We talked recently about the "crazy wisdom" traditions in Buddhism. At Patheos, Justin Whitaker has a post touching on crazy wisdom called "Eccentric Buddhist Masters" that I want to address and compare to another post at Patheos by James Ford, "A Thought or Two on Zen Training in the West."
(Note that Whitaker is commenting on the book The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David McMahan, which I discussed in several blog posts last November; here is one. On the whole I find Whitaker's criticism puzzling; I think he's reading things into McMahan that aren't there. But for now I just want to address the issue of "eccentric masters.")
James Ford writes that in traditional Asian Zen, "the container for Zen training is very tight":
"One enters the monastery and from that moment every single aspect of one's life is controlled. And this means everything from brushing one's teeth to going to the toilet. Even your bed is not your own. The Rinzai wrinkle appears to include virtually no instruction. Soto doesn't provide much more. Rebuke becomes the major currency. ...
"...In this way one just does it. There's your pillow. Sit down. Why is not a question. How is not explored in any detail. Doing is all."
This control may not be apparent to someone visiting a Zen monastery and just watching the goings-on. But even in my experience at an American monastery, I've gotten a taste of this. When it's time to sit, you sit. When it's time to light incense you light incense, and you do it in a very specific, ritualized way. And so on. Nobody explains why; you accept it and do it.
Victor Sogen Hori writes,
"A Japanese Zen monastery, on the other hand, substantially discounts rational teaching and learning and teaches both ritual formalism and mystical insight. In fact, it teaches mystical insight by means of ritual formalism."
"Teaching mystical insight by means of ritual formalism" is a pretty good one-sentence explanation of Zen training. Taigen Dan Leighton says that Dogen saw even Zen meditation, zazen, as an "enactment ritual." My impression is that this is the generally accepted view within Soto Zen.
But to say that traditional Zen monastic training amounts to one ritual after another -- which it pretty much does -- flies in the face of popular western views of Zen. Western "pop" Zen isn't anything like religion, you know. And Zen "masters" are these cool, inscrutable guys who don't conform to social conventions.
Yes, there is a tradition of eccentric masters even in Japanese Zen, fellows who broke rules and social convention without inhibition. However, I suspect that for every "crazy cloud" Zen teacher there have been a hundred or more hard asses who would take a monk's head off (figuratively speaking) for not bowing correctly.
So where did the western popular view of Zen come from?
And the answer is that Zen was introduced to the West largely by the "beats" such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and also Alan Watts, who romanticized the "crazy wisdom" tradition of Zen because it and blew it way out of proportion.
As I wrote in the earlier post, unconventional behavior by legendary eccentric masters should be understood in the context of their times and cultures. A realized master such as Ikkyu, who was "crazy" in 15th century Japan, was perhaps a tonic to an overly rigid social order. And it's easy to see how this appealed to the beats, who were pushing back against the rigidly conformist, gray-flannel-suit 1950s.
But the crazy wisdom stuff, while present in Zen, is not necessarily representative of Zen. And to define Zen as being primarily about being freed of social convention is a bit like defining an elephant as an animal with a rope-like tail. It's not completely inaccurate, but it doesn't really tell you anything useful about elephants.Â
Unlike some other Buddhist traditions, Zen was not first established in the West in ethnic Asian communities, as Whitaker implies. The Chan/Zen tradition was not popular among the Asian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's true that a handful of Zen teachers came to America before World War II and had a small number of students. But I believe the only permanent Zen center of any sort established in the U.S. before World War II was the Buddhist Society of America (now the First Zen Institute of America), which was launched in New York City in 1930. The founder, Sokei-an, was Japanese, but the officers and members of the institute mostly were white converts.Â
After that, I do not believe any other permanent Zen centers or monasteries were established anywhere in America, including in ethnic Asian communities, until after World War II and the "beat Zen" phase. And then Zen largely was embraced by white western converts who had read Kerouac and Watts.
A small part of those early Zen enthusiasts would drop their beat Zen romanticism and go on to formal training. But the popular crazy cloud cool beat Zen romantic ideal lingers in popular imagination to this day, and it gets in the way of seeing Zen as it is. And as I remember this was McMahan's point, which Whitaker utterly misses.
I want to say some more about what James Ford wrote, but I will save it for the next post.
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