Korean master Seung Sahn, although he, Zen Master Bowman, had also trained extensively with the Japanese Rinzai teacher Joshu Sazaki. Melissa had recently broken with her teacher of more than twenty years, Richard Clarke, who had originally studied with Philip Kapleau, but who had broken with him prior to receiving Dharma transmission. Melissa would go on to complete her formal koan studies with me and become my first Dharma successor. Within a couple of years, these first three sitting groups coalesced into Boundless Way Zen.
As I deliver this not quite a decade into our shared project, the Boundless Way consists of nine sitting groups, six in Massachusetts and one each in Maine, Connecticut and Rhode Island. We are now in formal conversation with an established sitting group in Toledo, Ohio, whose leader wants to join in our project. And we have begun some more tentative conversations with another established community. We are approaching a regular attendance of forty-five people at our multi-day residential retreats. While we have many fewer formal members, it seems accurate and even a bit conservative to estimate something more than two hundred people consider Boundless Way their Zen community.
At the base of our leadership we have our three transmitted teachers, representing three lineage streams: the Linji lineage through Korea, the Soto lineage through Japan and a reform of the Soto lineage incorporating a full koan curriculum, also through Japan. Lineage, Dharma transmission and Inka are terms for the formal authorization to teach Zen. It arose in early medieval China, although the tradition asserts a connection right back to the Buddha of history. These lineages are the lifeblood of the Zen institutions, and Boundless Way is unique in attempting to hold multiple lineages. So, far, it looks good. We work well together, we respect each other deeply, and we have a common understanding of the Dharma, as should be, but which in practice is not always so.
Of course teachers by themselves can’t make a Sangha thrive. Critically a number of people have assumed the many positions of responsibility that allow a multi-center Sangha to flourish. And, as our project is primarily devoted to practice, it is important to note as of this meeting fourteen people have grown into formal spiritual leadership roles among, us serving as practice leaders, dharma teachers and senior dharma teachers. It is also important, I feel, to note that we now count four priests among us as well as a lay Zen master.
This is very important. Throughout its history Zen has been held, and protected, and sometimes obscured by ordained Sangha, whether the Vinaya monastics of China, Korea and Vietnam or the Bodhisattva priests of Japan. One of the two principal schools of Japanese Zen, Soto has in fact historically blended Dharma transmission into a higher ordination, so that one could not even in theory receive that authorization without becoming a priest. The founding myth of Zen, which first explicated Dharma transmission, the Platform Sutra, clearly showed a distinction between ordination and transmission. But in practice until modern times giving transmission to lay people was always a novelty, and in Japanese Soto, an impossibility. One of the singular characteristics of Zen in the west has been the rise of lay teachers. The Boundless Way is devoted to holding up the complete equality of lay and ordained practice. Again, so far, so good.
Of course there’s a back-story. And before going into any more of the unique aspects and challenges of our Boundless Way, it’s important to recall the tradition out of which we come and within which we find our way toward this work of healing in this world. Zen is a school of Buddhism marked heavily by the Buddhist encounter with Chinese culture and spirituality, both Confucianism and most especially Taoism. The project of Zen is awakening, awakening from a constricted view to a realization of our true nature as at once constricted and at the very same time boundless and free.
There are any number of reasonable milestones for the inauguration of Zen in the West, and specifically here in North America. In 1893, Soyen Shaku presented a paper at the Chicago World Parliament of Religions. In 1922 Hosen Isobe established the first Soto temple on American soil. In 1953 Ernest Shinkaku Hunt received the Soto Dharma transmission in Hawaii. In 1957 Alan Watts’ Way of Zen first introduced Zen to a wide audience. In 1959 Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco and began receiving students. In 1965 Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen first introduced Zen as an actual living spiritual discipline to the American reader. In 1971 Seung Sahn arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, bringing, to the American Zen student, a new perspective on Zen training. Frankly this is an almost random list among many other possible markers. And before any of these people, there were Zen, or more technically, Chan, practitioners and undoubtedly masters among the laborers who toiled building railroads, running laundries or the many other hard and menial tasks of the nineteenth century West.
