Phil asks me the Big Question

Was Phil as confused as he pretended to be? Or was he just being a wily old fox?

Mumonkan Case 2 

Hyakujô and the Fox 

Whenever master Hyakujô delivered a sermon, an old man was always there listening with the monks. When they left, he left too. One day, however, he remained behind. 

The master asked him, “What man are you, standing in front of me?” 

The man replied, “Indeed, I am not a man. In the past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I lived on this mountain as a priest. On one occasion a monk asked me, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' Because of this answer (For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness), I fell into the state of a fox for 500 lives. Now, I beg you, Master, please say a turning word on my behalf and release me from the body of a fox.” 

Then he asked, “Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?” 

The master answered, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” Upon hearing this, the old man immediately became deeply enlightened

It was Saturday morning. Only a few minutes remained until the last period of meditation ended. Phil was set to descend the stairs to the zendo and begin the ritual of opening the dharma. He was legally blind. It all required a lot of effort and planning. He was going to give a talk on this koan, Hyakujô and the Fox.

I was being his jisha and carried the incense. We paused at the top of the stairs. He suddenly decided he needed to check the exact wording of the old man’s question. Phil, another old man, could not make a mistake. He asked out loud, “Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?  What was his answer, yea or nay? What did it say exactly? Is the man free from Cause and Effect, or is he still trapped?” 

He asked me, “Check it out in the Mumonkan, will you?” But the tone of his voice sounded more like a command. He appeared agitated. He seemed to expect that I should have had some ability to find a particular case. “It’s very famous, he said. “It's in the Mumonkan. It must be somewhere on the shelf in the living room. It’s a very important case.” 

I have described his ability to find the page, the paragraph and the sentence of an author he loved in his meticulously arranged library, but that morning, standing in the living room at Hartford Street, the books on the shelves were a total disorganized mess.

With the koans, or at least in this particular moment, my ability completely disappeared. When I eventually located the Mumonkan, he said he could not remember the case number, and he seemed to be blaming me for not supplying the missing information. Eventually, making us only a few minutes late, I read, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' 

Phil said, “Good. His first answer is no. Thank you.” Now, he was prepared to open the dharma. I remember nothing about his talk. Questions tumbled over and over in my mind--not just is the enlightened man free from the law and cause and effect, but what exactly are we trying to free ourselves from anyway? What part of my life did I need to unyoke to be happy

A few years later, I sat with this koan for days in the damp woods of Camp Meeker. When the sun came up till the day darkened, I thought of Phil, his blindness, and his generosity. The wily old fox had given me a koan filled with indecision, red herrings, witchcraft, and a few wrong answers, probably just traps or misdirections laid out with skill.  He told me that he thought he remembered it correctly, but he wanted to double-check it. What was this puzzle that he had to get right? 

Philip was a man whose life, almost all of his waking life not occupied with meditation, was devoted to language and the written word. I can attest that words were his lovers, and he returned the favor. Now, he couldn’t read at all anymore. He was almost completely blind, and the reason was simply misdiagnosed glaucoma, which would have been easily treatable. What a tragedy. If only a doctor had been able to give him the correct word for his blindness and not assigned some rare disease that only one a thousand get. Or if he had only gotten a second opinion when the highly recommended quack told him to kiss his sight goodbye. Maybe not 500 lives as a fox, but close.

Sometimes, the law of cause and effect seems filled with random errors. Perhaps the law is quirky and poorly administered.  The koan says, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” 

The Zen master says he’s happy to have saved us all!

Phil’s verse:

HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS

by Philip Whalen

I praise

 those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick

                      splashed picture—bug, leaf,

                      caricature of Teacher

on paper held together now by little more than ink

& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

That’s just the way it is in Buddhism

I want to respond to Doug McFerran’s comment on my post "How this Jesuit became Buddhist.": Doug is an old friend whom I met through a group of former Jesuits. He said that it seemed to him that I always needed a teacher, and that he was the opposite. After I got over being defensive, I thought “good point: do we need a teacher and what for?” I had to give up feeling that I am just some weak ninny follower who needs a guru, but I can do that. There is almost universal insistence across all Buddhist schools that the transmission of the Buddha Dharma requires a student-teacher relationship. It’s not just a way of buying the teacher’s dinner, or maintaining a school’s stronghold on a student's mind and pocketbook. That’s just the way it is in Buddhism. 

