The Sins of the Zen Masters and other reasons not to Quit Zen

              In the United States and in the West in general there is a grand illusion  concerning Buddhism: And once that grand illusion dissolves the curtain swings open and many people in Buddhist communities look at Buddhism and its teachings with new eyes.  Buddhism has done well in the West and it would seem like there are new Buddhist centers of every school opening all over the United States everyday. As I noted when I first started this blog many if not all of the people that are coming to Buddhism are coming from other religions from which they have fled in disillusionment. They come to Buddhism expecting a spiritualism that they didn’t find in their native religion.  Unfortunately they also come caring dreams of perfection concerning the teachers of Buddhism and unfortunately most of them do not take the time to study and truly understand the teachings or the foundations of those teachings.

            Most of the people that come to Buddhism seem to be fairly well-educated many of them have college degrees and many of them have graduate degrees. But having a Western education isn’t the same as understanding the teachings and foundation of Buddhism and sometimes when the two conflict rather than digging deeper new students of Buddhism simply walk away. 

            One of the great misunderstandings is Buddhism’s relationship to science.  This misunderstanding has been propagated by a lot of Buddhist teachers including the Dalai Lama. They have given a lot of people in the West the idea that modern scientific knowledge and Buddhist teachings run parallel to each other.  The simple fact is many of the early Buddhist teachings do in fact reinforce scientific research as it is known today but that doesn’t mean it’s identical or that your view of Buddhism should be based on your view of science.  I’ve always felt that science was simply another religion that had been born in the enlightenment and grown across the world just like any other religion and into the 21^st century.  If science is your religion you probably have no place to put a second religion if it begins to conflict with your belief system that was formed by the modern scientific mold. Buddhism predicted the multi-verse, much of what Buddhist realized through meditation has been proven out through modern scientific research. Quantum physics and Buddhism get along quite well, but you can not expect them to be constantly in sync with each other.  Buddhism often treads in areas science can never truly walk. We sometimes call this the spiritual world but at it's simplest it is a super mundane aspect of reality as we experience it. As I have often noted modern physics now asks us to believe 75 to 85 per cent of the universe is made of dark matter and dark energy which is totally invisible, They expect us to simply accept this,  so at least for now I see this conflict as a draw.  

            The next issue that always comes up is the issue of karma. It seems that no matter how many times Buddhist teachers tell their Western students the nature of karma they simply seem unable to absorb it. Buddhist teachers will tell you over and over again that karma is not a set of rules like the 10 Commandments set out by God to direct the faithful and set punishment for the sinful. It really seems odd that they can accept the fact that when they’re studying science that the universe has natural laws and specific rules that are followed by the material contents of that universe and at the same time seemed totally unable to comprehend the idea that there might be similar natural laws that affect things that are not material but whose effects are part of the mundane world around us. The law of cause and effect has been accepted by people in the West for centuries and karma is nothing more than an extension of this law a subset that applies to nonmaterial things. These nonmaterial things may be considered spiritual or they  can be considered to be composed of forces and materials and energies yet on detected by science and remain unobserved by science, like dark matter and dark energy. In any case to believe in karma is not to believe in a God hidden away somewhere in the teachings of Buddhism. If gravity needs no god, why should karma?
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            I have previously spoken on my opinions concerning reincarnation or rebirth in Buddhism. I have also pointed out that science has developed the laws of the conservation of matter, conservation of  energy and more recently the conservation of information. I think the real problem often is people who are educated in the west have only a rudimentary understanding of modern science and an even more rudimentary understanding of the foundations of Buddhism. I myself have never found any great conflict between the two,  however many people do. 
             I note here that many modern Buddhist simply ignore both rebirth and Karma, and despite their being major under laying concepts in Buddhism, these folks seem to toddle along being Buddhist just fine without them.. So it would appear they are optional in modern Buddhism and certainly no reason to leave. One thing you will seldom find in modern Buddhism is a Dogma to which you will be required to adhere to against your will or contrary to your common sense.

           Modern psychology has had a tendency in the last few decades to plagiarize a lot of the teachings of Buddhism.  There have been a lot of claims made by psychologists and psychiatrists concerning the medical value of meditation that simply may not be true for everyone.  Everyone from Doctors to new age life coaches now want to teach you to meditate.  But of course few of them or even the modern students of Buddhism have bothered to read the Buddhist materials warning students of the dangers inherent in meditation.  Many of the oldest teachings on meditation contain  a lot of material concerning the need for a strong foundation and a very good teacher when  preceding with the practice of meditation. More often than not neither  the psychologists that have plagiarized the information nor the many modern new age teachers of meditation are actually qualified to teach it and guide their students around the hazards involved. Further these modern psychologist fail to recognize that the Buddhist science of the mind was developed with an entirely different goal than modern psychology was. Even their basic understanding of what a mind is are different from each other.  The ancient Buddhist meditation masters and the sutras give warnings of the dangers you may find within your mind during meditation. If your Buddhist teacher has not prepared you for these demons, find another teacher, but don't give up. 

            Now we come face-to-face with the men who brought Buddhism to America and their students. I believe it was December 2013 that Mark Oppenheimer wrote his exposé of Eido Shimano.  The subject of the book was sexual predation by a much revered and heavily financed Zen teacher who come to the United States I think in 1964 and rode the wave of that era into the 21^st century.  The problem of Buddhist teachers, sexual misconduct and predation on their female students was by 2013 a very old story to any of us that had been practicing Zen for any length of time. In fact the idea of a much revered Zen teacher sexually abusing his students had by that time becoming so banal as to be prosaic.  Many don't even seem shocked by it anymore, or even ashamed of it.


       The list of offenders  starts out with the very beginning teachers  who came to America from Japan , such Zen Masters as Taizan Maezumi, Joshu Saaki and of course Eido Shimano. And I don’t think any of us were ignorant of Suzuki Roshi’s student Richard Baker and his sexual antics.  When my late wife attended the University of Tennessee obtaining her graduate degree in philosophy she told me that Alan Watts spent the summer there teaching a course in Buddhist philosophy and spent every spare minute  trying to get into every ladies skirt on the college campus, including hers.  The fact is Zen centers all over the country seem to have been plagued by teachers who couldn’t keep their pants zipped. I recently read an article claiming that at least 30 of the 40 major  Zen centers in the U.S.  have had  abbots or head teachers that have been involved in sexual misconduct.  This is becoming a very big issue and why many people leave because of it.
 

