Going back to a year that might have changed my life

 Yes and . . . 

Dear James, 

Your “Best Read on Jesus and His Message” was more than quick summation of the Jesus sayings, miracle stories, resurrection narratives, including possible source materials, how they were collected, and the way the early church used them, including the split between the Jerusalem vs the Greek/gentile communities. It is, from my understanding, pretty accurate. It might be a good jumping off point if we are just looking to examine the impact of what comes down to us, for both good and ill, of the “the Jesus Teaching.” I have to admit that it took me in another direction.

Can I tell you that your Unitarian training is showing? Let me chime in from the more liturgical Catholic point of view, even though I am definitely a former Catholic with little affinity left for ritual observance of any kind, even the spare zen kind.

I’ll call this “Going back to a year that might have changed my life.”

This morning I find myself thinking about the year and half I spent at Dartmouth in the Religious Studies department. After I came back from France in 64, I decided that I would enter the Jesuits. I wanted to go to the novitiate right away, but my parents objected. I talked with the Newman Chaplin, and decided to switch my major to Religious Studies. I’d written on the religious drama of Paul Claudel in France, and there were no majors in the department, so I worked out a split major. I spent my last full year taking every course given by a stellar faculty, the kind of top level scholarship rarely assembled anywhere. Every day Jacob Neuser, H Hans Penner, Jonathan Z Smith, Robin Scroggs and a Belgian Augustinian who'd been a peritus at Vatican II, a visiting scholar, directed my study. There were few other students so my classes were basically seminars. I wrote my senior thesis on the Prophetic Voice in the Christian church under Neusner. I was closest to Neusner. He liked me and encouraged me. His Judaism also came closest to the way in which I held my Catholicism, faithful, open-minded and inquisitive. I wrote to him several times over many years, and he always took the time to respond thoughtfully and generously.  

If it had not been 1965-66, the end of the Vatican Council, and if my deep personal bias is what most would label extremely liberal, I might have fallen in with some right wing group like Opus Dei though some might argue that the Jesuits could be classified as a left-wing cult. Regardless, I was cult material. Thank god I was more interested in what John Courtney Murray, Gus Weigel and Hans Bea were up to. Throw in some Urs Von Balthasar, Hans Kung, Thomas Merton mixed in a bit of Mircea Eliade and you got me theologically. Add hard drinking, avoidance of dealing, or even acknowledging my homosexuality, and you got me personally. Looking back I was extremely conservative, even defensive, sure that the Roman Catholic Church had all the answers, or at least kernels of “The” truth were there if you looked carefully, thoughtfully, prayerfully, and critically enough. 

My concerns, at least from a theological point of view, were reconciling the apparent discrepancies in the resurrection narratives. Jesus had to have been bodily resurrected into heaven. It all hinged on that. When Scroggs, I think, asked me how I handled the outlier report of the risen Jesus telling his disciples to go before him to Galilee where he would ascend to heaven, I felt that there was either some misreporting or reporting a miscommunication. Further textual analysis would solve the mystery. Perhaps I really just had to learn Greek and/or Aramaic. 

Neusner had just published the first of the more than 900 hundred books and articles he wrote during his stunning career: A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai. Leiden, 1962. Ben Zakkai was a contemporary of Jesus, and central to the creation of Rabbinic Judaism that took root in the diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Ah ha, so Jesus was not a stand alone figure in the religious turmoil of his era. Neusner was an amazing scholar. He’d studied the religious history of Palestine during the first century of the common era exhaustively. He said there was evidence of hundreds of wandering teachers like John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazarath, and Yohanan ben Zakkai populating the parched landscape. This estimate might be very conservative. 

Toying with the idea of converting to Judaism, I talked with Neusner. He was always the scholar, but he was an extremely approachable and friendly man. He cautioned me, ”the conservative Jewish position is quite cultural. Conversion does not work the way it does in Christianity. It normally happens when Jew marries a Gentile, and the couple has to handle the day to day observance of the Law.” I was not going to get married, period, Jew or Gentile. My sense was that he had the confidence of a religious man that his particular faith tradition, let’s call it religious proclivity, provided some clues. He said that he could not deny that Christians had helped spread the teaching of the Prophets throughout the world. How’s that for endorsement of a religious belief system? I’m looking for the Messiah and he says that Christianity would do as a promotion, including a byline, on the back cover of a particular understanding of the Law of Moses. Oddly at the time that was enough. He encouraged me to enter the Jesuits. He perhaps felt, or hoped that with the discipline of the Jesuits I might be able to become a scholar. He might have felt that truly mastering scholarship would unlock some of the questions that I wrestled with. 

Your quote from Robin R. Meyers about early Christianity is certainly provocative. “Consider this remarkable fact: In the Sermon on the Mount, there is not a single word about what to believe, only words about what to do and how to be. By the time the Nicene creed is written, only three centuries later, there is not a single word in it about what to do and how to be – only words about what to believe.” This not entirely true, or at least it's certainly misleading. First, the presupposition is wrong; very few of the parables in the narratives contain any doctrinal statements. Meyers has framed his "remarkable fact" for the spirituality vs religion crowd.  He says “only three centuries,” but neglects to say that those three centuries were as eventful as the last 75 years in terms of the rise and fall of religions and empires. But most importantly he completely neglects the importance of the confession of faith amongst the early believers.

