In his most famous apothegm, Christian apologist GK Chesterton wrote:
“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.)
I’ve found it's important to call yourself something.
In the first years of my Zen practice I was still a Christian, simultaneously integrated into a Christian and a Zen Buddhist community. Both were visibly annoyed at my insistence that I was both. (There’s no reason you can’t be, and I’m far from the first person to do it; prominent founders of Western Zen were Christian clerics.)
I should add that it wasn’t just immediately-interested parties (i.e., Christians and Buddhists) who took exception to my labels, or lack thereof. Pretty much everyone did. You’d be surprised how fundamentalist the non-religious are about the religions of others.
So at length I chose a side to identify with. It’s interesting to note that in so-doing, I did in fact largely drop the other side. I still get tremendous value from my 40 years of Christian training — I never repudiated anything but the magic stuff, which I’d already deleted from my Christian practice long before — but I now walk a squarely Zen Buddhist path. So that’s a comment on the power of labels.
It’s also noteworthy that as a hermit monk, I still catch the same sort of blowback, but about my practice model this time. Some don’t like it; if you’re a monk, you better have a monastery address and a dictator bossing you around.
So if I’ve learned anything, it’s the importance of inviting others to mind their own karma.
This week I happened on Andrew Springer's Why I Hate Paul (And The Religion He Made Up), an essay on the vital question of what the hell St. Paul is doing in the Bible. This has bothered me since childhood: the promotion of a random convert, not even a disciple, to Christ's equal. Christ's superior, really, given that the Church typically defaults to Paul over Jesus.
I heartily recommend Springer's article to anyone who has been or is now a Christian; it's lively and well-argued, and no doubt good companionship for Christians who find themselves blessed with a surabundance of hell-raisin', God praisin' fellows, but little in the way of actual fellowship. (Ah, memories…)
As for me, I'm grateful for my deep and broad Christian journey, which taught me a great deal about spiritual discipline and ethics, and comes in handy every day of my Buddhist life.
It also taught me to appreciate the paucity of Bible-babble in Zen. In my 24 years on the path, I don't think I've once seen a Zenner smack another about the head with a sutra, trying to win a point of practice. In this we beat the Christians cold, but all coins have two sides; our lack of scriptural literacy leaves the door wide open to innovation, with the usual questionable results. I grazed this issue some years ago in Are Teachers Necessary?, wherein I explored an abuse of the Buddha's teaching that's entirely as egregious as the cult of St. Paul.
What really brought this to mind for me in the Springer piece was his citing of a contention, roundly accepted by competent Bible scholars, that six of the 13 documents attributed to St. Paul in the Christian Bible aren't even his. In other words, almost half of St. Paul's contribution to Christian teaching is in fact fraudulent.
And guess which of those two lists is most problematic, from a Christic perspective?
Because where Paul appears to contradict himself, rescinding acceptance he'd extended before, the reversal occurs most often in the apocryphal material.
Hence the training I received on my Christian path: that written wisdom is frequently wangled to please worldly authorities. And that since we're called by and to the Holy Spirit, we must be careful not to replace it in our religious practice with idols of paper and ink.
So when pursuing the Zen matter in my own piece, I was neither surprised, nor particularly dismayed, to find that one of the most poignant moments in Buddhist scripture has been trafficked to political ends. Specifically, that whereas the Buddha preached and demonstrated throughout his life that no human outranks another, the cited sutra makes him "repent" of this on his deathbed, commanding Buddhist monks to accept social hierarchies.
Yeah, that's not blasphemous or anything.
As a Christian, I learned that angels neither wrote nor protect the Bible, so we must study our scripture minutely, always aware of where it comes from, where it's been, and who would stand to lose under its authentic counsel. Where that counsel appears to waver, you seek a higher power.
My comments on that bit of sutric softness met with some scorn at the time. I think I've quoted my favourite example before: "Sounds like Mara." (In case anyone thought devil-baiting wasn't a Buddhist thing.) Which is ironic for a religion – and here I refer specifically to Western Buddhism – chiefly founded by more or less indignant refugees from the Church.
So let the record show that the courage to exercise clear-seeing in scriptural study, and to signal potential tampering when suspected, came straight out of my Christian schooling, and I recommend it to anyone who's determined to get off this merry-go-round.
Because the counterfeit passages are fully as valuable as the authentic ones.
