Goa, Saint Francis and Me

McLeodganj, Himachal Pradesh, India
April 7, 2014

Part of this article was written for the publication of "Spiritual Journeys" by a group of former Jesuits.

One Sunday this past February, my partner and I went to the English mass at the Basilica of Bom Jesu in Goa. We were initially directed towards that queue, but after some negotiation, we found our way into a back pew in the main church. During mass people venerating Saint Francis Xavier wind through the courtyard of the Jesuit residence and pass his shrine, a small Baroque style altar where what’s left of his body is encased in glass.

I began to feel at home with the familiarity of the Jesuit ceremony, and was able to pay more attention. The priest’s sermon was not easy to follow. He struggled to connect Xavier’s religious enthusiasm to martyrdom, comparing the Saint’s remarkable life with the current situation of Christians in India. But Xavier died a natural death and, though they might feel persecuted, Christians in India are generally very well accepted. In fact in Goa, they pretty much control everything. I gave up on following the Jesuit’s exhortations, and drifted off, studying the congregation, mostly Indians, and certainly, as English speakers, well educated. They were not paying much attention to the sermon either, women looking after crying children, men closing their eyes and nodding, in many ways similar to the Irish American parish of my childhood.

The sermon and the ceremony were also disconnected from what was happening at the side altar where men, women, and children, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, pushed their way forward towards the barely visible body of the saint. We’d seen almost identical scenes at the many temples, mosques, shrines, gurdwaras we’ve visited across India, people seeking healing, relief from suffering, forgiveness for a personal transgression, blessings for a new marriage, a prayer for a child’s good fortune, or perhaps even a superstitious belief that touching his statue would produce a child. To be honest it felt disconnected from the Catholic, Jesuit saint I thought I knew, but it was real.

I turned my attention back to the altar and suddenly felt deep compassion, even kinship with the Indian Jesuit. He was obviously a competent, educated, thoughtful, even a devout, spiritual man who was sincerely trying to connect our messy lives with another dimension. With any luck, I might have turned out like him, but in that same moment, I also realized why I’d left the Society.

After I graduated from Dartmouth in 1966, over the objections of my parents, I entered the Jesuits, and stayed for more than a decade. When time came for me to be ordained, I took a leave of absence and extended it for 2 years before I asked to be relieved of religious vows. During that exclaustration, I realized that I had to confront, and deal with coming out as a gay man, my addictive personality, and, at the time, I thought that the most effective path was psychological work rather than prayer or meditation.

I had of course done the spiritual exercises of Father Ignatius many times. The experience was rich. When I was trying to decide whether to leave or stick it out, I undertook them again as well as trying to recreate some of that experience through a study of the enneagram, and beginning Buddhist meditation practice. Then for more than three decades, I either wore the designation “ex-Jesuit” as a badge of honor, and disavowed any value in my religious training except on the rare occasion when I ran into someone from that era.

Twenty-five years ago a chance meeting with a Zen priest who was starting a hospice for people with AIDS turned my attention back to meditation practice. It also allowed me to carefully trace the roots of suffering through a spiritual practice that is agnostic with regard to any particular religious system of beliefs.

Today my experience in the Society of Jesus grows dim, like a series of events in a very distant land, but what remains is a sense of intimacy that feels indelible and timeless. Most of the struggles of my youth, coming out in an unaccepting culture, finding a spiritual expression that suited me, have faded into the background. I no longer seek the kind of answers that I demanded years ago.

I regard spirituality as reflecting on the questions that life presents squarely, and I value seeing things through to the end, even things that did not turn out well. Most of the ordinary language of spiritual conversation feels inadequate. If I describe my particular path as a series of transitions, I feel I’m being melodramatic. Speaking of a path or a journey sounds like I just bought some nifty running shoes to train for a marathon at my unlikely age.