From the time of the very first churches, there was always emphasis on what you believed in, and who you believed in. That was in fact the path to salvation. I was just reading an interview with Neusner. He was asked, "Why is dogma essential to orthodox Christianity and not to Judaism?" His response: “The main reason is that Christianity begins with the demand to believe in something or someone. There is a proposition attached to the beginning of the faith. You are saved through what you believe. This is certainly the message of Paul and the early church. Christianity stresses theology, not merely dogma in the sense of what one must believe, but theology in the sense of a systematic study of the faith and of the propositions of faith. The result of this is that the Christian, particularly the Protestant Christian, will think of religion in terms of faith.” 

I think that this is just a given. What was emphasized and what was neglected or changed is a parochial argument, but once you enter into a polemical conversation, it is part and parcel. If you take the position that the only course of understanding in Christianity is through discourse, however evenhanded, clear and logical, some residue of this trails along. It is the nature of the beast, intensified by the internecine bickering that was rampant in the early churches. 

It is also the key, not just backstory for the Christian polemic that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was a singular, history changing event. My own take on this has evolved over the years. It is a life changing event in your history if it changes your life. That depends on you and you alone. I’ll let you call it grace if you include some qualifying statements. Personally I’ve moved from Paul to Kiekegaard but that’s another story.

This argument still doesn’t account for how the cult of Jesus along with the corresponding cults of Mary, and the saints and martyrs came to capture the religious imagination of the West. Listening to the early writers of the gospels, it was proven by the reports of miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. I would venture that this is still the case in the vast majority of Christian religious communities today or at least it’s in the general guidelines for membership. Listening to the church of religious science, in any of its forms, the reason is that it coincides with the nature of the human spirit, and according to most liberal theological thought, it is where our discourse lands us.

But for me this does not come close to answering the question of how among hundreds of itinerant preachers wandering in what we now call the Holy Land, did Jesus come to dominate the Western religious imagination? The believer says it's a statement of faith--that he was the son of god and it had to happen, but that’s a belief. I want to exert my personal prerogative to examine other possibilities.

I mentioned Jonathan Z Smith. The position at Dartmouth was his first as I recall, but even then he was working out the complex interactions of culture, ritual and belief. He scared me. After one seminar, because I was pretty resistant to his thesis, he looked at me and said, “If I lived in a culture that fostered a vibrant cult of Socrates, I’d be a follower.” Another time he said, “Christianity was the mystery cult that won.” Talk about provocative statements. But I remembered them. 

Let’s look at one of those propositions and see where it goes. In zen, as things fall away, beliefs get challenged inside where they reside. Let’s look at the belief in Jesus dying and being resurrected as a kind of myth that may or may not have a lot of import on many levels. It’s hard to be objective, but I have to acknowledge that several key elements of the pagan mystery cult are present. The god dies, initiates share some of the elements of the god in a ritualistic way, and the believer emerges with some aspect of the divinity. The sharing of bread and wine as a memorial of the sacrifice of Jesus in the communal rites of Christians, though probably very unlike what we know today as Mass, was practiced. You even have the separate entity of the primary god who presides over the unfolding of the mythic ritual, accepting the sacrifice of his son.

Information about mystery cults remains mysterious because they were secret. But they were rather widespread so some of the details have become known. I find it interesting that a lot of our information comes from early church fathers denouncing them. They were not blind to the similarities. Membership was also sought after. It was also used as a way of social advancement. Early Christianity among the Gentiles was regarded as a religion of slaves.

I’m not citing any of this to either prove or disprove any of the tenets of Christianity. But if I were looking for a reason why the teaching of Jesus was the one that found a fertile ground in Greco-Roman pagan culture, I would look here. There were hundreds of preachers with probably as many followers as Jesus, and who knows what they had to say about how to conduct your life. But the myth of Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection was planted in a culture that had a predisposition carved out by centuries of mystery cult initiations that went all the way back to early Egypt. It might have been the mystery cult that won. 

It took me more than 60 years to even entertain the possibility that Smith suggested. A few more and I’ll rewrite the Nicene Creed.

Your loyal reader

Blue Cliff Record, Case 23: Baofu and Changqing Go on a Picnic

 When Baofu and Changqing went on a picnic in the hills, Baofu pointed to the top of a hill, saying, “That’s the top of Miao Peak.”1

“That’s true, you are right,” said Changqing. “But a pity,” he added.

(Xuedou: What are you doing, going on a picnic with him?

I can’t say there will be no one like these two a hundred years from now, but there will be very few.)

Later Baofu told Jingqing about this. Jingqing said, “If it were not for Master Changqing, skulls would appear in every field.”

1 Miao Peak is the Peak of Wonder, the center of Paradise, according to the Huayan or Avatamsaka Sutra.

It was one of those crazy things you do when you travel with a fairly open agenda. We'd been visiting Angkor Wat for almost a week, and didn’t have to be in Ho Chi Minh City for another two. While in Siem Reap we’d heard about an adventurous boat trip, billed as once in a lifetime: You crossed the southern end of the largest freshwater lake in southeast Asia, Tonle Sap, and then followed a long shallow river upstream to a former French provincial capital, Krong Battambang.

We booked, but so did about 200 other people, mostly European kids. After arguing with the tour organizers--we were not going to sit on the hot metal roof of a flat river boat in the blazing sun for the 8 hour trip, they relented and hired another smaller boat to take the overflow. Once on board we discovered that even in a smaller boat the trip would be arduous, the river was low but flowing swiftly against us. Three added hours under a metal roof were just as hot as sitting on one, but we were spared sunburn. In the smaller boat, we were less than 30. We met and chatted with a lovely young German couple who were on their way to work for several years in New Zealand. The journey was tough going, but company helped.