(Photo of the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra courtesy of The Metropolitan Museam of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)
I first encountered the oft-cited invocation below in a newspaper column by United Congregational minister Dale Turner. At the time I assumed he was the author, but when the Internet happened years later, I found that its provenance is indeterminate. (No shade on the Rev. Turner, who frequently shared gems from his own tireless study, and undoubtedly flagged this as another in the column I read.)
In fact, no-one seems to know where these memorable lines come from. One source claims it's a traditional Kenyan prayer, but I was unable to verify that, either.
As for me, its very anonymity is value-added. Those many pithy, compelling observations that knock around the world, repeated for generations, unattributed or misattributed, are often the most profound; the mere fact they've travelled so far demonstrates how powerful they are.
Any road, this one became a form in my Christian practice. Now twenty years further, having taken the Zen path, I see no reason to change that.
So may this teaching from the great Zen master Anon be a guide and a buttress to fellow seekers in the coming year.
The Truth Testimony
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth
From the laziness that is content with half truths
O God of Truth
Deliver us.
Some months ago I had a refreshing conversation on Zen ethics with a fellow hermit on Mastodon. We're equally sceptical of quietism – the religious posture by which forms are judged sufficient to practice, and action anathema – and our discussion helped me clarify some of my own thoughts on a critically pressing matter.
The quietist temptation pervades contemplative religions: this notion that real Zenners sit serenely with a satisfied smirk on their faces while injustice gallops unchallenged and others suffer.
It's easy to mistake that for dharma.
Quietism is the opposite of theological activism: the idea that true practice means doing good outside in the Red Dust World. Western Zenners most commonly encounter its ad absurdum form in those Christians who are called to sing, exhort, and engage in public "praise" (an archaic word for advertising) by way of filibustering hesitant believers and driving converts to the fold, where they too will presumably join in such questionable practice.
We non-Christians and former Christians tend to lean hard on this demographic when the topic of activism comes up, since this sort of exercise is easily criticised. But let us note also the Christians who care for the poor and imprisoned; assist the stranger and the foreigner; educate the illiterate; raise the downtrodden; and actively boost the levels of hope and opportunity in their community.
A rare few publicly oppose deliberate evil, often at significant personal risk, while others – Quakers, for example – go so far as to confront passive evil. While a minuscule fraction of the whole, these last still trounce the percentage of Buddhists doing it.
Which brings me back to the exchange with my brother. We began on common ground, agreeing that the popular Zen position that practice excuses us from protest is erroneous. That, said I, is an illogical conclusion; ethical people act, and as I've written before, if practice doesn't result in an ethical person, there's no need of it. (I, for example, am already a fully-transmitted Self-Absorbed Jackass. No need for cushions, candles, or things that go ding to attain that.)
In the end, my brother summed up this entire meditation in words he'd come to several years ago:
"If you don't sometimes sit down and shut up, you'll never be enlightened.
"If you don't sometimes stand up and shout, there's no reason to be enlightened."
He also offered an alternative phrasing (another translation, what) that I call "the Rinzai version":
"If you never get your ass on the cushion, you can never become enlightened.
"If you never get your ass off the cushion, there is no point to becoming enlightened."
Regular readers will comprehend which of these I'm most given to.
(Photograph of police arresting a Buddhist sitting lotus during the Clayoquot Sound protests courtesy of Aldo de Moor and Wikimedia Commons.)
Enlightenment is the stated goal of Buddhism, possibly the only doctrine all denominations share, though variously defined.
As far as I know, all Zen lineages, diverse though we are, uphold the conviction that enlightenment is possible in this life; that it comes irrespective of social and material distinctions; and that meditation is the fundamental discipline of enlightenment practice.
In theory, we also hold our leaders to a "maximum illumination" standard; that is, the teacher must be the most enlightened person in the zendo. The old Chàn chronicles preserve accounts of itinerant peasants summarily unseating exalted abbots in dharma combat. And if that martial art has now mellowed to ritual sparring between genial sanghamates, in those old Chinese records it's presented as deadly earnest.
All of this goes to the strength with which the Ancestors cleaved to a central principle. To wit: if we're going to dropkick the Buddha's explicit orders for an egalitarian sangha, then the brother or sister monk we perch precariously on that perilous peak must at minimum embody awakening.