            Perhaps the most disturbing thing about all this to a Buddhist who has studied Buddhism and specifically Zen Buddhism is the issue of lineage holders and transmission.  Suzuki Roshi transmitted his lineage to Richard Baker. When asked about this  he made the usual kind of Zen paradoxical comment we’ve come to expect from Zen teachers, “transmission is nothing”  and “ there is nothing to transmit”. But the fact is when one Buddhist priest makes  another person a Buddhist priest of his lineage something is supposed to have been accomplished between the two. Traditionally the transmission of the lineage would only occur when the teacher had determined that the student had obtained the measure of enlightenment required to carry on the lineage. But what we’ve seen here in the West is a horde of transmitted teachers who are sexual abusers and alcoholics. Even in Japan American students have come home with stories of horrible physical abuse of student monks by their teachers in Japan. We also read the histories of famous Zen monks like, Omori Soyen and Hakuun Yasutani who were apparently involved in extreme right wing militarism in Japan and may have even been involved in murder and assassination.  All these awful things are being done by people who have received transmission and are Priests and teachers. 

            So far our experience in the United States with the so-called enlightenment of lineage holders would have to lead one to believe that in fact it is nothing but bull shit.  That Shunryn Suzuki wasn’t just being all Zen like when he said there was nothing to transmit and that transmission was nothing.  This failure not only to establish that the credentials of the individuals that have been made Priests are  qualified teachers, but in fact seems to totally fail to even warrant  that the person who holds the lineage is even a moral individual capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong.  This makes a sham of the total concept. We are supposed to believe that thousands of years of transmission are just a joke. That the Buddhist Patriarchs were just a bunch of scam artists.

       People who claim to understand Zen but in fact don’t, may set back and pontificate  "there is no right and wrong"  but if that was so then there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Buddhist  precepts and no Vinaya.  Such a belief in practice makes you a nihilist not a Buddhist . You can’t have it both ways either the precepts exist or they’re just a bunch of pretty words that the Zen priest are using to cover up their illicit behavior. People expect a spiritual teacher to have better morals than an alley cat. No amount of pontification or Zen like BS concerning the lack of right and wrong is going to change the fact that the public is going to want spiritual teachers that are not perverts.  The evidence is that whatever gauge it is that our previous  Zen priests and their teachers  have been using to decide who they ordain apparently  dose not include character or morality, which would seem to preclude  any possible kind of enlightenment as the word is understood by most lay Buddhist. This simply must change!  The sins of the Zen masters have been an epidemic these last few years. But there are many, many fine Zen masters still remaining.  Students you have an obligation to the others in your Zen community to refuse to let yourself be abused or exploited.

           I will make no excuses for the Buddhist teachers that have abused their power and their students and the Dharma in the United States. The simple fact is there is no excuse for them.  But that is not an indictment of the teachings as much as it is an indictment of the failure of these men’s teachers to properly evaluate their students and look deep into the character of the people who come to them.  Zen teachers are just human beings like everyone else and they have the same faults as other people.  But whether you’re a Catholic priest or a Buddhist priest your religion has expectations of you and adherence to morality is high on that list of expectations.

            Zen priests in America have all the same faults of Christian priests and preachers.  Some of them have egos so big it’s mind-boggling while others pandered to the rich in order to establish their  power, fame and authority.  There is more than one way to abuse your female students, pandering to the delusions of elderly widows in order to milk their bank accounts is in my opinion just as bad as fondling the younger women and shows just as big of failure of character.             

            Another of the really interesting misconceptions of Westerners who come the Buddhism is that it is offering some kind of salvation.  They don’t bother to study Buddhism or even read the four noble truths.  Salvation is a Christian concept that simply isn’t found in Buddhism.  Buddha created a religion, some call it a philosophy, the purpose of which was to mitigate the suffering of the human condition.  Buddhism has been around for almost 2500 years if not longer and people and teachers have over the years added and subtracted from the teachings of the Buddha but nowhere did anyone ever say Buddha offered you salvation.  Some may say Amitabha Buddha offers salvation, perhaps he does, but I think they have misunderstood the teaching
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           Some people make a big deal about the fact that the Buddha left his wife and child in search of spiritual awakening. They are  told his story and are both offended and amazed that he would do such a thing. They don't stay long enough to read the rest of his history where his wife,  his son and his mother all later joined him  in his community. In other words that he was a human not a god. Like all men you must look closely before you make a judgment of him.   They don’t read the story of how his other family members were slaughtered by an opposing King and the efforts he made to prevent their deaths. If you have come to Zen looking for a god to worship in the hope he will be your savior or even looking for perfection, you have come to the wrong door. .

                   Personally I think that everyone who comes to Buddhism no matter what the school must realize that it is not a philosophy or a teaching where someone’s going to offer you a free ride to Nirvana. It is not a school of magic and mystical powers like Hogwarts. If you come to Buddhism expecting to be spoon fed and thinking that someone is going to do all the work for you then you’re bound to be disillusioned in the end. Even pure land schools require much of their followers and don't offer a free ride to the pure land.             

            I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a way to tell whether or not a teacher is actually a predator or if the student is actually a predator looking for the tools to do their hunting. But I can only hope that with the almost endless amount of material available out there for us to study that the people in the West will pick up their obligation and do their part in solving this problem of the grand illusion.  It cannot all be blamed upon the sins of the Zen masters.
 

          But it is clear these issues must be addressed by the Buddhist community now and not later.  In my opinion every center must develop an education program on the foundations of Buddhism, and enforce the precepts as far as the teachers, priests and abbots are concerned.  If you read the old teachings on the student teacher relationship you will find that the student has just as much obligation as the teacher does in deciding if the character of the other person is suitable to the Dharma. The members of a Sangha have a duty to keep it's members safe from this exploitation.

     If you are considering leaving your Buddhist center for any of the reasons I have mentioned in this post, I would ask you to take the matter very seriously. There are many centers and many teachers out there now that can address all these problems and help you find your Zen. In the end the greatest strength of the Dharma is that it is true, and that's worth the struggle to find in a world full of lies and liars.

