The Myth of the Zen Roshi

Myths, Super Heroes and Real People

The issue is making something new available in our multi-dimensional, weirdly disconnected world. Buddhist practice predates Christianity by several hundred years, but really, it’s little more than a generation old in the West. If it were a product like the iPhone, proponents might apply Apple’s high-tech marketing tools, though I fear we might misfire the synapses and get a ham radio set instead of a shiny device with the cool logo. What we expect and what can be delivered--will they match up? It might be helpful to cut through some of the zigzags that are already visible in the landscape.

James Ford recently posted a fairly detailed précis of the various conventions and forms that have been handed to us for labeling our Zen teachers, and perhaps identifying their skill set, Holders of Lineage: A Small Meditation on Leadership in Contemporary Western Zen Buddhist Sanghas. If you’re in the market for a Zen teacher, you will quickly learn about Roshi and Sensei, but as with any title, there are hidden meanings, nuances, and misunderstandings attached. I suppose that we could call Roshis Bishops, and from a certain perspective, it makes sense. The crossover from East to West has been littered with misunderstandings at both ends. In the Western Jodo Shinshu, the presiding priest in a jurisdiction is in fact called Bishop, but is Pure Land Buddhism some version of Methodism? Where does that leave Zen? In the Pennsylvania wilderness?

Stuart Lachs has written persuasively about the role of the Roshi, and this blurry area where East meets West. (Cf the provocative title "When the Saints Go Marching In: Modern Day Zen Hagiography"). I hesitate to blur the edges of his argument. I concur that making any Roshi into some kind of irrefutable font of wisdom is a sure way of setting up for disappointment, but my thesis is that we in the West have set up our own set of expectations that can be equally debilitating.

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With many westerners interested in Buddhism, committed to self-inquiry and practicing meditation in the various forms that have been carried to these shores by our Asian teachers, we have already seen new forms of practice and support for the teaching as well as senior practice leaders. And more will continue to emerge. Our communities, our teachers, and practice centers will be distinctly Western. It’s inevitable. We have to create our own practice places and support our teachers.

As James points out, different skills and talents may or may not be present in all teachers, or they may be available to varying degrees, which may or may not overlap. Let me add a footnote to James’s piece: time, place, and circumstance call forth a particular skill set. In our brief history, we have so far relied on the genius of a few pioneering teachers who were, and are, to varying degrees charismatic, skilled in directing people in meditation practice, and very resourceful in using the materials at hand, building out zendos in their garages.

The first generation of teachers, both Asian and Western, has left us a legacy. We’re already a generation away from our Asian teachers; a whole new generation of homegrown American and European teachers has authorized a new crop of dharma heirs, and although I think for the most part that they’ve served the dharma well, there have been a few who would give a bathtub full of bodhisattvas pause.

From my reading, Suzuki Roshi was a fairly ordinary temple priest from Japan who blossomed in America and became the stuff of legend. His successor, Richard Baker, is a particular kind of entrepreneurial genius. If he’d left Harvard a few years later and hit the golden shores of California when the Silicon Valley was being born, he might have become a Gates or an Ellison. He’s certainly much smarter than Zuckerberg. Instead, we had the luck of his finding his way to the Sotoshu in Japantown. His personality, charisma and skill set created the San Francisco Zen Center as a platform for Suzuki. He matched the role Suzuki Roshi entrusted to him. Acknowledging this, old-time students still call Baker “Roshi'' instead of the familiar first-name basis adopted by the second wave.

Lachs deconstructs the enlightenment myth of transmission in terms of something added and misunderstood during the dharma’s transport to the Western shores. There is a lot to consider in his analysis, but I am equally interested in Richard Baker’s seemingly endless creativity for adapting traditional forms. Old wine in new skin. I don’t think that there is any Westerner who is more careful of traditional Japanese priestly rituals while at the same time being extremely resourceful, creating innovative ways of combining livelihood and practice. Some ventures were more successful than others, but Baker built a large, successful center with several campuses, and he opened the first secluded Zen monastery in the West. Maezumi and Glassman also created large and important institutions, but, at least from my reading, they relied more on some very creative people who were attracted to the practice. Not that Suzuki and Richard didn’t attract bright and creative people, but they were always in Baker’s shadow, which, in my view, was as much the source of the upheaval at Zen Center as any alleged sexual impropriety.