That morning in Goa, I didn’t feel distant or unconnected, but rather like I’d just grown up and realized that even if my life amounted to only a brief second, in that time I could leave things better than I found them, that I was not alone, and that the universe is vast and awe-inspiring.

__________________

The Experience of the Spiritual Exercises is indelible.

I entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, on August 15th 1966 at Shadowbrook in Lenox, Massachusetts. After a few months to acclimate to the schedule of getting up at 5:25 and bed at 9:30, the first year novices were guided through the Spiritual Exercises. For a full month, the whole community was totally focused on the discipline of the Exercises, as strict as the discipline of any Zen hall--total silence, 7 hours of contemplation very day, an unwavering methodical sequence of meditations, invocations and most importantly, in retrospect, the Examen.

The bell that alerted us to prayer, or mass, or spiritual reading, or the daily conferences with the Master of novices, was not a beautiful, clear temple bell. Rather it had the urgency of the alarm that gets firemen out of bed in the middle of the night. We were not to be monks dedicated to a life of prayer within exclusionary monastic walls. We were being trained to pray hard and work hard for the Kingdom of God.

After we took religious vows, every year we dedicated 8 days to the exercises. These were the heady days that followed Vatican II, so the strict retreat format, the fire and brimstone of the 1st week, for example, had fallen into disfavor.

Now more than 50 years later it is hard to believe that the Exercises had such a visceral effect, creating an opening for an experience of the Transcendent in the way that they did. I remember as a teenager reading Joyce’s description of the preacher's sermon on Hell in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My Novice Master, Fr. T. J. C. O'Callaghan may have lacked the dramatic flair of Joyce’s retreat master, but he followed the same script to create a picture of the fiery world of the unforgivable. That, combined with a retreat environment created by the 80 men who shared the life of the novitiate, the silence, the liturgies, the homilies, the food, and the penances, our lives were geared to the meditations of 4 weeks of the Exercises.

I remained in the Society until 1976. But 5 years before I left, I began to realize that traditional rigidity of religious life was not going to be a happy fit for me. Leaving the Jesuits was a difficult choice. I had been very happy studying theology and exploring religious practice, and I wanted to show the same respect for my choice to abandon the Society as my choice to take religious vows. And so I undertook the Exercises again in a form called the 19th annotation. In place of 30 days of seclusion and intense prayer, I dedicated an hour every day for almost a year and, with a director, followed the order of prayer and meditation that Ignatius set within the four weeks. I was already practicing both zazen and vipassana meditation by then, and though I didn’t consciously try to blend the two practices, that is in fact exactly what I was doing.

I cannot cut myself off from the life-giving roots in the Exercises. For most successful Jesuits, the Exercises have been grafted into their bones. I was not immune—it can even happen in 10 years. I have discovered several links between meditation practice and Ignatian discipline. I have written about two aspects, the Examen and the Discernment of Spirits. If you want to read further, follow the links on the Page “Writings about Father Ignatius.”

Reflections on the Feast of the Assumption

It is perhaps no surprise that I am not a devotee of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in the traditional manner of most Roman Catholics. When I took my simple religious vows, it was common for most men to take Mary as their “middle ‘vow’” name. So I might have said “I, Kenneth Maria Ireland, vow to your divine Majesty, before the most holy Virgin Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience in the Society of Jesus.” I asked to keep my given name and it was granted. The traditional “vow days” in the Jesuits were feasts of the Virgin Mary, today August 15th, and September 8th, her birthday.

I have zero desire to make a pilgrimage to Fatima or Lourdes. Apparitions are far too spooky for my rational mind set. I’ve always held that the “Dormition” of Mary is far more palatable than her bodily transportation to the Gates of Heaven. I prefer myth when it comes to such matters. The infallible pronouncement of Pius 12 happened when I was 8 years old, and I wondered even then how something this momentous could be hidden, unrecognized for such a long period of time. I said the rosary every day when I was in a Jesuit house of formation. We all did. I liked the repetition of the words of a simple prayer and the contemplation of the mysteries which I took to be more like visualizations of scenes from the stories told in Matthew, Mark and Luke (John is a bit too gnostic). As far as my Marian faith goes, I was a pretty stripped down basic gospel kind of guy. Some of this can be traced back to my Calvinist heritage, my father was a Yankee free thinker, and there's some rebellion against the rigid Irish nuns who taught the Baltimore Catechism by rote.