Buddhism is not a revealed religion. There is no deposit of faith that closed with the death of the last of Buddha's original disciples. Of course there are lots of texts, many more that actually probably should be considered than what comes to us as the gospel of Jesus; there is also a lot of history, teachers fighting with each other, sects, scandals and disputes, all the usual stuff of human interactions. But ultimately only our own experience shows us the path. That is all we got. When the Buddha died (if I can paraphrase and even if I am not allowed to, I will), he said, “You’re on your own. I’ve given you 40 years of training. I hope it actually did some good. Everything is always changing. You’ll have to hold up your experience carefully and examine it. Try not to take any wooden nickels.”*

The result is that although there is a huge body of textual material, we have an oral religious tradition. It’s been sliced and diced by thousands and thousands of monks over approximately 93 or 95 generations since the parinirvana of the Lord Buddha, but if you want to do Buddhism, you find a teacher. My cab driver in Bangkok, in the West we’d call him a pious man, said to me, “I have a lama.” He doesn’t just go to church. At the very core of his personal practice is a person we might recognize as a monk or teacher whom he talks to about his life. The Dalai Lama has teachers, the best that money can buy, but there are men who are his teachers. He’s supposedly an incarnate Bodhisattva but he has teachers. Go figure. Every monk and nun, every student, most pious laymen and women where I live in northern India also have teachers. They probably don’t talk to them on a regular basis as we do in zen, but at some point when they decided to practice their Buddhism, to “take refuge,” a teacher accepted them, and usually gave them a new name. I have a Tibetan name that Kalu Rinpoche, one of HH’s teachers, gave me in about 1976 and another Japanese name that Phil Whalen gave me when I took the Bodhisattva precepts as a layman in 1991.

In Catholicism we have confession and the other sacraments as a way of making the invisible world present, an outward sign of an inner grace. In Buddhism we meditate, we might take the precepts and we talk. If you’re lucky you will find someone whom you can really talk to. Stuff happens in meditation. It just does. I wouldn’t say that we “deal with it” or as we might say in the West, “handle it” by talking about it, but the actual conversations become part of the practice. It is difficult to explain. Let me tell a story. Father Eimyo LaSalle was the Jesuit priest most responsible for the extraordinary number of Jesuits who have been trained and authorized as Zen teachers in their own right. He is the root teacher of a new lineage of Christian Buddhists. He was never publicly recognized as a teacher in his own right, but I am quite sure that his teacher, Yamada Koun, recognized him. I am in this same lineage. My friend David Weinstein was also a student of Yamada Roshi. David tells the story of often seeing LaSalle, then well past 90, at the zendo in Kamakura doing formal interview with his teacher. One morning David was standing with Yamada as LaSalle was leaving. Yamada turned to David and said, “there is the man who taught me how to practice the koans in life.” Teacher/teaching is not as straightforward as the English word suggests.

A liturgical note: in every Buddhist temple I’ve gone for teaching, there is singing before and after. Inevitably there is a chant that lists all the ancestors, usually with a lot of words of gratitude. On September 6th of each year, there is a founder’s ceremony at Hartford Street, and the names of Issan’s teachers from Siddhartha Gautama through Indian, Chinese, Japanese and American teachers (in an abbreviated form--there are officially more than 90 generations of teachers) are chanted. And then we all ask that his teaching--Issan’s--go on forever. We are not saying that Issan was “the Buddha,” but we acknowledge that he was a vehicle for the teaching and that he made it his own. 

When I first came to the Hartford Street Zen Center, every few months a group of monks, mostly from Japan but several Western Buddhists as well, would come by to visit the hospice. I would serve tea, maybe they stayed for zazen, they talked with Steve, Issan and Phil. They asked as many questions as they answered. They were not coming by to inquire after the health of Issan who at this point already had some notoriety as the former drag queen monk. They came to examine how the dharma met the real circumstances of the epidemic in that moment. They came to test Issan’s dharma. 