The next day was Mardi Gras, and we arranged to have dinner with them. Ashish found a highly rated restaurant called La Pomme d'Amour. I know the exact date, February 12th 2013. Sometimes larger events help mark the calendar accurately. The day before when we were cut off from the world on our river boat excursion, Benedict, the oldest person elected to the papacy since the 18th century, announced he would be the first pope in centuries to resign. 

Our new friends told us. They were actually shocked. They still considered themselves Catholic even though they were an unmarried couple, but they were definitely Bavarian. One of their own was doing something unimaginable. I was startled by the news of Benedict’s resignation, but I think that I was more amazed at how our young friends had packed for their trip. The man wore incredibly crafted lederhosen with a pressed white shirt and his very beautiful girlfriend had on an exquisitely embroidered traditional dress. Ashish and I only carried the basics. Our European friends dressed for the occasion.

One thing about the French colonies, they have retained a tradition of cuisine. Even in this small Cambodian town, even after the unspeakable barbarity of the Khmer Rouge, there was still wonderful food. We enjoyed our dinner and the conversation. We agreed to explore together the next day.

We arranged for a larger tuk-tuk, seats for four, and driver for the day. Cambodians are in general smaller than a big American and a big muscled Bavarian boy, but we all managed to squeeze in. We’d heard about a bamboo train in the nearby hills. There was also a small ruin similar to Angkor Wat about 11 km out of town. We met early, before the sun got too hot. Before noon, we'd taken the train and climbed up to the ruin. We asked the driver what else he would recommend. With limited communication he indicated that he knew a place. 

The small Buddhist temple at Phnom Sampeau was about another 7-10 km across the flat plain. It's nice enough but really just a fairly ordinary concrete temple variations of which dot southeast Asia. We thought that was the end of our trip. But once there, some young boys drove up on their two wheelers and offered to take us up the very steep hill to the caves. They were very friendly, and happy for the work. We were told that there was a pagoda and a very simple Buddhist shrine near the summit. We could just make out the pagoda from the valley floor. At a kind of intermediate temple on the side on the narrow path about halfway up a few monks were chanting and performing rituals, but more just seemed to be hanging out with some Cambodian families. The walls inside were decorated with rather naive scenes from the Lord Buddha’s teaching career. They seemed to be done in acrylics right out of the tube. I noticed that you could commission a wall painting for a hundred US dollars and have it dedicated to whomever you wanted to have remembered and continually prayed for. I made a mental note that I might have one done for my dad. Somehow I began to sense that the whole mountain was about remembering ancestors. 

We continued uphill with our young breakneck drivers, eventually arriving at the top of some wooden steps leading down into a large opening of what seemed to be very beautiful limestone caves. We noticed that a very simple Buddhist shrine and altar had been set up on a level just below us. We had arrived at the killing caves, a Khmer Rouge execution site where they shot, strangled or slit the necks of their victims at the rim of this daylight shaft or ceiling hole, and then threw the dead bodies into the cave. Sometimes we were told, towards the end of their atrocities, in order to save bullets they simply threw people, teachers, doctors, almost anyone with an education, into the caves. They’d even killed children. If their victims were lucky, they died when they hit the floor. Otherwise they died of starvation or were killed when other bodies landed on them. There was a glass box containing skulls and some bone fragments. I can’t remember if anyone mentioned an estimate of how many people were killed there, but between 17 April 1975 – 7 January 1979 nearly two million were executed in a small country, so the number of people killed here was perhaps tens of thousands if not more. 

We were shaken.

We climbed back up the steps and continued towards the summit on foot. We separated. Ashish and our friends headed towards the viewpoint. It seemed like just a few steps from the opening of the cave I saw an elevated path towards the pagoda and small shrine. Inside a monk was sitting on the floor. When he saw me approach the door, he gestured for me to come and sit with him. 

He was perhaps in his late 30’s, early 40’s, Cambodian. I calculated that he would have either been born during the period of the Khmer’s slaughter or just after it ended, after millions were killed. He didn’t say. He was alone. He was too young to be the abbot of the community, but he wasn’t the duty monk. A rather forlorn layman by the shrine in the killing cave collected donations. The monk spoke meticulous, fluent English. There’d been many Americans in Cambodia after the war, helping rebuild the country. Perhaps he'd been part of that effort.

He asked where I was from, and how I got there? He didn’t see many foreign tourists. I asked him where he’d learned such good English. He told me that he’d been to Catholic school. He’d been Catholic. I think I remember him saying that he’d even been a Catholic religious. Yes, of course he knew some Jesuits. They were mostly in Phnom Penh. 

I asked him what he did. He said that he mostly just sat and practiced in the small shrine room. Sometimes people came by. Sometimes they asked him to chant memorial prayers for their relatives who’d died in the caves, but not often. Senior monks did that. There would have been a donation involved. Some people just had to talk; he was there to listen; sometimes people just sat with him. I felt a real connection with my fellow former-Catholic Buddhist.

After about a half hour, Ashish called out that it was time to get back down hill. It was getting dark. The motorcycle boys were anxious about the narrow path. There was a long tuk-tuk drive back to Battambang. I bowed and left.

Grâce à Google I was able to find some pictures of Phnom Sampeau. It’s almost exactly as I remember it with perhaps a few additions over a decade. Grâce à the koan, I am able to picnic with Baofu and Changqing on a peak of wonder. Grâce à my friend, we were able to help some of the skulls in the Killing Caves lose their power over people’s lives, my own included. 