By Erik Cleves Kristensen - House of the Virgin Mary

When Ashish and I visited Ephesus, after tromping through the amazing Roman ruins, we took a small jitney several kilometers high up into the bluffs overlooking the ancient harbor to what is known as Mother Mary’s House. According to legend, Saint John, the gnostic one, took Mary to the small community that Paul had founded in that Roman colony after the death of Jesus. She was to spend the rest of her days protected from the turmoil of James’s Jerusalem Church. Of course her presence also legitimized the ascent of the Jesus congregations of Greeks and Romans who were not observant of Jewish law and customs, but I will leave that side for polemicists to hash out.

It had been more than 35 years since I left the Jesuits and 30 years of practicing Buddhist meditation when I got on that small rickety bus. I’m just giving some background about the mindset of the guy who headed up Mt. Koressos (Turkish: Bülbüldağı, "Mount Nightingale") to the place that Saint Anne Catherine Emmerich had seen in visions as the last earthly abode of Mary the Virgin.

It fit the parameters of a place that I could envision for the house of Mother Mary. Being there was simply wonderful, peaceful, with a real feeling of the Transcendent. No throngs of the faithful seeking miracles, no massive basilicas commemorating a Saint’s vision, no sellers of Marian trinkets and memorabilia. There were perhaps a dozen religious women, maybe less, quietly tending simple gardens and very austere shrines. We wandered where we wanted, stopped when we felt the urge. No one exhorted us, telling us what to believe or how to pray. There were few votary candle boxes like the ones I remember from the Irish parishes of my youth in front of Saint Mary’s statues. There was only one donation box near the exit.

I felt a real sense of freedom when I boarded that rickety little bus for the scary ride down back to Selçuk. I had been in the presence of the Virgin and my mind was allowed the space to take whatever tack was appropriate for the time and place.

Food for the Moon

 August 6th, 2022

In August of 2019, after I learned that Father Bob Ochs had died, I tried to acknowledge my enormous debt to him. He brought the teaching of the Enneagram to some very hungry Catholic religious whose sputtering religious practices were on life support, me among them. I tried to recount as carefully as I could the story of his post Enneagram years when I wrote about the Jesuit transmission of the Enneagram. I will revisit some of them here. Last night a friend who was peripherally involved in the beginning of SAT and the whole Berkeley, New Age psychic scene, told me that Susan Diordoni, Bob’s longtime companion, died of cancer. I now feel free to tell a less edited, much sadder story.

Gurdjieff used the term “Food for the Moon” to describe some of the process of awakening and becoming a true person as if it were organic digesting and processing esoteric teaching. We, all our living and dying, become food for the moon. The process of shedding our old beliefs and habits of perception is akin to consigning this dead weight of the alleged mysterious powers of the moon: the relentless, predictable ebbing and flooding of the tides control the shifts and flow of our ingrained emotions, thoughts, inclinations, mind-sets. I heard Naranjo use “Food for the Moon” pejoratively several times to refer to a person who begins the work and, for whatever reason, just doesn’t have the stuff it takes to see it through to a successful conclusion, whatever that actually means. (I do think this mystical moonshine talk offers some clues about the exclusionary tendencies of cults).