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I’ve had direct experience in many different American Zen Centers with several authorized teachers; some felt a bit tangential, while others quite settled and profound (again, this is subjective for sure). While each was distinct, there were always certain features that held constant, which was in a way reassuring. They are all led by American or Australian second and third-generation teachers. None of the centers were even close to the San Francisco Zen Center in terms of wealth, number of students, or notoriety, but each reflects the personality of its leadership. Hartford Street Zen Center was a small, tight-knit family, very much dependent on the charisma of Issan Dorsey. Issan relied on many people to do the work of paying the water bill, keeping food in the refrigerator, and taking care of young men dying from HIV disease, while he did the heavy lifting of directing and inspiring us. Mel Wietzman’s Berkeley Center was more formal, focused on sitting practice. Though certainly not unfriendly, I got the sense that there was a definite inner and outer circle. It was Mel's center. It fit him. It really fit Maylie Scott, who maintained a separate residence with her mother and several students, me among them, and at that point in my practice, being separate from the day-to-day hubbub of a practice center was what I felt I needed.

I practiced with Bob Aitken on Oahu. Aitken Roshi had the most diverse international crowd, though nowhere near the size of the San Francisco Zen Center, besides the Manoa zendo. I sat in the Palolo Valley Temple before construction was complete, and in a way that was perfect--my work with Bob never felt really finished. Officially, he was the most scholarly of all the teachers I worked with. He could be uncomfortably rigid when lecturing; then in the blink of an eye, he became very personal, even vulnerable, but the feeling was not disconcerting. I always felt that if I were a good student, I'd be part of his next chapter. His students were dedicated; everybody had their job, did their work, and seemed to maintain their own autonomy. People were building the temple around him. By contrast, I also sat several sesshins at Crestone Mountain Zen Center when it was in its infancy. It was clear the minute you took your seat that it was Baker Roshi’s project.

John Tarrant’s California Diamond Sangha and the Pacific Zen Institute were very dependent on Tarrant Roshi’s inspiration. Like many of the early Diamond sangha, we depended on rented halls or members’ living rooms for a floating zendo with sesshin conducted in a ramshackle, drafty Episcopal retreat campus. One of my tasks when I was president of PZI was to find a site for a retreat center in the north country. I failed. I learned that teaching is not dependent on the convenience of a fancy temple, but rather on having a comfortable, reliable place to put down a zafu. In a very real sense, John, more than any other teacher, allowed me to disconnect from whatever ties to a cultural Japanese religion remained.

A marginal note, not meant to disparage any particular teacher, it seems that when I hold impermanence close and real, not becoming obsessed with real estate or dependent on income from student housing fees, my practice becomes freer and expansive. That might be just my experience. As I age, schlepping cushions up and down country roads has lost its Dharma Bums romanticism. However, holing up in cheap rooms in a gentrifying ghetto might even lead Roshi to become a Grumpy Old Man. Some facts of life are inescapable.

I am grateful to the many Buddhist teachers who have done everything they’ve done to plant dharma seeds here in the West. In my estimation, all the teachers I mentioned above deserve the revered title of Roshi. Each very willingly shared their meditation experience. Each was unique, some even quirky, truth be told, but I revere their teaching. They helped me in ways I didn't expect. They made a difference in my life, and I don’t know if they were enlightened.