           

Buddha said all is burning - The World is Burning - The Parable of the Burning house -

                                 Chapter 3 of the Lotus Sutra

  Thus spoke the Buddha:

 

            A great man had a great house.  The house, since it was old, was in a state of collapse:  the halls were lofty and precarious, the bases of the pillars crumbling and rotten, the beams and ridgepoles aslant, the stairways and landings disintegrating, the walls and partitions cracked, the clay and paint peeling off, the thatch worn thin and in disarray, the rafters and envelopes coming loose, totally misshapen, and full of assorted filth.  Kites, owls, and eagles; crows, magpies, pigeons, and doves; newts, snakes, vipers, and gribbles; centipedes and millipedes; lizards and spiders; weasels, badgers, and mice milled back and forth in a crisscross.  Places stinking of feces and urine overflowed with their filth, with may-bugs and maggots clustered on them.  Here and there and all about were ghosts and demons, poisonous insects, and other malignant birds and beasts.

 

            This old and decayed house belonged to one man.  The man had gone a short distance from the house when, before he had been gone very long, in the rear rooms suddenly a fire broke out, from all four sides at once, raging in flame.  The ridgepoles and beams, the rafters and pillars, shaking and cracking broke asunder and fell, while the walls and partitions collapsed.  The ghosts and demons raised their voices in a scream.  The malignant beasts and poisonous insects milled about in a panic, unable to get out.  Stinking smoke, with its foul odor, filled the place on all four sides.  In this way that house was extremely frightening, with calamities, conflagrations, and many other troubles occurring all at once.

 

            At that time the householder, standing outside the door, heard someone say, "Your children a while ago, in play, entered this house.  Being little and knowing nothing, they are enjoying themselves and clinging to their amusements."

 

            Having heard this, the great man entered the burning house in alarm, to save them from the catastrophe of burning.  He coaxed his children, explaining the many calamities:  the demons, insects, snakes, foxes and dogs.  "This is a woeful and troublesome place; how much the more so with a great fire!"

 

            The children, knowing nothing, though they heard their father's admonitions, were still addicted as before to their pleasures and amused themselves ceaselessly.  The great man thought to himself, "This house has not one pleasant feature, yet the children, steeped in their games, and not heeding my instructions, will surely be consumed by the fire."

 

            Then straightaway, intentionally devising a lie, he announced to the children, "I have various precious playthings, one for each of you, here outside the door.  For one, a goat-drawn cart.  For one, a deer-drawn cart.  For one, an ox-drawn cart.  Come out, all of you!  For your sakes I have made these carts, following the desire of your own thoughts."

 

            When the children heard him tell of carts such as these, racing one another, they ran out of the house, reaching an open place, far from woes and troubles.  The great man, seeing his children able to get out of the burning house, sat down and joyfully said to himself, "Now I am happy!  These children were very hard to bring into the world and raise.  Addicted to their games, they were in danger of great calamity.  But now I have saved them, enabling them to escape trouble."

 

            At that time the children went before their father and addressed him, saying, "We beg you to give us the three kinds of carts that your promised us a while ago, saying, 'Children, come out!  I have three kinds of carts in accordance with your wishes.'  Now is the right time.  Please give them to us!"

 

            The great man, being very rich, and having treasure houses filled with gold and silver, giant clam shells and agate, had a sumptuous carriage built, decked with ornaments, surrounded with handrails and shielding, with little bells hanging from all four sides and golden cords intertwined; with pearl-studded netting stretched out over the top, and gold-flowered tassels dangling here and there; with soft and fine silk and cotton made into cushions; with superbly fine mats, their value in the thousands, pure white and spotlessly clean; with great white oxen, fat, and in the prime of life, and endowed with great strength, their physical form lovely, yoked to the jeweled carriage.

 

            The children danced for joy, and climbing up on the carriage, they cavorted in the four directions, playing and enjoying themselves, forgetting all about the carts their father had promised them to bring them from the burning house.

 

            I tell you, I, too, am like this.  All the living beings, all my children, are profoundly addicted to worldly pleasure and have no wise thoughts.  The world is just like a house afire, being full of many woes most frightful, constantly marked by birth, old age, sickness, death, and cares -- fires such as these, raging without cease.  But the Buddha, having already left the burning house, is quiet and unperturbed, dwelling securely in forest and field.  Even though I teach and command, my children neither believe nor accept.  So addicted are they to their tainting desires that I, by resort to expedient means, preach the three vehicles* to them, causing them to know the woes of the world, and demonstrating and setting forth the One Vehicle (eka-yana) of illumination.

 

            By means of this parable, I have preached the One Buddha Vehicle.  All of you, if you can believe and accept these words, shall without exception attain to the Buddha Path! 

 

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        Is the Buddha in the carriage himself, or is the carriage just another step on the stairway?  

 

Choosing Dukkha, a look at free will and right intentions in Buddhism

          After a couple of thousand years of Buddhist scholars studying the old Scriptures and writing their own commentaries on them, there are many complex philosophies that have developed in Buddhism. A good example of this is the idea of free will and the rejection of its existence since there is no one and nothing to have a "free Will.   In  Zen and many different schools of Buddhism we are taught the concept of no self or non self. This is called anatta. But at the same time most schools of Buddhism accept the idea of karma which is essentially a subset of cause and effect in the universe.   karma is usually defined as an intentional action of the mind the body and speech. But many modern Zen Buddhist choose to look the other way on issues such as rebirth and karma.  This is because they say there is no self to generate these things . I insist that if they are going to keep  calling themselves Buddhist than they have at  some point to  go  and actually  read some of the things that Buddha taught or they are simply going to  have to stop  calling themselves “Zen Buddhist”. I believe the underlying teaching of anatta was that it was a false question,  in short on the mundane level a waste of time.  It arose as a response to the belief in a unchanging, immortal soul. But Buddhism teachings say all things are ever changing,  so there is never a you or self  in the sense of an immortal unchanging self or atman, but rather a set of aspects in constant flux. The you of yesterday is never the you of today. But this ongoing ever changing self exists comes and goes, has volition, and experiences suffering. 