Bob Ochs was a respected member of SAT 1, the first group that gathered around Naranjo after he returned from Arica and began to teach. Ochs, along with Charlie Tart, had the highest recognized level of academic training of all the group members. He was a professor at a prestigious Jesuit seminary with a degree from one the best Universities in France. I never asked Bob how he came to know Naranjo or what drew him to the group, but when we met at the beginning of the second year of that exploration, Naranjo had already delegated him to teach the Enneagram to groups of Jesuits, first at Loyola University in Chicago, and then at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Naranjo himself told me unequivocally that he’d entrusted Ochs to be his emissary, to teach the nine personality fixations and to guide people in discovering their own type and subtype. Only one other person shared this responsibility, Aubrey Lundgren; others had various teaching responsibilities within SAT, notably Reza Leah Schaffer and, eventually Kathy Speeth, though the scope of their responsibility was limited to new SAT students in Berkeley.

A lot happened in that first year that would change the dynamic of teaching the Enneagram in the West. Naranjo trusted Ochs, and Ochs had a knack for teaching. His presentation of the ideas behind the Enneagram was engaging and provocative. He was truly interested in ideas, as you might expect from the exemplary Jesuit that he was. But other forces were at work which would revoke both Naranjo’s and Ichazo’s lock on this esoteric system.

Almost everyone who teaches the Enneagram outside Naranjo’s immediate circle owes some debt to Ochs for their basic understanding, the impetus of their personal investigation, the outline of the 9 types and 27 subtypes, their books, their students and for teachers, their livelihood. I will name a few names but it’s by no means complete. This group has its roots in what I have labeled the Jesuit transmission. Here is a partial list of the Enneagram teachers who are linked to Ochs as the source of their practice; Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Jerome Wagner at Loyola University in Chicago; Joanna Quintrell at the Journey Center in Santa Rosa, California; Sr. Suzanne Zuercher at the Institute for Spiritual Leadership at Loyola University; Father William Meninger of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass Colorado; Don Richard Riso, a former Jesuit, (d.2012) and Russ Hudson of the Enneagram Institute, Stone Ridge, New York; Paul Robb, S.J., the founder of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership; Tad Dunne, S.J.; Maria Beesing; Robert Nogosek, C.S.C.; Patrick O'Leary. Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J., a very vocal opponent of the Catholic adoption of the Enneagram, was also Bob’s student in Chicago.

Helen Palmer also owes a debt to Ochs, which she may or may not have acknowledged, though it is a not as direct as the people who were in Ochs's groups. She was not in Claudio’s SAT groups either, but she was practicing as a psychic reader in Berkeley at about the same time that Naranjo’s groups were forming. She did readings with almost every member of the early SAT group, often multiple sessions. It was in a large part through these readings that she became aware of the Enneagram, and got a taste of the system’s power. When I did a reading with her almost 50 years ago, one of her first questions was about my fixation on the Enneagram. I also know that she also had access to some of our private notes about Naranjo’s presentation of the Enneagram as well as extensive notes from Ichazo’s 1968 talks at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. Ochs may have had a hand in delivering some of these materials into her hands.

This is a good jumping off point to describe the start of the Enneagram Wars, which also marked the beginning of Ochs’s estrangement from Naranjo. Even before Palmer’s creation and popularization of the “kinder, gentler,” more saleable Enneagram, the flood of Enneagram books had started. When I researched and compiled my Enneagram Bibliography a few years ago, there were more than 150 books and studies, a huge number for such a recondite discipline. In less than two decades, more than 100 separate practitioners, experts, authorities, claiming some level of insight, leading groups and individuals on an inner exploration. The armies were assembling.

You know that you are on an intellectual battlefield when after a Google search on the origins of the Enneagram, the “Let’s set the record straight” articles appear first. I’m not going to enter that fray. Have at it. Hope y’all have fun. The main battle, the Waterloo, was the lawsuit that Ichazo brought against Palmer. Again I am not going to put on soul armor and take sides, other than to point out that there had to have been some monetary upside to winning or losing to justify the enormous costs of any litigation. My interest here, with regard to Ochs, are the casualties resulting from friendly fire. 

