Long ago, in the first years of my Zen practice, I encountered a teaching that's remained in my mind through the intervening years. Unfortunately, despite my obsession for note-taking and record-keeping, an hour of combing through my files hasn't produced line or author.
So I'll have to report both from memory as best I can.
I recall that the source was a modern Chinese Chàn teacher, born in the 19th century. This makes him almost certainly Xuyun; the more since in the course of my digging I discovered in an early practice folder a text file of his teachings. Sadly, this wasn't one of them.
Whoever it was, the Chàn master in question had this to say:
"You ask why there are so many schools of Chàn. [This was possibly translated as 'Zen'.] It is because people have different natures. They require different practices. That is why there are so many schools of Chàn. It takes that many."
At the time, having just taken the Zen path following a lifetime of convicted Christianity, I was impressed by the wisdom and generosity of this pronouncement.
As my practice grew deeper and broader, I would come to see the very soul of Zen in it.
Such freedom from jealousy and turf-warring is rare; nowhere more so than in religion.
In the course of my subsequent Zen vocation, I've been a bit disappointed, if not surprised, to find that this is not in fact our party line. The truth is, though Zenners score higher on the many-paths test than Christians (low bar that they are), our reflex too is to malign teachers in other schools; even other teachers in our own.
The error in this goes beyond fundamental insecurity and egotism. At the end of the day, like all we purchase with that two-sided coin, it deprives us of wealth.
Because other schools, lineages, denominations, even faiths (that's right, I said it) encode centuries of enlightenment instruction. Buddhism isn't like other religions; our founder said enlightenment comes of action (meditation), not faith. The clear implication is that the world is full of people very unlike us who must nevertheless be enlightened.
And that means an honest seeker won't simply tolerate superficial differences in doctrine and dogma, he or she will welcome them as a blessing, delving into them to profit from the insight they embody.
In the end, I'd suggest we go Xuyun one better:
Given that our species is still stumbling around in the dark, 2500 years beyond the Buddha, screaming war and weeping bitter tears, it's obvious we don't have enough schools yet.
The sister in question is feeling the pull of her nature, though uncertain she can sustain a solitary practice, or that it will prove as fulfilling as the organised model. At the same time she feels like the institution doesn't respect her – that it views her as an isolated failure that must be repaired, or in extremis, rejected. That has led her to question her teacher's "never hermit" stance on alternatives.
As always, I didn't advocate any path to her, since I lack comprehensive knowledge of the facts and entities in play, and anyway, it ain't my karma at risk. But on this issue of only-ness, I felt compelled to give witness.
And so I wrote the following, with allowance for judicious editing:
As is frequently the case, I've been struck by the similarity of our life paths. We are, as I often say, a nation. This is very hard for the gregarious to grasp.
Although the neo-traditional Zen institution views people of our nature as unevolved or learning disabled, the fact is we are and always have been a demographic. One unserved by the innovated monastery model.
The same one that gave us the Buddha and Bodhidharma, to name just two.
And we seem to be coming out of the closet in greater numbers since the Boomers – great believers in authority, their market stance notwithstanding – began their slide into irrelevance.
Hermits don't necessarily seek isolation from others – I don't – but most of my adult life I've lived in rural areas; was raised in one, and have chosen to live in others when choice was mine.
But we live in a time when the rural areas that used to be despised by the urban and urbane have become chic, and they're clearing us rednecks away so they can take our land. It's a big topic, and for me, a painful one. Reminds me of the age of enclosure, and the segmenting of the European countryside into landed estates, which was the driving force that colonised the New World. 'Cept there's no place for us peasants to go this time.
From a practice perspective it doesn't matter much; you can be a hermit anywhere. But my preference is to be comfortably buffered from the rest of my species, and to be in daily contact with what remains. And that's harder to achieve in town.
As for your musings on Zen, I quite agree on all of them. Most of us find, when we encounter each other, that we've had similar experiences, received similar openings, and have much to offer each other in the way of teaching and support. We're the Buddha's only given monastic model, but formal Zen teachers (as well as those of other faiths) are great ones for saying that an unsupervised monk will quickly go off the rails and begin spouting bizarre, self-serving nonsense.
Which happens, of course, but not more often than it does in the Institution. And the result isn't crazier or more dangerous. From where I'm standing, it's clear that ordination is a risky state that few survive. Whereas my formal eremitical practice of assuming I understand nothing, mixed with a disciplining lack of social acceptance, has done a pretty good job of keeping me in my lane.
Anyway, when you mention Zen masters who run their monks as servants, that's my immediate thought. As a hermit, I can't imagine anybody cleaning up after me. Aside from the presumption, there's the fact that cleaning up my own messes is central to my practice; confronting chaos, accepting the necessity of soiling and breaking things, understanding how entirely I participate in universal entropy.
I suspect teachers who don't settle their own accounts have forgotten how unimpressive they are; given their working conditions, they can't help it.
As for me, "I'm nobody" has been my breathing mantra for twenty years. And I still think I'm the lead character in a movie from time to time; that tells you how much harder ordained types must have it.
Any road, society creates us, through a sort of petty terrorism, and at some point we just shrug and pull on the robe, to its great indignation. It's one reason I won't accept spiritual authority from other humans. I'm sometimes asked to address groups about Zen, and I always start by pointing out that I've never been ordained by anyone but my mother, that I have no unique understanding of anything, and that the next Zenner they meet will probably tell them I'm wrong about everything.
And I finish by telling them that anyone who says different about themselves is lying.
We hermits are a very diverse crowd – if we can be said to be a crowd – but I suspect all of us would agree with that last statement, at least.
Robin
(Photo courtesy of Matt Sclarandis and Unsplash.com.)
Case in point: I lately learned that the early Chinese chronicles sometimes affixed the label "One Vehicle School" to the amorphous movement that would eventually coalesce into Chàn. This in reference to the Buddhist concept of ekayāna, a Sanskrit term that also translates as "one path".
Seems shockingly doctrinaire for a loose affiliation of fellow-travellers, scattered throughout the then-existing Chinese Buddhist denominations, whose defining practice was to sit on their backside and cast off delusion.
Until you realise that their "One Vehicle" has rather a lot of seats.
Specifically, it has all of the seats.
For the essential tenet here springs from the Buddha's own teaching that we all eventually attain enlightenment, whether in this life or another. It therefore follows that all paths lead to the summit.
And therefore all paths are valid.
And therefore condemnation of others' practice is not.
Ekayāna doesn't get much ink in the Buddhist press these days, for reasons any incisive student of religion can grasp. As comforting as it is – we all make it through one day, regardless of the errors that occasionally set us back a thousand years – One Path is a lousy business model.
How can you profit, in gold or glory, if all you're selling is something folks can get for free somewhere else?
But this early doctrine of proto-Chàn does tend to explain all those ancient accounts of illiterate hermits coming down off the mountain and besting the local master – and also the continuing Zen strain of "you're not the boss of me" that current-day teachers' pets so haughtily deride.
As a hermit, I might be expected to cleave to the ekayāna viewpoint myself, and of course it has always been a keystone of my perception and practice, even though I only just learned the word for it. However, like all truth, it becomes false when distilled into dogma.
It isn't true that all paths are valid, even if we do ultimately survive them. You can build a cage of freedom.
But it's a cogent corrective to the invalid paths the Great Sangha, chasing worldly objectives that have little to do with saving all sentient beings, collectively stumble down.
May we each strive to practice more and preach less.
(Photo of ancient sculpture of Bodhidharma – founder of Chàn – courtesy of Buddha Tooth Relic Temple [Singapore] and Wikimedia Commons.)
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