    The problem with the Zen teaching on anatta or no self is that, at least in English, is that when taught in a absolutist and sophomoric level it creates  irreconcilable paradoxes that conflict with both reality and Buddhist teachings,  I’m sorry but if you’re not real stop reading this go put a plastic bag over your head hold it real tight until you quit taking up the air the rest of us need to breathe. I am so tired of pseudo-intellectual Zen Buddhist explaining to me how neither I or they exist, it is my firm desire to stand in front of each one of these male Zen zealots who say this sort of thing and  just as they finish saying it give them a good hard kick in the gonads as a simple demonstration of why I have a problem with their argument, this will also give them a very practical lesson in the expansion and contraction of perceived time.  So for the rest of this short blog I’m going to have the audacity to ask you to suspend your disbelief in yourself and accept the fact that you exist, that other people exist and despite the teaching of no self there is such a thing as  volition and free will. So this discussion requires that there be a you, that you have free will, that you are responsible for your actions , thoughts and deeds, and that there are consequences to them. So the counter argument to this blog that you don’t exist  and therefore you can’t suffer is one I’m going to ask you to take a hike with.

            The Buddha is reputed to have said: "I have taught one thing and one thing only, dukkha and the cessation of dukkha." In Sanskrit: dukkha is a Buddhist term commonly translated as "suffering", "anxiety", "stress", or "unsatisfactoriness". The principle of dukkha is one of the most important concepts in the Buddhist tradition

      Dukkha is commonly explained according to three categories:

• The obvious physical and mental suffering associated with birth, growing old, illness and dying.
• The anxiety or stress of trying to hold on to things that are constantly changing.
• A basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all forms of existence, because all forms of life are changing, impermanent and without any inner core or substance.

              At this point let us take a moment to see what the very first thing Buddha preached was,  what most Buddhist called the first turning of the wheel.

The Four Noble Truths," which express the basic orientation of Buddhism: this worldly existence is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but there is a path to liberation from repeated worldly existence. The truths are as follows:

1. The Truth of Dukkha is that all conditional phenomena and experiences are not ultimately satisfying;
2. The Truth of the Origin of Dukkha is that craving for and clinging to what is pleasurable and aversion to what is not pleasurable result in becoming, rebirth, dissatisfaction, and redeath;
3. The Truth of the Cessation of Dukkha is that putting an end to this craving and clinging also means that rebirth, dissatisfaction, and redeath can no longer arise;
4. The Truth of the Path Of Liberation from Dukkha is that by following the Noble Eightfold Path—namely, behaving decently, cultivating discipline, and practicing mindfulness and meditation—an end can be put to craving, to clinging, to becoming, to rebirth, to dissatisfaction, and to redeath.

              The second aspect of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism is Right Intention or Right Thought, or samma sankappa in Pali. Right View and Right Intention together are the "Wisdom Path," the parts of the path that cultivate wisdom (prajna). The Buddha said in the Dhammapada that our thoughts are the forerunner of our actions (Max Muller translation):

      Now here I’m going to suggest we look at the definition of volition’ this is called Cetanā (Sanskrit, Pali; Tibetan Wylie: sems pa) it is a Buddhist term commonly translated as "volition", "intention", "directionality", etc. It can be defined as a mental factor that moves or urges the mind in a particular direction, toward a specific object or goal in the various schools of traditional Buddhism Cetanā is identified as follows:

• One of the seven universal mental factors in the Theravada Abhidharma.
• One of the Ten mahā-bhūmika in Sarvastivada Abhidharma.
• One of the five universal mental factor in the Mahayana Abhidharma
• The most significant mental factor involved in the creation of karma.

            Karma or Kamma is a Sanskrit word, which has been alternatively defined in English as “action” or sometimes “intentional action” or simply volition. But when used in the Dharma it would be more accurate to describe it a dynamic process involving intentional actions by sentient beings and the associated effects caused by or resulting from those actions. Were I disagree with many teachers description of Karma is the statement that “Karma is a mental urge”. Which in itself suggests all actions are motivated only by a strong instinctual desire, drive; or impulse; which would strip us of free will and the ability to actually do things on our own volition. Traditionally we say that the deluded in Samsara are driven by such accumulated habits and urges but those that follow the path can and do learn to counter act these residual elements and take control of our lives.   I know that many  Zen Buddhist are not  familiar with this treatise, but perhaps the best treatise I know of on Karma are chapters 13 and 14 (Volume 1) of the Lam Rim Chen Mo, by the great Lama Tsong-Kha-PA , published by snow lion press. And at this time I have got to point out that I consider Tsong-Kha-PA one of the foremost writers and teachers on Buddhism and its practice and that the Lam Rim Chen Mo should be read by anyone serious about Buddhism , there has now been an English translation for of this work for several years. I highly recommend it to you.

      In my opinion (and it is just that my opinion) most schools of Buddhism are simply different approaches sometimes called skillful means to accomplish what Buddha himself said Buddhism was all about:  to mitigate if not totally eliminate those things in life which causes so much suffering and misery. I’m going to lump all of this under the term traditionally used in Buddhism as dukkha. And further that all of these teachings are a means of training ourselves to have the education and the wisdom to see what is causing our suffering , to understand it,  and in the best case avoid it.

             I recently had a discussion with a Zen priest, on line,  concerning expectations after he gave a short essay on expectations and the misery they cause. My position on this in my response was that one of the most uplifting things in life is a thing that we call "hope".  Further that hope’s major component is expectations. His response involved a subtle separation of expectations from hope, if I understood him correctly he was separating them out by excluding emotional and personal involvement in one over the other. Now I’m not a Zen priest and I do not claim to have the wisdom that they are assumed to have. His response may be and probably was perfectly correct at least as far as one can be correct on any issue of Buddhist philosophy.

            The problem with all this and everything I’ve written above is that we are real people living in a real world and that if it is to have any real value and I know I keep using the term real which is giving a major headache to all you Buddhist philosophers, but I’m going to insist that we all have mutual experiences that comprise a human life and live in a world where those experiences occur and reoccur in virtually everyone’s life. Those things are what I call real. We all share common experience which I will call real at least on a mundane level. 

           Now some people don’t think that Buddhism and especially Zen needs to have any practical application, I cannot tell you how many times and teachers have told  me not to come to Zen expecting to get anything out of it . That in the end it has nothing to offer. This is a viewpoint that they continually belie by their own actions and words. If Zen has nothing to offer why are they offering it, if it has no value why is anyone listening to them?

