Giving freely

A couple of months ago our teacher at Wind in Grass, David Weinstein, sent an email out informing us that he'd no longer be working with students who weren't members of Pacific Zen Institute.  Since there's a charge for membership, this effectively meant that he wouldn't be working with people who weren't paid up.

David did point out that there's no minimum membership fee, so you could be paying as little as $5 a month.  Also, we already give David the money in the donation bowl on the nights that he comes in.  Finally, the change will really only affect one night a month, when David's there.  So is this really much of a change?

I think it is, and I also think that it's a step in the wrong direction.  (And I know that I'm not alone in feeling this way.)  But before telling you why I should say that I have valued having a teacher in over the last few years.  I also think David is a very good teacher (and I've been to quite a few Buddhist events since I moved to California).

That said, I think this move is wrong for three reasons.  The most important one is that it brings us very close to paying for the dharma.  But if Buddhist teaching is centered on doing without material wealth, giving generously to others, and so on, that seems like a strange situation to be in.  Asking for payment undermines a central part of the message that we're trying to convey.

As I admitted above, we do give dana to our teacher anyway.  So what's the difference?  The main difference is that dana is freely given.  In other words, it's a real donation or gift, and symbolizes the very values of generosity and unstinginess that we're promoting.  It also gives us an opportunity to enact those values in giving freely what we can.

But paying for membership also creates a division between members and non-members, insiders and outsiders.  This is the second reason I'm against it.  People need to feel like they can come sit with us whenever they want, and not sit with us whenever they want, too.  As Michael said to me, one of our main strengths is that we don't ask newcomers for any kind of commitment. 

There's a related, practical issue.  It may make sense for someone like me, who turns up every week, to pay a monthly fee for membership.  But we have a lot of people who turn up once every two or three months.  Are we going to have to start presenting them with a choice of either committing to membership or going elsewhere to talk to a teacher?

The final problem I have with this is more personal.  It's that it brings WiG more clearly and firmly within the bounds of PZI.  Of course, WiG has always, strictly speaking, been a branch of PZI, but most nights it doesn't feel like one - it feels like a bunch of friends meeting for informal meditation.  I like WiG a lot, but have doubts about PZI.  But other people may feel differently about that one.

I've deliberately dodged a big issue here, one I might get around to discussing in a future post.  That issue is the whole question of how we should compensate Zen teachers, if at all.  For now, I'm willing to entertain the idea that they should receive regular and generous donations, since they often do work comparable to Christian ministers, who are salaried. 

But I'd still want to insist, at this stage, that they receive donations, and not pay.  I'd also want there to be a way of collecting donations that doesn't divide people into an inside and an outside group.  But these are just some thoughts from someone who's enjoyed having a teacher for the last three years and would like him to be able to work, at least occasionally, for no money at all.

Conjuring a collective

Things are moving at my home sangha, Wind in Grass, now a little more than three years old.  The group was started by Michael, a dynamic young businessman who started practicing with Boundless Way Zen in Boston before moving to the Bay Area.  A few times in the past couple of years he's asked regular members of the group how things might get better.  One common suggestion was smartening up the space we use, in the basement of the Potrero Hill Neighbourhood House.  My suggestion was always the same: make the group more cooperative and less hierarchical.  Now it looks like both suggestions are being acted upon.

I'll update you on the upcoming makeover of our meeting space later (if work-practice is a part of any good retreat, then sanding and decorating can be part of this blog).  This post will be about the effort to make the group more of a communal endeavour.  Or, at least, it will be about trying to keep the group as informal and horizontal in organization as it has been for the past two years.  In other words, it will be about the logic of collective action.

There are basically two ways that a group can organize itself.  It can delegate the things it needs to get done to one or two people, or it can make a concerted effort at making things happen as a group.  The first option is often the easier one, since it means that most people don't have to do anything.  It's particularly tempting for a group like Wind in Grass, where (for various reasons), a few people are going to be more dedicated than others.  But it's a dangerous path to start down, even with the best of intentions.

The reason it's dangerous is that the more tasks that are delegated to one or two people, the more power they'll have over the direction of the group, even if that wasn't their aim in the first place.  It's in any case unfair to the one or two people taking on the extra responsibilities, who are carrying an increasing burden.  The only answer to this is to insist that a broader section of the group gets the chance (and has the duty) to fulfill some of the community's essential functions.  That way, both power and responsibility are distributed more equably and tolerably for all involved.

At Wind in Grass, Michael's usually taken the lead.  That's partly because he founded the group, but partly because he's been the only one with the drive, commitment, and organizational nous to make things happen, week after week.  Chris, with his long experience of Buddhism and Zen, has headed up the more religious side of our operations.  And David, of course, is our official teacher and the closest thing we have to a priest or director.  These three usually lead the meeting three weeks out of four (or five - which happens every few months)

The reform we've now decided to make is to invite some other regular member of the sangha to lead practice on the last Wednesday of every month.  I was asked to make the invitations, and I have to say that it was tough going at first.  There was more shyness than I expected; and some uncertainty about planning two or three weeks in advance.  But as soon as one or two of us had sat on the hot seat, others were more ready to step forward.

With us, it's not a matter of doing a 30-minute dharma talk - you can do anything you want, really, as long as it involves some meditation.  Most people simply choose a koan and then lead a discussion about it.  I've done some experiments involving non-Zen forms of meditation.  One brave soul did a (refreshingly Theravada) dharma talk.  I've assured people that they're welcome to do magic tricks, a stand-up comedy routine, or a yoga session, but unfortunately nobody has taken up any of these opportunities yet.  The crucial thing is that we've stepped off the default path of leaving everything to the willing few.  

Translating quiet

I don't know what's going on in China.  I've never been there, in fact.  Which is why when a member of the Buddhist Community at Stanford sent an email around inviting us to a dialogue with members of Beijing's Longquan monastery, I thought it was very convenient.  I haven't always been a big fan of Buddhist events involving foreign monks, largely because their English is often very bad - no fault of their own (my Chinese isn't too hot either), but still hardly conducive to passive understanding, let alone dialogue.  But I've been warming to this kind of event since writing this blog.  It makes me feel very worldly and journalistic to go to talks by teachers from Japan, Tibet, even England - and I don't even have to do any traveling.  They all come to the Bay Area, or we drag them here, because San Franciscans' hankering for gurus is on a par with Londoners' thirst for tea.

The other thing that's always put me off about monks is that they're always late for shit.  Or at least, they're late for meetings with me.  Once in the monastery of San Domingo de Silos in Spain - the monks there are the Metallica of Gregorian chant - a Benedictine fellow made my friend and me wait two hours to speak with him, and all we wanted to do was ask dumb questions about Catholicism for our school project.  Then there was that guy from the Dhammakaya Foundation who was studying towards a PhD at Stanford who used to hold regular meetings - and was late every time.  This time the monk and his crew were about an hour late.  Poor Rebecca from BCAS who organized the visit kept popping in, red-faced, to apologize and inform us that the delegation was on its way.  At first they were in Berkeley.  Then they made it to Palo Alto.  At a certain point they'd found their way onto campus but had promptly gotten lost.

Being Buddhists, we hunkered down and made a show of being good at waiting.  In fact we sat on the floor in a circle and meditated.  After the first session everyone introduced themselves, and I was amazed to find myself face to face for the first time with members of the Stanford Zen group: I knew them immediately because they looked very serious and calm and introduced themselves as members of the Stanford Zen group.  It felt strange to meet them, because we'd passed each other like ships in the night.  When I'd first heard about them I was above Zen, and just wanted to meditate with the 'normal' Buddhists.  Then I got into Zen through my Wednesday sitting group in San Francisco, and wasn't interested in attending evening events on campus.  And it seems like I'll never have a chance to sit with the Stanford Zen people, since I'm a regular at Wind in Grass the same night of the week as they meet...

They seemed very nice and to know exactly what they were doing, despite there being no certified teacher around.  But there were other people there who I knew from BCAS, like Forrest, the Chinese Master's student in something sciency, who occasionally came to afternoon meditation when I was there.  It turned out that he was actually from Beijing, or had studied there, and had even been to Longquan monastery once or twice.  He started telling us about how the monastery had been effectively left to rot at some point in the 1960s, but had seen a huge revival in recent years, not only providing a home for monks, but also welcoming thousands of lay Buddhists through its doors.  There were quite a few Chinese and Chinese-Americans there, some of whom I'd seen at Buddhist events before.  A few people were talking in Mandarin.