As various leaders and teachers waged battle about the authenticity and effectiveness, the “truth” of their particular take on the teaching, whether it came from Pythagoras, the Sufis or some Egyptian cult, Naranjo knew that he’d lost control. And because a large number of the people who had forged their own versions and adaptations of the teaching that he’d stolen from Ichazo had been Ochs's students, Naranjo stopped taking Ochs's phone calls. Although very clearly in the Naranjo camp, Ochs was ostracized.

This was the point in my own life where I took a very clear break for any investigation and controversy. I had a host of personal reasons for my hiatus, among them caring for people dying from HIV/AIDS, but I also had no personal stake in the negotiated settlement: everybody was to lay down their weapons, just carry on, do what they’ve been doing. No one was going to corner the market for the Enneagram; leave the final judgment to when the Archangel Metatron settles all disputes among the lesser inhabitants of the heavenly realm.

When I finally made contact with Ochs after several years’ hiatus, I was overwhelmed by what had become of my vibrant friend. He had given up his position on the faculty of the Jesuit schools, stopped seeing most of his friends, and was living in small, Spartan, nearly windowless basement apartment in a modest suburb a few miles from the epicenter of the Enneagram Wars. His only regular visitor was Susan Diordoni. He is not the first heterosexual Jesuit to seek deep emotional connection with a woman. I have no knowledge if he maintained his vow of celibacy, but I am happy that he at least had some comfort and companionship.

Both he and I had started to separate from regimented Jesuit life when we shared a floor in the faulty residence at the American Baptist Seminary of the West in 1973. He however, was a priest, 14 years my senior, and had no possible means of outside support. He chose to remain within the institutional frame work. I did not. He received a modest stipend, and tried to justify his seclusion as a work on a book. His superiors, I think with some recognition of his contribution to the Jesuit enterprise, did not press him too hard to produce. 

While the people whom Ochs had trained were writing, advertising, going to conferences, producing and leading trainings that cost thousands of dollars, he was living on a few hundred dollars a month and struggling to write. He felt that he still had something to say. Actually I will rephrase that, he felt that he had an obligation to say something as one of the first proponents of the system. I think he may have also been jealous of the money that his one time students were making on “that gravy train,” but that was never his primary focus, and ultimately he would be unsuccessful. He was a One, and the burden of trying to frame his thoughts against the conflict of the Enneagram wars proved impossible. He could never persuade himself that he’d successfully argued his case. There would be no book, but his efforts came with all a One’s self-recrimination and doubt. Ironically, I think I remember that the analysis was to be based on typing some famous writers but I could be conflating a couple of conversations.

He claimed he had almost no physical energy. He was eating a very strict diet whose contents and restrictions baffled me as much as they obsessed him. We met at a Peruvian restaurant out in the Mission in San Francisco only because he could eat several of the things on their menu and really enjoyed them. 

Here he told me about another obsession. He’d become infatuated with the work of Doris Lessing. “Infatuated'' is not too strong a word. Idries Shah had introduced Lessing to Sufi teachings, and she was also apparently interested in the Gurdjieff school although I have no clear knowledge that she actually worked with any of Gurdjieff’s longtime English students. But she was very conversant with “the Work '' and its alleged connections to ancient Sufi orders. The link here is twofold: Ochs was as obsessed with discovering Enneagram’s esoteric roots as he was frustrated in his attempts to create what he considered an adequate language to describe the teaching.

He also told me about corresponding with Idries Shah, claiming that letter writing was a revered form of spiritual instruction among Sufis. After Shah died in 1996, Ochs tried to initiate a correspondence with Shah’s son, because Ochs was certain Tahir had been designated as his father’s spiritual heir. When Tahir replied that he was a writer, not a Sufi teacher, that his father had not designated him to teach, and actually he was not interested in the job, Ochs said to me, “He’s supposed to say that. It’s his job to put me off.” 