      After almost 30 years of studying Buddhism in different Buddhist schools I really think that Buddha saw value in his teachings and that he taught them as a practical matter to express his compassion for their suffering in this world. That suffering requires a self to experience it.  I see Buddhism as a kind of science of the mind, I once heard it referred to as minding mind. Buddha himself said that the only thing that he taught was how people could relieve their own suffering, and that they were the cause of it and they were the only ones who could truly stop it. His prescription for this cure was the eight fold path.

            Now I’m coming to the essence of my essay which is simply weather a person who is practicing right thought and right intention  can choose to suffer and still be right?

            One of the primary differences in the western sciences of mind and Buddhism is that Buddhism does not separate out our emotional matrix from our intellectual matrix. We all have by our very nature emotions and an intellect.  The early Buddhist philosophers seem to me to have seen that the emotional matrix is very much a part of the intellectual matrix as a practical matter in our life they are impossible to separate.  So when the Buddhist fathers taught about detachment and renunciation I think they were viewing this from a very real practical every day point of view.

                I like to think that I am a little bit older and wiser,  I sure know I’m older,  than I was 30 years ago and that the experiences I’ve had in those 30 years have accumulated and affected both my point of view and how I perceive the teachings of Buddhism.  I think people with limited experiences in life have a tendency to be a lot like the children who have just learned a new skill or a new concept and want to show it off to everyone, this leads to young men and women with very little experience in the realities of life having read a few books and heard a few lectures making profound statements about the teachings of Buddhism without the underpinning of the experiences of life that really test those teachings. In other words I hear a lot of arrogant little children all caught up in their own self-esteem glibly making pronunciations about detachment, existence and suffering when they have experienced very little of both.  It’s a fine thing to have a mind that works well and a good intellectual capacity it’s quite another to have the wisdom that is brought upon one by experience.

             Perhaps the greatest armor that Buddha taught as he walked barefoot across India as protection against our misery was our attachment to the world in the things and it. I think that’s why he created monks and a monastic movement. He certainly had rejected the ascetic movement, but at the same time he created a movement of renunciation.  Practically speaking Buddha had parents, he had a wife and he had a son so from a personal point of view he was well aware of what that meant to a person’s psyche. He knew the obligations that these things imposed. But today as Buddhism spreads broadly across a  community of lay practitioners people living in the real world and having family and family obligations,  most people do not have the will or the courage to leave them behind. Buddha himself did have the will and the courage and I think that taught him just how difficult that makes the practice of Buddhism. I said difficult, not impossible.

            I’m going to assume that the people that are reading this are not Buddhist monks or ascetics but people who have families husbands wives children and all of the emotional bonds that come with them.  My first pronunciation that I’m going to pull right out my hat is that I think that this is perfectly fine.  I think there is nothing that can screw up your Buddhist practice more and yet have more potential for value in making you really experience Buddhism and understand its teachings than having people you love and people you have both hope and expectations for.

            Buddhism itself is based on vows. These vows expressed an intention and in doing so under the teachings of Buddhism create actions of volition. In an almost existential manner Buddhism says you’re responsible for these intentions when it says that karma is created by actions of "thought" and the  words you speak and the deeds you do. I was a Buddhist I married and I was a Buddhist when I had my children and I had read many  Buddhist teachings but I chose both to be a Buddhist and a father and a husband. I was perfectly aware that being a father and husband would create attachments as deep as any attachments in the human experience. So I think it’s fair to say that of my own volition and with my Buddhist education and of my own  free will chose to suffer. I chose the suffering that was inevitable when I took these roles.
            I do not think that suffering taken knowingly and intentionally and with purpose is necessarily a bad thing. Buddhist are taught to have compassion for all living things and this always starts with having compassion for yourself. So I do not regret one minute or even one second of the suffering that I knew would go along with taking on these obligations. So my answer to the question in the title of this essay is that most of us will many times in our life knowingly and intentionally create circumstances that will lead to our own suffering and I do not think this is necessarily in opposition to the teachings of Buddhism.  If I were to have followed the path truly and become a  monk it could be easily said that I was practicing right view and right intention. But I do not think that right view and right intention excludes  an informed decision to take  upon yourself the suffering that goes with things like being a father or a  mother or a spouse. My conclusion :

           

            Choosing Dukkha, is not always wrong, and sometimes it may even be the most rewarding thing you can do.           

 Togen

The Wrong Side of History

          One of the more interesting things about history is that it seems to be changing all the time. I live in the United States a country which seems to have become in the last 20 years  extraordinarily polarized.  One of the more irritating facets of American society is that we let individuals and newsroom reporters and so called think tanks tell us who and what we are and what we are supposed to think. They are constantly applying labels to everyone and everything.  Probably the two most irritating labels that I’ve run across of late are the terms conservative and liberal.   The primary quality that’s assigned to the term conservative seems to be a strong fear of and resistance to change.  The primary quality assigned to being liberal is to encourage change, usually concerning social and political behavior.

                 One of the more fascinating qualities that distinguishes Buddhism from the three other major religions on the planet right now is each groups attitude toward change. Christianity, Islam and Judaism all seem to have at their core a basic quality that seems to align them with the term or a label we call conservative. That is to say they seem to be extremely fearful of and resistant to change. Buddhism on the other hand has at its core the teaching that change is the very nature of reality.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons that modern Buddhist are more often than not considered liberals while members of the other three religions seem to be conservative at their core and only liberal around the edges.

            I am I think a member of a class of people in the west  and especially in the United States,  that usually makes up the core of the conservative groupings, both politically and religiously. That is to say I am male, white, moderately educated, and pretty much in the middle of the middle class economically .  Change very often means for my group a lessening of respect, a lessening of power both socially and politically as well as a deepening anxiety that this lessening will increase in crescendo to an all-out collapse of our privileged  status in society. Whether this is true or not is really irrelevant because it’s what is perceived to be true by most of the members of my group. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t really matter if it’s actually happening or not. The fear that this is what’s going on is more than sufficient to drive members of my class to become more and more afraid of change and of the future, and of other people.