I work with the koans. After more than a thousand years of koan practice, there are several “Koans for Dummies” books that Japanese monks use to cheat, pass and get a cushy assignment. They were usually hidden in the monastery toilets and a few translations are floating around Western centers in various places. (My days of seeking out a rich temple gig are long past, not to say that I haven’t picked up a clue or two from the manuals when I was stuck). What is also true is that teachers who have been authorized to teach are also given another book, “A thousand years of  teacher’s notes,” including lots from the oral tradition--great responses, lines of inquiry, questions to ask, even gestures to look for. So when I decided to study the Blue Cliff Record, I went looking for someone who was authorized to teach it. My friend James Ismael Ford put me in touch with one of his senior students, Ed Oberholtzer. Ed and I have been working together every week for more than two years. Ed’s good. He encourages me. He never gives me an answer and when I want to peek at the precious marginalia, he will only talk about it after I have had some insight myself. Is this better than working on my own? Of course. Does this mean that neither of us go out check some juicy piece of modern Zen scholarship about a text, teacher, or sociology? We share it.

And now for the last question that I see at this point: Does anyone need any of this to be happy, or to get enlightened?  As you might have guessed, several Buddhists have already considered the question and formulated an answer. Doug, you are an Arhat, a category and description for men and women who have gained their own enlightenment. They looked at the world of samsara and they got it. They found the key and unlocked the door, and achieved a high state of inner peace. They are also called Shravakas, but I think that refers more to the library/self-help stage. But tradition also says that they still haven’t really fully got it. At least in the Mahayana, they are still not bodhisattvas, that is beings who are dedicated to the enlightenment, the freedom of all beings. There’s still too much self there, and for the Mahayanist there is No Self. If you want to figure out what that means, you might need a teacher.

And one last knot in this thread: Having a teacher, at least in my experience, is still very rich. Times are changing.  As I said I still work with a teacher. It’s part of Buddhist practice. Since I began to practice meditation, study the scripture and, most importantly, work with the koans, I have had several teachers. I do better than if I were working on my own. I know that from experience. I would describe it more like a mentor relationship, but that seems to describe a higher and lower position. Some of the people that I have talked with have less experience than I do. At this point they all are younger, but in the relationship I consider myself on equal footing. There is always something to learn. 

* *Buddha  gathered with his monks encouraging them to continue practicing everything he taught them long after he was gone. His words, translated into modern English: “I was only able to point the way for you.” He furthered: “All individual things pass away. Strive on with diligence.”

"Too Many Words"

 

What I learned from Phil Whalen about writing.

It's a matter of some reassurance

That we are physically indistinguishable from other men.

When introspection shows us

That we have different degrees of intelligence

Varying capacities for knowing morality

We lose something of our complacency

    --Scenes of Life at the Capital

One morning in July of 2022, Google’s algorithm decided that I needed to hear James Dalessandro, bestselling novelist, journalist and filmmaker, tell me about ”The Beat Poets and the Summer of Love.” Or to do justice to the algorithm’s intrinsic value, I was to pay 25 dollars to listen to Mr. Dalessandro’s wise words. When I read the blurb, he told me that Lawrence and Allen and Jack would spill light on the short lived revolution. 

In 1967 more than 100,000 young people descended into the Haight-Ashbury, donned tye-dyed tee shirts or just stripped off their clothes, took lots of drugs, had lots of sex and proclaimed a new age. The Summer of Love was also the end of Phil's sojourn in Kyoto, so it is possible that he had returned to San Francisco. But Jack had already departed the scene, renounced a lot of the Beat philosophy which he thought just gave people permission to be spiteful. I think it highly unlikely that Phil would have shared his friend Allen’s enthusiasm for a revolution. Phil’s hedonism was more restrained. Very much more actually but that didn’t stop him from loving Allen. 

Still I find it abhorrent that the Road Scholar Scholar didn’t include Phil; perhaps the platform insists that their experts focus on hot money makers. 25 bucks is 25 bucks.