La Pomme d'Amour still gets good reviews for lovely food. I stayed in touch with the young German couple for a while on Facebook. When I lost track of them, they were no longer a couple, but apparently both happy. I hope they are still thriving. I have no idea what became of my wonderful solitary monk. I trust that he’s still making skulls, in one form or another, disappear from every field. The koan says there's some chance.

Even if you haven’t been to the Killing Cave, the pictures I retrieved from Google tell the story well.

I don’t recall the large statue of the Buddha’s parinirvana. My feeling is that it covers the actual lip that they used to throw the bodies into the cave.







© Bo Løvschall


The path to the pagoda and shrine, exactly as I remember it.

My skull clearing monk was sitting in the shrine room at the top of these steps, behind this door.

The intermediate temple, with the naive paintings.



Wat Phnom Sampeau on the valley floor,




Phnom Sampeau from across the fields. It is a high mountain for southern Cambodia.






This would have been the first stop of the day.

La Volonté de Savoir, Foucault on Sexuality

McLeod Ganj, Vesak
Revised Dewali, 2022

After all the bad press, after the astronomical settlements of lawsuits, after the decimation of congregations, Zen masters, priests and politicians continue to behave badly--still. Recently a gifted young teacher, Josh Bartok, resigned from the vibrant Greater Boston Zen Center amid a swirl of accusations of sexual impropriety. As he was trained by James Ismael Ford, my teacher’s teacher, I took note. Bartok joins a list that keeps growing.

Some blame it on losing sight of the true teaching of the Buddha, or Jesus. Others blame it on human frailty, or sin, or disregarding the grave precepts. or teachers and priests getting power-hungry when elevated to a position of authority and taking advantage of people in their care.

But taking a position of blame and passing judgment is not ultimately very useful in my view. It is also distinct from creating policies and procedures for establishing protections against abuse within our communities and hearing grievances. Blanket condemnation is not, to use a Buddhist phrase, skillful means. It creates a dead end.

I would like to take a step back and try to carefully examine the situation through a different set of lenses.

When I showed the first draft of this article to various people, some of whom I did not know but who’d been involved in communities where significant damage had occurred, they thought that I was simply doing revisionist history, letting certain people off the hook, or creating loopholes for abusive behavior. These people felt that after all the bad blood, there had not really ever been a proper settling of accounts. I want to be clear: I do not want to change the record, or excuse anyone whose behavior has caused harm. That is the arena for those who’ve experienced the damage or insult and the perpetrators, but we all take sides. And in a real sense the whole community has been harmed. But it is also true that the arena of taking a position, leveling blame, feeling some degree of personal fear and exposure is fertile ground for a Zen student to practice introspection.

The list is long, and includes many of the most important of the first generation of Zen teachers in the West. I have to ask myself as a practitioner, and a person who’s had important interactions with several teachers whose behavior has fallen under a dark cloud, how can I understand my own feelings in a way that might shed light rather than simply confirm a long standing belief system. Along the way, I also want to do some excavation of persistent, compelling but useless assumptions.

Is it about sex?

In Jesuit school, we teenage boys lined up in chapel on First Friday mornings to receive absolution for the sins of the flesh, or what was euphemistically called “self-abuse.” Maybe there was an occasional confession of cheating on the Latin vocabulary quiz, but we all masterbated.

The line for Father Halloran’s confessional was long because he was understanding of adolescent sex, or at least he seemed more tolerant than immigrant Father Murphy who was Puritanical, angrily demanding manly resolve that you would never to play with your penis again. Halloran might have simply been bored, or realistic, or perhaps he’d just given up, but he still demanded a sufficient level of shame before he dispensed the penance of 5 “Our Father’s” and 10 “Hail Mary’s.”

When the inner compulsion for shaming became intolerable, or you’d made the pious decision to try to live like a saint, you quickly ducked into Father Murphy’s booth where all hell broke loose. I made the mistake of asking for his absolution once and never went back. I also didn’t want to be seen in that line by Saint Aloysius’s shrine because the boys who masterbated together feared that you named names when Murphy asked the prescribed question from the confession manual “with yourself or others?” Dealing with ostracization as well as shame. Social ramifications have always part and parcel of sexual training.

Sex, shame, purification, reslove, failure to meet the standard demanded by the Irish Catholic cult, sex, shame, repeat. Perhaps this was just the way things have always worked, La Comédie humaine. We know without a doubt that some Zen teachers, priests or politicians will continue to abuse just as surely as the same faces will be back at the understanding, tired or just fed-up Father Halloran’s confessional the Friday before they are next obliged to perform the Sunday ritual of Holy Communion with their parents, free of mortal sin.

Shifting Zip codes

Then some of us became Buddhists. Perhaps part of the motivation for our seeking was to find a more tolerant setting for our sexual personna or nonconforming proclivities, or at least an escape from the charade. This was certainly part of my story. I joined a truly ecumenical movement. Irish Catholics may have a particular flavor as opposed to the Jews, but basically the same tales, the same quilt run through the whole sangha, and this includes the immigrant communities, the only possible difference being the level of toleration.

However, we soon discovered that our sexual training, repression and cultural taboos had simply shifted zip codes. They were persistent and stubborn. The public uproar at the San Francisco Zen Center around Richard Baker’s alleged misconduct has subsided. Or has it, really? The list of other Zen teachers who have confessed to abusing their students is long and continues to grow. Perhaps we’ve weeded out some bad actors, or maybe they have become more cautious. Some might even have developed an awareness of normative ethics, but still, when we survey the landscape rigorously, we see wreckage; friends who fled practice, or stayed but never seemed to make much progress; teaching careers shortcuited or ruined; persistent rumor and recrimination that harm the sangha. The evidence of unresolved trauma and hurt is vast.