            A short synopsis of recent history in the west I think can be illustrated here to explain this fear. For several hundred years members of my cast group told themselves and everyone else that God had appointed certain people to be our rulers, these people usually looked and acted just like me. Many people in my group historically made their living’s by exploiting other people. While this is not true of our group as a whole there certainly were sufficient numbers of people who believe this way to create thousands of years of misery and Empire going from Genghis Khan to the British Empire.  My groups belief in their own natural superiority allowed them to own slaves, have children work in their coal mines in their factories for 12 to 18 hours a day, and conquer and destroy  the cultures of just about everybody in the world who wasn’t white.  In almost every society regardless oof race or religion for thousands of years males have dominated females in just about every way imaginable. The conservative white male opposed women’s suffrage and still to this day many oppose women receiving equal pay for equal work. Hell we even told people, and ourselves  that animals couldn’t feel pain so when we worked them to death we wouldn't feel guilty about it. I am not joking about this I’ve actually read historical papers were so-called scientists argued that animals couldn’t feel pain or suffer like humans do. To me that’s just mind-boggling.

            The United States of America was started by some people that believed that the citizens of a nation should have control over how that nation was run. I think people forget that good old King George believed in the divine right of kings. This was an unheard of idea, at least for the last thousand years.  America has a lot of guilt on its doorstep, hundreds of thousands of Americans killed each other because about half of us wanted to own slaves. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right for corporations to have 10 and 12-year-old children work themselves to death in their factories and actually saying that this was good for their character. We  all but wiped out the native Americans that were here before we were. The men that started our country were of course both practical and more than a little bit hypocritical.  They wrote wonderful poetry about the quality of man while upholding slavery and basically consigning women to the status of property. But that in no way changes what a great and wonderful idea America was and is. Politician's like Donald Trump harken back to the days when people like him were the undisputed ruling  class of every one else here. This he says will make America "Great Again". He is unable to see that America is now greater than it has ever been, closer to the dream that it was founded upon than it has ever been.

            Right about now most of the members of my class are calling me a traitor and saying that I hate my nation, that I am un-American to my core. That I don’t love my country because I’m willing to admit that in the past my country did things that I don’t think were very nice. This is an outrageous argument and untrue. America started as an experiment in equality and liberty and that experiment is still ongoing. It is a dream that has just begun to unfold.  We Americans are a very young group of people as a nation. For that matter nationalism itself is a fairly new concept on the stage of history. There is no way to go back and undo what’s been done, and certainly when  at some point there has to  come an end to dwelling over it birth pangs. I really don’t think that if women get equal pay I’m going to be somehow made to suffer for it.  I don’t think that if people of different colors and races and religions all have an equal say in how our government is run.that I have any great thing to fear from that.  Of course when you look back on history and you see what my  own group has done to the other folks in the world you certainly do have a valid reason to fear that they might do the same thing to you that was done to them, even expect it to be so. . But the  goal here, the hope and the dream is progress not history repeating itself, a nightmare with each group taking it's turn to exploit the other. The simple fact is all those issues that arose leading to a Civil War in the United States are still playing themselves out,  not only in our country but all over the world. 

            All of the economic and social class issues that led to the French Revolution, the Marxist revolution in Russia and class war across the world are  still playing themselves out on the world stage.  The opposing  ideas of a theocracy verse a secular government are still killing thousands. The amazing  thing is that almost everyone in the United States at least really believes in that wonderful poetry that the founding fathers wrote about liberty and equality.  But  all of them have their own blind spots, areas in which they just can’t see what the real problem is. That applies to both conservatives and liberals and to Christians, Muslims, and Jewish people. There is this horrible mental and emotional disease that humans have that tells them that if everyone doesn’t act look and behave the way they do they are under threat and that fear blinds us.

            There has been more change in the world in the last hundred years then there was in the last 10,000 years of human history.  Scientists tell us that as the environment changes those species that learned to change with the environment and to adapt to it survive and those that don’t become extinct. It’s really fascinating and horrifying to see  an entire race of people almost 7,000,000,000 strong constantly at war with each other when at their core they all want the same thing or at least  the same thing for themselves,  if not for those others they perceive as "different". I have no answer to this nor do I have any explanation for it. But I do believe it is a fact. It is this fact that may well kill us all.

            But I do have an opinion, just as I’m sure you do. My opinion is that any religion or society or  a nation that isn’t willing to accept and adapt to change is going to go extinct and perhaps take everyone else on the planet with it. Of all the religions on earth the only one that I know of that embraces change is Buddhism. I think we all accept that the thing that we call Buddhism is going to change that this change is inevitable. The other religions must adapt to change or parish.  But if I were to pick a survivor, that is to say pick out which set of beliefs will still be around in a  1000 years my bet is on Buddhism.  I think our fundamental belief in change will put us on the right side of history.

            

Enlightment and Emptiness

               Whenever I decide to comment on a subject in this blog I always like to research what I’m talking about, I have a  really good library of Buddhism and of course I always search the Internet to see if the history has changed while I wasn’t looking. Yesterday something happened that’s never happened to me before, while finishing up my notes on the subject I found a blog post by a man named Lewis Richmond. It was as if he had stolen my memories and my education and written the blog post that I was in the process of writing but he wrote it back in 2011. I’m going to do something now that I have never done.  I am going to republish in part Mr. Richman’s post from back in 2011. I give Mr. Richman absolute credit for what’s written below.  It is however from my decades of practicing Buddhism in my judgment  the most absolutely correct history of the development of the word “enlightenment” in the history of American Buddhist that I have ever encountered. It is concise, and while it skips a few points that I would’ve made, for example the long-running battle between those Buddhist that believed that awakening was at an event that took place suddenly , something that struck like lightning, and those that believe that it was something that occurred over a lifetime of practice and work. This debate has raged for centuries and at one point cumulated into a very famous debate that took place in Tibet. It said that the proponent of gradual awakening won the debate, and that some sore losers actually waylaid and murdered the other debater

        The conflict between these two approaches was, according to Tibetan tradition, settled in the eighth century in a formal debate. Whether the debate actually occurred as such has been called into doubt, but there is no question of the importance of the legend of the debate to the Tibetan tradition. According to the Tibetan histories, the debate was arranged in Samyé temple in the late eighth century to determine whether Tibet would accept Indian or Chinese Buddhism ( think Chan and Zen here)  as normative. In the stories of the debate, the Indian side was identified with gradualism and the Chinese side with simultaneism, a greatly simplified version of the complexities of early Buddhist influences on Tibet which nonetheless became widely accepted in Tibet. According to tradition, the Indian Buddhist scholar Kamalaśīla, arguing for the gradualist position, opposed an Chinese monk called Hashang Mahāyāna, who was arguing for the simultaneist position. In the Tibetan versions of the story, Hashang was defeated, and his method rejected

            . I can’t see how it Mr. Lewis managed to leave that out but other than that his blog was spot on. I really hope that he doesn’t resent my republishing part of his blog, but I think what he has written needs to be preserved and remembered because we second wave baby boomer Buddhists are on our way out and history has a way of being rewritten especially when it comes to American Buddhism. I have watched this occur on a very fundamental basis over the last 20 years in the practice of Zen and in what I consider a tragic corruption of the Tibetan tradition by Westerners with money.

