by Robert Aitken RoshiWhen changes involve one's self, it is difficult to stand off and see clearly just what they are. It is also difficult for people in a community that is changing to know just what is happening. We in the Western Zen Buddhist Sangha know that something important is shifting in our lives and in our practice, but it is hard to keep perspective from the inside. However, it is important for us to try to understand what we are going through, so in this essay I will make such an attempt as a first step in what I hope can be an ongoing discussion.
It is plain that the old way of Zen Buddhist practice is not working very well. People are saying this and demonstrating it in a number of ways. Here in Hawaii in our Diamond Sangha, attendance has fallen off a little; but, more importantly, members are openly questioning some of the assumptions about the monastic nature of Zen practice which have been accepted as fundamental heretofore.
I see this fall-off in attendance elsewhere on my travels, and hear the same questions. We tend to focus on our local problems and it is useful to see how they are really symptoms of underlying changes that are occurring everywhere.
Let's begin with our origins. We have inherited a mode of practice from Japan and Korea and China that was set up for monks and nuns, or more realistically just for monks. Women who wished to be ordained could have their heads shaved and could wear robes, but they lived separately from the ordained men, and the training they received was probably inferior to that of their male counterparts.
Still, they were much more a part of the mainstream of Zen practice than were the lay people of their time. Even devout lay Zen Buddhists found themselves in low status in China, Korea, and Japan in old times. Some great teachers like Bankei Zenji devoted a lot of time to them, and attracted great crowds to their public talks, but personal access even to such teachers was quite difficult. It seems that there were very few lay people, like the Layman P'ang and his wife, son and daughter, who managed to reach real depth in their practice.
In the West, Zen Buddhism has maintained a quasi-monastic mode. Monks und nuns have been ordained in Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere. Although there has not been the distinct line between the priesthood and the laity in Western Zen that we find in our Far F.astcrn antecedents, still it has been clear that teachers at many Western centres have felt that the true path leads through ordination. Moreover, lay people too have sought to keep a kind of monkish role, even when married with children. I myself followed this path.
I remember when I first went to Japan to do zazen, my old friend R.H. Blyth said to me, "Your first duty is to your wife and to your son." That was hard for me to swallow. I felt that my first duty was to my practice. Now I see clearly how 1 was distinguishing practice from my life.
We in Western Zen Buddhism have not begun to deal with the conflict between family and Zen training, and we are feeling a lot of pain as a result. In the Far East there was resistance to the monastic system, but it was based on Confucian ideals of perpetuating the family line. In old European families, there was concern about bringing forth a son and heir, but it was never as strong and as institutionalized as it was (and is) in China, Korea, and Japan. These days our emphasis is more than ever on the family itself, and the person who goes off alone to make a career of meditation seems to be betraying commonly accepted standards of family responsibility.
Another factor in understanding our situation is the attitude we hold toward ages of the individual human being, as distinguished by such shrewd observers as Milton Erickson: the ages of childhood, puberty, marriage, having children, growing old, and so on. While the ages themselves are more or less the same in all cultures, we find different imperatives about them in East and West. Generally speaking, I think it can be said that in Asia people tend to accept their ages more readily than we do. Middle aged people are content to be middle-aged, old people are content to be old — except, of course, in those communities where there is strong Western influence.
Within cultures themselves, there are great historical interruptions of this natural movement through individual ages. Most of us have experienced at least one of these during our own lives. Wars bring interruptions for large numbers of people; depressions can bring interruptions, as can social upheavals such as the one we experienced in the decade of 1965-1974.
In that Vietnam period, we saw hundreds of thousands of people drop out of society in a religious search, neglecting the conventional stages of education, marriage, and employment. In their own way, they were monks and nuns.
It was during this time that Zen Buddhism took root and people were attracted to its monastic way of life. However, even those who were ordained remained fundamentally Western. They did not become Confucian. They did not become Japanese or Chinese. As time went on, most of them married or formed lasting relationships, but they still considered themselves monks or nuns and continued to direct themselves toward spiritual self-development and a kind of monkish life. Even those who were not ordained maintained quasi-monastic lives, though most of them too formed relationships or married, and many started families.
Now the New Age has run its course, and the old, very deep drives for spouse and perhaps children, home, and fulfillment of career potential conflict in many cases with the drive for spiritual self-development. Some people have managed to integrate these two drives, but this achievement has been a matter of individual talent, and does not spring from the design of the Western Zen Buddhist programme.
So here we are in 1985, sixteen years after the funeral ceremony was held in the
Haight* For the flower children. Focus in society is again on the family, and we Zen Buddhists find ourselves rather an anomaly, following an outmoded way.