I tried my best not to be put off by Ochs’ increasing reclusiveness, but eventually I gave up waiting for him to return my phone calls. Looking back I do feel some remorse for not persisting. But I also ask myself, after the truce was called in the Enneagram Wars, where were any of his former students? Did you play any role in his life? Did he shut you out? I didn’t have a lot of contact so I don’t know if you visited, called, offered support, but I do know that he was not included in your conferences, invited to speak or write an article. And I’m not suggesting that you should have included him as an obligation, like inviting your cantankerous uncle to Thanksgiving dinner, but actually because he had something to contribute. You missed out, yes you, narrow-minded, parochial, greedy, war-mongering Enneagram enthusiasts. He dedicated his life, every waking minute, to making the possibility of human freedom real. If you don’t do that in all your life, all your relationships, all your work, you’re just food for the moon.

Finally this Midwesterner who’d learned French and earned a degree in Paris, a man who’d introduced Gurdjieff, Ichazo, Naranjo and the Enneagram to Catholic religious, a man who’d struggled to make his own mystical experience available to others, this man returned to Michigan and a Jesuit house dedicated to the French priest who’d promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Perhaps full circle.

Roshi Ignatius

Planting Buddhism in the West

The early Jesuit model might be something to explore because it matches the scale of our project--creating a new cultural model, even a revolutionary one, for Buddhism in the West. It captures the enthusiasm for change, along with the scholarship and spiritual discipline required for creating new forms.

With due respect to Ignatius who inspired the Jesuits’ operation, some other dynamic kicked in that created a genuine spiritual movement, one that would be derailed at various points by the normative Roman ecclesial culture of the day, but still persisted. I am not suggesting that we should expand the list of Jesuit Roshis, much less appoint a Father General Roshi to spearhead the endeavor, but I do want to at least examine the foundational tasks the Jesuits undertook. 

There is a saying among Catholic religious, “Our founders had visions. Their disciples built hospitals.” Creating a vibrant, sustainable Buddhist culture will take time, money, and a lot of organization, but most of all it will take talent and inspiration, the kind of religious pride that the Irish used to build Saint Patrick's or the spiritual and intellectual discipline that the Jesuits used to found Georgetown, the first Catholic University in America. 

The Catholic, mostly Irish experience of planting the Roman Church in the New World was a European tradition arriving in the New World along with European immigrants. It is different from an Asian practice taking root in foreign soil among people who do not share any cultural or family ties. Saint Ignatius parish may not easily translate into a small local Buddhist temple, but the Jesuits did far more than just lend their founder’s name to a parish church.

The Jesuits based their success on a few simple operating principles. I have outlined the ones that I think were important, but I am certainly open to hear other points of view.

Service based on need 

This may be a bit of a stretch to get “service based on need” from the Jesuits’ organizational principle that they would go wherever the Pope wanted them to go, and do whatever he directed (commanded), but bear with me. This was not always done by fiat, but with dialogue, needs assessment, manpower, as well as securing the money. Less than a year after the Jesuit Constitutions were approved by Paul the Third in 1540, Francis Xavier, one of the first companions of Ignatius, boarded the Portuguese warship Santiago bound for Goa. This unleashed a series of important historical firsts in the history of religion. More Jesuits quickly followed Xavier into Asia with their particular skill sets. In a relatively short time there were the first Indo-European dictionaries for several Indian languages, Tibetan, and Japanese; the first translations of the Gospels; the first encounter between Christians and Zen Buddhist monks; the first attempt at crafting Christian rituals in Chinese; the first seminaries in Asia; the first Christian congregations in Japan and China. 

Dictionaries, check. Translations, check. Rituals, check. Contact with local religions, check. All within a generation. Enlisting the assistance of the US or a European navy, No. Churches, check. Seminaries, partial check, after a fashion. These efforts are ongoing, but substantial progress has been made, all within the first generation of Western Buddhists.