   Mr. Lewis Richmond is a Buddhist writer and teacher, and the author of the upcoming Aging as a Spiritual Practice, to be published Spring, 2012. Lewis leads a Zen meditation group, Vimala Sangha  , and teaches at Workshops And retreats throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published three books, including the national bestseller Work as a Spiritual Practice. Lewis also leads a discussion on aging as a spiritual practice at Tricycle magazines online community site.

 

“A Cultural History of the Word 'Enlightenment'”

                                      

By Lewis Richmond

“ The word "enlightenment" in a Buddhist context has been used so frequently and in so many ways, many people may not realize that this use of the word began fairly recently, and has a complex cultural and literary history.

Though 19th century translators of Buddhist texts sometimes used the word "enlightenment" to refer to Gautama's moment of spiritual awakening on seeing the morning star, the first time a large number of general English readers saw the word used as a spiritual term was with the publication Essays on Zen Buddhism First Series by D.T. Suzuki in the 1930s. Before that time the word referred to the 18th century rationalist movement in Europe that strove to understand the world using logic and reason.

D.T. Suzuki used the word "enlightenment" to translate the Japanese term satori¸ and his recounting of the enlightenment stories from the Zen koan literature made quite a splash among intellectual elites at the time. From that time forward, the idea of a sudden transformative spiritual experience became embedded in Western cultural imagination. It is worth nothing that D.T. Suzuki paid relatively little attention in his writings to the Buddhist practices of precepts, mindfulness, meditation, and the monastic life.

The best-selling books of Alan Watts in the 1950s, and Philip Kapleau's The Three Pillars of Zen in the 1960s, filled in some of D.T. Suzuki's omissions (Kapleau's book had good instruction about how to meditate, for example). But it was not until the arrival of Asian teachers in the late 1960s, that students began to understand that Buddhism was about much more than a single epiphany; it was a lifelong path of spiritual development which included both sudden and gradual transformations.

It was Shunryu Suzuki (not D.T. Suzuki), who said in the 1960s, when asked directly about satori, "Satori is not the part of Zen that needs to be stressed." (This was quoted in the introduction to the paperback edition of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind). In other words, he did not deny the reality or importance of satori; he just pointed out that satori, when separated from rest of Buddhist practice, has a tendency to devolve into just another object of desire, something the ego wants for itself.

"Satori" is the Japanese reading of the Chinese character "wu," which is in turn a Chinese translation of the Sanskrit "bodhi," which does indeed mean spiritual insight or awakening. We see this root term in words such as "bodhisattva" (literally enlightenment-being) or "bodhicitta" (the thought of enlightenment). Some Buddhist scholars (Edward Conze, for example) have felt that the Zen emphasis on satori as the sine qua non of Buddhist experience is somewhat outside the mainstream of Buddhist tradition. The Buddha himself taught an eight-fold path with many facets, all of them important. The Tibetan and Vipassana approaches each have detailed descriptions of the gradual stages of spiritual development. Even within Zen, there were various schools and approaches; not all of them emphasized satori as primary.

During the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s the sudden alteration of consciousness brought on by LSD and other drugs dovetailed neatly into the satori stories of Zen. Many veterans of psychedelics sought out Buddhist teachers to see if meditation could reproduce those altered states. Many Buddhist teachers and writers worked to counteract that view. That may have been the context of Shunyru Suzuki's remark about satori. Lama Anagarika Govinda, a German-born Buddhist teacher popular at the time, likened the psychedelic experience to a deep rut in the center of a wide road. Once you have carved that rut, he said, all your other spiritual experiences tend to roll down into it.

In the 1960s book Conversations Christian and Buddhist by Catholic priest Aelred Graham, he recounts the time Yamada Mumon Roshi  an eminent Japanese Zen Master at the time, took LSD. Mumon Roshi's comment about the experience was, "This is form is emptiness, but this is not emptiness is form."

Shunryu Suzuki had his own teaching on this point. He said, "'Form is emptiness' is relatively easy to understand; 'emptiness is form' takes a lifetime."

It will be interesting to see how the next generation of Buddhist teachers and practitioners deal with the cultural history (and baggage) of the word "enlightenment." Maybe they will bypass it; maybe they will change it. I have a feeling that whatever they do they will come up with their own rather different understanding (and possibly mis-understanding) of this deep matter.”

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    This is the end of the part of Mr. Richman’s article that I have reproduced here.  As readers of this blog know I practiced with the Tibetans for many years.  And I will always appreciate the teachings I received from any and all those old monks who have probably gone on to their next rebirth by now.   I was always fascinated by the statements that were made virtually every practice session that enlightenment could be  achieved in a single lifetime, this statement accompanied by the fact that old-time fundamentalist Buddhist like the Tibetans have a firm belief in reincarnation and rebirth, they also pride themselves on their logic and logical analysis, so it always seemed kind of funny to me to say that enlightenment could be achieved in one lifetime when in fact no one is on their first lifetime and by their own teachings the rebirth into this lifetime where you have encountered the teachings means that you have progressed through numerous lifetimes to reach this point.  I think when the Tibetans came over to America they encountered the Zen Buddhist that were already here and adopted the term enlightenment without giving much thought as to whether or not their western students would be able to distinguish their cultural illusions of what that word meant from what they ( the Tibetan Monks) were talking about and the problems it would cause later on down the road. Of course there are other words like Nirvana and prajna',  as well as Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi in Hinduism and in Buddhism, that have led to endless confusion in the teachings of traditional Buddhism when translated into English.