I lived with Phil for about 4 years after he’d received dharma transmission from his teacher. I sat with him in sparse zendo, recorded his talks, got yelled at, went to sesshin, sewed a rakusu, listened to his gab, went with him to Walgreens and took lay precepts under him. I was as close to Phil as most of zen friends, except for the very few he really allowed into his life, Allen for one, and I know that he was in love with Lew Welsh, but aside from that, Phil was a lone wolf. We could be friends, but when I got to a place where real intimacy might have been possible, he ended it abruptly. I know others who had the same experience. He wrote “When introspection shows us/ That we have different degrees of intelligence,” and he thought of himself on the high end of that scale.

And despite his remarkable intelligence and way with words, Buddhist Phil could be incredibly dull. He once taught a class on the Heart Sutra and my head didn’t burst with the astounding insight into the interplay of form and no-form, full and empty, thinking and the end of thinking. I had to fight off sleep. Phil preferred his Buddhism boring. He could be as doctrinaire as any squawking human being, and then some. Today however, as the clouds drift down from the mountains, and internally I begin to count between the thunder and the faint flash to locate where it has struck, I am reading his verse with joy and gratitude. He was a genius. 

Morning is fading and the clouds have covered Moon Peak. I can only see as far as my closest neighbor, a small Indian hotel called “Heaven’s View,” 25 meters to the East. Monsoon is closing in. When I knew Phil and was his student, his eyesight had failed to the point where, if I can weigh his words and match it with what I can recall of his gait and gaze, he could only see vague cloud-like formations, and that had to be enough. Misdiagnosed glaucoma would take away the joy of seeing words dance on the page. He was not resentful, or if he was, he didn’t show it. The more immediate concern was how words, which had been the center of his life, the real source of his joy, would continue to nourish a voracious appetite for clarity. It was also an inventive appetite, so we experimented. I was enlisted into a small army of amanuenses. 

We would read to him. I could see him concentration latch onto a passage and hang there. Sometimes there would be a request to return to the beginning of a passage. We could not stop until instructed or we heard the han for zazen. 

Once in while there would be a request from some recondite journal which Phil could never turn down. It usually meant reworking an older prose piece. There would be no more poems. He would find a short piece that came from years back--one that I remember was about dancing around a bonfire on the beach near Bolinas. I read it once. Phil had me shift the order a few clauses, then I read it again. We put some back into their original order. I read the passage again. And then again. Finally in what sounded almost like a sigh, “Too many words. Too many words.” That was the point where work began in earnest. 

 

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. I took note. James Ismael Ford, my teacher’s teacher, trained him. Bartok joins a list that keeps growing.

Some blame it on losing sight of the actual 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.

However, taking a position of blame and passing judgment is not very useful. 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 want to step back and carefully examine the situation through different 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. After all the bad blood, they felt there had never 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 let’s be honest: we all take sides. In a real sense, the whole community has been harmed. 

But it is also true that taking a position, leveling blame, or 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 masturbated.

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 play with your penis again. Halloran might have simply been bored or realistic, or perhaps he’d just given up, but he still demanded sufficient shame before dispensing the penance of five “Our Fathers” and ten “Hail Marys.”

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 masturbated 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 been part and parcel of sexual training.

Sex, shame, purification, resolve, failure to meet the standard demanded by the Irish Catholic cult, sex, shame, repeat. Perhaps this was just how 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 our motivation for seeking was to find a more tolerant setting for our sexual persona or nonconforming proclivities or at least an escape from the charade. This was undoubtedly part of my story. I joined a truly ecumenical movement. Irish Catholics may have a particular flavor as opposed to the Jews, but 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 tolerance.

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? 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 offenders 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 harms the sangha. The evidence of unresolved trauma and hurt is vast.

To our credit, we've made our practice spaces safer; to varying degrees, people feel free enough to open up without subjecting themselves to exploitation; ethical guidelines are 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 or play the game of weighing a teacher’s charisma to offset egregious failings. I won’t reduce our practice to the level of a cult. We cannot suppress genuine hurt feelings arising from past experiences 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. I've been ignored or gaslighted when I’ve attempted to bring it to light. 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 costs a great deal of money, so the sweep-it-under-rug behavior is pretty much expected.

The history of sexual abuse in our Buddhist communities has been tumultuous. 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 victims and abusers. We are a Buddhist community; understanding, empathy, and compassion are the heart of our practice. 

