Showing spine

I have a friend in England who occasionally sends me links to articles about meditation.  They're usually more or less enthusiastic explorations of meditation or mindfulness.  But a couple of weeks ago he sent me the recent New York Times piece about allegations of sexual harassment against Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki.

It's all very sad.  A few months ago, the same friend sent me a link to Sasaki's Mt. Baldy training center.  I spent a few minutes on the site and distinctly remember thinking, 'How nice, an old-style Zen center without any sign of untoward behaviour or controversy'.  I sent an email back saying, 'Looks like a good place to do koan work'.

That judgment will have to be revised now.  It seems that the kind of koan work that went on at Mt. Baldy involved women being encouraged to expose their breasts to the teacher as a way of 'showing' the answer.  It also seems to have involved a lot of unwelcome groping, and the occasional tea-time at which the Zen master would do his best to seduce his students.

My own view of this is clear: Sasaki should be stripped of his status as a roshi and should never again be allowed to teach.  More generally, Buddhist teachers who fail to live up to the few simple rules that govern their conduct - the norms that we apply to teachers of any sort in our society, as well as the basic ethical tenets of their own religion - should no longer act as teachers (at least for a significant period of time).

Western Buddhist communities need to apply these rules strictly for a number of reasons.  We need to send a clear signal to those who might be interested in Buddhism that sexual harassment and abuse will never be tolerated.  We need to affirm in a public way that everyone in our communities, from the most experienced practitioner to the complete beginner, partakes of a fundamental equality and is bound by the same rules.  And we need to make it clear to those in authority that abuse of this sort will not be taken lightly, so that it is less likely to happen again - or, at least, so that it happens less frequently in the future.

This is, of course, not the first case of a Zen teacher abusing his authority for sexual gain.  Part of what upsets me about the Sasaki case is that it is the latest in a long line of such cases.  And nobody ever seems to learn from the past.  Each time this happens we are told that next time, things will be different.  More people are going to speak out earlier.  Nobody is going to be hoodwinked by a charismatic teacher ever again.  From now on, people will go into things with their eyes open.

Then the next scandal breaks, often revealing (as in Sasaki's case) that abuses had been going on for decades.  That nobody had been brave enough to speak out against them (or only a few people, who were ignored or condemned by the community at large).  That the master's inner coterie had done everything they could to sweep the allegations under the carpet.  And that people calling themselves Buddhists had, on the whole, preferred perpetual forgiveness of the master to standing up for the rights of their fellow students.

If everyone agreed on what needed to be done, that would be one thing.  If everyone agreed that what we need to do is ensure that our religious institutions are accountable and transparent, then we could start the conversation about how exactly we might go about doing that.  Instead, as a glance at any online Zen forum will tell you, a lot of people think that we should avoid being too harsh, or judgmental, or hung-up on sex, or disrespectful of the tradition, or whatever.  A lot of these people have the best of intentions, but it's worth pointing out why their arguments won't wash.

The first argument I've seen is that we shouldn't take action against teachers like Sasaki since to do so would be unkind.  In other words, it would violate one of the core teaching of Buddhism, that we should be compassionate.  Some people even claim that whistle-blowers like Eshu Martin - who broke the story of Sasaki's abuses with a letter to Sweeping Zen - are guilty of triumphalism, or showboating, or of profiting from others' suffering.  In any case, stripping an 105-year-old priest of his dignity can hardly be seen as the kind of acts Buddhist should be advocating.

The problem with this argument is that we can all agree to be kind, while disagreeing about what being kind should consist in.  It's arguable that if we take into consideration everyone that might be impacted by this - including potential future victims of harassment - the kindest thing to do is to impose strict sanctions on teachers who do wrong.  And while it's good to remind ourselves that showboating doesn't help, the actions of whistle-blowers can also easily be interpreted as acts of kindness, since the intention behind them is often to reduce future harm.

The second argument is a more sophisticated, more Zen and less Buddhist, version of the first.  It is that we should avoid being judgmental of others, and that we should have a certain detachment from the judgments our minds often make.  But it seems impossible to avoid judging altogether.  In Sasaki's case, not taking any action would constitute a judgment just as much as taking robust action would.  Given that we're all going to judge the situation in various ways, we need some way of arbitrating among judgments.  So it's probably better to focus on whether a given judgment is accurate than to try to get rid of judging altogether.

