Making it wrong

For the past year I've been living with two philosophers.  Occasionally they leave books about ethics the kitchen table.  One of those books made me think again about the Buddhist precepts I took about nine months ago now, and about the discussions with a teacher that led up to them.

I didn't take the precepts for purely ethical reasons.  I did so mainly for other reasons - committing to a practice, a community, and so on.  But committing to precepts clearly has an ethical dimension.  So what does it mean to commit to Buddhist precepts?  What are they? 

I was inclined to viewing them as rules.  In that interpretation, 'I vow not to kill' means that you can't kill anything under any circumstances.  My teacher David favoured a more psychological interpretation.  For him, not killing was about not killing your spontaneity or your vitality.

Both of these interpretations I found difficult to take.  I found it difficult to take my own interpretation of the precepts as rules mainly because, if they were rules, I couldn't honestly commit to some of them.  I found David's interpretation hard to take because it seemed to drain the precepts of all content, allowing him to take them to mean pretty much whatever he liked.

Consider the precept against intoxication.  I took it to mean that you shouldn't drink or take drugs.  If it meant that, though, I wasn't sure I wanted to commit to it.  David thought it was about maintaining your attentiveness - whether you'd been drinking alcohol or not. 

Extreme versions of these positions don't work.  If the precept against killing means you can never kill anything, you might have problems dealing with hamburgers and Nazis, let alone E. coli. 

If you think it is guiding you not to kill your spontaneity, you should say how you can tell it isn't guiding you not to kill your depression, or your murderous urges.  You may choose to apply it to spontaneity because you like spontaneity.  But then you're just adapting the precepts to whatever ethical assumptions you happen to have already.

You're also draining the word 'killing' of any content.  If you take the precepts metaphorically, they can all end up saying the same thing: you shouldn't kill your vitality, you shouldn't steal your vitality, and so on.  But there might be ten precepts rather than one because each of them is trying to tell you something different.

There is natural middle way between these two extremes.  You might take the precept against killing to be advising you not to kill things - on a reasonable interpretation of what 'killing' consists in, and within the bounds of what might reasonably be expected of someone.  So it might mean you have to become a vegetarian or a pacifist, but not that you can't take antibiotics. 

This isn't a bad way of taking the precepts.  It makes them possible to commit to while also preserving their natural meanings.  On this reading, it's clear what the Buddhist path is; you may reject it, but at least it's clear what it would mean to embrace it. 

The problem with this compromise position is that it's fuzzy.  What is a 'reasonably interpretation' of what killing is?  And what can reasonably be expected of people?  Some people may find vegetarianism or pacificism as difficult to embrace as toleration of E. coli.

This objection claims that the precepts aren't informative enough.  And that may well be.  They may be best taken as guidelines rather than as a complete ethical system.  They may simply point to things that are important ethically and ask us to be aware of them: be careful about killing.

The book I found on the kitchen table was by a philosopher called Jonathan Dancy, and it helped me think about these issues.  Dancy is a moral particularist: he believes morality isn't about rules but about context.  That's closer to David's views than to my initial take on the precepts.

I didn't read Dancy's book through, but at this stage moral particularism doesn't strike me as particularly plausible.  One view that Dancy canvasses in his book, though, was more helpful.  This was the approach of W.D. Ross, whom I knew as a scholar of Aristotle. 

If Ross had moved to San Francisco and become a Buddhist, he would have called the precepts prima facie moral claims.  On this view, the precept against killing says that if an act involves killing, your starting assumption should be that it's bad.  You may later revise this view, for example if you find out that the beings being killed are E. coli; but it's a good starting assumption.

There are all sorts of reasons philosophers nowadays don't like Ross' theory.  Some of them aren't very important - such as the complaint that Ross should have used the phrase pro tanto rather than prima facie.  Pro tanto reasons are reasons that other reasons may trump, whereas prima facie reasons may, on closer inspection, turn out not to be reasons at all.

Despite this infelicity of language, Ross' main idea is clear.  Killing is a 'wrong-making' feature of actions.  If it has killing in it, it's more likely to be wrong when looked at as a whole.

There are further complexities.  You might (like my housemate) want to distinguish two versions of this idea.  In the first, killing adds some wrongness into the mix.  I may decide that killing E. coli with antibiotics is right in the aggregate, but there's still a bit of wrongness there (in the killing).