To our credit, we've made our practice spaces more safe; to varying degrees people feel free enough to open up without subjecting themselves to exploitation; there are ethical guidelines in place in most centers; we have even asked professional therapists to help us craft the norms. But honesty, if pressed, I do not think that most people feel that the issues surrounding sex and practice have been resolved. Some feel that we’ve just added another layer of admonition and prohibition to our norms for sexual behavior. Some say it will take a generation to heal the wounds. Others say what we need is a return to that old time religion.

Let me be clear. As I stated at the very beginning, I am not setting out to create excuses. I do not intend to rewrite history. I will not whitewash what is clearly harmful behavior, nor will I play the game of weighting a teacher’s charisma to offset egregious failings. I won’t reduce our practice to the level of a cult. We cannot suppress genuine feelings of hurt that arise from past experience because, as the saying goes, time heals all wounds. It does not. I was a victim of sexual abuse myself. Bob Hoffman raped me within a few months of completing his Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. This story remains almost entirely in the shadows. When I’ve attempted to bring it to light, I’ve been ignored or gaslighted. A senior teacher of the Process told me, “It was 50 years ago so get over it.” But this New Age “Love and Light” process is a cult, and it costs a lot of money, so the behavior is pretty much expected.

The history of sexual abuse in our Buddhist communities has been tumultous. There has not been a full accounting of the alleged misconduct because, for the most part, sexual conversations are secret; even when we talk about them, there are some areas that remain hidden; the secrecy adds to their power making it more difficult to dislodge. There has never been a full recognition of the depth of the abuse because it touches the deepest core of human intimacy; people, mostly women, say that they are still hurting; we should believe them. I do. The abusers have not taken full responsibility; people are still speaking up despite calls to move on. There should be more compassion for both victim and abuser. We are a Buddhist community; understanding and compassion are at the heart of our practice. There’s always room for improvement.

Taboo or precept?
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”― George Orwell

I ask myself how as a practitioner I might address the situation. A Zen priest friend whom I admire and trust warned me against “starting off from [a] wrong assumption... and end up justifying a forgone conclusion.” I’ll frame my question to address my friend’s fear, and I will do so directly: what are the assumptions that seem to drive everyone to a foregone conclusion? Let me frame the inquiry in another way. If the same question is asked over and over, and the answer that’s repeated continues to be totally unsatisfactory, is it a bad question, a good question asked in the wrong way, or simply a question not designed to reveal useful information?

My intention is to ask honest questions in a way that sheds light on our dilemma. My methodology: I will do my best to recreate the set of assumptions that are the underpinning of the conversation, and I would add, provide what’s been taken as demonstrable ammunition for presumptive guilt. Then, hopefully, I can challenge these assumptions to see what remains.

They first assumption is that the perp’s, even a Zen prep’s action takes place in a vacuum, against the stark moral backdrop of right and wrong. False. The further assumption is that by simply labeling it and calling it out, we can tame the beast. False.

We haven’t eliminated sexual abuse from our practice because we can’t. The way sex manifests in each individual will be unique, but just because one enters the zendo and sits without moving does not guarantee that the sexual impluse sits quietly. It’s more likely that we notice how active it is. It’s the nature of self-investigation. Sex cannot escape our investigation, but it does not deserve a special place. Nor can we eliminate risk when we venture into uncomfortable or forbidden territory. Those may seem like extremes, but my non-professional survey points to both the exclusion of sex and evading dangerous territory are common in most practice centers. How often is sex directly discussed in dharma talks? My experience is that this happens rarely and then usually as a footnote. How often is it the subject of scuttlebutt and rumor? If the walls had ears. What’s the first response when people ask about what’s been done since Roshi’s picadillos were uncovered? We’ve put a code of ethics in place. Don’t you worry your pretty little head.


The Will to Know.

The second part of my methodology will be to analyze the conversation itself. Is it simply a straightforward case involving sex outside of marriage or the accepted boundaries of intimate relationships. The fact that I am going to cite the work of Michel Foucault will alert you that I think there’s a lot more going on.

I have been studying the French philosopher’s first volume of The History of Sexuality, La Volonté de Savoir. It’s been a real eye-opener. His contention is that the discourse about sexual behavior in the West since over the last few centuries has been incorporated or subsumed into a larger conversation about power and control. I would prefer the word hijacked, but it carries too many pejorative connotations to allow for anything close to objective analysis.

Foucault says that despite the modern liberal claim that sex has been repressed, forced into silence, or even neglected, the truth is that the level, frequency and specificity of our conversations about sex have actually increased. These conversations are varied, complex, and sometimes thinly disguised. Talking about sex does not create a problem; the way we’ve been trained to talk about sex, specifically in the West since the 17th century, has created a conversation that didn’t exist before, and, I would add, certainly one that didn’t exist in the Lord Buddha’s day. You don’t need a hefty dose of Irish Catholicism in parochial school to take part. It’s pervasive. The Irish have merely repeated the conversation with our particular brogue as have Jews and Latinas and Italians and Asians, each with their own inflection.

Foucault fills three volumes with his analysis. I will focus on the first few pages of the fist volume where he defines the scope of his inquiry and spells out his methodology. I will be talking mainly about the situation at the San Francisco Zen Center when Richard Baker Roshi stepped down from his leadership role because it is the one that I am most familiar with. There were equally disruptive scenarios occurring in other Buddhist communities in the early history of Buddhism in the West--Robert Aitken Roshi’s interactions with Eido Tai Shimano in Honolulu and subsequently with his organization in New York are now part of the public record as Aitken’s letters have been released by the University of Hawaii. They reveal the conundrum of trying to shield a growing community from scandal. Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi ’s dalliances have also become part of the public record as well as Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi Roshi and the more flamboyant history of Chögyam Trungpa and Ösel Tendzin.