The Zen recommendation to keep your thoughts at a certain distance is often a helpful one, in that it can prevent us from taking our own upset for a disorder in the world.  But it's important to realize that never endorsing any of your own thoughts leads to an infinite regress.  Radical doubt is simply impossible, because the thought 'I should never believe any thought I have' leads to paradox.  People who say 'we should not judge at all' are caught in a bind; if we shouldn't judge anything, why should we judge what they say to be true?  The healthy way of applying the original recommendation is to remember to take some time to gain some perspective on each thought as it arises.  Eventually, though, you will have to decide one way or the other. 

There's another reason that it's perfectly permissible to judge teachers like Sasaki by certain ethical standards.  This is that they themselves have chosen to take certain vows and precepts as Buddhists and as Buddhist teachers.  It's not like we're imposing some entirely foreign system of values on them that they never signed up to or saw coming.  All Zen students who take refuge agree to the ten Boddhisattva precepts, among which is the precept against sexual immorality.  Zen teachers are obviously bound by these precepts too - indeed, as teachers, we should expect them to be especially committed to them.  And though ideas of what constitutes sexual immorality thankfully change over time, what Sasaki was up to clearly fits the bill.

This helps with a third common argument, that we in the West are too hung up on sex.  Really (the argument goes) there's nothing intrinsically wrong about sex; and even if there were, the way we are reacting to the Sasaki scandal is exaggerated.  In the normal course of things, teachers will sometimes have sex with students, and there's no reason for us to freak out about it.  (This seems to be Brad Warner's view, though he is careful to draw a line between consensual sex between students and teachers and Sasaki's non-consensual groping.)

I don't want to revisit the issue of why consensual student-teacher sex is unacceptable, except to remind everyone that power differentials within Zen groups is often considerable.  But I will say two things.  The first is that in the case of Sasaki, it's clear that the vast majority of his groping was done without the consent of the women involved.  You don't have to be prudish about sex to see why this is wrong.  All you have to understand is that sexual choice is an important right, and that this right was violated by Sasaki's actions.

The second thing I'll say is that the idea that we should be careful about sex is not simply a Western idea.  It is present in many Eastern belief-systems too.  One of these is Buddhism.  Both the ten Mahayana precepts and the five Theravada ones warn us to avoid sexual immorality.  Of course, we can disagree about what sexual immorality is, and whether a particular person has committed it.  But the idea that we are introducing Western concerns about sex into Buddhism is a non-starter: the concerns about sex were already there.

The final argument I want to confront is that stripping Sasaki of his authority as a teacher would be an affront to his ancient lineage.  Now, I personally am moving towards the conclusion that we shouldn't have spiritual teachers at all: the potential for abuse is just too great.  The claims of lineages seem especially spurious: even if were true that there were chains of teachers reaching all the way back to the Buddha, I still wouldn't see why that would necessarily make people at the end of those chains better teachers.

But I recognize that there are lots of good people who value lineages.  I can certainly appreciate the intangible and yet real value of being part of an ancient tradition.  And I have met and worked with teachers who had a lot of worthwhile things to say.  Even if we grant that lineages should play a role, though, we might still want to take action to make teachers accountable.  Indeed, people who value lineages should arguably be the most active in disciplining renegade teachers, since their transgressions visibly dishonour the traditions that those teachers claim to be part of.  Besides, if we truly believe that the precepts reduce suffering, helping teachers to abide by them is a gentle act.

The bottom line in all of this is that we need to remain level-headed about meditation and meditation teachers.  If a teacher in a high school sleeps with a student, he ceases to be a teacher.  If a doctor fails to live up to a code of medical practice, he ceases to be a doctor.  But whenever a Zen teacher is caught abusing his position for sex, and (moreover) contravening a clear ethical code he himself has signed up to and continually advocates, there is always a chorus of voices saying that no practical measures should be taken.  Why?

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.

Cutting a diamond

When I first started practising Zen, I liked it so much and found it so intriguing that the last thing I wanted to do was read books about it.  Most of my life is reading books, and I didn't want a dusty intellectualism to distract me from what I take to be the center of the practice, meditation.  Since I decided to take refuge, it's occurred to me that that approach might be irresponsible: since a confirmation ceremony involves getting into something, it might be a good idea to become better informed about what it is I'm getting into.  So I've now taken a couple of books out of the 'Wine-box of wisdom' which serves as our lending library at WiG.  My first Zen book was John Tarrant's marvelous and perplexing Bring me the Rhinoceros, which confused the hell out of me and made me cheerful.  Over the Christmas break I worked through my second, Robert Aitken's more conventional Taking the Path of Zen.  

