Your Way, Our Way or the Highway? A Cautionary Tale.

A friend told me that he received some advice from a Daoist master. I automatically distrust some Western dude sporting an ancient Chinese title. I immediately think it’s an esoteric label to make him credible. Honestly I can’t really say that I understand what Daoism is, and I certainly haven’t the faintest idea of what it might have been meant in China in the 6th century BCE, but I’m equally sure that Master X has no secret information. The friend of course didn’t actually repeat his Taoist teacher’s advice. I’m sure that I would be required to fork over a handful of cash before I had the pleasure. We are a gullible lot. 

When I investigated my initial response, I discovered two basic questions: First, what prejudices spark my immediate response? And second, what criteria can I use to trust a teacher and what he or she teaches? These are separate questions. It is important not to discover one answer and think that it provides a solution to both investigations. It is easy to conflate the answers: Just because I have discovered that I am distrustful for X reason, the teacher and his or her teaching is not automatically trustworthy Or the flipside: Because I find this or that teacher personally trustworthy, therefore my suspicions about his or her spiritual lineage must be mistaken. 

These questions are separate but interrelated: How can I recognize what I call “authentic” practice; and what makes a teacher trustworthy? They bite their own tail. Some people, even trusted teachers, have counseled me to trust my feelings. But when I honestly examine them, I find a twisted mess. I was told to just sit and they will sort themselves out. I sat. Perhaps a few of the knots disentangle, but oftentimes no clear direction emerges. Judging by the solutions that appear in real time, there are no easy answers. 

In what I see as an attempt to deal with this dilemma, sometimes in western Zen circles we practitioners get lost in a lot of talk about “our” way, the Rinzai Way, the Soto way, the Right Way and the Wrong Way. This jabber is barely distinguishable from cultish blabber. 

In 1990 when nearly 100 men were dying from AIDS in San Francisco every week, I was talking with a bright, engaging woman who came to sit zazen at Hartford Street. She asked some questions about the Hospice and Issan. I invited her to come back, perhaps become a hospice volunteer. She begged off, explaining that she was very involved in her practice at “the big Zen Center.” I remember her words exactly. “We do the real Japanese Buddhism: we bow at everything every time we turn around.” I confess to having a few judgmental thoughts. While we were cooking for dying men, and sitting with them when they took their last breaths, she was bowing in every doorway and to a statue at the top of every stairwell.

Perhaps there was something about the dying, knowing that you’re dying and the emotions that stirs up. I cannot say. Several of Issan’s close students didn’t visit him when he was dying. Some actually disappeared when he started to get sick later explaining that they couldn’t bear seeing him suffer. I met him when HiV started to ravage his body and mind so that is really the only Issan I knew. It was his gift to me, and my good luck. But on the other hand, when I listen to stories of Issan at Tassajara or at Zen Center, Green Gulch or Santa Fe. I am certain that dying Issan was the same man dedicating himself diligently and completely to the practice.

I never saw the woman again. She never met Issan. At some point she might hear stories at Zen Center about him. In my gut I feel that she missed an opportunity to experience a man who lived out the teaching until his last breath, but I also know that Issan would never have faulted her for avoiding him and bowing every time she turned around. He was so non-judgement and tolerant. I also admit to applying a little pressure on the woman--I needed help at the hospice--and I also admit to feeling slightly superior in my role running the hospice which was of course real practice. I can’t set my experience center stage for applause, but on the other hand, I need to avoid rote answers, or getting caught up in some cultural forms that I don’t understand as if they unlock some esoteric secret. 

Quick change of scene

Listening in on a recent discussion bemoaning the death of Zen in Japan--so many first-son priests escaping the lifeless tedium of administering the family's temple business, my mind went back to a morning I spent looking over the library at Hartford Street, searching for a book that might unlock the mystery of the universe. Trained as a Jesuit, I hoped to find an answer, even a coded one, recorded by someone at some time in some place that might point me in the right direction.

I picked up a volume and read about the third and final destruction of Nalanda, including its vast library, and started a conversation with Phil Whalen. I was more horrified at the loss of the sutras, mahayana texts and commentaries, including all the works, notes and who knows what else of the pivotal scholar Nāgārjuna than I was by the wanton murder of thousands of monks and teachers. I blurted out something about the horror of burning books to Phil who was sitting in his chair across from me. He just looked up, smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. They left us enough, just enough.”

But Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji is not alone in trying to destroy the dharma by burning books and killing monks and nuns. Beginning in 1950 Mao and the People’s Liberation Army systematically destroyed monasteries and burned as many sacred texts as they could lay their hands on in Tibet. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration began the campaign of Haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈), literally "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni," which led to the wholesale destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries as well as sacred texts. The Taliban destroyed huge ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan Afghanistan early 2001 which shocked the world and was soon followed by the regime’s defeat, but it did not prevent them from reasserting their hardline earlier this year.

So while I deplore book-burning and destruction of religious art, their preservation is not a necessary condition for our practice. The loss of cultural Japanese Buddhism, centuries old beauty and tradition, including bowing to everything all the time, is a real loss, but I might have to let it go.

How much remains? Just enough if they left an instruction manual or we figure out how to use it.