The sequence of events Foucault outlines seems to fit with what occurred at Zen Center. When the scandal of Richard Baker’s romance with a married woman began to tear the San Francisco Zen Center apart, they called in a triage team. People were counseled by therapists and senior practice leaders that they had to talk about it. And that they did. I was not present, but I know many people who were. A lot never stopped talking about it. They are Buddhists so, at least on the surface, the intent to gossip, blame, or take sides, was absent. Also Baker removed himself, so there was no lightning rod, but among most of the people I know from Zen Center, they were definitely taking sides. I was trained by two men who followed Baker to Santa Fe where he started over. When they returned to San Francisco’s Hartford Street Zen Center, both Issan and Phil Whalen established a congenial working relationship with senior people who had taken over running the San Francisco Center, but, well, let’s just say that they didn’t talk about Baker’s sexual exploits, real or imagined, in polite conversation. I will make my mother happy and not join that conversation either, though I will allow myself a few general statements about the nature of the conversation.


The Zen Speakeasy
Or a general economy of discourses on sex, or the way in which sex is “put into discourse.’”

I will try to follow Foucault as closely as I can. “The central issue . . . is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one assets its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said.” [Page 9]

He says further that his main interest is locating “the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior…” I will try to use these questions as prompts for my own self-investigation. When I was coming into my sexual maturity in the Jesuit school, I learned that even the solitary pleasure of masterbation has a structure in the public conversation. All the boys at my prep school knew that Father Halloran would be less judgmental about adolescent sex just by the length of the line that formed by his confessional. Foucault does not claim that this examination will yield some correct position or reveal the truth about sex and power, but rather bring forth “the will to knowledge,” la volonté de savoir, which serves our inquiry.

My questions are from the point of view of being on the meditation cushion and not as a leader among the poobah of a practice center. Different sets of concerns yield different answers. Though my concern is shaped by the institutional response, it’s not my job to formulate a more polished defense or rebuttal in the debate, or more clear language to designate it.Historically what do we know about the history of the sexual ethos in the early days of Zen in the West, specifically among the first generation of Westerner students and their interactions with their Asian teachers?

From the very beginning, there was a lot of sex going on at San Francisco Zen Center, at least among some groups. It was an open secret. This was equally true when Suzuki Roshi was alive as when Baker Roshi assumed the helm. I assume that Suzuki Roshi knew about his students’ trysting, but to my knowledge he said nothing publicly. He surely did talk about it in private practice conversations, but we only have anecdotal evidence and no way of knowing what he really said. He was also steeped in Japanese temple culture which colored his attitude in ways that we will never fully understand.

What’s also true is that there was a lot of negative judgment about sexal behavior at Zen Center. We can all trace the outline of the public conversation. I can recognize the “orthodox,” public judgments simply by listening to the conversations that persist. But there is also evidence of personal struggle, admonitions, conflict about sex that people struggle with. Issan once said to me, “People call all the time. They need to talk.” One of the reasons why Issan was such a popular teacher was that you could talk about sex openly with him. He really did understand. Not being judgmental gave him the ability to listen. When sex presented a problem in our adloscent lives, we lined up at the Father Halloran’s confessional, the priest who at least pretended that he understood your plight. How much better a priest who really understood and could be compassionate.

Here’s what one student told me when I asked him about the sexual culture of Zen Center. “There was definitely a Puritanical aura about the place, ‘a disciple of the Buddha does not misuse the senses.’ . . . It was like being Catholic again, though in a small community full of the smart, good children in the front row of the class, who love to click their tongues at others and rat them out in senior student meetings. It was kind of an unwritten rule that you had to be in a committed relationship to have sex, but sex was never really mentioned.” Apparently this student found his way to Father Murphy’s confessional box by the Saint Aloysius shrine.


Deconstruct!
The Case: Phil blurted out, “the Presbyterians got the upper hand.”

Foucault says that it is legitimate to ask why sex was associated with sin for such a long time and question how this pervasive attitude was formed and why it persists. Of course partial blame goes to the scriptures and the taboos of our Abrahamic religious past, but close examination will show that the Sabbath celebration has roots is the celebration of sex, and most taboos single out specific sex acts. Foucault notes that the association with sin comes part and parcel with the religious power structure; they define the taboos. Phil exploded, slurring a notoriously staid religious sect while in the same breath berating a particular group of senior students. The ascetic discipline is “especially careful in repressing useless energies, the intensity of pleasures, and irregular modes of behavior.”[Page 9] If I didn’t know better I might label John Calvin a hidden Zen master (or an extremely strict, Western, image of one). The confusion might have its roots in history but it continues to exist in the heads of some zennies. And, in answer to Phil, the Presbyterians had no need to stage a coup d’etat when the war was going on in peoples’ heads..

In Buddhist ethics, the precept that is cited is the Misuse of Sex, whereas Foucault’s analysis is to observe and trace the use of power. It’s a tricky distinction. We’ve enlisted sex in the service of domination, or that is the assumption. Let me cite an example. If a person wanted to assert his or her position in the hierarchy, why does an expensive dinner at Green’s pass under the radar, while sex is a red flag? What if, perhaps, what we took as a sexual violation was a consensual sexual encounter which we couldn’t recognize, and I underline, “we couldn’t recognize.”