And it's at this point that we slam smack into the Christian concept of antinomianism.
For among the many commonalities our two religions share is an insistence on the possibility – nay, obligation – of attaining a superior spiritual state in this life. We call it enlightenment, they call it salvation, but though our understandings of those states differ in important ways, our certainty that they exist prompts coreligionists to announce themselves special and demand extra-scriptural privilege.
Specifically, they declare themselves leaders.
And this is where the antinomianism comes in. Because upon their ascension to secular power, two unproductive phenomena abruptly co-arise:
1. Their conduct becomes demonstrably unenlightened.
2. They insist this unenlightened conduct is in fact the height of enlightenment; it's just that the sangha are too pedestrian to grasp their higher wisdom.
And that second one is antinomianism. You see, it's really very simple: treating others like doormats is the soul of bodhisattva practice. It's just what arhats do, and if you were one, you'd get that
And there-in lies a crisis. Because it's not.
Not that defining enlightenment isn't hard. How can you tell if a person has attained a state that can't be comprehended, or even defined?
As the ancient Zen joke would have it: how do you eff the ineffable?
I've thought about this a lot. I've scrutinised my own experience; what's happened on the cushion, where my heart moves during and after kensho, what's changed in my personality in two decades of mindful practice.
I haven't become enlightened, but I've grown measurably, and the Buddha said that's evidence of nascent awakening.
So becoming a better person than you were pre-zazen is the test. Are you less judgemental now, more empathetic? Less uptight, more patient? Calmer? More loving, less ambitious?
Has your ego diminished, or inflated? Are you supple or brittle? Do you fret more in social contention, or less?
How do you measure up on the 8 Worldly Dharmas Illumination Indicator?
If these lights aren’t green, why waste your life becoming an even bigger ass than you already are, by becoming the boss?
In the end, I've gained one practical insight into the quandary of human limitation:
–––> It's what you do with it.
(NB: Not a new concept on these pages, but a new application of it.)
Annoyance, impatience, disappointment, despair, frustration; what do you do when they happen?
Do you use or manipulate others? Do you make cutting remarks or determine to get even?
Do you apologise when you've behaved in an ignorant, superior, or abusive fashion?
These are universal human challenges, but a moral authority must own and publicly grapple with them. And by this standard, you can see the risk you run to your own practice when you set yourself up as a guru.
Which is why my brotherly counsel is not to.
Of one thing I'm sure: selfish, inconsiderate, preëmptory behaviour is not a sign of enlightenment. And refusing to confess, apologise, and atone afterward indicates you're not even on the road.
It's not that I don't yet know enough about enlightenment.
Though it's generally unknown to Western Buddhists, Russia is one of the formative homelands of our religion. Not only has Buddhism been practiced there for as long as many another Asian nation – for example, the Volga republic of Kalmykia is the only region of Europe to have a historical Buddhist majority – Russia also hosts today what is likely the most fervent and productive conversion movement in the Eurosphere (i.e., nations with white majorities).
I was reminded of this while, for the first time in years, rewatching the above video. I originally encountered this song via primeval Internet radio, and it first appeared on Rusty Ring away back in January 2011, at the bottom of my third-ever post. (Those earliest articles sometimes ended with a premium, called the Cereal Box Prize. When, inevitably, finding and formatting this treat began to eat appalling amounts of blogging time, I abandoned that quirk, though not without regret.)
But having listened to Не могу оторвать глаз от тебя again (and remarveled at that awesome video), I figure it's due for a 14-year bump.
Аквариум (Aquarium) are a seminal Russian pop group, with roots deep in the perilous (for rock musicians) Soviet era. Today they're one of a handful of contemporaries routinely compared to the Beatles. Although founder Boris Grebenshchikov's precise religious convictions remain elusive, he's published multiple translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts and has a long history of including consequent themes in his music.
Just what (or whom) he is singing to here is a bit enigmatic. That chanting refrain suggests your standard love poem; you know, to another human. But the moiling mysticism of those verses opposes that hypothesis.
Still, his repeated second-person appeal at least seems to rule out a Buddhist theme; the author is clearly addressing an interlocutor he can see and calls "you". Our religion generally, though not categorically, refuses to speculate on such things.
The Eastern church, meanwhile – Russia's majority faith – has spoken of and to God in tones very like these for two thousand years.
So there it is: the song is Christian.