When the delegation turned up it was similar in its general modus operandi to the similar monk + hangers-on teams I'd seen with the Thai Buddhist community.  There was a thin young monk at the center of everything bowing in all directions; he never seemed to have enough spare cloth around him to conceal all the objects he needed, which meant that people constantly had to hand him things and later take them back.  This was the Venerable Wuguang, the first Chan Master I'd seen in the flesh (unless you count Simon Child, who for some reason I'm not counting because he's Western).  Besides the brown and grey robes rather than the bright orange ones I'd seen in Thailand, not much differentiated him from the Theravada monks I'd met in the past, except maybe a bit more focused calm and a bit less ebullient smiliness.  He sat down in the center of the circle.

Immediately everyone scattered from the area like frightened pigeons, but he repeatedly encouraged us to sit beside him, so I took one for the team and did.  He seemed friendly enough.  The session consisted mainly of us asking him questions in English, which a translator would then relate to him.  He'd answer in Chinese, at which point that would be re-translated back to us.  I seem to remember that most of the questions were about the place of Chan in modern-day China, the day-to-day workings of the monastery, and the interface between monks and lay practitioners.  I got the sense that things were much stricter there than at even, say, the San Francisco Zen Center: the Chinese lay people seemed to live like the monks in SF, while the Chinese monks seemed to keep all the old vows of absolute celibacy and almost constant silence to the letter.  I of course asked a question about accountability, and got a well-meaning but slightly bewildered response.

Some of our side were asking their question in Chinese as well as English, and eventually the session flipped to them asking us about ourselves.  We went around the room and introduced ourselves and said a bit about why we liked meditation or Buddhism or had come to this event.  All this was related to Wuguang, who smiled very approvingly at everyone after they'd said their bit.  I wonder how it sounded to him to say that I'd taken up meditation because it helped with headaches, but he seemed to think it as good a reason as any.  At the end of the day they started handing out gifts to everyone, mainly DVDs of prayers and chants.  We were also warmly urged to check out their website, where they translate Buddhist texts into other modern languages, and also visit them in Beijing.  Maybe one day I'll make it, so that I can finally say that I know the price of tea in China.

Attent chan

I've been spending more time on Stanford campus again recently, and the other night had the opportunity of attending a talk hosted by the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, in their Distinguished Practitioner Series.  The speaker was Simon Child, a medical doctor and Buddhist teacher from England, and the title of his talk was 'Chinese Zen comes West'.  Yes, 'Chinese Zen', because although Chan is the proper term for Zen's Chinese precursor, Child decided to use a number of Japanese terms in his talks, since it is Japanese Buddhism that has so far been more influential in the West and whose terms are therefore more familiar to a Western audience.  Child is softly spoken, in his fifties, and has a gray beard, large glasses, and a passing resemblance to Oliver Sacks.  Before giving the talk he led the audience in an optional half-hour session of meditation, during which he kneeled in seiza position with a bright yellow throw over his legs.

Child studied in England with John Crook, an academic ethologist who - I learn from Wikipedia - went to the same secondary school as the writer of this blog.  Crook was in turn the student and protegé of Sheng Yen, a Chinese master who was born in Shanghai but emigrated to Taiwan after the revolution.  Sheng Yen was a teacher in both the main schools of Chan, Linji and Caodong (or, in Japanese, Rinzai and Soto), and thus held lineages founded by Linji (810-866) and Dongshan (807-869) respectively.  (Both of these strands trace their lineages back to Huineng, 638-713, the Sixth Patriarch, who is supposedly linked by a single line of descent to the First Patriarch Bodhidharma, who is 28 generations removed from Mahakashyapa, the only one of the Buddha's disciples who knew what he was up to when the Buddha's sermon one day consisted entirely of him holding up a single flower.)  That, then, is how Buddhism got from Siddhartha Gautama to Simon Child, more or less.

Since Child's lineage has two separate strands, his practice also used two approaches, both of which I was somewhat familiar with from the Soto practice at SFZC and the more Rinzai style of PZI.  Child's opening meditation encouraged us to become aware of various parts of our bodies in turn, before inviting us to integrate the discrete impressions of the separate parts of our bodies into a single sensation of presence.  This is the method of silent illumination or mozhao, associated with the Song master Hongzhi Zhenje (1091-1157).  When he talked about his group's Western Zen retreats, however, Child described a practice focused on koans, or, in Chinese, gongans, and especially on the 'head' of the gongan, a particularly crucial phrase or question that the student is invited to repeat to himself over and over again.  This is the huatou practice advocated by Dahui Zong Gao (1089-1163).

The main subject of Child's talk was the coming of Chan to the West, some differences between Western and Eastern practitioners, and how to adapt Chan to a Western context while remaining true to the traditions of the practice.  Child said that in his experience of doing retreats in Taiwan, the UK, and the US, Westerners tended to be more questioning of the practice, while Chinese Buddhists were more ready to follow instructions without challenging the teacher to justify them.  He described the new style of Western Zen retreats that he and his colleagues in the Western Chan Fellowship have been doing for two or three decades now, telling us how they combined traditional silent meditation with periods of spoken practice in pairs that are closer to Western psychoanalysis.  According to Child, we should not be too wary of integrating therapy into Buddhism; after all, one of the Buddha's titles was the great physician.

I was very happy to hear what Child had to say about Chan in the West, since many of the issues he was discussing have been knocking around in my own head for quite some time.  Child was very careful to avoid stereotyping Chinese and Western Buddhists while all the same making some generalized comments about his experience of practitioners of different backgrounds.  But while Child seemd content to say that Westerners are skeptical and questioning of both teachers and methods because of their upbringing and leave it at that, I would prefer to go further.  Asking questions, insisting on evidence, and auditing holders of authority do not simply reflect Western values; they are a way of going about things that reflect universal concerns not to be misled, fooled, or abused by others.  In short, I am not sure whether seeking to unite Eastern mysticism and Western politics doesn't miss the point: what we should be seeking to synthesize are instead two systems with universal appeal, both centered around similar conceptions of human dignity.

Knees/up

'Do not look around the meditation hall. Do not make eye-contact with others. Do not speak to others. If you must communicate, write a note. Sesshin starts now.'  There were four black-robed monks sitting in a line.  The Ino - the head of the meditation hall, who in this incarnation had an impeccable upper-class English accent - had just finished reading us the instructions that would govern the seven-day retreat I'd signed up to at the San Francisco Zen Center.  After my conversation with John Tarrant, I'd decided not to go on retreats with his Pacific Zen Institute anymore, though I was continuing to practice on a weekly basis with his student David Weinstein.  But I had undertaken to attend other retreats available in the area, and since SFZC was only a couple of blocks away from my flat, and is an important reference-point for American Buddhists, what better place to start but there?

From the beginning, I knew that these guys were serious.  We were instructed to make an effort to turn up to every compulsory session of meditation and to every service, in order to support others in their practice.  There was to be no use of phones or computers, and no reading or writing.  (One woman asked at the beginning what we would be allowed to do in rest periods, given that these activities were forbidden.)  Unlike at PZI retreats, where people would often talk quietly together and greet newcomers with a hug, here practioners followed the rules strictly.  The whole experience reminded me of nothing so much as being at boarding school in England.  All activities were forcibly communal; a great regularity prevailed; and the whole eccentric endeavour was presided over and punctuated by the periodic ringing of bells.  At the end of the day I returned to my room feeling like my mind had been nuked with quietness.

Nowhere was the attention to etiquette more marked than in the traditional oryoki breakfasts.  Oryoki is a ritualized form of eating involving a small bundle of kitchenware wrapped in a cloth.  It looks like the kind of thing you bring on a picnic, or that a kid running away from home would hang from a stick he would then carry jauntily on his shoulder.  When you unwrap it there are chopsticks, a spoon, a spatula, a cloth, and three bowls (or five if you're a priest - apparently ordination in Zen is partly about getting more bowls than everyone else).   There was a special hour-long instruction session on the first day to ensure that we all lifted our bowls at the right times.  At one point a controversy arose among the clergy about when we should be allowed to serve oursleves the gomasho, a poppy-seed condiment you sprinkle on your food.  In the end, the Senior Dharma Teacher announced, 'The Abbots have met about this, and have ruled that the gomasho will be served after the third bowl'.  So it was decided.