Foucault also notes that “[t]oday it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form--so familiar and important in the West--of preaching.” [Page 7] I would note that we are not talking about a sermon about the Joy of Sex, popular in the hey day of the California New Age, but sin, hell and damnation. (Foucault also notes the “solemnity” that pervades most public conversations about sex. [Page6] This rings true. How often have have we heard a sexual joke in dharma talk?)

It is just not possible to remain unaffected by this discourse. Most of the automatic response in the west, across the board, would be for the sin and damnation side, or, if we are in a rebellious mood, a swing towards the Joy of Sex’s happy sermon. Both positions are simply reactions within a set of cultural sexual norms.

If we define the relationship between sex and power as repression, Foucault points to that he calls the speaker’s benefit. “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets the established law; he anticipates the coming freedom.” [Page 6] He goes on to an analysis of the way that early psychiatrists or the 19th century felt compelled to make excuses when they broached the topic of sex.Taking a position is getting your feet wet even if the position is against what appears to be repression. I noticed the same pattern of apology in the initial unmasking of a Zen teacher’s sexual transgressions, and I notice in myself a kind of self-approval when I side with the accusers. But then these speakers quickly pivot to a broader condemnation, including for example teaching style, politics,spending habits, and other things they might find objectionable. Taking the high seat, it is a short leap from sex outside of marriage to fast cars and expensive suits even though there is zero logical connection. This is also the speaker’s benefit and a tough one to catch because it is shielded by the righteousness of “correct” sexual behavior.

I would venture this extends to the tone, and even the content of practice instruction. I noticed that when I was talking to a teacher, and stumbled on some strong inner objection to what was being said, I dismissed it with an inner notation that he or she is a hot mess so why pay attention? When teachers can’t be saints, and control their penises, nothing they say has any value.


Blurring the question

“Only in those places (the brothel and the mental hospital) would untrammeled sex have a right to (safely isularized) forms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence.” [Page 5]

What happens when I realize that I’m just following, or reacting to a set script; that there is a conversation that has shaped what I hold to be true? It is a cultural creation, perhaps not entirely specific to the west, but in many other ways, entirely a creation of western culture.

Reading and studying Foucault, even when I didn’t fully understand the analysis (one could have hoped that he was easier to understand, but he was a French academic), I realized that there is a script. It exists outside our zen communities, and does not have its roots in Buddhist precepts. Foucault has shown that this is a creation, a “mental reaction” in a particular time and place, so it might be possible to break free.

Can I use this analysis to discover a hidden treasure? I am obliged to thread the needle carefully. I can see that I am part of a particular conversation, and, necessarily, I will remain part of that conversation. But perhaps if I can follow it carefully, I will become less enmeshed in it. There may be echoes in psychotherapy, but it seems a bit broader. It is not just my sexual proclivities and an analysis of their root cause in my unconscious, but the context where I first learned about sex.

I used to say about several of the men I know whose careers have been the subject of accusation and lots of scuttlebut: they and their partners were consenting adults. End of conversation. But this is using the “Get Out of Jail Free” card. If I am going to be rigorous, I have to also examine this statement. I began this discussion by mentioning Roshi Bartok and then never said another word. I don’t know Josh, and I can’t comment. However I will bet that the conversation in the Greater Boston Zen Center contains many of the elements that Foucault describes. Does that excuse anyone? No, but it might provide some insight for the people who struggle with what occurred.

Were there repercussions of those First Friday line ups of shame and guilt, barriers to experience sexual pleasure? Of course. Has the barrier between me and the pleasure of sex vanished? Not entirely, but I am a lot happier than I was when I was obliged to stand in line for Father Halloran’s absolution.

Three cheers for Zen Boring

James Ford says in his essay about Saint Francis of Assisi being a Bodhisattva, “Wali Ali Meyer once described a madzub as ‘a human being who has an immediate and intimate relationship with the God reality, and who often is absorbed in that realm and at the same time appears strange, incoherent, eccentric, but somehow deeply invested with power. In some cultures madzubs would be treated as sacred treasures, in others treated as if insane.` The Madzubs (distinguished as a kind or level of mysticism) may be more Sufi than anybody else for they may be seeing God in everything and everybody.

While I found this description challenging, I also thought that it was clearly discriminatory. I went back to the various texts from the major traditions and looked for a clear definition of Bodhisattva. It is not to be found. There seems to be a basic definition with a lot of elaboration reflecting the practice in the various schools.

A bodhisattva:

1. (in Mahayana Buddhism) a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so through compassion for suffering beings.

2. A bodhisattva, or bodhisatva, is a person who is on the path towards bodhi or Buddhahood.

3. Bodhisattva, (Sanskrit), Pali bodhisatta (“one whose goal is awakening”), in Buddhism, one who seeks awakening (bodhi)—hence, an individual on the path to becoming a buddha. Because of the high degree of difficulty in the undertaking, the Elder School reserves the distinction to a few heroic practitioners who are little less than gods.

4. Bodhisattvas can in some of the Mahayana forms take on the celestial qualities that Buddhists like to celebrate even if not cultivating the same. There are the Four Great Bodhisattvas: Avalokiteśvara or Compassion. Kṣitigarbha, a kind of factotum for relieving suffering; Mañjuśrī, Wisdom; Samantabhadra, or the pure essence of Being; I did actually know one man who came close to being a living, breathing Avalokiteśvara, but that’s another story.

5. In the Tibetan tradition, there is the added qualification of having generated bodhichitta, a spontaneous awakening of great compassion which, coupled with equanimity, allows us to wish that everyone from our mother-in-law to our two timing ex the ability to escape from samsara. This is labeled as an heroic feat, and well it might be.