But what about that video? Seriously, fellow Buddhists, what about that awesome video? That's not just patently Buddhist, that's outright Zen.
Bodhidharma if ever I saw him.
So maybe "you" is enlightenment. Or the Path. Or the Great Matter. Or Kanzeon. Or some other glib Buddhist euphemism for God.
I don't know.
(See what I did there?)
Anyway, it's in front of you. Watch it. Hear it. See if it doesn't key your bodhisattva nature as hard as it does mine.
The video is of slightly – if very – higher quality than the one shared all those years ago. I was unable to find better, even on our Currently Superior Internet. But no trouble; it still works.
More irksome is the lack of reliable English interpretation. I can grasp the thrust of these lyrics, but my Russian is not up to translating them, at least not accurately. But I can tell that the translation supplied here is a little better than several others I found, by a slim margin.
I'd bet all were generated by artificial ignorance. Buy human, folks.
But for the moment, it seems our only recourse is to accept the best of them, however flawed. Just bridge the gaps with your koanic intelligence.
"I have learned silence from the talkative,
toleration from the intolerant,
and kindness from the unkind;
yet, strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."
Attributed to St. Stephen, in honour of this his feast, 2024.
(Page from a mediævel manuscript on the martyrdom of St. Stephen courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Rawpixel.com.)
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 has produced neither line nor 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 ancient 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.
I never get used to the fact that there's exactly one religion on this planet. Or humanity's eternal frantic protest that there are in fact many.
Convicted Christian for the first 2/3 of my life, the hypocrisy – worse yet, the casuistry – of that sangha was deeply troubling for me from the beginning. At long length I was convinced to seek better company, for my own welfare.
I was therefore heartened when, early in my subsequent Buddhist training, I encountered Zen priest and historian Brian Daizen Victoria, whose book Zen At War documents the way Japanese Buddhists abandoned their most essential convictions during WWII to embrace the horrors of Imperial Japan – even to the point of declaring Emperor worship, and all the murder and violence his servants demanded, the highest expression of the Buddha Way.
The willingness of a Buddhist cleric and scholar to "go there", as the Americans say, reinforced my faith in my new path.
Wrote Daizen:
My reading of Buddhist political history tells me that every time Buddhist leaders have closely aligned themselves with the political ruler of their day, the Buddha Sangha has become corrupt and degenerate... The Sangha's often slavish subservience to, and actions on behalf of, their rulers have resulted, in my opinion, in its becoming the de facto pimp and prostitute of the State.
Change Buddhist terms for Christian, and you get an exact description of what's happening in Christian-majority nations today, most notably the US and Russia.
I suggest that the opportunity this offers Zenners is to let go of our reflexive tendency to assume we're different from our Christian neighbours, and instead consider how our own institutions subtly or overtly call us to analogous conduct. (Yes-butting and what-abouting Daizen, for starters.)
And how must we act, in light of this insight?
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
There’s always a very inconsiderable minority of these non-joiners. [...] But you will find that insecure societies are the most intolerant of those who are non-joiners. They are so unsure of the validity of their game rules that they say everyone must play. Now that’s a double-bind. You can’t say to a person you must play because what you’re saying is – you are required to do something which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily.
Alan Watts
Long ago I happened upon this teaching from Alan Watts – an Anglican priest, founding figure of Western Zen, and arguable Zen hermit – for whom I have attested admiration. He was specifically addressing the predicament of Buddhist hermits, but as was his habit, more basically referring to the universal status of free-range monks of all paths. Virtually all religions have them, though some meet us with greater grace than others. (I've been told that Zoroastrians, alone among major religions, have no hermits, but I might not believe it. It's possible they "have no hermits" in the same sense as Western Zen.)
Over the years I've returned to Watts' meditation on hermits and the Institution, and found it validating and insightful. Since fellow hermits and the hermit-curious rest here occasionally, I thought to spread the wealth.
Palladius said, "One day when I was suffering from boredom I went to Abba Macarius and said, 'What shall I do? My thoughts afflict me, saying, "You are not making any progress, go away from here".' He said to me, 'Tell them, "For Christ's sake, I am guarding the walls"'."
The Paradise of the Desert Fathers
(Pictured: the Bodhi Tree, the huge old bigleaf [Acer grandiflora] I guarded while sitting my 100 Days on the Mountain.)
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