I enjoyed oryoki only to the extent that it gave me a glimpse into Japanese monastic practice, and if I'm honest that's the only way I could really put up with several of the other aspects of practice at SFZC sesshin.  Every day we spent a couple of hours chanting, sometimes texts that had been translated into English, like Dogen's enlightening 'Fukan-zazengi', but just as often meaningless strings of Japanese syllables, 'to yota mitsu bishi ka rate to kyo', and so on.  Now, I don't mind being made to repeat words that will stick with me and may eventually sink into my heart ('Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord'), but I do object to reciting phonemes that are simply not intelligible to me (or anyone else in the room) and are unlikely to become so in the future.   Presumably the SFZC response would be that they are honouring the ancestors, but the ancestors in question were Japanese, and so presumably understood the Japanese text they were chanting.

Worse than the bowing were the prostrations.  At about six o'clock every morning we'd file into the upstairs hall, bow once or twice in one direction (you can't go anywhere in that place without there being some statuette to kowtow to somewhere behind you), and then put our hands in gasho (prayer-position), kneel down, fall forward, softly head-butt the reed-matt floor, and then lift up just our hands so that we looked like caterpillar with curious antennae.  Then we'd get up, and do the whole thing again, driven repeatedly forward and downward by a serious-looking young chap with an extra-large sacred bonker and a supersized bowl-bell.  It was like a static pacifist version of the scene in Ben Hur where all the slaves rowing are being taken up to ramming speed by a man banging a drum.  I don't really see the point of falling on the floor for a bunch of statues, or for Siddartha Gauthama: the man died in 483 BC, so it's hard to see why he would care.

I also had to bow when doing dokusan (personal interview) with the Senior Dharma Teacher, although she was such a humble person that it was easy for me not to think of it as an act of obeisance to her personally.  In general I have to say that SFZC, for all its liturgical conservatism, has a much less top-down approach to teaching than PZI.  When I went to speak to Victoria Austin, the retreat's other leading teacher, I asked her about Richard Baker and accountability, and she welcomed my questions, before responding to them in a straightforward manner.  She said that SFZC Abbots served at the pleasure of a board of governors, that spiritual teachers should be expected at the very least to live up to the ethical convention governing other organizations, and that unusual insight should never be used to justify teachers' transgressions.  I felt reassured by her response, not only because it confirmed my instincts, but because it made SFZC seem like a safe and sane place to practice meditation.

All the same, after four days the rigidity and strictness of the practice there - during a sesshin which was supposed to have been specially designed for the ailing - was making my usual low-level pain intolerable.  I sat left foot over right, I sat right foot over left, I knelt with a cushion, I knelt with a bench.  I went home the fourth night and couldn't sleep because my legs and back were in such agony.  I stayed awake until five, wrote a note to the Ino, and then went and handed it in.  It read: 'I am ending my sesshin a day earlier than planned due to excessive pain'.  (Later I got an email back, saying 'I was sorry to hear of your pain; I hope you found the retreat a valuable experience nonetheless'.)  I walked back along Page Street, thinking 'Well, that didn't work'.  I stopped for a long time by a tree to listen to a blackbird singing; but that, of course, is something you could do any day.   

The fall of tortoises

Zen Buddhism advises you to step off the 100-foot high pole, but though last week's post was a cliffhanger, I won't walk off that particular cliff until next week.  This week I prefer to talk about a Japanese man who pretended to be a cat.  But wait!  I can explain, though not entirely.  My sister lived in Japan for four years (and now she has lived in Korea for the same amount of time - you can read her blog about it to the right of this post).  During the whole time she lived in that fascinating country, I never visited her once.  Japan, you see, is far away, and in any case I was more interested in traveling to Italy back then.  I also never knew that I'd become interested in Zen; not to imply that Zen has anything to do with Japan, but you know what I mean.  Despite my never visiting her, she did send me innumerable postcards and also give me a number of Japanese novels for Christmas.  I've read one of them now, I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume (in translation!), and I thought I'd tell you about it.

I am a Cat is narrated by - you guessed it - a cat.  Soseki originally wrote only a single short-story employing that particular narrative technique, but when readers whined for more he ended up expanding the story into a full-length novel.  The novel shows the strain of having to stretch out such a simple idea over hundreds of pages: soon enough, the focus shifts away from the cat and his thoughts to the lives and conversations of the characters the cat is constantly watching.  The main character is Sneaze, the cat's 'master' (though we know who is really charge).  A bumbling schoolmaster, he enjoys frequent visits by his friends, Waverhouse, a cynical free-thinker, Coldmoon, a young scholar, and Singleman, a Zen practitioner.  The novel has not one plot but several, as various fads and schemes pass into Sneaze's consciousness and - not too long aftwerwards - out of it.  It is written in a light, whimsical, and thoroughly English style, reminiscent of nothing so much as P.G. Wodehouse. 

Soseki's novel is not Zen scripture in the sense of the Diamond Sutra, nor Zen literature in the sense of the Blue Cliff Record, nor even a Zen book like Bring me the Rhinoceros.  But it does arguably get to the essence of Zen in a fairly direct way, partly simply by swapping the heroic narrator Western readers have been used to since Conrad for an ordinary domestic cat.  But the cat also makes statements that could pass as pithy summaries of the Zen approach to things: hearing humans muttering about how life would be so much easier as a cat, he observes that 'if they really want their lives to be nice and easy, it's already in their own good power to make them so.  Nothing stands in their way.'  There are also occasional references to Zen institutions and traditions, often lightly mocking, such as the story about His Ineffable Holiness the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng, who discovered that placing one's buttocks on a cold stone was a reliable corrective for rushes of blood to the head.

But a more serious case for Zen is made in a long speech in which Singleman tries to convince his friend Sneaze that however hard you try to fix things, new problems will always arise.  'For the real issue', he goes on, 'the problem in your mind, remains unsettled, however hard you wrestle it around, until your dying day...Nobody, however mighty, can do as he likes with the world.  None can stop the sun from setting, none reverse the flow of rivers.  But any man is able to do as he likes with his own mind.'  Hence the importance, says Singleman, of a systematic program for developing control of the mind, and that is what Zen offers.  He ends by quoting a stirring quartet supposedly composed ex tempore by Sogan, a 13th century Chinese master, when faced with decapitation by a Mongol swordsman, which ends with the defiant declaration 'One is not awed/ by threats of such a blowless blow'.  (The Mongol swordsman was apparently so disconcerted that he dropped his sword and fled.)

Singleman's comments are predicated on a distinction between Western 'positivism' and Japanese quietism: 'The progressive positivism of Western civilization has certainly produced some notable results, but, in the end, it is no more than a civilization of the inherently dissatisfied.  The traditional civilization of Japan does not look for satisfaction by some change in the condition of others but in that of the self.'  Placed in that light (and described in that manner) the traditional Japanese way certainly looks attractive, but Western readers may want to reassess their initial reaction after reading one of Singleman's examples: you may, he says 'live under an oligarchic government which you dislike so much that you replace it with a parliamentary democracy', but changing it will do no good.  After a century of Japanese history, this doesn't just look flaky: its falseness has been demonstrated by events.

But it would be misleading to present Singleman's views as if they were straightforwardly those of Soseki, who later on exposes his Zen character to considerable mockery at the hands of Waverhouse.  Waverhouse even claims that Singleman's Zen proselytizing has driven people insane.  One man, he says, 'went to the Zen center at Kamakura [where my teacher David Weinstein studied] and there became a lunatic'.  Another, with a tendency to gluttony, began mixing up his koans and his meals, and 'on one occasion, he informed me somewhat ponderously that beef cutlets might soon be coming to roost in my pine trees'.  Some of Singleman's own statements don't even require outside ridicule: when asked how to practice Zen, he replies: 'There's really nothing to learn.  Just concentrate, as all the Zen masters advise, on the pure, white cow which stands there in the alley.'

