Most of the people fired up to "westernize" Buddhism (or "naturalize" it, which amounts to the same thing) argue about changing the philosophical foundations and teachings. Basically, they want to bring Buddhism into line with western cultural bias.
(My drawing abilities arrested sometime in the third grade, but if I could draw, I would draw this cartoon: Imagine a western philosopher sitting at a table. On the table is a cube labeled "western philosophy" and a ball labeled "Buddhism." The philosopher frowns at the ball, picks it up, and begins to pinch off the parts he doesn't like while re-shaping other parts. Pretty soon he's turned the ball into a cube that looks just like the other cube. And then he says, "Hey! This Buddhism thing is OK after all!")
I think the real work of "westernizing" Buddhism is more about re-shaping the container, not changing the contents.
Buddhist teachers sometimes speak of "containers" of the dharma. A dharma center is a container. Practice is a container. A lineage is a container. Buddhist institutions are containers that have served to pass the dharma along from one generation to the next.
In "A Thought or Two on Zen Training in the West," Zen teacher / Unitarian Universalist minister James Ford writes about traditional Zen monastic training as a very tight container. Sometimes it "works," and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work, people can be "twisted to the container without ever quite getting it."
Often what passes for Zen in the West has hardly any container at all, however, and the result is more Zen Lite than Zen. And a lot of the reason for that, I think, is the Zen Mystique that grew out of the "beat Zen" phase of the 1950s; I wrote about this in the last post.
The Rev. Ford writes that there is a "growing fringe of Zen teachers in the West with people who have credentials, and sometimes just making 'em up, but whatever the credentials, who lack much by way of serious practice leading to those titles. When challenged they make romantic assertions and proof text quote references to how it's all about awakening, and training doesn't matter."
In other words, they don't see the need for the container. This is bigger than just Zen; I run into romantics keen to smash all kinds of traditional dharma containers.
Still, the Rev. Ford says, what he sees emerging in the West is "really rich and really interesting." In Zen, what's emerging is more centered in lay practice than monastic practice. There have been Zen lay practitioners since there has been Zen, but nothing on the scale that's being attempted in the West. So already we're re-shaping the container.
Can we make it work? I think we can. Key, I think, is forming communities of practitioners, preferably with a teacher close at hand. By "communities" I don't necessarily mean that we'd all be living in an ashram together, just near each other. Communities are containers.
However, the old containers are critically important. If we get sloppy at this point, much could be lost. This means respecting lineage and maintaining ties to Asian traditions.
The Rev. Ford says that without a larger tradition, the container can become mere capriciousness, making it up as we go along. There's a lot of that going on already.
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