Foreign Invasion

Greetings, honoured sangha. This week I offer Japanese for Zenners, with this basal concept:

マインドフルネス 。

Can't read it? Let me help:

Ma-i-n-do-fu-ru-ne-su.

I think what threw you is that it's written in kana, unlike other elemental Zen concepts, which are usually expressed in kanji.

"But," you say, "that's not hiragana!"

Ah, but I didn't say hiragana, did I?

In a fascinating Tricycle magazine article, writer Karen Jensen reports that Japanese Zen teachers are pinning their hopes on a patently unAsian remedy to their religion's problems.

You see, in contemporary Japan, Zen – like most religions there – has devolved into something more akin to a fraternal lodge than a spiritual practice. Today it's more associated in the public mind with the national obsession with rites of passage, than anything higher. And this shallow, agnostic role naturally obscures the Path in Japan.

Faced with this challenge, some Japanese teachers are resorting to desperate measures. To wit: for the first time since Dogen, they are injecting foreign practice into their teachings.

That's why maindofurunesu (say it aloud with me; feelin' it?) is written in katakana, the syllabary of foreign words.

Because it is a foreign word. For a foreign concept.

To be brutally precise: a Western one.

At this point, some Zenners are probably rushing into the street, looking for a statue of me to push over.

But the joke's on them. Hermits are pre-cancelled.

That's why we're hermits.

Anyway, yeah. "Mindfulness" is not a Zen thing. It's a purely Western one, albeit one that's been kneaded into non-Asian Buddhist practice over the last 50 years.

Which means, among other things, that when you advocate it, you're being Eurocentric.

And thank God for that, because mindfulness is darn good practice.

Not that it's exactly absent from historic Asian models, mind you. At the root of Japanese Zen, for example, is the notion of nen, which refers to spontaneous thought, and by extension, delusion, and by further extension, awareness of same and the necessity of waiting for that second thought, which entire process leads to "clear-seeing". That insight, and its implications, are fundamental to enlightenment practice; some seekers call it the entire path.

But as Brad Warner has pointed out in his excellent essay on the distinction, "mindfulness" is not nen. It's a little less hard-core (no pun intended), a little less "religious", and a lot more accessible. Which, as he says, makes it packageable, and therefore marketable.

Which is why he avoids it.

I'm hip. I too am deeply suspicious of bourgeois Buddhism, with its feel-good bandwagon hustle. But I'm not ready to toss out mindfulness on that basis alone. After all, the local nursery sells concrete garden Buddhas to a decidedly non-monastic clientele, but I still have a Gautama statue on my altar.

But I do insist that mindfulness practice imposes recognition of the fact that Asian Zen is not all Zen. Let's have done with beating others about the head over bowing and chanting, or Dharma transmission, or ascetic practice, or submission to human beings, or other non-Buddhic calculus that accreted over the two millennia we were a uniquely Asian religion.

Because if it's true that Buddhism can't be "just anything" (and it is; this is a defined path, with fundamental teachings), it's also true that the response to those teachings is as varied, and as valid, as anything else in this universe.

And that's a blessing.

(Fortunately. Because ain't crap you can do about it.)


(Photo of a sign on the grounds of the Mid-America Buddhist Association courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)