But however much institutionalized Zen is - quite rightly - pilloried in the novel, the cat often returns to the essential teachings.  'The proper study of mankind is self', he reflects at one point.  'The heavens, earth, the mountains and the rivers, sun and moon and stars - they are all no more than other names for the self.  There is nothing a man can study which is not, in the end, the study of the self.  If a man could jump out of his self that self would disappear at the moment of his jumping.'  And he tells a story (if this isn't a koan, what is?) about how the playwright Aeschylus thought so much that his hair fell out, at which point he was killed by a passing eagle who decided to try to smash open a tortoise's shell by dropping it on the Greek's shiny pate, which it had mistaken for a stone.  There is no finer use of the Classics than this little anecdote; and no finer admonition about the dangers of thinking too much.

Moving towards the center

A month or two ago Adam informed me that he'd been cheating on me.  Us, rather.  Adam's a Buddhist friend who encapsulates everything I'd thought Californians would be like when I first came here (which makes sense, since he's from Massachusetts).  He's young, he wears what looks like a shark's tooth around his neck, he spends most of his free time surfing; he says 'hella' and 'dude'.  He's also extremely friendly, and he was the first person to welcome me to the Wind in Grass community I now sit with weekly on my first visit.  But then for a while he disappeared, emerging only occasionally in the flesh at one-day meditation events and more frequently in the virtual reality of Facebook, dressed garishly in a succession of bizarre cotumes.  But there he was that Wednesday night at regular pratice again, sheepishly admitting to us that he'd been meditating with another sangha.

It was, it turned out, the San Francisco Zen Center, which has a fair claim to being the oldest Buddhist temple outside of Asia, and is certainly the biggest and most well-attended I've seen, with maybe a hundred people in the meditation-hall every week.  It was founded in the 1960s by Shunryu Suzuki, a priest of the Soto sect from Japan who came over to San Francisco to serve the emigré community in Japantown, but who was adopted by beatniks and dharma-bums who had a fascination with seated meditation.  After Suzuki died, his burgeoning convert community moved into the handsome and spacious building in the Lower Haight that it still inhabits.  Later on, it acquired two other properties: Green Gulch farm, a center for work-practice and organic farming, and Tassajara, a traditional monastery in the California wilderness.  But you can read all that on the internet.

My own view of the SF Zen Center was formed by a couple of entirely contingent factors.  The first was my reading about the sexual and other misconduct of Suzuki's successor Richard Baker (which I've written about already) and the frankly straight-out weird actions of his successor, Reb Anderson (which I'll write about now).  The story is that Anderson was out running one day in Golden Gate Park (a smart thing to do), when he came across a recently-murdered body and a gun, and decided to sit beside it and meditate (not so smart).  He then took the gun with him and stored it in the Zen Center, only to retrieve it one night weeks later to brandish it at a homeless person who'd tried to mug him (dumb and dumber).  He said he was only trying to scare the mugger, but the police weren't impressed.  Nonetheless he wasn't charged, and I'm told he now greatly regrets the entire incident.

The other factor that did a lot to form my view of SFZC was that a lot of the older people in my own group, Pacific Zen Institute, had started out practising there and had, for various reasons, defected.  One man had done damage to his spine after trying too zealously to sit in full-lotus posture without sufficient preparation.  Another simply found that his practice wasn't progressing.  Another preferred a lay style of practice to one that seemed to focus on training priests.  As various as the complaints were, though, there was a common thread: SFZC was a a very formal, strict, and traditional place.  This struck a chord with me: a couple of years previously I'd been researching retreats online and had been put off by all the black gowns and stern faces on the SFZC website, and by the apparently high bars to being involved in pratice periods and retreats.

The Baker and Anderson stories both seemed to encapsulate the dangers involved in giving too much power to religious leaders, and that has always been a particular concern of mine.  The alleged formalism of the Zen Center was also something I found not to my taste, and although this was more an aesthetic than a principled difference, I do still sometimes wonder whether over-attention to ceremony can be a distraction the direct practice of awareness and compassion.  But Adam's going there made SFZC seem more accesible to me, especially when he pointed out that it was two blocks away from where I lived.  Since I'm still in an exploratory phase in my practice and since I still see San Francisco as a strange foreign city that's to be explored, I decided to go down one morning and check the place out.  I had decided, in other words, to cheat.

Mr. Propter's koans

It's been some weeks since I told you about my real self, so I thought it might be about time that I told you about my fake self as well.  It is was when I was (really) living in Italy that I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Propter.  He was in a novel called After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley (pictured - no, not there).  I'd read some of Huxley's earlier novels, mordantly satirical and sharply witty observations of the social life of the English upper classes, and enjoyed them well enough.  If you're careful you can detect in them the seeds of the meditative mysticism that would later reach full bloom in Island, Huxley's final novel, and that would eventually collapse into the championing of psychotropic substances in such works as The Doors of Perception.  But I don't know of a fuller or more coherent expression of Huxley's mature views on meditation, God, and much else besides, than that communicated through the speeches of the character Mr. Propter in the first part of After Many a Summer.

The novel follows the progress of Jeremy, an English historian, on his mission to the lavish mansion (modeled on Hearst Castle) of the oil-baron Jo Stoyte.  Jeremy has been employed to examine the manuscripts in the Stoyte private collection, but soon becames absorbed in the drama playing itself out among the residents of the mansion.  Pete, a young idealist, is hopelessly in love with Virginia, Stoyte's unreasonably young and desirable girlfriend, who is cheating on her wealthy lover with the house physician, the cynical and manipulative Dr. Obispo.  Down in the valley, vigilantly independent of Stoyte's money, the luxuries of his mansion, and the lure of his girls, lives Mr. Propter, a retired professor, who dedicates himself to silent contemplation and living off the land, all the while humouring Jeremy, mentoring Pete, and nudging Stoyte towards a more compassionate treatment of his workers.

We first meet Mr. Propter hitching a ride in the car that takes Jeremy to the mansion.  When we next meet him, he is sitting and watching the sun go down and meditating on koans.  Of course, that's not how Huxley describes it, but that's pretty much what's going on.  Sitting alone, he asks himself 'What is man?' and contemplates the answer given by Pierre de Bérulle, the 17th century cardinal: 'C'est un néant environné de Dieu, indigent de Dieu, capable de Dieu, et rempli de Dieu, s'il veut'.  As if that weren't enough, he then asks himself, 'What is God?' and whispers to himself the definition offered by the 13th century mystic John Tauler: 'God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working'.  Like those of any koan practitioner, his thoughts then wander from the object of meditation to thinking about other matters, in this case, how to improve the lot of Stoyte's employees.  But he soon brings them back again:

'Little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself intoa kind of effortless unattached awareness, at one intense and still, alert and passive - an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words.  But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness - what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking?  And as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself...The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality...'

Mr. Propter sets out his philosophy in a series of conversations with Jeremy, Stoyte, and above all Pete, who becomes a kind of apprentice, across three or four of the central chapters of the novel.  Fundamental to Mr. Propter's modus vivendi is a 'skeptical attitude of mind', maintained in the face of  political creeds at both ends of the spectrum, nationalism of any sort, and even organized religion.  Despite his work on behalf of exploited labourers, the only liberation worth seeking, in Mr. Propter's view, is a spiritual liberation: 'Liberation from time...Liberation from craving and revulsion.  Libration from personality'.  The end of liberation is so important that it structures Mr. Propter's ethical system, in which a good act is simply 'any act that contributes towards the liberation of those concerned in it'.  Science and art are good, bad, or simply indifferent depending on whether they aid or hinder people on the way to this over-arching end.

Once we appreciate the importance of liberation in Mr. Propter's system, it becomes easier to see why he rejects attachment or devotion to any other cause.  After all,  'scientists and artists and men devoted to what we vaguely call an ideal.  But what is an ideal?  An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspects of personality...And that's true...of every ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation - liberation from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God'.  And even among those who feel the desire to search for God, 'most find, through ignorance, only such reflections of their own self-will as the God of battles, the God of the chosen people, the Prayer-Answerer, the Saviour'.  So where might they find the real God?  Only in contemplation, 'in timelessness, in the state of pure, disinterested consciousness'.