In the second, all we look at is the action as a whole.  If we decide that killing E. coli is good in the aggregate, then we have to conclude that killing simply wans't wrong in that case.  This is close to the epistemic claim that if killing is part of an action, it makes it more likely to be wrong.

I might be wrong, but I think that Ross' view offers us a pretty satisfactory way of approaching the Buddhist precepts (or any other ethical guidelines) that avoids the extremes of treating them either as inflexible rules or as nearly content-free suggestions. 

Whether I think the ten Mahayana precepts really identify 'wrong-making' features of actions is another question.  I actually don't have a problem with gossip, for example.  I like gossip.  Maybe I prefer the five Therevada precepts: killing is wrong-making, stealing is wrong-making, sexual immorality is wrong-making, lying is wrong-making, intoxication is wrong-making.  As they say.

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.

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.

Beating the drum

 
If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that while I'm keen on meditation, I'm also aware that there have been problems in American Buddhist organizations, and especially in Zen groups in which there isn't a sufficient level of oversight or criticism of the head teacher of master.  You'll also know that I've had my doubts about John Tarrant, the head teacher of Pacific Zen Institute, which is the larger organization of which my smaller sitting group, Wind in Grass Sangha, is a chapter.  I found out online that John has been accused of misconduct - 'professional, sexual, and organizational', to use the words of Nelson Foster, a rival and critic - and so have talked to a few senior members of the organization to hear their version of events.  I also talked to my main teacher, David Weinstein, about the same topic.

All these sources admitted that John had made errors of judgment in the past - usually involving dating students - but they all ultimately defended him, saying that none of his mistakes could be considered harmful.  But since I found it hard to find out the truth about what had gone on in the past, and since my real concern was not that John had dated students but that he had refused to be accountable to them or to his own teacher Robert Aitken, I decided to talk to him myself about what had happened.  Of course, I appreciated that it was hardly a gentle act to dredge up someone's sexual past, and I felt myself that it was no easy one, since I'm relatively new to Zen and teachers are treated with some deference.  Yet at the same time my mind was clear: if John answered my questions reasonably, or gave reasons why he could not answer them, I would continue to go on PZI retreats; if he reacted unreasonably, I could be sure that I didn't want to associate with him further.

Besides the occasional one-day event, I only ever see John at retreats in Santa Rosa, and I felt asking him about the issues I had on my mind during dokusan - a kind of one-on-one interview with a teacher somewhat reminiscent of confession - would be the natural thing.  I felt nervous going into the interview room, but reassured myself by reflecting that John had extensive experience both as a meditator and a teacher; I also knew that other, older students had aired similar issues with him before.  When I went in, he asked me how things had been going, in his usual, friendly enough manner.  I told him there was something I wanted to talk to him about, and that I felt very much at home at WiG, had learned a lot from his talks, and had enjoyed my previous retreats.

I then tried to put what I was about to ask in context, by saying that when I'd decided to take refuge I'd felt the need to better inform myself about American Zen, and had found out about the serious abuses committed by teachers such as Richard Baker and Dennis Merzel.  On reflection, this may have been a mistake - whereas I'd meant to make my questions look understandable by putting them in the context of my learning about misdemeanours by other teachers, I think John took me to be accusing him flat out of having been up to the same kind of thing.  Although, come to that, John's first response to what I'd been saying was to say that Dick and Genpo were friends of his, and that 90% of the things people had said about them online weren't true.  I found this surprising, since it was my understanding that Baker and Merzel had both admitted that they had been involved in adulterous affairs.

I also told him that I'd been writing a blog in which I'd raised some of these issues, which seemed to make him angry.  He said that people criticizing each other on the internet was just like two 12-year-olds playing first person shooter games, or like a food-fight in a meal hall, and added that he didn't see a point in responding to it.  This appears to have been his position all along - not to respond to criticisms at all, and to retain a dignified silence.  And if you spend any amount of time looking at the unseemly controversy surrounding Merzel, for example, you can see where he's coming from.  At the same time, I think it's also important to see that many of the people criticizing teachers and passing on information about them are acting with some sort of integrity: they're trying to encourage transparency, or accountability, or hold true to the precept against lying.  But when I put this to John, he again reacted angrily, saying that all critics were motivated by spite or envy. 