As I’ve already said, Zen in Asia has its origins in early the early middle ages when Indian missionaries encountered the ancient and lively spiritualities of China. Out of that encounter arose several distinctive features: a unique take on the ancient practices of Vipassana and Shamantha, koan introspection, an assertion of the possibility of awakening in this life, the introduction of lineage and the myth of Dharma transmission. These developments all coalesced together as a new spiritual school: Zen. By the twelfth century of the Common Era, Zen pretty much as we understand it was established
In Japan, Zen evolved along dramatically different lines than in China and Korea and Vietnam, which followed the Chinese model. First, two distinct schools of Zen continued in Japan, with particular emphasis on the two great meditative Zen disciplines, Shikantaza in the Soto school and Koan introspection in the Rinzai school. Second, professional leadership took on an entirely different cast. Rather than the Continental focus on monks or nuns living together in monastic communities, in Japan many thousands of temples were established, often with a single monk or occasionally a nun serving the spiritual needs of the surrounding community. This new class of religious professional continued to use the monastic titles they had inherited. But in fact they quickly became much more like parish priests or ministers than monks or nuns. In fact by the end of the nineteenth century almost all temple abbots were married.
The first wave of Western interest in Zen arose when the Japanese abbot Soyen Shaku delivered a paper at the World Parliament of Religions. People were fascinated with the aesthetics of Japanese Zen. Notably the first book in English to use the word Zen was about tea ceremony. Soyen Shaku’s student, the scholar D. T. Suzuki brought a focus on the peculiar Zen doctrine of sudden awakening, or kensho. And soon after came an interest in Zen meditation itself.
A few Westerners, most notably the Americans Philip Kapleau, and Robert Aitken, and the British Peggy Theresa Nancy Kennett, traveled to Japan to study Zen. Japanese teachers also came west, notably Nyogen Senzaki, Soen Nakagawa, Soyu Matsuoka, Joshu Sazaki, Eido Shimano, Hakuun Yasutani, Koun Yamada, Shunryu Suzuki, Kobun Chino, Dainin Katagiri, and Taizan Maezumi. While there would be significant teachers from other cultures, most notably Thich Nhat Hanh of Vietnam and Seung Sahn of Korea, even they would often find themselves adapting to norms first established by the Japanese missionaries. Even the word Zen itself is the Japanese pronunciation of what in China is called Chan, in Korea, Son and in Vietnam Thien. But for these historical reasons most in the west use the word Zen.
Among the common thread shared by all these teachers that immediately separated them from their home culture, was bringing an emphasis on lay practice. It was nothing more than that they taught those who came to them. But it changed everything. Right behind this, perhaps because the people who were attracted to these first teachers were the generation that came of age in the late nineteen sixties, there was an early acceptance of women as equal in all matters, and not long after, the acceptance of BGLT people. This reflected a broadly liberal stance on social matters, which has continued to this day. Nonetheless, while the focus was on lay people and the moral context was liberal, all these teachers also brought a fierce devotion to the meditative disciplines of the Zen way.
As the continental Vinaya monastics began to establish themselves, they introduced a full-on monastic discipline, increasing the rich range of ways to engage Zen in the West. However, these monastic traditions never held quite the unchallenged ascendancy they enjoyed in Asia. Over the ensuing decades various forms of Zen in the West began to take shape. The largest of these schools were the Japanese derived Soto lineages. This lineage put particular emphasis on the discipline of shikantaza. The smaller Rinzai lineage held up koan introspection practice. Both schools also gave considerable attention to monastic training, if in most cases only for a period of formal training.
The Harada-Yasutani lineage is a hybrid derived from the Soto school, but incorporating a complete koan curriculum. While a tiny institution in Japan, it has become the primary source for koan introspection practice in the West. It also started as a lay movement and this aspect has had wide spread consequences for Western and particularly North American Zen. It was within the koan curriculum traditions that lay Dharma transmission began to emerge. Lay transmission is extremely rare in Asia, but has become a significant element of Zen in the West.