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 from [a] wrong assumption... and end up justifying a foregone 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 me to a foregone conclusion? Let me frame the inquiry in another way. Suppose the same question is asked repeatedly, and the repeated answer continues to be unsatisfactory. Is it a bad question, a good one asked incorrectly, or simply a question not designed to reveal useful information?

My intention is to ask honest questions that shed light on our dilemma. My methodology: I will do my best to recreate the assumptions that underpin 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.

The first assumption is that the actions of the perp, even a Zen prep, take place in a vacuum against the stark moral backdrop of right and wrong. False. The further assumption is that we can tame the beast by simply labeling it and calling it out. 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 impulse 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, which 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 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. He contends that the discourse about sexual behavior in the West, over the last few centuries, has been incorporated or subsumed into a larger conversation about power and control. I 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 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, Latinos, 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 first volume, where he defines the scope of his inquiry and spells out his methodology. I will be talking mainly about the San Francisco Zen Center situation when Richard Baker Roshi stepped down from his leadership role. 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 the University of Hawaii has released Aitken’s letters. 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 fits with what occurred at Zen Center. When Richard Baker’s romance with a married woman began to tear the San Francisco Zen Center apart, they called in a triage team. Therapists and senior practice leaders counseled people 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. Baker also removed himself, so there was no lightning rod, but most of the people I know from Zen Center were 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 how sex is “put into discourse.’”

I will 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 primary 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 self-investigation. When I was coming into my sexual maturity in the Jesuit school, I learned that even the solitary pleasure of masturbation has a structure in 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 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 or poobah of a practice center. Different sets of concerns yield different answers. Though the institutional response shapes my concern, it’s not my job to polish the defense or the rebuttal, nor is it to clarify the 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 the San Francisco Zen Center, at least among some groups. It was an open secret. This was equally true when Suzuki Roshi was alive, and after Baker Roshi assumed the helm. I assume that Suzuki Roshi knew about his students’ trysting, but he said nothing publicly to my knowledge. He surely did talk about it in private practice conversations, but we only have anecdotal evidence and no way of knowing what he said. He was also steeped in Japanese temple culture, which influenced his attitude in ways we will never fully understand.

What’s also true is that there was a lot of negative judgment about sexual behavior at the Zen Center. We can all trace the outline of the public conversation. I can recognize the “orthodox” public judgments simply by listening to persistent conversations. But there is also evidence of personal struggle, admonitions, and 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 did understand. Not being judgmental gave him the ability to listen. When sex presented a problem in our adolescent lives, we lined up at Father Halloran’s confessional, the priest who at least pretended that he understood your plight. How much better a priest who really did understand and could be compassionate?

Here’s what one student told me when I asked him about the sexual culture of the 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.” 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 in 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 berating a particular group of senior students in the same breath. 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 did not need to stage a coup d’etat when the war was going on in peoples’ heads.

In Buddhist ethics, the precept 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 Foucault’s 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 that 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 heyday of the California New Age, but sin, hell and damnation. (Foucault also notes the “solemnity” that pervades most public conversations about sex. [Page 6] This rings true. How often 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 and sexual norms.

If we define the relationship between sex and power as repression, Foucault points to what 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 analyze the way that early psychiatrists in 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 noticed in myself a kind of self-approval when I sided with the accusers. But then these speakers quickly pivot to a broader condemnation, including 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.

This extends to the tone and even the content of practice instruction. I noticed that when I was talking to a teacher and stumbled upon 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. There may be echoes in psychotherapy, but it seems 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 scuttlebutt: 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 must also examine this statement. I began this discussion by mentioning Roshi Bartok and never said another word. I don’t know Josh, and I can’t comment. However, I bet that the conversations in the Greater Boston Zen Center contain many of the elements that Foucault describes. Does that excuse anyone? No, but it might provide insight for the people who struggle with what occurred.

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

Writing that Can Change the World

In a recent conversation with some former Jesuit friends, I mentioned that I’d read a thinly veiled complaint that there were no theologians actively contributing to the ongoing conversation about pressing issues of the day. Hiding behind a litany of some of the most influential religious thinkers of the last century, the author was crying out, almost plaintively, for a strong, persuasive voice that could shed some light, provide some guidance about a possible course of action. He or she obviously felt that a religious perspective makes a difference and it is missing.  