This began a new phase of our interview, in which he questioned why I'd decided to take the precepts in the first place.  This seemed to me to be a strange thing for a Buddhist teacher to be doing, on the face of it, although I can understand that someone might be taking the precepts for the wrong reasons.  He asked me whether I even knew why I was taking them.  When I responded, 'I think so', he immediately contradicted me, saying 'No, you don't'.  Now, I can accept that embracing 'not knowing' (as the koan puts it), and not being sure about our own mental stories can sometimes be a healthy thing, allowing us to release our hold on certain obsessions and delusions.  But it did strike me as odd that while I didn't seem to have permission to make even tentative statements about my own mental states, John allowed himself to make very confident pronouncements on my mental states.  It seemed like an element of Zen psychology was being used as a way of shutting me up.

His main gripe about the way I seemed to be approaching the precepts was that I was doing so in a moralizing way.  When I asked him if he thought the precepts weren't about morality, he said that they were to some extent, but that he didn't want to be in a community where people were policing each other.  And I can certainly see the dangers of becoming a religious prig.  At the same time, is there anything wrong with members of a community supporting themselves in sticking to the key elements of a practice they've all freely committed to?  I suppose I do take the precepts to be concerned above all with morality, which isn't to say that you have to be perfect to take them, just that you should make an honest effort to abide by them.  But maybe there is room for reasonable agreement on that point.

By the last ten minutes or so of the interview he had calmed down considerably.  He asked me why I'd begun practising in the first place, and I told him that it was because of chronic pain and anxiety.  (Earlier, he'd said, 'Look at you, you're anxious', as a way of backing up his claim that all my concerns were reducible to paranoia; I'd replied, 'I know - that's partly why I'm here'.)  After this, he became more sympathetic, and we settled back into what I take to be the usual pattern of his interviews with students, where he dispenses advice to the troubled.  At one point he even said that I could ask about whatever I wanted and criticize whatever I wanted, though since he'd spent the first two thirds of the interview trying to convince me my concerns were entirely a result of paranoia and priggishness, I found it hard to take this as sincere.

At the end of the interview I repeated what I'd said at the beginning, just to make sure he heard it - that I thought PZI was wonderful in lots of ways, and that I was grateful for his teaching.  I shook his hand, as warmly as I could (admittedly not Zen practice, but a sincere effort on my part), and he banged his drum, signalling the next person should come in (which seemed brusque, but is the standard way of ending dokusan).  I went back to the meditation hall and sat for one period or two - I'm not sure - with thoughts racing around in my mind.  I realized that I wasn't going to get much meditating done in my emotional state, so I asked an older member of WiG to come take a stroll with me outside.  When I told him I'd approached John and that he'd reacted angrily, his reaction was, 'Shit!  Shit!  Fuck!  Christ!' and that John's reaction was a matter of personal disappointment to him.

He also defended John, saying that it was sesshin, which involved putting fifty people together and limiting the amount of time they slept (to seven hours a night or less).  (I've heard this excuse before for blow-ups on retreat, but if the traditional way of doing things does encourage mindfulness and compassion, why the occasional explosions?  And if it doesn't, why not change it?)  He reminded me that John spent hours at a time working with people in physical pain or psychological anguish, paid only by donation, and suggested that for all his failings, John had probably done more good than harm.  And I agreed with this - but failed to see why we shouldn't encourage him to reduce the harm.  I was also told that someone had once characterized John's leadership style as recalling a maxim of British diplomacy in the imperial period - 'never explain, never apologize'.

My older friend urged me to try to talk to David again before I left.  I was snuck into David's interview room just as the bell went for dinner.  David suggested that John hadn't heard all the positive things I had to say about PZI, but I insisted that I'd made the point doubly clear.  He also said that the issue I'd raised was a sore spot for John, since he'd been criticized for it so much in the past.  And I definitely understood that, while failing to see how accusing me of being delusional constituted a mature way of reacting to my concerns, whatever the soreness.  David said he'd talk to John about our interview, and that he'd look forward to see how things unravelled.  I told him I hadn't wanted the interview to go badly.  He said, 'I know that, but John may not, because he doesn't know you, and so he also doesn't understand how what you did was courageous.'  I left that night, my mind as clear as day.  