Chinese Zen has continued to function mostly within the Chinese immigrant community. While there are a number of Westerners who practice within these lineages, with the notable exception of those who practice within the Dharma Drum Sangha established by master Shengyen, Western practitioners have pretty much had to embrace Chinese culture often including learning Chinese as part of their discipline. This has effectively marginalized Chinese Zen from the much larger convert community.
The Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has had a significant influence on Western Zen practitioners, particularly the first generation of Zen teachers. His influence has been strongest in the area of engaged spirituality and ensuring social and political activism has a part in Western Buddhism, and particularly Zen. His spiritual teachings, however, are more closely aligned to the emerging Western Vipassana community than other Western Zen sanghas. And over the years connections between Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing and other Zen communities have slowly become more distant.
The principal alternative to Japanese-derived Zen in the West has been the Kwan Um School of Zen established by the Korean master Seung Sahn. While not part of the Korean tradition, Master Seung Sahn created a form of curriculum koan study. Kwan Um and Harada Yasutani are the two curricula primarily available for Westerners who wish to engage in koan introspection practice.
Master Seung Sahn offered the opportunity to ordain and practice within the traditional Vinaya monastic tradition. He vigorously supported the importance of lay practice, and by the time of his death left more lay Dharma successors than ordained successors. He also introduced an expanded system of teaching roles short of Dharma transmission. In the Kwan Um school the possibilities for lay leadership and service include “dharma teachers” and “senior dharma teachers.” In contrast, in the Japanese schools one tended to remain a student without significant opportunities for leadership unless or until one received transmission. And in Soto this was only possible with priestly ordination.
Among the distinctive features of Zen in the West is how the institutional structures have tended to follow a center model. This means that the places of practice have been “centers,” where one comes to do the discipline, to meditate or perhaps to take a class, and then to go home. The principal alternative has been a monastic model, devoted to intensive residential training for extended periods of time. Attempts to create spiritual communities more resembling Christian churches or Jewish temples were spotty and generally unsuccessful. There were few attempts to create opportunities for religious education for practitioner’s children. One result was that many married Zen Buddhists with children began attending Unitarian Universalist or other very liberal religious communities that could provide these opportunities. Today somewhere between ten and twenty percent of Unitarian Universalists consider themselves in some sense to be Buddhist. A serious academic study of this phenomenon should prove very interesting, but cannot get any more attention here, today.
A central aspect for training in the Japanese derived system is a period of monastic practice, demanding surrender and focused attention to the smallest details of one’s life. In Japan novice priests make this commitment for sometimes as little as three months, although three years appears to be common. Critically there is a livelihood to follow as one assumes, incumbency as an abbot at one of the thousands of Zen temples across the nation. Only a tiny percentage of those who ordain assume they will engage a rigorous monastic practice for any extended length of time, becoming monks and nuns as a permanent vocation. In the West the question that hangs, is what happens when this period of training, sometimes here lasting for many years, ends?
A problem has arisen from transplanting the semi-monastic Japanese way to the West. There has been a tendency in larger communities for people to join and stay cloistered for many years, living rather marginal lives. Without the traditional vows of celibacy many marry and have children, but earn very little money, are chronically under-insured and have no resources for either their children’s education or retirement, sometimes lacking even social security. In at least one dramatic situation a very large community has made promises of lifetime support that seems impossible to keep. Equally important, from where I stand, it seems most of these people have been as much stifled by their commitment to practice as empowered.
Which brings us to the Boundless Way. Our mission is the project of awakening found within the Zen tradition. Our conscious intent is to examine clearly what we have inherited, to make some judgments about what has been useful and what has not been useful. And out of that examination and reflection we are crafting a community of practice for our time and place. Judging from our numerical success it appears we are meeting a genuine need.