I asked my friends about the authors they were reading. I have to admit that I was less than impressed by some of the suggestions, but obviously I was just putting on my snarky and judgmental persona so I decided to take a step back and see if I could discover some of the characteristics that I thought made some writing and writers really stand out. This led me to examine what kind of writing, and I suppose by extension, what kind of thinking generated the kind of following that might help people in one way or another. 

What are the characteristics of truly great spiritual writing?

The most important characteristic is that people read it and that it generates some interest. This might be expressed in fostering more writing, spearheading some cultural ferment, or provoking a line of inquiry. And from a personal point of view, each one of us acts as our own unique editor. I’m no longer a kid with the possibility of many years for reflection and study. I might reread Shakespeare or explore certain tragedies that I neglected in my misspent youth, but I probably won’t. I’m a realist. I know that I don’t want to spend a lot of time on pulp fiction or pulp theology. I’m not going to exercise my peculiar tastes, or at least try not to, and condemn some popular writing that other people like but I wouldn’t touch with an unwiped hand, but I will try to distinguish it. For me the limiting characteristic is that it aims to hit certain notes that tickle my fancy but doesn’t really invite me to entertain a new line of thinking, or follow an uncomfortable thought to an unexpected conclusion or insight.

We’re talking theology, so obviously the sacred texts have generated quite a bit of interest, at least for the religions that have attracted followers. If they represented a particular type of literature, my task would be easy. But they do not really match the criteria that I’m looking for. Whether the Testament of Jesus, the Hebrew Bible, the vast array of Buddhist literature, or works that are considered sacred in India and China, they are for the most part a conglomeration of works by various writers or schools within a particular tradition. There are notable exceptions, The Qu’ran is the work of one man, the Prophet Mohammed, over a period of time. The evolution of his thought might reveal itself with study just as the various currents within the Biblical literature can also reveal themselves with study. This kind of study, however, requires more background, cultural and linguistic scholarship. If we were to consider the letters of Paul, or the prophetic writings of one figure from the Jewish tradition, perhaps I can use Amos as an example, or one particular Buddhist thinker, Eihei Dogen comes to mind, at least I feel closer to the kind of writing that has had an outsized influence and we can leave what we refer to as sacred writings in a category by themselves. (Just a note: at least as far as sparking interest or gaining some insight, there’s no chicken and no egg--you don’t need to know the detailed history of the covenant with Moses to get Amos, although the prophet might open a window into a deeper understanding of the Jews’ relationship with their god. You don’t have to know the sutras to be intrigued by a turning word from Dogen, although your curiosity might illuminate something about the sutra literature along the way).

Perhaps if I can identify several books, or types of literature or particular authors that I feel changed the world, and talk a little about what I think makes them special, I might begin to make my case. In no particular order and with huge obvious gaps, here are three works and two authors who exemplify what I’m aiming at: The Summa Theologica, Ovid, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, Diderot, and Howl.

My personal view of Aquinas is based on the rather vague and scurrilous rumors that he was as dull as dishwater. He had been a boy monk and thus insulated, my guess, from the tumultuous world at the end of what we call the High Medieval Period. I suppose that some of my resistance is also based on my assumption that he more than anyone was responsible for the rigid worldview in which clerical culture had wrapped itself for self-preservation. But these are just my prejudices, based on a loose reading of history. I just doubt that I would have asked Thomas to share a glass in the aula and sing the Carmina Burana. 

Another confession: although I have listed the Summa as one of the books that changed the world, I’ve only read the usual bits and pieces that were assigned in the ratio and got enough of the Unmoved Mover to pass the examiner. (Not entirely convinced actually, but that’s another story). So why do I include him? He invented Natural Theology. He had enough curiosity and intellectual integrity to actually explore the work of Aristotle and Averroes in a rigorous way that would begin the separation of reason from myth and magic, a process which after a few hundred more years would birth the Enlightenment. I have drifted far from his synthesis that we learned in philosophy, but I recognize that every time I begin a study of any modern philosopher, from Richard Precht to Michel de Certeau, I owe a debt to Aquinas.