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No one is perfect. Richard Baker, with his knack for envisioning and accomplishing huge projects, could have done things better. He admits it, and it is even possible that had he the chance to redo a few things, he might entertain the prospect. But owing to the nature of karma, that is not going to happen. And so there are stories and conversations that saddle us on the one hand with the myth of “Super Roshi,” he who can keep the coffers full, invent delicious yet simple foods for the sangha’s table, procure awesome religious art for the zendo, interest important and influential people in the possibility of Zen, deliver talks that inspire as well as calm emotional storms and say the perfect turning word at the exact moment required. For contrast or in opposition is the “Teacher of No Rank.” There are several versions of this I’ve heard over the years, but the one I chose to poke gentle fun at here is the “Lady in Sneakers,” a Miss Marple Roshi who lets the path take whatever twists and turns are in the cards, all the while quietly and stealthily watching out for Truth, Justice and the Buddha Way. (And of course never getting involved in any sexual intrigue).

Although I had to pick and choose from my heap of memories to create this SNL Zen sketch, each of the characteristics I highlight I’ve overheard in Zen centers. I confess to making up the character of the “Super Roshi,” but the “Lady in Sneakers” comes from a dharma talk by a woman who has received transmission. I intended for them to be funny, but blog posts don't allow for hearing feedback chuckles. These myths are also the stuff that fuels expectations. We’ve all heard some variations of these myths, and I submit that they stand in our way as much as “Transmitted Enlightenment Roshi.”

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One renowned teacher described the task of planting Buddhism in the West like “holding a lotus to a rock” (also the title of another piece by James). I hold that it ain’t necessarily so. Even if disguised as a koan or a fragment of poetry, what does the feigned impossibility of a project do other than inflate the person doing the work? To be fair, it might point to the difficulty of the task, but I’ve done the work, not perfectly by any means but it got done. I’m just an ordinary guy, and my mistakes will keep me in that category, but I know that it’s not impossible. It’s not heroic. It’s just a task that the dharma requires, a task the world sets in our path.

Buddhism is Buddhism, and Zen is a particular flavor. It is as Bodhidharma pointed to, a transmission outside the scriptures. We trust our practice to guide us, but first it directs us to go deeper and dig for real solutions to all the problems that we didn’t even realize we had. Maybe they are problems that we only imagine that we have. Maybe the solution is there already and will find us. It all began for me when I started to contrast Super-Roshi with the Buddhist Lady in Sneakers, but I made those up.

I also know that we can do this. With apologies to Bobby McFerrin, I will close with a tune that Issan used to hum with a little sing-along,“Don’t worry. Be happy. Do the best that you can.” He sang while he was creating a way for Buddhists to continue to practice until they took their last breath...He did that while he was taking his last breaths. Remarkable.

Response to a homophobic book--Don't even open it.

My friend David Chadwick sent me a pdf of the draft of a book by a Buddhist practitioner filled with homophobic rantings. He was distressed and didn't know what to tell his friend and didn't even want to ask other gay friends for fear of being associated with it. We've known each other a long time, so he came to me. I will not cite the author or quote the book for reasons that will become obvious.

David, I tried to read a bit of your friend’s book as you requested to see if there were something that I might be able to say to diffuse the homophobia in the "gay" poems. Sadly I can only tell you of my personal reaction. I am filled with sadness. There was a time in my life when I would have felt anger, and my reaction would have been to protest, even burning the damn thing. But I am almost 80 now. I was a Jesuit for 11 years, I have been practicing Buddhism diligently for almost 40 years. I have heard some version of your friend’s argument since I was very young, certainly since the time I started to realize that I was gay. It is a script. It doesn’t change. I am not sure of its origins, whether sexual taboo, or repressed homophile feelings, but I do know that control and power play a role. Gay people make an easy scape goat which makes publishing, reading and promoting this garbage sinful. It foments violence and hatred.

Every gay person I know has heard this rant. Believe me, we have taken it to heart, listened to it, considered it, and reacted to it. We’ve been forced to. It is painful. Some protest, some hide in a closet, some try to change creating more pain and suffering, some commit suicide, but most of us simply come to a level of acceptance with who we are and try as best we can to create a way to live our lives with dignity, compassion and service to others, and yes, even love.

I have nothing to say about the actual substance of your friend’s argument other than it has no place in Buddhist practice. It is a hindrance. It clouds the mind and seeds hatred, the very things that we are trying to mollify, to clear away the debris of our karmic actions. This is the only way I can deal with it--to set it aside and go on with my life. But there are also times when I have to comment, and this is one.