Mr. Propter's determination to achieve spiritual liberation is accompanied by an eccentric desire to free himself from political and economic dependencies of all sorts.  He has solar cells and his own generator so that he can live off the grid; he grows his own vegetables in a greenhouse and builds his own wooden furniture in a workshop.  His explanation for all this is that he is a 'Jeffersonian democrat'.  What does democracy have to do with anything?  He answers simply, 'The more bosses, the less democracy.  But unless people can support themselves, they've got to have a boss who'll undertake to do it for them.  So the less self-support, the less democracy.'  Hence his interest in the generator, which promises to 'help to give independence to any one who desires independence'.

Unsurprisingly, Huxley's Mr. Propter is a pacifist, though his answer to the question of what we should do about Fascists ('something appropriate') is unreassuringly vague considering the year in which the novel was published (1939).  He is also, very surprisingly indeed, committed to violent revolution, although here too concrete details are disturbingly scarce.  He says only that he is willing 'to do active work on the techniques of a better system' and to 'collaborate with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization.'  His final comment on the topic - 'incidentally, the price, measured in human terms, is enormously high' - should be chilling to anyone who has lived to the end of the 20th century. 

So Huxley's hero is hardly an unblemished role-model for the would-be contemplative, the ardent democrat, or even for those (and there are a lot of them here in California) looking to go back to the land.  All the same, he possesses what he calls 'the most characteristic features of an enlightened person's experience', that is, 'serenity and disinterestedness'.  In him, Huxley has provided us with a portrait of someone who has worked towards 'the absence of excitement and the absence of craving' without losing any of his humanity.  And how is he going about it?  As he tells Jeremy and Pete, there is really only one way - the path of direct experience, looking at reality head on.  They can go and look at it just as they can go upstairs to look at the priceless paintings on the walls of Stoyte's mansion.  Except that in this case, 'there isn't any elevator.  You have to go up on your own legs.  And make no mistake...There's an awful lot of stairs'.

How not to drink Kool-Aid

A few blocks north-east of me as I write is the old site of the People's Temple, where a charismatic young preacher by the name of Jim Jones was winning converts and admirers to his innovative version of Christian socialism, local hero Harvey Milk among them, by the early 70s.  After a few years in San Francisco Jones decided to bring his flock to a special compound in Guyana, where they would be able to found a community free from the taint of atheistic capitalism.  At the urging of an association of concerned relatives, a member of Congress was sent out to Jonestown on a fact-finding mission.  After several of Jones' community tried to leave the group, Congressman Leo Ryan and four others were gunned down.  Soon afterward, Jones persuaded or coerced all 909 members of his congregation to quaff Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

The Jonestown mass-suicide was the single biggest loss of civilian life in US history not related to a natural disaster until September 11th, 2001.  Leo Ryan remains the only serving member of congress to have been successfully assassinated.  For anyone joining what sociologists term new religious movements - independent, experimental, or innovative religious groups - the tragic history of the People's Temple of San Francisco might well be kept in mind.  It was the dark side of the upsurge of interest in alternative lifestyles and syncretic mysticism of the late 60s, and led to the founding of a the anti-cult movement of the 80s.  But of course, new religious movements are still with us, as are cults.  My mother sometimes reminds me of her friend whose daughter was brainwashed into believing that her mother was a witch.

One of my friends, when she found out I enjoyed meditation, told me, 'You're not going to join a cult like my friend from college, are you?'  (Her friend was a student of Andrew Cohen, whose physical abuse of his followers is documented in William Yenner's memoir American Guru).  And I don't think I am, but it had crossed my mind.  I've talked to several older members of PZI, and thought a lot about cults and new religious movements in general.  The atmosphere at retreats is what gets me worrying, mainly just because it's so unusually loving that I figure something must be up.  (I remember one woman saying to me as I left, 'It's been so good sitting next to you!'  I thought 'What, in silence?', 'How nice', and 'It's a cult' pretty much simultaneously.)  But PZI's experimental nature also has me wondering at times.  All this wondering has led me to try to put together a list of signs to look out for if you don't have a taste for cyanide-flavoured grape juice.

1. Exaggerated claims that the movement or the leader is transforming the universe, bringing together all human knowledge, or healing all ills.  If you join a religious movement that makes the claim that it can get rid of all your problems, it's not a religious movement: it's a roomful of people who are delusional.  If the leader is someone who claims, like Andrew Cohen or Ken Wilber, to have synthesized all human knowledge and to be ushering in a new stage in human evolution, chances are they don't know much about any particular branch of human knowledge, and that they know especially little about evolution by the natural selection of inherited characteristics.  John Tarrant certainly doesn't make any of these claims, or at least he hasn't in my hearing.  At WiG we constantly try not to get rid of our problems, but to become better acquainted with them, which is hurtful and helps.

2. Extreme or bizarre deviation from traditional ethical norms.  Most new religious movements don't actually claim to start from scratch, but are instead parasitic on religious traditions that command varying degrees of authority.  Now, one of the best reasons for religious innovation is that traditional teachings, for example on homosexuality, are felt to be out of tune with the times, or simply to have gotten things badly wrong.  To that extent any modernizing movement will have to deviate from the past, at least the recent past.  But a religious group that didn't have some notion of sexual morality and immorality would seem to be leaving out a rather large segment of our moral lives.  Everyone can see that the Family cult was taking liberties with scripture in encouraging incest as an expression of God's love; but it may help in less obvious cases to remember that a Buddhist group that doesn't present some minimally honest understanding of the four noble truths and the eightfold path isn't really Buddhist.

3. Rigidly hierarchical structures, with a cult of the leader or teacher.  I talked recently with a man who'd been around SFZC during the time of Richard Baker's leadership.  He told me that it was quite clear that your criticisms of the teacher weren't welcome; in fact, he said that Baker would probably have reacted to any criticisms by shouting something along the lines of, 'How dare you question my authority?'  With nobody questioning his authority, and with him being a bloke, it's not too surprising that he used his  unquestioned authority to  have sex with as many women as possible.  I'm told that John Tarrant sometimes gets angry with people, and he seems to prefer to react to criticism with silence rather than with cogent argumentation and appeals to documented facts.  But I've also heard he does meet with people who have issues with him, and doesn't hold grudges against them afterwards. 

4. A veil of secrecy rather than a culture of transparency.  If there's nothing to hide, then nobody should really be going around helping to cover things up.  One disturbing aspect of the recent Tarrant-Foster dust-up was that an editor at Shambala Sun magazine wanted to let the matter drop to avoid 'washing the Buddhist world's dirty laundry in public', important for a newspaper 'with a substantial non-Buddhist or beginning Buddhist audience'.  The argument seems to be that we should not tell the truth in order to convert more people to Buddhism.  But Buddhists lying to cover up the wrongdoing of other Buddhists is unlikely to be an acitivity that draws a great many converts.  And it also might just be in contradiction with the precept against lying and the undertaking to practice right speech.  If you can't write home on a retreat, that's something to write home about, and not in a good way.

5. Encouraging adepts to create a whole new identity for themselves and cut off ties with their families and friends outside the gorup.  I'm well aware that many Buddhist and neo-Hindus in the West adopt new names to add to or replace their own when they convert, and also that this is routinely done in our own Zen lineage.  (I want my new name to be 'James'.)  In many cases this is a touching and intimate form of symbolism, though I must say it strikes me personally as almost intolerably pretentious.  (I'll post more on this later.)  But if a group wants you to change your identity completely and encourages you to cut off contact with your previous group of friends, I'd suggest running very, very quickly in the other direction.  Not that you'll take my word for it - you've probably cut off contact with me already.  But you don't really need a new identity anyway - you can be quite happy with your ordinary one.

6. The workshops and retreats don't cost $50 or $100 but your savings, your car, and your house.  How much people should be paying (or being asked to pay) for what is another issue I'll have to return to (as much because I may be paying too little for certain events as because others may be paying too much).  Ideally, nobody should pay anything for meditation, and if a run-of-the-mill sitting group or meditation teacher asks you to pay, just find one who won't (it's easy).  Once we're talking about an institution with a website and staff or about events with food and rooms, it gets more complex.  But one thing isn't complex: the guru doesn't need that Mercedes-Benz.  If he can't get through life without one, you may want to look elsewhere for help in developing contentment and generosity in your life. 

