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“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
Chesterton was not an outlying critic. He was in fact a prominent ecclesiastical conservative, the sort of religious influencer I grew up calling a "professional Anglican". All of which raises the impact of his observation, accepted on my watch as indisputable.
It's also true of Zen. Over the generations, we too have found every means to occult our stated programme, which is powerful and effective, but leaves little leeway for human ambition. So we've reintroduced rank to our true men of no rank, ritual and liturgy to a path our ancestors named "meditation" (the literal translation of "zen"), and absolute religious authority to a practice our founders gave one objective: to transcend separation.
This walking repudiation of Bodhidharma first takes us into the morass of peer pressure, where sitting with the cool kids (pun intended) is the first, and often only, goal of our organised sangha. Along the way we've come to teach that our koanic texts are contextual rather than literal, and that the notions and forms of practitioners in the past are inapplicable to us, in our advanced and complicated time.
To state it plainly, those outside our tribe are judged separate from, and irrelevant to, us.
We converts to Zen from Christianity have already seen this movie in Technicolor, yet we don't seem to recognise it in this theatre. (Op. sit. Shadow Gospel, c.f. parable of man living with demons @Matthew 12:43-45.)
But let's be real: there is not now, nor has there ever been, on this suffering rock, a religion that fewer than 99.999 per cent of declared adherents didn't blow off, in full and in part, while brandishing random flecks of rhetoric to justify their egotism. Zenners are not the only, nor indeed are we the worst, examples, and neither are our Christian brothers and sisters.
But I must say, though I participate fully in the ebullient apostasy, actually practicing Zen – that's Zen, as our Ancestors taught – has never failed to push me further and faster along than anything else. That's why my hermit practice has been in a constant state of Reformation since it was… well, formed. Where enlightenment practice is concerned, I'm always grilling myself about my fears, my ambitions, my motivations, and my actions.
And even when I conclude that I can't resolve those questions right now – business as usual here at Sabita Yubiwa-ji – I keep my windows open, and that fresh Vatican II breeze blowing through my hut.
Because it does get stuffy in here.
(Photo courtesy of Thomas Quine and Wikimedia Commons.)