In the Diamond Sangha we still have old-time members who are single or who are in a relationship without children. They manipulate their careers so that they either work part-time and are voluntarily poor, or they have some kind of professional status that allows them to take off for sesshin quite easily. We also have old-time members who have conventional careers, who have married and begun a family, and who have tended to drop away.
Now this may seem to be natural, but it is not. Look at other religious institutions, churches and synagogues all over the West. Parents are the most active among leaders of those institutions. There is something in our basic structure that encourages people to seek a monkish role.
What to do? It seems to me that our teaching has to change, and the attitudes of individual participants toward the practice have to change. There must be changes in schedule and even in buildings themselves. What would the changes in teaching be?
I think that we teachers have over-emphasized the kunin aspect of the practice. Kunin is one of ten kinds of forebearance — ku means "empty", nin means "endurance." Kunin is the endurance which comes with acknowledging that all things are empty. This is the basic teaching of Zen Buddhism as you will find when you look at the first four lines of the Heart Sutra.
Avalokitesvara doing deep Prajnaparamita clearly saw that all perceptions and things perceived are empty. Such realization transformed suffering and distress for Avalokitesvara, as it does for all of us who have the same insight. This teaching is absolutely true, but we have been leaving out some of the stepping stones.
I tell the story in my teisho on the Ninth Precept about a Tibetan lama who asked me what Zen teaches on the subject of anger. I replied, "There is no anger and no one to get angry." He gave me a strange look and said nothing, but I thought about it a lot afterwards. It seems to me that whereas Theravada Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism tend to leave out concerns about realization, we in Zen Buddhism tend to leave out concerns regarding the human character and its cultivation. So I think that mindfulness practice should have much more of a place in the teaching of Zen Buddhism.
Most Zen students tend to divide practice from their daily lives, just as I did when I first went to Japan. This tendency is shown in casual remarks I hear at Zen centres. Such and such is not good for my practice, people say — that is, drinking alcohol or smoking dope prevents one from doing good zazen. I think we must explode the word "practice" and diffuse it to mean a Tao that inspires and informs at every moment.
We can do this by remembering to practice "One-breath Mu," or, more simply, one-moment awareness of breathing. We can do this when we hang up the telephone, when we walk across the lawn from the car to the front door, when we are waiting for someone. There are many such chances each day.
We can also practice by reflecting, "How does my koan refer to me?" We can practice in the market by considering the interconnection, interpenetration, mutual dependence of all things. Where do these cabbages and carrots come from? We can practice it with our friends and colleagues, watching their body language and acknowledging it as our own language, and by listening to people in restaurants, reflecting, "These are my stories." In this way we are engaged with others, we suffer with others, on the compassionate path of the Bodhisattva.
Most central of all, we can practice in our families, with spouse and children, listening to them, and investing and engaging in their process of life. And finally we can practice zazen at least three minutes here and five minutes there, brief intervals we deliberately take to restore ourselves for fulfilling our Bodhisattva vows.
We must learn how to walk the ancient way as we change. There is an interesting senryu, "Forever and ever, dancing girls are nineteen years old." There was an interesting story on a television news programme the other evening about a gathering of the Rainbow Family at some place in the Western part of the United States. Here were these wrinkled old hippies with their beards and their nakedness still maundering about things that seemed so important 20 years ago. It gave me quite a pang. We may stay 24 in our heads in some ways, but it isn't real.
I dream of a camp, a large piece of property with a dojo and perhaps a building that could be both a main hall and a dining room, with many little cottages and lots of space for children to play. The families could live in the cottages during their vacations, and take part in formal practice as their family-time permits. The Roshi could live at the camp with a small group to maintain the programme. There could be rigorous training periods and sesshins, with entire families taking part at several levels, each member according to need and ability, starting with play for the children. It would be a monastery transmuted into our own dimension. There is no historical precedent for this kind of arrangement, but if Zen Buddhism is going to acculturate, we are going to have to create family practice.
One final point: I don't want to give the impression that I think that ordination is unnatural, or that being in a relationship or being married without having children is somehow inappropriate, or that gay people aren't welcome. Many single people, unmarried people, and people in relationships without children can sublimate some of their social imperatives and their practice can be thereby the stronger. A Zen programme that is designed for the family can also be pursued by people without families. But if we design our Zen programme for people without spouses and children, then the families are, to some degree, left out. I submit that in our society, this won't do.
* Height Ashbury was the district of San Francisco associated with Hippies and indeed the whole Californian Counterculture of the 1960s