Half lotus land

There's a story about an old monk with a withered leg who couldn't sit in what's traditionally seen as the ideal position for meditation, with legs crossed and both feet on the top of the opposite thigh (a posture called 'full lotus').  On his one hundredth birthday he came into the meditation hall, sat down on his cushion, looked at his leg and declared, 'All my life I have been at your service.  Now, for once, you will be at mine!'  With that, with a quick and determined heave, he pulled his crippled limb up, breaking it off, reaching enlightenment, and dying all at the same time.  Robert Aitken has a characteristically laconic comment on this, advising the newcomer to Zen not to attempt such an energetic practice, at least not until they are ready to die.

A lot of books on Zen still state that full lotus is the ideal position for meditation, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who could demonstrate it for you.  I saw one of my friends at school doing it once outside of the hall we were about to go in to do some important exams (and afterwards he went to Cambridge to study medicine, so it must have done the trick).  I saw somebody do it next to me at San Francisco Zen Center the other week.  And that's about all the people I've ever seen actually sit full lotus in any of the half-dozen or so meditation groups I've been a part of over the years.  There was one other guy doing it in the group I sat with in Oxford, and the teacher looked at him and said, 'Wow, I've only ever seen one other person who could sit full lotus before'.

But there are many people who say that you can get to full lotus eventually with a little application; okay, a lot of application.  The Dutchman Janwillem van de Wetering, who lived at a Zen monastery in Japan for a year in the early 1970s, tells of being forced to sit in full lotus for as many as fifteen hours a day.  They say that after a few months of that kind of practice, anyone can sit in full lotus pretty comfortably.  There are people who even see the excruciating pain caused by sitting - or trying to sit - in full lotus as a key part of the Zen practice of achieving detachment from your mental states and observing them with something approaching objectivity.  I've seen quotations from medical scientists appealing to the 'training' the posture offers to explain the success experienced meditators have in controlling pain or their reactions to it.

If you come to meditation as a Westerner, especially if you start out practising in either the secular or vipassana styles, it's likely your teacher will encourage you above all to be comfortable, giving you the choice of sitting on a cushion, on a chair, or even lying down.  This is actually in line with Buddhist tradition, in which there are four classical poses for meditation - sitting, standing, lying, and walking.  (I've tried all of these except for standing, though it sounds like a good approach.)  If you don't believe me, just consider any of the millions of depictions of Siddartha Gautama meditating lying on his side, for example the colossal statue at the Wat Pho temple in Bangkok.  All the Zen places I've been to, and the Tibetan temple in London I once frequented, alternate longer periods of sitting with shorter bouts of walking, usually in a line, slowly (though the Rinzai sect people like to race around).

One of the things I like most about my main Wind in Grass group is that we're always told, and always tell newcomers, to meditate in whatever position makes us feel most comfortable.  Most people seem to go for seiza, kneeling, either with their bum on a cushion and their legs to each side of it, or with their calves on the floor and their bum on a small bench.  This freedom is also extended on Pacific Zen Institute retreats, where you do see a lot of people sitting in half lotus (an easier version of full lotus, where only one of your feet is up on the opposite leg), but where an equal number of people sit on chairs.  One of them is the teacher David Weinstein, whom I've never seen meditating in any other position than seated on a chair.  Once when I was complaining of back pain David sympathetically told me about another student he'd had who had such serious spinal trouble that he used to meditate stretched out flat on his back or on his stomach.

But though the trend seems to be towards a more generous conception of how your limbs might be arranged when you meditate, there are signs of a holdout in some quarters, or maybe even a backlash.  Brad Warner, the onetime punk rocker who is now a Zen priest, is hardly the type of guy who stands on formalities.  And yet he's repeatedly insisted that 'sitting in chairs is not zazen' (that is, Zen meditation).  His reasoning is that zazen is at least partly a physical practice, like a yoga posture; doing zazen in a chair is like trying to do downward-facing dog standing up.  People who really need to sit in chairs because of spinal issues should be allowed to do so, but most of us don't really need to sit in chairs for that kind of reason.  We should keep pushing ourselves just a little bit, because getting used to discomfort is one of the main things we are doing when we engage in Zen training.