I have two stories that I would like to share. I now live in Dharamsala, India. This is a community of as many as 14,000 monks and nuns with HH the Dalai Lama in residence about 200 meters from my rooms. We are a very conservative community. I practice Zen and follow some classes with Tibetan geshes. There was a monk here who took off his robes and began living as a woman. She is now known as Tenzin Mariko. She is not in hiding, nor has she withdrawn from spiritual practice. She goes to teachings and initiations. And like some men who discover the trans-nature of their sexuality, she is quite stylish. She stands out, and, after a good deal of rejection, she is accepted, even admired. I attend class with one of HH's translators, Kelsang Wangmo, a ground breaker herself as the first woman to attain the degree of geshe. At some point when discussing karmic imprints, Geshe-la used Mariko as an example of a person who discovered their true nature and has the sheer gumption to live it out. I invite your friend to be inspired by Mariko's (she/her) courage.

Then there is the story of Tommy Dorsey, whom you know David, but whom your friend may not know. Tommy, or Issan as he became known, was a very much a gay man. He could not pass as straight so he never tried. And he did face vicious homophobia, and suffered some side effects, drug addiction, poverty, ostracization. Then he discovered the Buddha Way and totally dedicated himself. He did not stop being gay. That was impossible. When circumstances gave him the opportunity to live out his life heroically, he did not shy away. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, when hundreds of men were suffering and dying in his neighborhood, he used all his energy, every bit of what he learned in practice to take care of them with compassion and love, plus a few chocolate bars and drag shows. I had the honor and the blessing of working with him, helping him, learning from him, serving him. It changed my life. There are people now who honor him as a Bodhisattva. For those of us who knew him, of course he was, there is no question, but he will never fit into the straightjacket myth of a heavenly being. Perhaps we just have to change our view and allow him to take his rightful place.

I hope your friend can at least find the courage to use a big red pencil on his draft even if he cannot personally give up his preconceived notions. It is a stain on our practice.

Bamboozled

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

In the middle of the night in 1968 in Oakland, California, Bob Hoffman was awakened from a deep sleep by the discontented ghost of his former shrink, Siegfried Fisher. Dr. Fisher, as Hoffman always called him, stood at the end of his bed and revealed to him a key piece of psychological insight that had eluded his mentor, Sigmund Freud, and the entire Viennese school: “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”

Thus was born the notorious concept of Negative Love and the "world famous" Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy; both have the dubious markings of revealed Truth, and Hoffman, the awakened Teacher—literally.

I listened to Hoffman’s psychic awakening tale many times, and although the basic outline never changed, I did manage to fill in some of the lacunae over my long association with him. For example, there is a lie embedded in the narrative—he confessed that he had been Fisher’s patient and not an old family friend or acquaintance from shul. That misinformation had been manufactured for marketing purposes, and Hoffman was a born salesman. But it never occurred to me to ask how his wife reacted to the whole affair. I think that they were still married at the time, but I don’t want to make any factual assertions without some evidence, so I can’t say if they shared a bed, and I don’t want to spoil the party with more misinformation. Did she even wake up? 

So how did a Jewish tailor with barely a high school education become a healer, a channel for this occult insight, coupled with powerful results of psychological investigation? Answer: the Spiritualist Church and, if you believe the proponents of the Hoffman Process enterprise, the gifts of a highly advanced, and compassionate, “intuitive,” the new moniker that has become the cover for knowledge that mysteriously surpasses the hard-earned therapeutic work of professional psychology. 

I chronicled as accurately as I could the creation of the “Process” as a psychological tool in “The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Hoffman Process,” and I tried to give everyone I interviewed a fair hearing. At the time, I imagined that I could resolve my long-standing qualms about Hoffman and his influence in my life by simply getting to the facts, but in fact, it only aggravated my personal pain. 