Scholarship & Inquisitiveness

Back in Europe, the Jesuits began to marshal their considerable intellectual force to combat the Protestant Reformation (a dubious initiative in the eyes of some, but a response to the times). With their openness to the new humanistic scholarship, they attracted some of the best minds from universities, but not so much from existing monastic colleges. As a matter of fact, they started to develop an alternative “ratio studiorum*.” Although heavily doctrinaire, mostly as a formulation for the Counter Reformation that they would lead, it still laid the foundation for Jesuit scholarship and universities that would help shape the intellectual backbone of the Enlightenment. 

Their scholarship forged institutions and a line of inquiry that yielded profound results.

A crop of bright intelligent Buddhist scholars, thoroughly trained in Buddhist philosophy, linguistics, epistemology and hermeneutics, check. Again within a generation. This scholarship is not limited to Zen Buddhism. A huge area of inquiry has been the Tibetan practices. Sometimes Zen scholars and Tibetans scholars do talk to one another--when they have to. But the parochialism remains parochial. I will have more to say about Zen “our wayism,” when I draw my tentative conclusions.

Seeking common ground & Communication

Francis Xavier began a famous conversation with a Zen Roshi, whom he calls “Ninxit,” (whom I've traced to an actual Roshi, Ninjitsu, the abbot of the Zen Temple, Kinryu-zan Fukushoji). We can read about the encounter in Xavier’s letters to Ignatius; he describes Zen meditation practice in some recognizable detail, at first with admiration and then, when he put on his missionary hat, with an eye to finding the weak points for polemical debate. 

Beginning with Father Enomiya-LaSalle, S.J, followed by several more Jesuits and religious sisters, an Episcopal priest, Unitarian and Church of Christ ministers, there are fully trained Zen teachers with feet firmly in both Buddhist and Christian religious traditions. 

 

The hallmark of this unprecedented exploration, coupled with a zealous missionary effort, was communication. Given the technology of the day, there were problems. Delivery of Xavier’s letters to Ignatius took at least 6 months even aboard the fastest Portuguese caravel. Brother Tom Marshall, a great Zen adept as well and the archivist for the Jesuit California Province, told me about his discovery exploring the archives at the Gesù in Rome. Father Nobili had decided to follow the 49’s to California; the letter from Father General ordering him to establish a mission for indigenous tribes in the Northwest arrived after he had accepted the invitation of the Bishop of Monterey to establish a college at the old mission of Mission Santa Clara de Asís. If the internet had been around in 1851, Santa Clara University would not be. 

The communication also involved careful observation of the people with whom they interacted. A whole new field of ethnography from places as far afield as Tibet and the cultures of central America flourished in the 17th century.

Friends who have worked with teachers in Japan tell me that there are Rinzai priests who have never had a serious conversation with a Soto monk. If that is the baseline, the communication between the various schools in the West is revolutionary. There are students with experience in all the major schools of schools in Zen, plus some training with Tibetan and vipassana teachers even if our leadership remains somewhat parochial given the amount of time and effort to become fluent in the particular practice.

Seeking common ground, check. Without for the most part any polemical, doctrinal conversion motivations. Check plus+!

Mobility & adaptability

The early Jesuits, pledged to poverty, chastity and obedience which helped their mobility, and with the generous support of European colonial powers to be sure, traveled to the ends of the earth. Within the first generation, Jesuits had traveled, and settled in Japan, China, India, Tibet, Africa, North and South America. Siberia would have to wait until 1814, and Australia until 1848. Even with a fair amount of philanthropic support, Zen teachers and their relatively small communities have been restricted to the major university hubs in the West as well as several well-heeled retirement communities where aging Buddhist boomers go to watch the setting sun. The mobility of our mostly middle class senior teachers is restricted by the economic realities of middle class life. The few attempts to foster meditation practice in marginal communities have fizzled out. I have personal experience with two. 

No pass. I don’t know how or if this situation will change. Buddhists cannot print their own money. The real costs in establishing and funding practice centers is a luxury item for people struggling to put food on the table.