I don't want to add to the comments below Brad's post by people who've been encouraged to sit zazen and who've hurt themselves as a result.  But I do wonder whether physical posture defines zazen in the same way as it defines downward-facing dog; after all the yoga asanas are called postures, while zazen is a word for meditation.  Siddartha Gautama and hundreds of other masters after him seem to have done just fine meditating without their crossed legs reminding them of the first noble truth.  If pain and suffering are a part of life, it seems rather obnoxious to seek them out ourselves, as if we didn't have what's in our heads to keep pushing us towards endurance every second.  And what happens when we greet moments of awakening in everyday life?  Do we have to take up half-lotus in the restaurant?

I myself can't meditate in a chair for more than five minutes without falling asleep, even if there are people stomping about offering to whack me with sticks.  For some reason I can't even discipline myself not to let my back touch the back-rest, which is when the slumber comes.  I like half lotus, and find it most comfortable when my foot isn't all the way at the top of the opposite thigh, but just resting over the opposite foot.  But for some reason I do try to sit full half lotus, and have a vague ambition to one day sit full full lotus.  I could fuck up my back, like my friend Dan, who now sits in a chair with straps to help him stay upright.  I do have pain in my lower right back and near the right groin, but that may have as much to do with working on an archaeological site this summer than with Zen Buddhism.  But I go on sitting that way, and also practising meditation in the running, working, eating, meditating, playing squash, and watching a play positions.  I heartily recommend them all.

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. 

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.

Sesshin obsession

Why do I even bother?  If Zen is traditionally so hierarchical, and its teachers wield peculiarly unconfinable types of authority, why am I still getting deeper into PZI and preparing to become a card-carrying Buddhist (without a card)?  Part of the answer is that I think that convert Buddhism in the West is a religious tradition at a revolutionary moment; less dramatically, it's a practice whose forms are undergoing an unusual amount of scrutiny as newcomers imbued with Western scientific and political convictions look for something to put their minds at rest.  I want to be a fully committed part of the Western Zen community - which involves, in my view, exposing it to honest criticism when it looks like there's a need for it - partly because it presents me with an exciting and worthwhile project to be part of. 

But of course, there'd be no point in taking the time to commit to or constructively criticize a project if you didn't see any value in it, and that brings us back once more to the question of why I think a spiritual community is such a valuable thing.  And that brings me back once again to the experience of PZI retreats, and to my third ever sesshin, the autumn session of last year, when I stayed for six days and five nights.  (Meditating all day can be a shock to the system, so I'd decided to work my way up to a full week-long practice session.)  I thought I'd arranged a lift up to Santa Rosa with my friend Sara, but she'd gotten a different impression, and anyway had just come down with the flu.  So I phoned an immaculately composed Zen student from Santa Cruz and asked her at about an hour's notice to come through San Francisco and pick me up.  It was once again a quiet drive up, either because my friend was already in her Zen Zone, or because I'd just made her drive through a city full of traffic (or both).

As it turned out, this time the retreat wasn't in either of the buildings just outside of Santa Rosa that I'd been to before, but at a more remote location somewhere around Occidental, an giant's step or two closer to the Pacific.  As we got closer to our destination, the roads got narrower and windier, and the trees grew taller and started huddling around the car like pedestrians in some crowded metropolis.  The place itself was another Christian retreat-centre, but this time it felt less like a convent or a hostel and more like the base for a Scout-camp or a souped-up tree-house.  Parts of the dorms upstairs had no windows, only screens that let the air breathe in an out of the room, one to ten to one again.  When you looked out the windows of the dining-hall downstairs there were trees so close you could touch them, and hundreds of others farther away that made you remember how depth is a startling thing.

By this time, most of the faces around me were familiar rather than startling.  I worked in the kitchen with Socrates, who turned out to be called William and to be a master soup-chef as well as a peerless trumpet-tooter.  I worked away at my dissertation-reading during break-periods beside the professorial room-mate at my first retreat, who was engaged in seemingly inexhaustible paperwork for his academic department.  I recognized the jolly French professor with clever socks, the serious silver-haired woman who oversees my perennial requests for financial aid, the Santa Rosa Unitarian minister with the square glasses.  I still embraced my WiG friends when I saw them like a castaway clinging to the fragment of a mast.  Ashley was there, a reassuring presence; Sara beat the flu eventually and got there; Michael chatted to everyone with unrestraned loud friendliness as his daughter crawled around the Zendo making the serious faces crease.