When my friend Stan Stefancic cautioned, “Remember that there's a lot of Claudio in the Process,” I thought long and hard to determine if Naranjo’s input was enough of a justification to accept Hoffman’s preposterous story. In a long rambling piece, Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter, I tried to understand why Naranjo took Hoffman to be some kind of modern-day shaman, and supported his work—I will not deny that Claudio did support Hoffman and tried to plant some professional practices in the Process. But it was a relationship fraught with jealousy on Hoffman’s part as well as a good deal of passive-aggressive behavior, all the while seeking Naranjo’s imprimatur. I asked myself the question, why do intelligent people believe nonsense, but again, I couldn't really find a good answer, nor in any way understand Claudio's infatuation with Hoffman.

 

To complicate the investigation, as if it were not already cloudy enough, Hoffman was a sexual predator. I had firsthand experience, and the effects of his abuse have lingered for decades. I tried to exorcise that demon by writing what became a long series of posts on my blog, beginning with Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. If the criteria for resolution is that I can forgive and forget, it has not been satisfied. At 77 I am resigned that his selfish and unethical behavior will be a trauma that I will carry for the rest of my life. I have given up looking for some reason why it happened. It makes no difference to me that he was a closeted, homophobic queer man and that it was a severe impediment to his happiness. It was. Yes, everyone is guilty, but I will continue to blame him. I have also given up trying to see some “wounded healer” motivation as a factor in his psychic therapy.  What’s the word? Bunk, as in complete nonsense.

So how was I bamboozled? When I read Henry Miller’s account of his experience just looking at a photograph of Madame Blavatsky, I understood him completely. Miller writes: “Now I don’t know if that had anything to do with what happened next, but I had a flash, I came to the realization that I was responsible for my whole life, whatever had happened. I used to blame my family, society, my wife . . . and that day I saw so clearly that I had nobody to blame but myself. I put everything on my own shoulders, and I felt so relieved: Now I’m free, no one else is responsible. And that was a kind of awakening, in a way.”

In October of 1973, I had such an awakening over several weeks of psychological investigation in Claudio Naranjo’s SAT group. It changed my life, and I will be forever grateful to Claudio for providing the platform for the experience. But I had the bad luck to have had Bob Hoffman standing in the room, shouting nonsense. That was almost 50 years ago. I gave the charlatan power over me, but damn it, I’ve taken it back. 

To the ghost of Bob Hoffman, if you’re still lingering around, there’s an open invitation to state your side of the story at the foot of my bed in my flat in the Himalayan foothills. It’s 12 and a half hours ahead of Oakland time, but if you can’t figure that out, Google has a nifty world clock application. 

Other Posts regarding Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

The Truth about Bob Hoffman

The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult. 

It’s a cult, damn it. Nothing more

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman 

Jonestown and Our Deliverance from Cults

Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple 

The Death of the Public Intellectual

Ideas have the power to change minds or reinforce tightly held beliefs and prejudices. Ideas can capture the public’s imagination--I’m not talking about soundbites or the flagrant manipulation of sentiment by appealing to racism, fear, or hysteria of one brand or another. At the risk of sounding overblown or pretentious, I will put forward a few ideas that might have legs: democracy and fascism, climate responsibility, the ethical life, the role of imagination, and spirituality. These topics interest me, and I would hope that joining in an intellectual conversation, sharing and discussing our ideas in a civil way, might help us find a way forward.

But sadly, in today’s information environment, this kind of conversation is on life support. Instead of a real conversation, we are reduced to sloganeering and “bothsidesism” that includes vile insults as well as calls for execution. Will it be by firing squad, or maybe just shot with an AK-47 and unrecognizably mutilated?

Someone posted on my Twitter account a clip of an animated Marjorie Taylor Green ranting incoherently about fake meat Bill Gates grew in a "peach tree dish." Surely a delicacy that will add to the wonders of Georgia. The woman is totally unhinged, yet she gets lots of coverage, and this is exactly what she wants, what the Right wants, and what her donors demand. This is the script: monopolize our attention, clog the airtime, and then move ahead with the other agenda, and we're not talking QAnon or some other nonsense. It doesn't matter whether MTG is an idiot or an Oxonian. She's just a pawn. Their Queen is about to checkmate our democracy.