Robert Aitken was one of the first native-born Americans to become a Zen master, at least in the traditional sense of being a recognized successor in one of the Japanese lineages.  Captured by the Japanese while working as a civilian construction worker on Guam at the outset of the Second World War, Aitken spent the next few years in an internment camp.  It was in these unideal circumstances that he discovered Zen, the shapeless mould into which the rest of his life would be poured.  After studying English and Japanese literature at the University of Hawaii, Aitken made a series of trips to Japan to study at various monasteries.  He had a miserable time, with his stiff Western knees constantly swollen and painful from being forced into half-lotus; eventually he contracted dysentery and spent a brief period of time in hospital.

By his own account, Aitken was also suffering on the inside; he refers to this time as the 'dark night of his soul'.  Slowly, though, he began to see the point of certain koans and to make progress, even breakthroughs ('a bit of light') in his practice.  By the 1970s he had established a zendo in Hawaii, and in 1985 he received full authorization as a Zen teacher from Yamada Koun.  He was also writing books, the most famous of which was probably The Mind of Clover, on Zen ethics; for Aitken, ethics was ultimately inseparable from politics, and he gained some prominence as an activist, co-founding the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.  Aitken's prose is direct, concise, sharp.  It is often drily ironic.  At one point in the book I read he talks about a man who always used sitting periods to try to solve his practical problems; he soon left the zendo.  Aitken comments, 'Perhaps he had solved all his problems'.

There are many senior members of the Pacific Zen Institute who knew Aitken personally.  Some of them carry on key aspects of his teaching, as Chris Wilson does by continuing to do work on behalf of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.  I've asked several of my older friends about Aitken, and their accounts are strikingly similar.  They all start off by saying that they respected Aitken, that he had integrity, but that he was also incredibly fussy, or pernickety, moralistic, an old New England schoolmarm.  My teacher David told me that as soon as he started studying with Aitken, he had the sense that the roshi didn't really understand him or see him fully.  When he told Aitken this in a private interview, Aitken simply said, 'That's you', and rang the bell (which means: leave).  Years later, the two men happened to be in Japan at the same time and met up to have dinner.  As the noodles were being brought to the table, Aitken looked across at David and said, 'You know, it was me too'.

The practice community that Aitken founded in Hawaii was called the Diamond Sangha, and it grew to have several offshoots in both the United States and Australia.  Since part of the mission of this blog is to increase transparency, I thought I would note down what I've found out about the lineage of my teachers in California, with the important disclaimer that this information has been gathered haphazardly and at second hand.  PZI's head teacher John Tarrant was the first dharma heir (student who became a teacher) of Robert Aitken.  Like most of Aitken's other dharma heirs, including Nelson Foster, who was Aitkens's successor as head of the Hawaii Diamond Sangha, Tarrant initially taught explicitly in Aitken's lineage, heading a group called the California Diamond Sangha.  Around the turn of the millenium, Tarrant chose to dissociate himself formally from the greater Diamond Sangha and from Aitken's lineage, renaming our group the Pacific Zen Institute.

When I ask people why this happened, I hear various different stories, but there are two main ones.  Both of them seem to be true, and both undoubtedly had a role to play in the development of an independent Western Zen lineage.  The first story is that Tarrant broke away from the Diamond Sangha because he and his group wanted to develop different ways of doing Zen, an experimental approach that offended Aitken's relatively conservative religious sensibilities.  This seems to chime with what I've seen at PZI (compared with the SF Zen Center) in terms of a relaxation of traditional forms, as well as with the impression I have of Aitken from reading his book and talking to people who knew him.  The other story is that Tarrant had a sexual relationship with a Zen student, Aitken tried to discipline him for it, and the result was a falling-out between the two men that led ultimately to John cutting ties with his former teacher's lineage and institution. 