I may have strayed off-topic a few times, but I flatter myself that what I've provided isn't a terrible list of things that should make you think twice about getting deeper into your local new religious organization.  It's not an exhaustive list by any means - if your teacher thinks he is Socrates, or Jesus, or both, for example, that may be another reason to step away.  I think PZI does pretty well at avoiding cult-status on all of these counts, which is a reassuring thought as I approach taking refuge; all the same, this blog was started partly as my contribution to keeping the organization as non-hierarchical and transparent as possible.  But there's a problem with my list, and that is that none of its criteria are particularly well-defined.  What constitutes an extreme deviation from traditional ethical practices, for example, as opposed to a moderate one?  The quesion gets to the heart of the problem of cults.

The core problem about cults is similar to the core problem with murderers - it's very difficult to tell what they are for sure before they become something horrible.  Cults aren't all completely new religions, but nor are they all newfangled reworkings of existing faiths.  They're not overwhelmingly drawn from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism.  And they don't even all depend upon charismatic leaders.  Even definite cults can do a lot of good in some ways, and they nearly all present a minimally appealing public face to newcomers - for both points, see Lawrence Wright's long and detailed report on scientology in the New Yorker.  In the end, the best advice is simply to keep your eyes open and trust your instincts - not your deep spiritual 'heart', but your ordinary, everyday instincts about what seems phoney and exploitative.

Because when it comes down to it, the tragedy at Jonestown wasn't that people were drawn into a cult, but that Jim Jones browbeat them into drinking cyanide.  Groups of all sorts - corporations, goverments, armies among others - can commit crimes and do great harm to others and to their own membership.  Talk of cults makes it seem as if spiritual groups are more vulnerable to a certain type of mind-control, but I've seen no evidence that this is the case.  (If the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments are anything to go by, secular forms of authority are quite sufficient for that kind of exploitation.)  It's been a theme of this blog that politics is everywhere, and that means that vigilance is always a necessity.  Whatever a group's purpose, you shouldn't support it if it suppresees dissent, exploits its membership, and makes transparency impossible.

When I first came to California, I was immediately driven to an extensive compound where I would spend the next three years living and working, many hours a week for low pay and with little recognition for my labour.  The entire time my actions were supervised by a team of superiors, and I was given little choice but to comply with their instructions.  That seems like a fair description of my time so far as a grad student at Stanford, but it would be ridiculous to say that I've been drawn into a cult.  My point is not at all that grad school, or Stanford, is excessively isolating or insufficiently transparent; rather, I just want to remind you in closing of what an ordinary thing hierarchy is.  It's there in your workplace, so you can't be too shocked when you find it in your religion.  Of course, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't fight it; but it does mean that it's nothing to be afraid of.

Democrats or donkeys?

My teacher David did a talk near the end of my second retreat with PZI that centered on Jerry Brown, the past and present governor of the state of California.  It turns out that Jerry Brown has a longstanding interest in Zen, and shortly after losing the race to become the Democratic candidate for President, he boarded a plane for Kamakura in Japan to experience a few months in a traditional monastery.  It just so happened that David was studying there in the same period, and the two Americans ended up sharing a flat.  (I'd overheard David talking about the Governor before; one night at WiG he mentioned, in an unpretentious way, that Jerry had called him to ask about state funding for addiction-recovery programs; David advised him not to cut it.)

David told us how there was a tradition in the temple in Kamakrua to celebrate any spiritual breakthroughs made by individual students.  And amazingly enough, Jerry Brown experienced a breakthrough of just this sort during his relatively brief stay at the monastery.  It's my understanding that the teacher recognizes and confirms progress of this sudden kind; but when the Japanese Master announced to the other monks that Jerry had experienced a breakthrough, the celebrations were somewhat muted.  A number of the Japanese students got together and drafted a letter to the Master beginning with the phrase, 'A number of us believe...' and expressing their suspicion that Jerry Brown's breakthrough had less to do with essential understanding than with his status as a politician.

It was clear enough - though I don't think he said so explicitly - that for David, the monks' reaction was motivated mainly by envy.  In any case, the main point of his talk was that we shouldn't consider anything as outside of our practice, including our thoughts and feelings about the progress of other students or about decisions made by a teacher.  As usual, David seemed to have the best intentions, and if we assume that Jerry's breakthrough was genuine (or that the Master took it to be genuine), it's not hard to perceive an embarassing lack of dignity in the actions taken by the other monks.  But what is the Master was really corrupt, and just certified a breakthrough to increase, say, the fame of his temple in America?  When I asked David this on the night, he said he'd talk about the corrupt master when he came across one.  (It doesn't strike me, from my superficial researches, that they're that rare.)

I can remember a talk I heard at school that was given by a visiting expert on Asian politics.  When someone asked him why India was virtually the only stable democracy in Southern Asia, he replied that it was because India was one of the only countries in the region where Buddhism was not a major force, and that Buddhism taught people to be content with whatever government they had, and not to engage in violent revolts.  I'm not overly fond of religious explanations of political structures, and in any case Japan and South Korea are counter-examples to the posited correlation between Buddhism and political repression (and Thailand and Sri Lanka may be turning into further exceptions).  But the claim has always stayed with me, partly because it runs counter to the link that many intellectuals (such as Aldous Huxley) want to forge between meditation and personal freedom and autonomy.

For me, there's nothing more heart-breaking (and no stronger admonition for converts) that the sight of earnest and loving students of the dharma being abused by con-men like Dennis Merzel, and taking it lying down.  On the other hand, it's hardly surprising, since meekness and acceptance is partly what they've been taught to cultivate under all circumstances.  The problem with David's advice to treat your suspicions about a teacher as part of your practice - hosting them with a patient mind the way you would with pain, say, or a distracting noise - is that it assumes that the suspicions are unfounded.  It's just like when overeducated wranglers accuse opponents of employing 'rhetorical devices' instead of arguments: the phrase itself implies that the arguments have no substance, but allows its users to avoid saying why.

These people would be better off simply showing how the argument they're attacking doesn't stand up to scrutiny; and Zen teachers who accuse critical students of base motives would be better off simply demonstrating that the students' criticisms have no basis in reality.  The fact that they often don't choose this route, tending instead to treat complaints as distractions or pathologies, points a finger at a very real problem with authority in spiritual communities: there is always a danger that the very content of the practice becomes part of the structures of authority that were meant to be incidental to it.  Scott Edelstein advises that we give teachers authority only in their specific field of competence, just as we listen to a doctor's recommendations about our physical health, but not about what car to buy.  But this may underestimate and impoverish the scope we desire for our spiritual practices.

The problem, in plainer language, in that we want our spirituality to seep into every aspect of our lives; a path that worked well for money problems but couldn't help you with grief or bitterness would not really be a spiritual path at all.  Because of this, it's hard to tell people to listen to their teacher's expositions of koans while turning a deaf ear to their comments about marriage (even if the two things could be clearly separated in the first place).  It's been my experience with PZI that students (myself included) want to discuss their personal problems with a teacher; that's one of the reasons they turn to the practice.  An attempt to restrict the authority of teachers by restricting the applicability of the dharma is bound to fail, since the whole point of the dharma is that it's universally applicable.

If trying to compartmentalize spirituality and politics as two separate spheres does damage to spirituality, though, we should remember that it does damage to politics, too.  There is no space in any aspect of human interaction in which politics is not operative, and we only hurt ourselves and others by pretending otherwise.  In other words, the standards of logical argumentation and evidence-backed claims that we employ in our professional lives should not be abandoned simply because we're in a group whose raison d'etre is spiritual.  If teachers or students try to wiggle out of this, we should judge them for it, though of course we should also try to judge in a non-judgmental way.  If Jerry Brown deserves to be treated on campaign with as much compassion as the next Zen student and human being, he also deserves to be dealt with in the monastery with as much scrutiny as any other politician.

Zen democracy

Once upon a time there was a student who traveled for months to ask a great teacher about the way.  As he was trekking the final stretch towards the once distant monastery door, the master came out to meet him, saying, 'Hello, what is the way?'  The student had a sudden realization and waved his arms around wildly.  The master asked, 'How did you come to this great understanding?'  The student replied, 'What ways are there?'  It's one of those koans that makes the way seem very crooked and then suddenly very straight.  For me it's about how I used to stumble upon myself quite often just being there, especially when I was a child: sitting on a stairwell at school doing nothing but hearing the silence, laying in the backyard at home watching the clouds cross the sky.  The techniques and the drugs and the programs came afterwards, and so did the way: before I was just there.