I also renewed my affairs with two people I'd fallen in love with on my first retreat, one man, one woman.  At some point when I was making tea I turned and looked down to see the diminutive Chinese artist Alok looking up at me like I was a redwood reminding him how height is a startling thing.  He said, 'Hey, Short Stuff.'  He looked eighty at least, and had apparently brought his new girlfriend with him; since she complained at one point of having done 'one too many prostrations' in Tibet I assumed it was a good match.  One day David Weinstein the teacher told us we didn't have to say grace, apparently just to confuse us, but Alok and his partner went up to the altar with offerings and performed their own little rite, just the two of them, grateful for the food or for eating it together, or just hedging their bets.

The periods of discussion are one of the things I like most about PZI, partly because my resistance to top-down teaching gets to steal a nap (though our head teacher John Tarrant's replies can sometimes, in the Japanese tradition, verge on put-downs), but mainly because you get to meet and learn from all the people who've been silently meditating next to you all day.  At one point in a discussion about refuge vows Alok started talking about how he'd made a vow to his partner; when John asked if that was necessary he said 'Yes and no', and then, 'It wasn't as if the ladies were queuing up', which made me chortle.  (John said, 'Well, I don't know.')  He said that after he stopped being a Christian minister, he'd switched from prayer to meditation, and hadn't prayed in years; but when he met his girlfriend,  'I got down on my knees and prayed to God that if I were meant to be with this woman, he would let that happen; and if we weren't meant to be together, he would let that happen too'.  Logically, it struck me as the most pointless prayer ever; but it was about putting your heart in the right place.  It all is.

He also talked about how he'd originally been reluctant to become part of a religious community, especially a Buddhist one, since 'Why be a Buddhist when you can be a Buddha?'  But he said he'd more recently decided he wanted to become a full member of PZI, but hadn't been able to find a job in Santa Rosa.  I found it quite touching the way he yearned to be closer to the group and its regular meetings.  (Once or twice unconditional statements of dedication to the community of this nature got me thinking frightenedly about whether I was being drawn into a cult, but only once or twice.)  As for the second person I'd fallen in love with, the beautiful old lady, she told us that after many years of practising with others she'd reached a place in which she felt only a great tenderness towards others, and towards herself.  John said that comment would be the right note to end on; I agree.

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.

Sesshin accession

Before I write more about the peculiar dangers of spiritual authority, how not to join a cult, and ways to test the purity of your Kool-Aid, I wanted to give you a sense of what a wonderful thing a spiritual community can be; since without some sense of the immense value groups of this sort can offer, and given the pitfalls and dangers that are associated with becoming a part of one, it might seem perverse that I am persevering on the particular path I've found myself following.  I also wanted to continue the story of my growing identification as a Zen student and of my increasing involvement with PZI in particular.  And there seemed to be no better of way of doing both these things than by continuing my narrative of my experiences at PZI retreats in Santa Rosa.

The first time I'd been there for the weekend, only two days, though it felt like far longer.  The second time - Spring sesshin - I decided to increase my stay by one day, making it a slightly longer weekend.  I got a lift up with my friend Sara, and when we arrived at the site of my first PZI retreat, just outside Santa Rosa, I realized that we would be staying in a different building on the same site, this one also apparently designed with Christian retreats in mind (the room where I met David was actually a chapel).  The meditation hall was much smaller this time, with only around thirty people in it; there were the familiar alien artworks hung on the walls and the same old twisty well-armed deities chilling on the white altar, the incense curling around them like cigarette-smoke at some Parisian cafe.

This time round we each had our own rooms, so that I felt less guilty about going back to it when I was tired of meditating.  I even did a bit of work on my laptop, reading an extraordinarily helpful and boring article on the finance behind the construction of the Parthenon in fifth-century Athens; I may regret this.  I skyped with my then-girlfriend at night, which was sweet then depressing, as all her anxieties poured into the room, overwhelming my most earnest efforts at Zen mopping.  Naughtier still, I slept well beyond the jangling bells at four thirty in the morning.  Instead, I set my alarm for shortly before seven, and then skulked around in the corridors waiting for the good meditators to emerge before joining them in the queue for breakfast, with sleep gumming up the corners of my eyes and my face leaden with weariness and shame.