Aquinas is entirely different from the second name on my list, Ovid. I actually do read Ovid, though with a dictionary and a grammar in hand to get through the tricky parts. Why do I select Ovid above Homer or Virgil? Because it was through him that some memory of the myths of the classical world survived when the darkness of war and cultural destruction descended on Europe. His verse was so simple and eloquent that they were preserved in monastic libraries. The monks could and did read him. We can still taste an unchaste godly world that we might find licentious and promiscuous, wild and irrational. Beauty, pleasure, sex, trouble, mystery. Totally worth it.

The next book that I’ve included on my list is The Spiritual Exercises of Father Ignatius. Thin, filled with a kind of jargon and extremely formal prayer formulas that makes it easy to dismiss, still it makes the short list. It is of course a very different kind of writing. There are examples in other religious traditions of step by step practice manuals, but nothing I think has had as far ranging effect on the inner life of individuals as Ignatius’s directions. I’m even withholding universal approval. The good bits have to be weighed against the bad, but through its use of imagination, concentration, and various mental disciplines, thousands and thousands of people have turned their attention inward. Whatever the result, this is important. I don’t think that you can find another book with a relatively short number of pages that’s had a wider effect.

Next we come to Denis Diderot. I learned about Diderot when I was studying 16th century French literature in Caen. He was one of the founders, editors and collaborators of the important "Encyclopédie." The Encyclopédie's aim was, according to Diderot, "to change the way people think.” Apparently it was also an ordeal to edit and write, but it was one of the main publications that promoted the Enlightenment, as well as the political upheaval that was to follow. Diderot appeals to me personally. He was Jesuit educated, had an early affinity for religious life which faded when he got some real experience in life. He was also a Bohemian. But most importantly he is an example of the kind of intellectual inquiry, mainly in France, but with ripples throughout Europe that changed society. I chose him for my list of important writers rather than someone famous like Voltaire or another rabble rouser because his aim was to simply present the argument of various luminaries on a level field as a way of fostering the debate that was going on in the salons of Paris. Reading between the lines, he was not motivated by personal gain at all--he always struggled--but he loved ideas and debate.

On a cold Friday night in 1955 at the Gallery Six Reading in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg read his long poem “Howl” and the world really did change. There would be a far reaching legal decision about obscenity; City Lights Bookstore and the Beat Movement would enjoy their moment, actually several moments, in the sun; the collective discontent with the materialistic world of post war America found a focal point, and a sexual revolution, fueled by a new sense of freedom and to some extent drugs, would emerge along with its own art and music. I was only 11 years old, living a sheltered middle class life in a New England suburb. Of course I had no idea that 35 years later I would begin my own Zen training with one of the poets who also read that night, Philip Whalen. The effects were deeply personal. When I reread Howl, my current feeling is that it rambles and butchers language in ways that my Jesuit trained mind finds offensive, but I cannot deny that it is the kind of powerful writing that tapped into a very deep emotional reservoir and left anyone willing to listen shaken, questioning, and seeking new answers.

So after all that, what kind of writing am I looking for that would even begin to address the kind of situation that we find ourselves in? First off, none of these writers or their books are perfect; they do not contain the last word. I don’t think that they pretend to, not even Aquinas, which is the reason that I wanted to keep them separate from the category of literature we call Scripture. But as in Aquinas, the line of inquiry is open and curious while remaining rigorous. With Ovid there is also a deep respect for memories of the sacred stories that have guided our search, even with a touch of beauty. Perhaps their beauty is one of the most important characteristics. With Ignatius there is an invitation and a road map for an interior exploration using our own imagination and contemplation. Then onto an open field of inquiry we can join Diderot and his cohorts in a debate (How I would love to have visited the salon of the chatty but impeccable Mme de Sévigné and tried to follow the conversation). I think that even Allen Ginsberg would have enjoyed it, and I do know from experience that he could totally mind his manners while mysteriously funneling a high emotional jolt.

From Aquinas to Ginsberg, a slightly different take on the Western Canon.