But there's something else I like tremendously about this koan, and that's the way the student knows more than the master, and in part precisely because he doesn't know what ways there are.  (As ever, I may have mangled the precise form of the traditional koan, but that may not be a bad thing.)  One of the things that struck me most about the philosophy of Zen as it's been taught to me by students and teachers at WiG and PZI is its emphasis that the truth is available to everyone, and that in a deceptively immediate manner.  Everyone is an awakened one: they just need to wake up to being awake.  Those moments of gentle awareness you had as a child are available to you right now, as soon as you stop trying to get to them.  As John Tarrant told us at one point, the thing that seekers go searching for when they go on journeys of discovery - that's here with us right now.  In its essential philosophy, Zen seems an eminently democratic path.

In its historical practice, on the other hand, Zen seems an eminently hierarchical institution.  Since WiG and PZI are so informal, it took me a while to work this out, but Chan and Zen as they have come down to us from our Chinese and Japanese ancestors carries with it an organizational structure that looks something like this.  On the outside are all the billions of people who aren't Zen practitioners, or who haven't realized that they are yet.  Once you start studying with a teacher, you become - unsurprisingly enough - a student.  You can take refuge (jukai) to become an official Zen Buddhist and get discounts on enlightenment; and you can undergo ordination (tokuda) to become an official Zen priest and get to lead various ceremonies.  But the top rank of the hierarchy (I don't see any point in disguising that that's what it is), is the master or teacher (roshi).

A teacher becomes a teacher by being granted dharma transmission (inka shomei) by someone who's a teacher already.  That teacher will have become a teacher in the same way, so that chains of succession called lineages are formed that branch out into the future like family trees.  More importantly, each lineage provides in theory at least a clear and unbroken link to the past, to the beginnings of major branches of Zen (all Rinzai offshoots go back to Linji), to the roots of Mahayana Buddhism (all Chan branches go back to Avalokitesvara), and to the deepest roots of Buddhism in India.  Ultimately, all lineages are supposed to provide a link between your unfriendly local Zen teacher and Siddhartha Gautama himself, the original seed.  (Or, to be cynical for once, all lineages are a legitimizing rhetoric meditation teachers can make use of to present themselves as heirs of the religion's one true founder.)

Since I'm currently committed to formal conversion to Zen Buddhism (and am mindful of the precept against lying, and not really sure what to think about the one against denigrating 'the way'), I should say that I think dharma transmission sounds like the biggest load of horseshit since apostolic succession in Christianity (actually, the first is older than the second, but never mind).  Maybe it's just that the translation 'dharma transmission' brings up images of one robed weirdo transmitting forking blue streams of dharma-power through his fingertips into another one's convulsing body.  (On reflection, that may just be my thing).  More seriously, there's no way you can be sure of a linear succession of teachers stretching back 2500 years; as it happens, I study the fifth century BC, and I can tell you very little that's definitely true about what went on.

Worse, the practice of dharma transmission is patently undemocratic, since rather than being elected by students, teachers are appointed by other teachers.  (Sure, there may be good reasons why you don't want a teacher elected by students; but that doesn't mean that it's democratic, and that's my point here.)  It's my understanding that one of the reasons that Richard Baker was allowed to get away with so much for so long at SFZC was that 'he had transmission', meaning that his commitment and integrity should be beyond doubt.  Since students who want to become teachers depend on their teachers' opinion of them for advancement, it wouldn't be surprising if senior Zen students weren't quick to criticize their teachers or publicize their wrongdoing, since that way they might put in jeopardy something they'd been working years to achieve.

So I'm not studying with David Weinstein because I think he's the caretaker of the true teachings of the Buddha; I'm studying with him because he seems like a solid chap and because he's been practicing meditation several decades longer than I have and so can reasonably be assumed to have a correspondingly greater understanding of it.  As for John Tarrant, he seems to wear the title of roshi a little less lightly than David; not that he's hung up on formalities.  One of the most encouraging anecdotes I've heard about John comes from my friend Michael, who used to study with more traditional Zen teachers on the East Coast.  When he first did work in the room with John, he went immediately into a full prostration, and John was horrified and told him to stop.  I'm with him and the ancient Greeks in having no taste for proskynesis.

At one of the first one-day events I attended with John he told us that even if you make mistakes you can be happy - even if you've slept with your best friend's wife, there's no point in beating yourself up.  That didn't fit in very well with my understanding of the eightfold path, our ten precepts, or the general principles of not being an asshole, so I said something polite expressing my distaste.  Afterwards John shook my hand and thanked me for what I'd said, promising he'd think more about it.  Since then I've expressed my confusion or disagreement to him in public discussions on several occasions, and have been met with a mixture of prickliness and encouragement (once he praised me for sticking to my guns, only to later tease me for the position I'd taken).  Nobody's perfect, and it can be hard to respond gracefully to critical probing, especially in a public setting.  All the same, considerable authority should always come at the cost of continual public scrutiny, so I'm grateful for the moments of graciousness.

At one point during my last retreat I needed to re-charge my laptop, but couldn't find the right kind of power outlet.  While searching for one in the corridor I came across John carrying his laptop, so I asked him where there was an outlet.  These retreats are meant to be silent, and you're also not supposed to look other students in the face, let alone the master; from what I can tell, pulling what I did at some other Zen retreats would have gotten me cast immediately into the outer darkness to hang with the hungry ghosts.  John just told me to look in the kitchen.  I found that reassuring, because if there's a feature of Zen that elicits my inner (and outer) resistance, it's the undeniably hierarchical nature of its institutional structures.  In my professional life, I study ancient democracy, partly because I'm fascinated by the possibility of non-hierarchical collective action.  And there must be a way of restructuring ancient Zen so that its practice is as democratic as its philosophy.  That way, we could take a step towards realizing that our inherent equality is as much spiritual as it is political.

Roshi romances

This post will also be about sex, though it's also about domination (so don't be put off).  Sometime after I started going to Wind in Grass every week, I started looking around online at other Zen places in San Francisco.  Obviously the first one to show up in search results was the San Francisco Zen Center.  It claims to have been the first Buddhist temple of any denomination outside of Asia, and today it must be one of the largest Zen communities in the Western world.  I've only recently visited the place, and I'll have other more positive things to say about it in other posts (as well as more negative things, I'm afraid).  But for now I want to tell you about a story that caught my eye virtually as soon as I started looking into the history of the place.

The first head of the center was a Japanese emigré, Shunryu Suzuki, who's famous for the concept of 'beginner's mind' that provided the name for this blog.  Nobody seems to have anything bad to say about him.  The first American abbot at the center was a man called Richard Baker; he succeeded Suzuki.  Baker was by most accounts a charismatic and dynamic figure; he built up the Zen Center's property holdings, increased the size of the community, and hobnobbed with local bigwigs, like erstwhile (and current) California governor Jerry Brown.  But it later emerged that among the extracurricular activities was the energetic pursuit of a number of affairs with his students, including a woman who happened to be married to one of the center's main benefactors.  All of this is covered in detail in Michael Downing's 2002 book Shoes outside the Door.

Baker was forced to resign in 1984, but you might supect that the episode had a lot to do with a bunch of hippies in the 60s and 70s entering into authority relations and spiritual practices with naive optimism rather than cautious skepticism.  But people are more realistic now, and that kind of sex scandal must now be in the past, right?  Wrong, unfortunately.  Just this year, in February, Dennis Merzel admitted to three adulterous affairs with students and announced that he'd be disrobing as a Zen teacher (that's the term for it, though it's an unfortunate one in the context).  After a number of American Zen teachers issued a statement calling for him to stop teaching, he agreed, only to change his mind shortly afterwards.  No longer part of Zen, he now teaches his own brand of meditation.

And the evidence that sexual affairs involving Buddhist teachers and students is not just anecdotal.  Jack Kornfield published a study a few decades ago now in which he surveyed 54 Bud­dhist, Hindu and Jain teachers in the United States.  According to their responses to his brief questionnaire, only 15 observed celibacy.  34 out of the 39 others admitted that they'd had sex with students on one or more occasions.  The particular predilection teachers appear to have for the bodies of their students appears to cross demoninational boundaries (with Tibetan teachers performing particuarly strongly), as well as differences in sexual orientation.  The only factor that appears significantly to lower the likelihood that a teacher will commit sexual improprieties is being female. 