On the first day I ate breakfast, cheerfully acknowledging the hungry ghosts; I meditated through the morning, guiltily reverting to my visualizations; and I went out for a walk to the lake, which hadn't moved.  In the afternoon session somebody suddenly announced 'Prepare the hall for sutra service'.  Everyone swung their mats round so they were facing the corner of the room, or dragged them closer.  In the corner of the room was one of the stern-looking men I'd seen talking about Christianity, now with a tambourine; Socrates, pressing a rather unexpected trumpet to his lips; a young man I'd felt a pang of sympathy for when I'd first seen him, bent double with back trouble; and an extraordinarily beautiful woman, eighty years old at the youngest. 

They were providing cheerful - if occasionally somewhat disjointed - accompaniment to the liturgy we were chanting or singing from the floor of the room.  This, apparently, was a Sutra Service, and I hadn't encountered it on my first retreat only because the Winter sesshin is a pared-down version that focuses on almost entirely on meditation.  We recited Hakuin's praise song of meditation just like we sometimes did at WiG - you see, meditation can't be praised enough - as well as a series of other pieces in any number of unidentifiable Asian languages.  The old lady led the chants as the Cantor, but her voice was frail, and broke down completely at the point where 'Guanyin finds us on the dark and br--o--ken roads'.  She was the worst cantor of all time, and also incomparably the sweetest.

I've since been told that this is one of the most mould-breaking and experimental aspects of PZI, that there's a makeshift jazz band (with occasional forays from a didgeridoo) leading the chants, which are often set to rather catchy tunes.  (One returning member was so shocked by the change she even began reciting the diamond sutra on her own - so I have heard.)  If experiment it is, I have to say that I like it.  Much of the sentimental attachment I have to Anglicanism is mediated through hymns that I had to sing week in, week out, in the school chapel, and which are now an inextricable part of my spiritual and emotional fabric.  And I'm beginning to feel a similar tenderness towards the lilting melody that carries the three refuge vows, the way we do them: 'Buddham saranam gachami/ Dhammam saranam gachami;/ Sagham saranam gachami:/ Buddham, dhammam, sangham.'

John encouraged us all through the retreat to imagine (that is, realize) that every event that occurred and every thought that arose was for us, for our benefit, and only for us (though that last formulation seemed to me to go a bit too far).  The koan featured two friends washing bowls when they saw a crow tearing apart a frog.  'Why does it always have to be this way?' one said to the other; and he responded, 'It is for your benefit, Master.'  It was not quite like the dream in The Magic Mountain, where there's a city whose members treat each other with respect precisely because they know that in the temple, old hags are tearing apart an infant.  It is more like sitting there realizing that my life has been blessed not in spite of headaches, but because of them: perception, like community, is a coin with two sides.

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.

Night community

I used to prefer cats to people, but recently I've been coming round to the human race.  When I first starting meditating, I saw no reason to do it with anyone else; actually, since it seemed like kind of a weird thing to be doing, I prefered nobody else to be around when I was doing it.  I remember reading a passage in one of Christmas Humphreys' books where he says that Buddhists don't really do community; they just read books and meditate at home on their own.  I found that reasuring, since I never really liked having to talk to people after church.  Once when I went to a Quaker meeting with a friend he said, 'We like to think of coffee after Meeting as an integral part of Meeting, but I'm not very good at that'.  So we left without talking to the welcoming older people, and I was glad: they looked boring.

At some point I realized that I was so busy with working, playing, and drinking that I wasn't anywhere near meditating every day.  I thought that joining a group would provide me with some extra motivation or will-power, and I was right.  Even though I didn't take to the group in Oxford in a big way, I met some apparently normal British students who were into meditation and weren't shooting for a certificate in yogic flying.  I talked every now and then to the teacher about meditation, and that made me want to try out the advice he'd given me, if only as a matter of personal courtesy.  And when we sat, I couldn't get up and absent-mindedly start perusing books as I sometimes found myself doing at home.  I had to meditate, and that reminded me that I liked meditating, actually rather a lot.