        I think the translation of prajna  and various other  Sanskrit words into the word enlightenment and the English translation for the Sanskrit word  Śūnyatā as the English word “emptiness”  have made them the two most misunderstood concepts in American Buddhism. Emptiness as Americans understand it in its normal application has nothing to do  with the Buddhist concept  of  Sunyata.  (I suspect  somewhere  out there Mr. Richman has probably written a blog post on this very subject as well,  it’s like the guy can read my damn mind, and his is probably better than I can do.)  Of course  the concept of Sunyata  is as old as Buddhism itself,  and what it means may depend upon whether or not you're reading the Pali cannon  or a Mahayana Sutra.

 

              So according to  Pali Philosophy as Thanissaro Bhikku, writes  emptiness is a quality of dharmas, in the early canons, means simply that one cannot identify them as one's own self or having anything pertaining to one's own self...Emptiness as a mental state, in the early canons, means a mode of perception in which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away from what is present, noting simply, "There is this." This mode is achieved through a process of intense concentration, coupled with the insight that notes more and more subtle levels of the presence and absence of disturbance .

         Meanwhile  in the Mahayana schools, the famous  monk philosopher  Nagarjuna  decided that he would redefine  Śūnyatā ,   He equates emptiness with dependent origination. On the basis of the Buddha's view that all experienced phenomena (dharma) are "dependently arisen" (pratitya-samutpanna), Nagarjuna insisted that such phenomena are empty (sunya). This did not mean that they are not experienced and, therefore, non-existent; only that they are devoid of a permanent and eternal substance. . Since they are experienced elements of existence, they are not mere names. In his analysis, any enduring essential nature would prevent the process of dependent origination, or any kind of origination at all. For things would simply always have been, and will always continue to be, without any change. In doing so, he  restores the Middle way of the Buddha. His goal seems to have been at the time to refute the essentialism of Abhidharma, a third century BCE reworking of Buddhist teachings found in the Pali Cannon.  But in no case is emptiness in Buddhism related directly to the English word that simply means containing nothing, not filled or occupied. 

        I think it’s important that the  history of the English word "enlightenment" and the  history of the English word "emptiness" as they stumbled into Buddhism in America  be recorded somewhere. I’ve heard it said that once something is on the Internet it lives forever maybe this little bit of knowledge about how we got to where we are will hang around longer than the baby boomers that screwed all this up in the first place.

 Gassho, Togen  

 

 

 

The Three Ages of Buddhism, Welcome to Mappo.

The Three Ages of Buddhism, also known as the (Three Ages of the Dharma) are three divisions of time following Buddha's passing.  Buddhist temporal cosmology assumes a cyclical pattern of ages, and even when the current Buddha's teachings fall into disregard, a new Buddha will at some point be born to ensure the continuity of Buddhism. This cosmology  appeared early in Buddhist writings references to the decline of the Dharma over time can be found in such Mahayana sutras as the Diamond Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, but also to a lesser degree in some texts in the Pāli Canon such as the Cullavagga of the Vinaya Pitaka. Nanyue Huisi was an early monk who taught about it; he is considered the third Patriarch of the Tiantai.

The Three Ages of Buddhism are three divisions of time following Buddha's passing:

1. The Former Day of the Law, also known as the Age of the Right Dharma the first thousand years (or 500 years) during which the Buddha's disciples are able to uphold the Buddha's teachings;
2. The Middle Day of the Law, also known as the Age of Semblance Dharma, the second thousand years (or 500 years), which only resembles the right Dharma;
3. The Latter Day of the Law , Mappo, which is to last for 10,000 years during which the Dharma declines.

             The three periods are significant primarily to Mahayana adherents, particularly those who hold the Lotus Sutra in high regard, such as the Tiantai and Tendai  and Nichiren Buddhist, and some schools of Zen,  who believe that different Buddhist teachings are valid (i.e., able to lead practitioners to enlightenment) in each period due to the different capacity to accept a teaching  of the people born in each respective period.  

      In the Lotus Sutra, Visistacaritra is entrusted to spread Buddhist law in this age and save mankind and the earth. He and countless other Bodhisattvas, specifically called Bodhisattvas of the Earth (of which he is the leader), vow to be reborn in a latter day to re-create Buddhist law, thus turning the degenerate age into a flourishing paradise. Shakyamuni entrusts them instead of his more commonly known major disciples with this task since the Bodhisattvas of the Earth have had a karmic connection with Shakyamuni since the beginning of time, meaning that they are aware of the Superior Practice which is the essence of Buddhism or the Dharma in its original, pure form some call the era of Maitreya (the future Buddha)

             Pure Land Buddhism in China and Japan believe we are now in this latter age of "degenerate Dharma". Pure Land followers therefore attempt to attain rebirth into the pure land of Amitābha, where they can practice the Dharma more readily. Nichiren Buddhism has taught that its teaching is the most suitable for the recent Mappō period. Vajrayana Buddhism taught that its teaching would be popular when "iron birds are upon the sky" before its decline^. The Kalacakra tantra contains a prophecy of a holy war in which a Buddhist king will win. Theravada Buddhists taught that Buddhism would decline in five thousand years^.  Some monks such as Dōgen and Hsu Yun had alternative views regarding dharma decline. Oddly enough Dōgen believed that there is no mappō while Hsu Yun thought mappō is not inevitable. Maybe that's why Dōgen  wrote huge volumes on Buddhism while telling his students scholars went to the hell of hungry Ghosts.

So the point of this small bit of trivia is being presented so that you understand that Zen Buddhism in Japan and China, pure land Buddhism in Japan and China, Nichiren Buddhism as they all exist today all developed, more or less,  during what is known as the Kamakura Period of Japan  1192-1333, based on the belief that we have now entered the Mappo period of Buddhism. With the basic understanding that in this degenerate age the people born herein  are not capable of understanding Buddhism as it was taught by the Buddha. 

           So! Each school is in effect a chopped down readers digest form of Buddhism aimed at the diminished capacity of the people who are born in this age because they’re not capable of digesting the pure Dharma.

           Therefore, Zen practitioners are taught to just sit, pure land practitioners are taught to just chant the name of the Buddha of pure light, Amitabha, so that he can take them to a pure land where they can do what’s necessary to become enlightened, Nichiren Buddhists only have to recite the first couple of paragraphs of the Lotus Sutra, over and over, they don’t even have to understand the words.

Just thought I’d mention this, it seems like something worth knowing.