For a lot of my friends, a consensual relationship between a teacher and a student isn't a big deal.  As they point out, it happens all the time, at various sorts of educational institution.  It's easy to understand the dynamic and the temptation, and also easy to see that you can be overly cynical, given that some of these relationships actually lead to loving partnerships.  I accept that valuable relationships sometimes do develop in this way, but I'm skeptical about how often they do, particularly in view of the disparities in power written into every interaction between teachers and students.  I'm not saying that Zen teachers should all be celibate; the fact that most of them in America don't pretend they're not sexually active is a healthy thing.  But I don't really understand why guys who are meant to be all spiritually complete have to turn to their students for sex when they could presumably just log onto a dating website.

It's true that nobody's perfect, and that sexual transgressions don't necessarily invalidate a person's teaching or erase all the good they may have done by introducing others to meditation.  This is one of the reasons I'm still part of the PZI community, even though I've heard from reliable sources that the group's founder John Tarrant had a fling with one former student (when they were both single), and even though I know that he's now in a relationship with another (they seem open, though not in-your-face, about it).  John's an insightful speaker and an open-minded organizer, and I'm happy to go on retreats led by him and listen to his talks while having David Weinstein as my main teacher.  At the same time, I think I have a duty to be open about what I've learned so that others can make up their own minds.

Scott Edelstein's new book Sex and the Spiritual Teacher deals firmly with the excuses that teachers guilty of transgressions often have recourse to, but also recognizes that sexually transgressive teachers may nonetheless have much of value to say.  He suggests a simple principle: rather than dismissing wayward teachers wholsesale, we should allow them to continue to do good (by lecturing, for example), but take steps to stop them doing harm (by limiting one-to-one meetings with students, say).  He also recommends that spiritual communities have clear codes of ethics and behaviour, and that they have proper oversight by independent boards.  I don't think PZI currently has a code of ethics, and though it has a board of directors, that board is headed by our main teacher.  I have to admit that I'd be happier if things were arranged differently.  In the meantime, this is my shot at right speech.

Zen cricket

You may have read the phrase 'Zen cricket' on this blog.  I had a go at explaining what Zen is in my second or third ever post; so now here's a shot at explaining cricket, prompted by someone asking me about it the other night.  Cricket is a sport played by men in white trousers with red balls (and green knees).  The pitch is a circle or ovoid of whatever spatial extent happens to be available on your local green; it may include holes, hillocks, or trees.  At the centre of the pitch is a wicket, which is a rectangle of flattened grass, and also refers very confusingly to the two wooden constructions set up at each end of the wicket: yes, at each end of the wicket (rectangle of grass) there are two wickets (wooden things).  The wooden things actually consist of three sticks called stumps and two twig-sized bobbins called bails.  If a red ball knocks the bails off the stumps while you're standing nearby with pads on your legs and a bat in your hand, you're out.

This usually happens after a chap at the other end of the wicket (grass) propels the ball towards you at high speeds.  He does not throw it; this is strictly forbidden.  Instead he must sling it down onto the wicket (grass) with a rigorously straight arm after going through what looks like an attempt at doing trikonasana (triangle pose) in the middle of a forty-yard dash.  You make runs by smacking the ball back at him as hard as you can, or by politely stopping the ball in its tracks and running away.  If you successfully abscond to the other wicket (wood), that is one run, but be careful where you hit the ball!  There are men in white trousers cunningly placed all around you at positions known as slip and gulley and silly mid-off.  A friend of mine at silly mid-off once took a ball smack in the forehead.  It left a red dot that made him look as if he'd experienced a sudden conversion to Hiduism.  He was standing about two feet away from the batsman; hence the silliness.

The first cricket match I ever played ended with 137 runs for us and 4 points for them.  It was a draw (a tie).  This is one of the central ways in which cricket is like meditation: you never really win, but then, you never really lose either.  You'll doubtless be dismayed to learn at this point (after slogging through two paragraphs) that the phrase 'Zen cricket' you've seen in this blog really has nothing to do with a fusion of Japanese spiritual rigour and English sporting eccentricity, interesting though that particular combination would no doubt be.  Instead, the Zen cricket is simply a green plastic bug that hops around from student to student as we speak our minds in the green green field of our Wind in Grass zendo.  Why then did I just give you a delightfully unhelpful description of the English sport of cricket?  Two reasons.  The first is because I've realized that Zen is the last refuge for authentic Englishness; but more on that in a later post.  The second is to introduce a post on our Zen games.

You see, one of the things I've been up to on this blog is giving you the lowdown on what we get up to at Wind in Grass.  We do something different every week of the month: so far I've covered the dharma talk, interviews with a teacher, and community night, and our Zen game nights are the only regular event left.  (Not counting what we get up to on the fifth Wednesday of months with five weeks, when all hell breaks lose, anything goes, and we meditate and walk and drink tea.)  Dharma talks and dokusan are venerable Zen and Chan traditions, and community night is our way of honouring the sangha, but how Zen games fit into the tradition is anybody's guess.  I'm told our teachers approve of our experiments (and this is partly why we like them).  But I must confess I can't really tell you what Zen games are.  I don't think Michael could either, and he runs them most nights.

We've already established on this blog that Wittgenstein was a Zen master (along with Socrates).  In the Philosophical Investigations there's a lot about games, because the word 'game' was a good example in the master's mind of how words meant: there's no essential quality that chess and tennis and manipulation share that makes them all games; rather, they're all linked to each other at different points, the way members of a family resemble each other through different features.  Our games are also like that, though like many things that change a lot they tend to have the same form every month.  After we meditate for half an hour, Michael invites us to meditate again for two or three minutes on something in particular: complaints we have, for example, or why we're here.  Then the Zen cricket does its innocent grasshoppery rounds through the tall grasses of the half-light we sit in. 

If I'd been called into construct a religious group a few years ago, the last thing I'd have done would be to put a businessman with a law degree in charge of organizing it.  And that, it turns out, would have been an enormous mistake, since one of the best things about Wind in Grass is that it's so well-organized despite all the informality, and most of that is Michael's fault.  Everbody gets to speak one at a time, for as long as the Zen bug is with them.  As Michael says, this isn't to put anybody on the spot; it's just because we want to hear what everyone has to say, and because we suspect that extroverted people don't have a monopoly on wisdom.  A- fucking -men.  People comment on what they came up for them in the experimental supplemental meditation party.  And more times than not, that somehow hands the rest of us, and them,  a shiny reflective fragment of their entire lives.

Once there was a game about complaints; I thought I would win, since I thought I had some pretty solid complaints about my life.  Naturally I was aghast when it turned out that other people were also bloody good at suffering; half of them at least had more heartbreaking misfortunes than my own, damn them.  Once there was a mind game about the Buddha; I talked about killing him, Chris told us all he did was wake up, Mick discussed his hairstyle.  Everybody said something completely different about the same bloke; it was like watching Citizen Kane.  Once Toby led a Zen game which was apparently a well-known mindfulness exercise.  Not well-known to me; she gave us raisins and I immediately asked her whether I could eat mine.  It turned out that was the game; we were meant to look at the raisin, smell it, listen to it, sense it and undress it and snort its pheromones.  At some point I'd realized I'd eaten one of mine before she'd told me I could, which I meekly confessed to later. 

I'm not sure who told us to play games like this, to conduct these trailblazing experiments, to muck about in the sandbox; but it's always a new enough joke to feel like an ancient practice.  We are all, we working young of San Francisco on winter nights, Englishmen on village greens in high summer.  Somehow we've figured out that the best way of making use of the space and time we have is to play a careful, bizarre, and elaborate game with each other.  At the centre of it is a red ball that means pain; it will hit you in the head in no time if you're silly and stand too close.  We launch it at other with stiff arms after cartwheels, swing at it wildly with bats, or wait in the outfield watching affectionately its suprising career.  Sometimes we can see it, high in the blue sky, hurtling towards us.  It looks very much like a fearful thing from underneath; but all of us are shouting out to catch it, because we know that there's nothing more joyful than to catch it in your smarting palms and to hurl it up again sky-high.