6. In western Zen the word has taken on a more egalitarian meaning. One famous American Zen master used to begin all his teisho “Greetings Bodhisattvas,” encouragement no matter where we stood on the Bell curve of enlightenment. No matter if someone within earshot would go out and backstab a fellow sangha member by evening of the same day, the fact that they’d plunked their ass down on a cushion for some period of meditation was enough for Aitken Roshi to confer this high title of respect. I respect that.

Saint Francis spoke the language of the birds and stripped naked in front of the Bishop of Assisi to teach a few things about the essentials. I certainly don’t want to take away any of his powerful mysticism or his rather rudimentary teaching methods, but if we are to follow in this new iteration of Buddhist teaching, I don’t want to necessarily create a new category of naked roshis showing how to be genuinely authentic, but I do want to extend the definition.

Without the boring, sometimes insufferable characters in our sanghas, we’d be lost. They also qualify as true seekers of the Way. So are also the timid practitioners, the less intellectually gifted, the scholarly, the nerds, the sanctimonious, the annoying, the repressed. They all fit into the definition of Bodhisattva that I’ve landed on. 

Given that it’s Buddhism in many variant forms, there’s going  to be some dispute about the meaning of terms and extent of the list: Boring Bodhisattva. Timid Bodhisattva. Nerdy Bodhisattva. Dumb Bodhisattva. IvoryTower Bodhisattva. Saccharine Sweet Bodhisattva. Insufferable Bodhisattva. Uptight Bodhisattva. The list goes on,

Oh how human human beings are.

What would Bapuji be Doing?

Sunday, 2 October
Gandhi Jayanti 2022 in India

Originally posted to my blog “Buddha, S.J.” on 23 April 2020. Today, July 15th, 2021, the Coronavirus is still a threat here in India; I have revised and reposted it. And deep thanks to my friend Ankit Deshwal for inspiring and encouraging me.

On Tuesday, 13 April 2021, I fasted. It was 397 days since the first Coronavirus lockdown in India. It was also the first day of Ramadan. I am not Muslim, or even particularly religious, but I’d been asking myself what would Bapuji be doing during this pandemic, and my answer was very clear: he'd be fasting. 

Since the founding of their Republic, Indians have faced many challenges. Being true to the principles that created the largest democracy on the face of the earth, each generation has to reformulate an answer in the language and the circumstances of the present moment to this question: what would Bapuji do? This question is more than lip-service to the man whose compassion and courage inspire us. It is more than just a sound bite on the TV news to gain political advantage. When facing the silent enemy of the Coronavirus, a life and death situation, our answer might determine whether we live or die. 

The threat of death and the economic destruction brought on by the virus is very different from the occupation of the British Raj. There is no enemy we can point to, no foreign army, no terrorist, no General Dyer, and also no malicious government conspiracy or incompetence. The victims of this virus are not defined by the language they speak, nor the clothes they wear, the clubs where they hang out, nor the religion they practice. The virus does not obey human laws or ordinary conventions. It is a force of nature.

And the threat is very grave. Many people are dying in the second wave. Crops are not harvested. Shops are closed again. Temples, mosques, shrines, churches, and gurudwaras, all are empty. The hospitals are turning sick people away because all the beds are taken. Doctors and nurses are being overworked, getting sick themselves and dying because they are caring for huge numbers of patients. But most Indians, some more willing than others, are following the advice of our leaders and health professionals and staying home, reducing the rate of infection.

But this comes at an enormous cost. Nerves are frayed. Families confined at home are seeing both the love that brought them together as well as the negative traits that they would normally tolerate. And yet, we have to do what we can because our survival depends on it. 

Of course it is far too early to begin to draw any lessons from this experience. But certain things are clear, and I think we should keep them in mind because we cannot really know how long this situation will last.

First we are all in this together. The virus does not discriminate between Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, or secularist. Our only defense is a united front. We will only succeed if we work together. We number about 135 crores and share a relatively small section of the earth’s surface. This is a difficult situation even under the best of circumstances.

Second, we have faced other crises in the past, and we have prevailed. People know how to work together facing impossible situations. We've realized that any struggle is hard work, but there is no way to avoid the pain that our human life presents us.

Third, Coronavirus is stealthy. It hides. In war, soldiers wear uniforms so that they know who they are fighting with and who are the enemies. The virus has robbed us of that luxury. It has no memory of past injustices. It does not hold grudges. It does not discriminate. To those who might say that the virus itself is God’s punishment for evil, I would just beg for humility in the face of calamity. Which one of us really knows the mind of God? It is perfectly understandable to try to blame someone else when facing an overwhelming fear. It is an instinctive reaction to lash out, and we think it helps. But the virus does not share our prejudices.

And fourth, there will be pain, suffering, and loss. These are the facts of our lives now. There is no way to avoid it. 

When I first learned about Bapuji’s fasting, as a Westerner I was puzzled. It seems obvious that the way to fight an enemy is to use all the strength and power at our command. I thought he inflicted pain on himself to motivate others, perhaps even through guilt, to come to his way of thinking or unite against the British.

But perhaps it was the only thing he could do. There was no other defense. There was no power that he had to defeat the oppressor other than his inner strength. He nourished his soul by depriving his body. It was also his way of standing up to the suffering of life, accepting it willingly. 

I feel helpless in the face of the epidemic. I remain confident that the situation will improve, but I cannot predict when or how. In the meantime, I will do my best, and I will try to overcome my prejudice and work with everyone to defeat our faceless enemy. And I will fast.