Zen Rebels And Reformers

This is a talk inspired by the latest book club reading by Perle Besserman and Manfred Steger.

It is a book about charismatic individuals who broke with the establishment and did had very different approaches to zen.  They each seem to have found a way to true Zen practice, and their stories point to sincerity, truth, real zen.  I have spent a lot of time thinking about how these stories are relevant to America today.

In the introduction which sets up these stories as being “different” the authors say:

“The tendency of students…[is]… to revert to dependence on gods, the Buddha, and the “holy” scriptures persisted…This book is not concerned with scandal.  It focuses on those religious Zen geniuses whose training, commitment and realization experience led them to a free life, unconstrained by religious etiquette, rules, or hierarchy.”

“We are encouraged by the Crazy Clouds’ [the authors’ general name for the rebels] commitment and hard training and by the true realization of emptiness that prompted them to take their experience out into the world and live as compassionate bodhisattvas.”

I’ll spend some time looking at my own favorites from the book and then draw some conclusions and look at what this means for my own practice.

Layman Pang – He famously refused to become a monk and never gave up family life.  But even Layman Pang visited monasteries and spent a year early in his career with Sekito.  Eventually though he gave up the bureaucrat’s comfortable life and the monastery and left the world.  Like many Zen masters he wrote poetry, one of his most famous poems is:

My daily activities are not unusual

I’m just naturally in harmony with them

Grasping nothing, discarding nothing

In every place there’s no hindrance, no conflict

My supernatural power and marvelous ability

Drawing water and chopping wood

He took his daughter as his traveling companion and in a sense as his disciple, and they settled in a cave.  One of my favorite stories about him happened two years later when Pang decided it was time to die.  He sat down in zazen and instructed his daughter to go outside and come back to inform him when the sun reached its zenith.  She went out and later rushed back in saying, “It’s already noon and there’s an eclipse of the sun.  Come and look.”  The Layman rose and went to the window to look and his daughter jumped onto his seat, crossed her legs, and died.  The stories have him delivering a smart-arsed Zen comment, performing a seven day funeral rite for his daughter, then with another pithy comment passing away, and of course they have his wife, on hearing of their deaths, making another smart-arsed comment.

Rinzai – Studied with Obaku for three years before he could even meet the master in personal interview.  After many years studying with Obaku, he grew his hair long and traveled for a year testing his enlightenment with many other teachers.   Started his own temple and throughout he shocked the religious and political establishment with boisterous practices, such as grabbing priests and officials by the lapels, hurling insults and yelling at them and hitting with stick.  He urged students to slay the Buddha, ancestral teachers and their own parent.  To become Rinzai’s student you had to relinquish the world and become homeless.  There was no monk, no meditation, no Buddha, no notion even of enlightenment.  He was a major reformer, founding one of the two main remaining zen lineages. 

Ikkyu (He called himself Kyoun, Crazy Coud) –Illegitimate son of emperor, constantly under threat of being killed.  He spent many years desperate for enlightenment, wandering from teacher to teacher.  But when a teacher finally declared him enlightened and gave him an inka certificate, he threw it on the ground and left the room.  He refused to take on a temple, but nonetheless he ended up with a group of followers – women, bums, beggars and prostitutes were his students.  And famously he ate meat, drank alcohol, and made love to women.  He went further, and in the brothels and geisha houses cultivated the connection of his human life and body to death through the red thread of passion and created “Red Thread Zen” with similarities to tantric Buddhism.  And he celebrated all of this in his large body of poetry, such as:

sin like a madman until you can't do anything else
no room for any more

My naked passions, six inches long.
At night we meet on an empty bed.
A hand that's never known a woman's touch,
And a nuzzling calf, swollen from nights too long

In his seventies he met Lady Shin the blind singer, composer and musician who has been called his missing female self and was to become his passionate companion.  And in his eighties the emperor gave him the task of rebuilding Daitokuji, which I understand is a big deal, and he committed the last years of his life to this task, returning to and rebuilding the establishment colored by his own unique style of Zen

Hakuin.  Stories are from a young age showed extraordinary religious ability (though I’ve never known what that means) and expounded long sutra passages from memory.  Childhood anxiety on hearing of the agony of the eight burning hells.  Went to lots of teachers, then read a book with Joshi’s mu and tried to understand in meditation.  This led to his first satori, great doubt of practice leading to great death, the sudden expansion of consciousness and then great joy of nonseparateness and overwhelming love and joy.  He went on to found modern koan practice.  He also used imaging practices in and around the body to induce healing and bring balance for others as well as himself (some inspired by Daoist practices).  He came to see the body as important as a vehicle for enlightenment and the exercise of compassion, and therefore something to be treasured – though this was completely at odds with the practice that almost killed him.  And he developed a considerable reputation and a large temple.  He is said to have seen koan practice as the only way to be brought to genuine insight.  Like many of the rebels and reformers, he is famous for his art and poetry