We have been extraordinarily fortunate in being able to bring together teachers who stand in the lines of the two dominant currents of convert Zen practice, the Japanese and Korean inheritances. At first glance we appear to be primarily the inheritors of the Japanese tradition. We use the nomenclature and styles and robes of the Soto school and those who ordain among us are registered with the Soto Zen Buddhist Association in North America. However, we have enthusiastically embraced the system of non-transmitted dharma and senior dharma teachers first developed within the Kwan Um. And we are deeply committed to genuine equality between lay and ordained practice. In effect seeing it as one thing, while understanding ordination to be about a particular calling within our shared practice, to a life of service rather than to a deeper commitment to practice. Water does not get wetter. And our primary focus is always practice. The only shifts in giving focus to how it might best be engaged by people living in the world, marrying and raising children, fully engaged.
And there’s something else very important about how we are approaching the Zen dharma in the west. Our transmitted teachers have voluntarily surrendered cultic status as ultimate arbitrators of all decisions, gratefully surrendering authority for all matters financial and “temporal” to our elected Sangha representatives, the Leadership Council. As an example, looking at our possibilities of expanding outside of New England I’ve proposed to the Leadership Council that we might consider revising our bylaws. They thanked me for the suggestion and will consider it. And they mean consider. We have no rubber stamps for the teachers in this organization. We’ve worked hard to create this and it is something important marking who we are within the Boundless Way and how we all relate to one another.
Now let’s be clear. It is going to be a very long time before anyone can speak without irony of anything justly called “Western Zen.” We are still very much in a time of Zen finding its way in the West. We are, as are all Zen communities in the West, an experiment. It will take several generations to see what, if anything, will come of Zen’s transmission to the West. Still, we are seeing some of the issues. Among our concerns within this community are, how do we support and nurture practice in an egalitarian and democratic culture? What place is there for the Japanese-derived Bodhisattva priesthood? What place is there for a lay practice? How are these gifts preserved, fostered, and transmitted to future generations?
The Boundless Way is an attempt to address these questions. That all three of our teachers are Unitarian Universalists and one an ordained UU minister means that we have from the start embraced a broadly liberal and critical approach to all these matters. It also implies a commitment to some fundamental equality between lay and ordained, even as we honor the ordination tradition we’ve inherited through our Soto priestly transmission. It also means from the beginning we hold the mythic claims of Zen with loving but critical arms and we’re aware of limitations in the Zen institutions as they’re currently formed.
And we’ve been busy. We consciously support new groups, with financial backing and more importantly with a growing cadre of senior practitioners. We see the value of these autonomous groups as the seedbed of an authentically democratic Zen tradition. Our embrace of multiple lineages within our institution, while fraught with potential and immediate difficulties, is also a hallmark of the Boundless Way’s broad approach. And mark us out as unique among current Western Zen sanghas.
We attend with fierce devotion to the two great spiritual disciplines of the Zen way, shikantaza, the discipline of “just sitting,” and curriculum koan introspection practice. From the beginning we’ve supported meditation retreats as critical, although hopefully with a genuine sensitivity to the needs of people who work in the world and who wish to engage in healthy family lives. We also know the ethical life which lies at the heart of the Bodhisattva precepts are central to an authentic Zen life and focus on this aspect of our shared work whether as lay or ordained. We also know we need to support the intellectual and aesthetic life as well. And we know there needs to be some form of social justice outreach for us to complete ourselves. A consequence of our close association with Unitarian Universalism has been that we’ve not had to address questions of childrearing, although I suspect as we continue this will become a more important issue among us.
Of course this time here, nine years out from our beginnings, is just a marker. Where we will be in another decade, it is impossible to call. Among the issues we are facing, including various secondary understandings of Dharma transmission we’ve inherited from our uniting Korean and Japanese Zen lineages, and the need some of us feel for tweaking our institutional structures to support our growth, each present as problems that need to be addressed. Others, no doubt, lie just beyond the horizon. But we are informed by a common understanding of the Zen Dharma and a fierce commitment to creating and sustaining a lively nest for the birds of heaven, who have found this way to heal their own hearts and to address the concerns of the world.
What I am confident of, is that something precious is happening here in New England, what I like to call with only a hint of irony, the true East, a vision for Zen practice and community that is lively and productive and may become one of the singular patterns for what may well in time come to be called Western Zen.
Thank you.
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