If you did a survey--now at this moment, not yesterday before the Peach Tree idiocy--you’d find more respondents believe that Bill Gates is experimenting with synthetic meat and that it's finding its way to your neighborhood butcher without proper labeling. I’ll put money on it.

In the process, MTG has also heaped more distrust on the FDA and the entire expert class of technocrats who are ruining America. She’s also created an atmosphere where people who have done good work, gone to college, and gained some standing in their communities for careful thought, attention to science, and language are pilloried. Of course, you don’t have to know a damn thing about scientific experiments to know that we’re being poisoned by fake meat. Actually, the less you know, the more credible you are. There's not much of an audience for a man or woman who actually knows something about the real poisons that can infect the food chain. They’re just boring.

Who qualifies as a public intellectual, and what is their role? Narrowly defined, they would be an academic, philosopher, economist, or scientist who devotes some of their time to commenting on public issues, and, I would venture, subjects that a large number of people find interesting. In science, both Neil deGrasse and Stephen Hawking fit the bill. The late Milton Friedman, for all his faults, would have to be included, at least as testimony that his or her opinions don’t have to be as solid as Euclidean geometry.

Who are the current crop of public intellectuals? In America, with less reverence for academia, Dan Rather comes to mind, but there are no philosophers such as Albert Camus or Bertrand Russell.. Rachel Maddow gets high marks; though she’s an Oxonian, Google calls her a television presenter. John Oliver and Steve Colbert are very bright and, in their own quirky way, provide sharp commentary. Charlie Rose was in the running until he demonstrated that he'd disconnected his head from his penis. Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal are no longer with us. Thomas Friedman tries. No one today commands the respect of an Edward R. Murrow, but there must be people who could assume that role, yet as I survey the Op Ed page across America, brilliant voices do not speak out clearly and strongly for fear of getting mowed down.

We've always had crazies, even in very powerful positions. Sometimes the powerful maniacs have kept a low profile, or maybe they just didn’t stop taking their meds. But now, after Trump in this era of Fox News, the Margorie Greens of the airwaves flaunt their stupidity because the media will lap it up, and that’s key.

When I lived in the Upper West Side, an older woman installed herself every day on one of the benches set on Broadway's median divide and spent her day screaming at the traffic. None of it made much sense, a 70s version of Fake Meat and Peach Tree Dishes. But, my point--no one paid her any attention. If MTG were shouting her nonsense from the same bench, they'd have to close Broadway to make room for the TV crews.

The woman whom I used to see at 102nd Street has now been replaced by a silent public monument. She didn’t make the cut. Dan Rather has 2.5 million followers on Twitter. MTG has almost 900,000. Still behind, but her brand of insanity is getting exposure. Lauren Boebert has 1.3 million! Watch out, Dan. They’re coming after you.

If you can't shut her up, stop paying attention, stop giving her undue attention. Just stop it.






*Daniel Drezne made these nominations:

1) Ta-Nehisi Coates: Any book or long-form essay of his becomes the topic of conversation among elites. That’s influence.

2) Masha Gessen: I have found her thoughts about the Age of Trump, and the Age of Hysteria surrounding Trump, to be invaluable. She might even be right about Trump acting more like a teenager than a toddler.

3) Francis Fukuyama: An awful lot of people would have a hard time repeating something like “The End of History,” which holds up better than you think. Fukuyama’s latest work on political decay, however, has proven to be both prescient and vital.

4) Ron Chernow: I suspect some might not think of Chernow as an intellectual, to which I would respond by noting that Chernow’s biographies lead to reinterpretations of American history. If nothing else, reading Grant will cause multiple generations to rethink what we were taught about Grant — and Robert E. Lee — when we were kids. Since the Civil War seems to still play a role in current political life, that is no mean achievement.

5) David Autor: The hardest-working labor economist in the profession, and probably the least well-known name on this list. His research into the effects of technological change and globalization on the American worker guides much of the conversation on these topics in the current moment.