Nyogen Senzaki.  He was born of a Japanese mother who either abandoned him or died in childbirth, and an unknown father believed to be Russian.  He was adopted by a Kegon Buddhist and given a good education, studying with DT Suzuki, then spending two years in Southeast Asia studying Theravada Buddhism, and becoming abbot of Engakuji at 33.  But when he read the works of the German educational reformer and founder of the kindergarten system, Friedrick Froebel, he left the monastery to form a nursery school which he called Mentorgarden.  Eventually he left not just the monastery, but Japan, and came to the states, where he led practice without money or home, and founding practice and community based on mentorgarten, living together and practicing together without teachers, associating with his sangha regardless of sex, etc.  Two quotes I especially like are:

“When my master was alive I asked him toi excuse me from all official ranks and titles of our church and allow me to walk freely in the streets of the world.  I do not wish to be called Reverend, Bishop, or by any other church title.  To be a member of the great American people and walk any stage of life as I please is honorable enough for me.  I want to be an American Hotei, a happy Jap in the streets.”

And

“If anyone makes demarcation foolishly, thinking that he alone has the right view of water, who should not pity him for his ignorance?  There are many schools, monasteries and sects, each considering their own teaching a lake, rather than a bay, forgetting the inlet to the ocean of Dharma, the universal truth.

Common themes

-          Childhood tales – some miraculous; others, like Dogen, of great doubt; yet others of brilliance and instinct for Buddhism: “the language” of these stories

-          Path began with fervent desire for enlightenment

-          Training in the institutions

-          Spent time with many teachers and wandered wide

-          Then woke up and “went rogue”

-          Concluded the institutions are bankrupt

-          Decided their practice was correct

-          And later went back to lead big monasteries

-          Not just accepted but welcomed back by the institution

-          Not just sitting

o   Soen: “Meditation is not Zen.  Zen is meditation, but it is also thinking, eating, drinking, sitting=, standing, shitting, peeing—all of these are nothing else but Zen...Zazen is sitting Zen.  But this is not the Zen.  Don’t be mistaken on this point.

-          Compassion

-          Living, being in the world

-          Embrace humanity

-          Embrace the dirty stuff – sexuality

What does this mean in the present day?

We talked a lot in the book club about this, but as I’ve thought about it I’ve reached a different conclusion.  I don’t have a good answer to any of this for the universe at large, and even if I did have, I am always conscious of Thich Nhat Hanh’s screensaver, “Are you sure.”  But I can tell you what it means to me.

-          I actually have little use for rebellion per se, though this might just be semantics.  Looked at from the outside a rebel does something different from the rest of society, but from the inside a rebel just does what is natural.  Living out of alignment with who I am supposed to be is rebelling against my own nature.  Giving up rebellion and bringing myself into line with myself will make my behavior more natural.

-          On to reform: to me Buddhism is so small in the US, and Zen a diminishingly small fraction even of that, as well as a very young one, such that reform is not a relevant consideration: rather we are in the process of “forming.”

-          The only thing I have to reform is my own life.  I remember a family vacation a few years ago when one of my sisters came outside onto the patio, said, “Hmm, there’s a dog turd by the BBQ, and went back in leaving others to clean it up.  I have been sitting on a fence for too long and looking the other way.  For so long, in fact, that the ground beneath the fence has been eroding, so the drop has been getting greater and it’s been harder to climb down.  I am making conscious strides to change that.  I am making big decisions and taking deliberate actions in my life to come into line.  It is no longer okay for me to talk about peak oil and Occupy Wall Street and the prison industrial complex and then turn the other way and work my ass off to earn money to live in my big house.  I must reform in what I do, the way I live, the way I hold relationships.  I must allow myself to come back into alignment.

-          So to radicalism.

Radicalism is probably the big one.  To live a radical life is to discard all views and live a free life.   Quoting Layman Pang again:

My daily activities are not unusual

I’m just naturally in harmony with them

Grasping nothing, discarding nothing

In every place there’s no hindrance, no conflict

My supernatural power and marvelous ability

Drawing water and chopping wood

Zen is radical.  It does not exist in institutions.  To be radical is to live such a life.  It is for each of us to find out what that is for us.  It may be as a monk.  It may be the radicalism of living Way of the Bodhisattva of Shantideva, which I have previously talked about as truly radical.  It may be in the daily activity of Layman Pang, in his family life.  It may be freely following one’s calling to found Mentorgartens or Occupy Wall Street.  It may be to live it in the Red Thread of Ikkyu, embracing sex not just as natural, but as a wonderful and beautiful part of this human existence.  It is probably some combination of all of these and more.

But to me that is the core message not just of this book, but of Zen itself.  Zen is not in the institution, whether that it be the national religion supported by the emperor or a tiny, parochial club in Amnerica, but rather in seeing the world as it is, living a life in harmony with whatever you are doing, open and connected and without hindrance or conflict.  What a beautiful thing that would be.

For me this is about stepping off that fence and realizing that the ground I thought was receding such that it would hurt even more when I hit does not even exist.  It is allowing myself to enter that natural free fall of simply being without resistance.  

[Originally delivered to Red Clay Sangha on March 24th, 2012]