When I moved to Battersea I found that there was a very good chess club down the road and a very ornate Buddhist temple.  There was an altar or three at the end of the meditation hall, any number of snarling deities or half-deities wielding all manner of blades, candles and flowers and mandalas and gilt-framed photographs of reincarnated Rinpoches.  There was a complex series of bells, deep bells and tinny bells and jangling bells, to tell you to start meditating or stop, to start walking or stop, to make tea or drink it or listen to the dharma talk or do one yourself.  The people were the kind of Western Buddhists who started sentences with phrases like, 'When I first started down The Path...'  A man from Toronto gave me some useful hints about meditation, but it wasn't enough to keep me going back more than once or twice a month.  The chess club was great though: I went every week.

At Stanford the chess clubs was rubbish: everyone was analyzing and talking about math.  It was only in my second year that I started turning up to the meditation sessions advertised online in the Old Union.  There was guided meditation offered by a young man that looked to me like your typical Stanford grad student - clean-cut, Asian, serious and pragmatic - except that he had a certain calmness about him.  After a few sessions stubbornly doing my own practice, I decided to give his visualizations a try, if only as a matter of personal courtesy.  I ended up coming every week, even during breaks when I'd be disappointed to find no-one there.  Sometimes it was just the two of us; usually two or three others came.  There was a medical student, an tiny Indian girl, a middle-aged woman in philosophy.  We talked a little bit after the meditation about how we'd felt, and all the things we'd thought.

The year after Sith graduated I found what I'd thought was my ideal group.  There was no hierarchy, though there was a Religious Studies student who'd been a novice monk and answered my questions about monasteries in South-East Asia.  We'd meet, sit in our own ways for half an hour, and then disperse without saying much more than hello, goodbye, and thank you.  The following year afternoon sessions were led by a happiness researcher who drew something of a larger crowd.  There was a young techie who told us how meditation sometimes made him burst into laughter for no reason, a chilled-out Brazilian with an afro who just couldn't stop smiling, an anxious undergraduate who said looking at the contents of her own mind terrified her.  And all these groups were my sanghas; this year I've started staying for dharma circle in the same space.  Another year, another community.

If I'd been given the power to create my own ideal meditation group, it wouldn't have looked like Wind in Grass.  There wouldn't have been any koans, for a start, since I've always been a small-vehicle guy when it comes to meditation.  There wouldn't have been discussions or Zen games or dharma talks.  There certainly wouldn't have been statues of the Buddha, candles, or incense, not to mention disembodied heads, energy eggs, or Zen crickets.  But part of joining any community is being with people who have different preferences than you do, and different ideas.  If they didn't, it wouldn't be a very interesting group to be in, since you'd never learn anything.  Sometimes when I'm sitting in Wind in Grass I come across a rich tenderness in myself towards our altar, a drawer with a table cloth over it loaded with paraphernalia.  I didn't realize I would like it; thank goodness someone else did.

Once when I was on retreat one of the more severe looking students told me I should bow when approaching the teacher's room, bow after I'd gone through it, and then bow to the teacher before sitting down.  The next time I went into the room I did just that, and David looked at me and said, 'Dan probably told you to bow - which is sweet, since he's trying to make younger students feel at home.  But you should know that I couldn't care less.'  Since then, I don't bow to David (I shake his hand).  But for the rest of the retreat I still bowed to Dan.  You bow to Dan by bowing before entering the room to speak with the teacher.  I know Michael likes bowing too, so sometimes I bow to Michael.  You bow to Michael by bowing before sitting down, before serving tea, before lighting more incense.  And it seems fair enough, after all the bowing he's done for us by organizing Wind in Grass.

Once a month we have Community Night, when our practice is even less formal than usual (which you'd think would be difficult, but somehow we manage it).  There's a beautiful baby girl stumbling headlong around the zendo, gooing and gaing and aiding our meditation - she's a year old, the same age as my niece in distant England.  Our artist friend Mick, who left for Mexico last year, is here in the form of a wax energy sculpture on the altar - he is disguised as an enormous translucent egg.  My friend Ashley is sitting across from me cycling through memories of sticking needles into people therapeutically, which is her day job.  Marika is here with her boyfriend, Michael is here in his business suit, Raffy is looking clean-cut.  We are huddled in our wooden hide-out like revolutionaries or terrorists dedicated to doing nothing.  This is my secret society of friends, my sworn conspiracy of meditators, my night community.