The whole reason I'm writing this blog, of course, is that I don't now much about Zen (see title), but anyone who's read an introductory book can tell you that there are various sects, the two most popular being Rinzai (which uses koans) and Soto (which doesn't so much).  Though Tarrant's teaching centers on koans, his inheritance is ultimately not from Rinzai but from a third and relatively new sect called the Sanbo Kyodan, and more particularly from a lineage called the Harada-Yasutani line.  Named after two twentieth-century masters, this line emphasized lay practice (teachers can marry and don't have to shave their heads!) and inter-religious dialogue (many of Yamada's students were Catholics), as well as less praiseworthy endeavours such as Japanese militarism (a sorry story for another time).  This is the line of John Tarrant and David Weinstein, and explains why they aren't celibate and have hair, if nothing else.  Not that lineages really matter, of course, or that there's really more than one; after all, as a Chan teacher once said, there's really no such thing as Chan, and there are certainly no teachers. 

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.

Sanghacest

This post will be about sex, so keep reading.  This first paragraph, though, will make another point about meditation and neuroscience (and if you're tempted not to read it first, just remember that skipping foreplay is bad karma).  There seems to be plenty of evidence that meditation will eventually change the structure and functioning of your brain, which sounds amazing, but which is actually less amazing than what people like Robert Aitken have been saying for centuries, that it changes your character and your way of experiencing the world.  But in any case, it's one thing to accept that the practice is transformative, and quite another to want to sign up to the particular transformation it offers.  I once read a report on a study suggesting that experienced meditators could eliminate their subconscious startle reflex.  I thought, 'Impressive', and 'Why the hell would I want to do that?'

I had an exchange of emails at one point with a friend who was at the time (and is still) studying philosophy.  I was already interested in Buddhism at the time, and had been telling him about the four noble truths and the eightfold path, which I'd learned about in Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught.  My friend (like many friends to this day) urged me to consider what he saw as the inhumanity of ideals such as the extinguishing of desire and the realization of selflessness.  I wondered whether the attempt to extinguish desire made us more inhuman than unthinking servitude to it; whether the realization of selflessness had led to greater acts of inhumanity than selfishness' full realization.  And anyway, though I didn't really want to extinguish my self or my desires completely, I knew I wanted to become less self-regarding and less anxious; and that was enough to keep me going.

I know what you're thinking: what does this have to do with sex?  Well, achieving the orthodox Buddhist ideal of exstinguishing desire would obviously involve extinguishing what for many of us feels like the tallest and hottest flame of all, sexual desire.  That's presumably the main reason that monks strengthen the traditional precept against sexual immorality into a vow of celibacy.  I remember reading about Buddhism in a comparative religion textbook we used at my secondary school called Six Great Religions.  There was a picture of some monks with shaven heads looking very silly and very pleased.  Next to them there was a text box saying: 'KEY IDEA: celibacy is key to spiritual development'.  I thought, 'Gosh'.  Although really, Christian monks have usually had the same idea.

I can sometimes see where they're coming from.  Being free from desires may sound unattractive, but it can really just be a way of being fully present in the moment: enjoying the way the sky is ripening to purple over the silhouette of your neighbourhood may be more difficult if you're thinking that you haven't gotten laid for a few months and need to be plotting how to put that right.  And I'm surely not the only twentysomething single in America to be weary of dating: all the fussing and striving that goes into finding someone to desire, pursuing them, and eventually either disappointing them or yourself.  One of the things I've liked about being in relationships it's easier to put all that to one side.

There is, of course, another side to the story.  Many people's most intense experiences of being alive have come from romantic relationships or sexual adventures, and some of them would no doubt insist that those moments were not merely physical but spiritual.  James Joyce seems to have been one of these people: the ecstatic vision that Stephen Daedalus has of the girl with bare legs at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is simultaneously a religious epiphany and an erotic dream come true (as well as an Ovidian metamorphosis, but we'll put her turning into a stork aside for now).  And there's a vein of tantric Buddhism that embraces this: there are even buddhas who are said to have come to realization in more senses than one. 

There's a Zen koan that asks 'Why can't the clear-eyed boddhisatvas ever sever the red thread?'  Nobody knows the answer, but John Tarrant thinks the question is about desire, and his view on this deserves some respect.  Chris Wilson talked one night about how those great old Theravadin monks, try as they might, could never really exstinguish all desire; and about how the Zen way was more to accept that the world we're in was a world of desire, whether we liked it or not.  I looked up to see my friend one seat over nodding vigorously.  Since joining the group, I've gradually pieced together the complex web of relationships, amicable and professional and sexual, that helped bring it into being, and the equally complex network of emotions, desire and love and hatred, that still holds it together.