Education, including Developing Spiritual Leadership 

The Jesuits created and staffed their new Colleges to educate the sons of the elite class. They also founded a series of houses of formation for the spiritual education of their own leadership. They also changed the system for educating the ordinary clergy. In the current Zen model, again coming from the Japanese teachers who founded the first practice centers, and the resources available to them, any formal Buddhist education, sutra study, ethics, philosophy comes mixed in with meditation practice. 

We don’t have the numbers to support institutions such as the Rinzai Hanazono or the Soto Komazawa Universities. Western students cannot go to Japan without fluency in Japanese language. There are more than a few Western Zen students who have done serious work in Buddhist studies, but their numbers haven’t reached the critical mass required to staff a university even if the other necessary support systems were in place. Here where I live in northern India, all Buddhist education takes place in monastic colleges. There are a few auxiliary programs for Westerners, some taught in English but for the most part, advanced training require proficiency in Tibetan; one I am familiar with, The Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo Translator Program, focuses on training translators for the geshes who teach in Europe, the US, and South America.

There are excellent Buddhist Study Programs at Emory, the University of Virginia, Harvard and Stanford just for starters. But it is a huge commitment of time and money to undertake this level of academic training as well as, for example, mastering the koan curriculum. I know of only one or two people who have done both and lived to tell the tale. Most people I know on the academic scholarship side perhaps have a sitting practice, but they’re not on a Zen teacher track. Because university teaching positions for Buddhist scholars are limited and highly competitive, practitioners who opt for an academic degree are more likely to slip into a mindfulness based psychology program such as California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) where “right livelihood” career opportunities have a higher pay scale. One of the few Buddhist Universities in the United States, Naropa in Boulder, has adopted a similar program as one of the main economic engines of their enterprise.

The Institute of Buddhist Studies, a Jodo Shinshu Seminary, is the only non-Christian graduate school in Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. The ethnic Buddhist Churches of America have been in decline, and face a shortage of priests. The enrollment at IBS must be low also as they have only a dean and 4 core faculty on staff, one of whom heads a chaplaincy program, non-denominational chaplains becoming a career opportunity for serious practitioners. I went to IBS as a special student, hoping to fill in the gaps in my understanding of Buddhist texts, philosophy and epistemology. Although modest, it became an expense that I could not manage struggling with my career in a small non-profit. 

In our examination of the core operating principles for aiding and abetting a spiritual revolution, Education and Development of Spiritual Leadership gets non-passing marks. I think most serious Buddhist practitioners are aware of the problem, but good solutions have not yet appeared. Part of the reason is that it takes time, energy and money. Most centers are independent, small operations that struggle financially to begin with. Systematic careful analysis of the texts, and their commentaries, as well the history of the spread of the teaching is not seen as critical. Offer a Tuesday night class reading the latest book promoted in Tricycle. Handled. The Zen emphasis on immediate experience also leaves the troublesome side effect of an anti-intellectual bias which is not helpful. And finally there is a “Our Way” parochialism and rivalry, not just for example, between Tibetan and Pureland schools, or Zen schools that include koan study and those that emphasize sitting practice, but also between teachers whose teachers were Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai or Burmese. 

If we are to make progress on this front, the New Buddhist Universal University has to cut through these barriers and be non-sectarian in the broadest sense; it has to develop innovative programs that are affordable and available to people who work, practice and perhaps even have family obligations; the programs have to be basically in English or Spanish, with as little academic jargon as possible; the courses have to be developed and taught by Buddhist practitioners who have the highest level of academic professional training. I know that the elements for a solution exist. They just haven’t been assembled in the workable form.

Forgive me for mixing Francis Xavier and the Jesuits into the recipe. I don’t think that the title Roshi comes with a Ph.d or vice versa. Roshi also doesn't mean Saint. Not even in the lose usage.

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 *The Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu, often abbreviated as Ratio Studiorum, was a document that standardized the globally influential system of Jesuit education in 1599. It was a collection of regulations for school officials and teachers.