I've always approached meditation groups as a refuge from all that.  Most of my Zen friends would probably remind me that there is no real refuge from desire, so I'd better stop pretending I can find one.  I won't pretend I've never felt attracted to anyone I sit with.  But I won't date within the community, just like I won't date in the department; call me Theravadin, but I'm not into sanghacest.  Occasionally, I look around the zendo at my dear friends, knowing that they're feeling impatience or anger toward someone, and feel glad to be free of it all (assuming I really am).  But more often, I watch them meditating together and bowing at one another, and become aware of a feeling in myself of admiraton, perhaps awe, even envy, that though they go on feeling lust or longing or regret or frustration at one another, they always do so, in this space at least, with compassion and dignity.

Work in the room

The third or fourth time I turned up for meditation at Wind in Grass I found that they'd hidden a man with a white beard in the closet.  The space we sit in has a rustic, outdoorsy feel, even though as soon as you step outside you can see the densely clustered towers of the downtown area sparkling away beside the Bay Bridge.  Every time you walk in the door it's like going on an urban camping trip.  The wooden floorboards are rough and unsanded (some work practice we never seem to get around to), and throw up splinters that unquestionably help with mindfulness when we're doing walking meditation in our socks.  In the corner there's a wooden door with a catch and behind it there's a small space between the wall behind you and the sloping bedrock of Potrero Hill.

That night they'd announced that the teacher David would be coming.  After we started meditating the girl to my left put the disembodied head of the Buddha in my hands and disappeared into the corner.  Beneath the noise of the heater you could hear hums and haws and sometimes an explosion of laughter.  After twenty minutes or so she came back to her cushion.  I passed the head of the Buddha on to the person to the left of me and opened the door of the closet.

In the closet there was an empty chair, and across from it another chair with a man with a white goatee in it.  Next to him there was a little table with a bell and some other curious objects on it.  Around his neck he had a kind of apron like the one I'd noticed Chris wearing, only this one was yellow and sparkly, as if he had taken care to dress up extra silly to keep the children entertained.  He looked friendly and glad but also kind of mischievous, as if he were savouring the happy outcome of a recently executed practical joke. 

This, I later learned, was our version of dokusan, a private interview with a Zen teacher.  (This was also my first encounter with a Zen teacher, although I'd foolishly taken the other chap with the black bib as a teacher, because he had taught me things.)  I've heard that in Japanese tradition the interview can be quite confrontational, with the master throwing the student a koan immediately upon entry and ringing the student out of the room with the bell if a satisfactory answer is not forthcoming.  When I heard this I immediately felt at home, realizing that the Japanese had invented the Oxford tutorial.  'How did the ancient Greek city-state get there?'  'How do you stop the sound of the distant temple bell?'  Ding-dong.  We've all been there.

My actual experience was much more disconcerting, consisting as it did largely of patience.  I sat down and waited for the teacher to say something, and he sat there and smiled.  At a certain point we started talking about meditation.  I'd already been practising for seven or eight years but immediately felt that everything was upside down.  More precisely, I felt like the strange man sitting opposite me was flipping my brain over, repeatedly and lighthearetdely, the way you flip a fried egg over on a frying pan.  Flip, flip.  This is your brain on koans.  And my koan was to stop the sound of the distant temple bell.  With what?  How come?  No idea.  It was like an extra secret dangerous mission from the spy agency that you couldn't refuse. 

I've since had many sessions in the room with David Weinstein, in Wind in Grass, on retreat, in somebody's house in Alameda, over the phone.  Somtimes we talk about meditation, which I thought is what I was meant to be doing at first (and that may be right; I don't know).  Sometimes we talk about what's going on in my life, which I was pretty sure was wrong, until I found out that's what most people in Wind in Grass were doing (not to say that it isn't wrong; it may be).  And sometimes we talk about stopping that damn bell from clanging in that distant bloody temple.

After I'd put forward my interpretion of the koan, my thoughts concerning it, and my complaints about it ('My koan doesn't appear to be working'), David started asking me to show him how to stop the bell without using words.  I have no idea how to do this, but I've figured out that figuring something physically is a big part of koan work, the only way, David told me, of getting the understanding into your bones.  I will work on that.  In the meantime, I look forward and backward to meeting strange men with white beards whenever I enter the closet.  There I am with Socrates in the Agora, finding out thay I have no idea what piety is.  With a priest in the half-darkness, admitting that getting everything wrong is alright.  With Wittgenstein in the deckchairs, a fly being coaxed towards the open end of a bottle.