Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications

This is a new feature for the TWW Blog with the hope of adding a little more coherence to the line up.  Under the title of “Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications” I will be outlining my pet peeves about Buddhism’s “coming to the West.”  Being aware of the processes of accommodation, acclimation, and acculturation that occur in transplanting Buddha Dharma into another culture is my primary concern.  The Buddha Dharma is the teaching of how mind awakens.  This awakening is not bound to any particular culture and is universally available to and inherent within each and every single person and living being. 

One of the most important factors in Buddhism’s arrival in the West is the necessity of disentangling the cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma from those aspects that are the common denominator of the human mind, i.e., the Buddha aspects. This happens whenever Buddhism enters a new cultural context.  It happened whenever and wherever Buddhism spread beyond the region where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, actually walked as a living, breathing, spiritual mendicant, e.g., into the areas now known as Southern India, Northwestern India, Southeast Asia, Ancient Gandhara, Centeral Asia. China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

The core problem is that we mostly do not know what is cultural and what is mind. As Buddhism spread throughout the regions of Asia, there was a general cultural communication that facilitated the transplanting of Buddha Dharma without a head on collision of cultural themes.  For example, Buddhism moves relatively easily into a culture that has either an animistic-shamanistic or pluralistic-pantheistic approach, because it can either become one more view among others in a panoply of perspective, or can integrate the perspective of the mind’s awakening within the preexisting metaphors of awakening in a shamanistic cultural matrix. 

But Buddhism has more difficulty in cultures that worship and idolize an anthropomorphic monotheistic hegemonic God, such as the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It is therefore historically significant that Buddhism is now able to come to the West, only after the West has had its own form of “Enlightenment” wherein the Dharma of Science has been able to free its own culture from the dogmatic rule of an anthropomorphic God.    

This current historical condition now presents problems of its own for Buddha Dharma coming to the West, as now practitioners of Buddha Dharma must take advantage of the cultural space created between the old precincts dominated by the God-religion and the new fields of the scientific worldview, while at the same time addressing the concerns of each.  Buddhism’s finding its place in the West between the polarization of an other-worldly God religion and a worldly science is analogous to Buddhism’s finding its place in China between the preexisting forms of Taoism and Confucianism. 

Part of the difficulty will be for Buddha Dharma to simultaneously shed the Indian, Chinese Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultural encrustations, yet remember and retain Buddha Dharma itself.  As we wash off the cultural accretions, this of course presents us with the paradigmatic conundrum of not throwing the baby out with the bath water.   As just one example, we can see in the West that some adherents to a materialistic scientific worldview misperceive karma and rebirth as merely cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma that can be jettisoned.  But as I see it, we have in the scientific field of psychology the common denominator of the study of the psyche with which Buddha Dharma can ally itself to show us that in the scientific study of mind, every single human culture that has existed has some form of teaching about karma and rebirth, e.g., the Christian teaching of “you reap what you sow.”  

For instance, in 1939 Carl G. Jung wrote an essay titled "Concerning Rebirth" recognizing that the concept of rebirth has various aspects and outlining five categories of rebirth as psychological forms that the archetype of rebirth manifests itself.  Jung points out that rebirth is not a materialistically measurable phenomenon, it can't be weighed or photographed, but it is a "purely psychic reality." Jung said,

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the most widely differing peoples. There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss--without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1, Par. 207.]

 

Therefore by recognizing the role of psychology we can scientifically determine that karma and rebirth are not merely cultural notions to be discarded but are archetypes of the universal collective unconscious that is the foundation of all cultures, and both karma and rebirth can be scientifically and personally studied today, with the 2500 year history of such Buddhist study providing insights for us today .    

For this series, the heading “Caveats” will warn about and point out the problems in sentences and ideas that I come across in English speaking texts, usually describing the Buddha Dharma erroneously, giving false impressions, causing confusion, or generally mistaking or misstating something about the Buddha Dharma.

The heading “Corrections” will attempt the brief restatement from my perspective to correct what was written.

The heading “Clarifications” will articulate the reasons for announcing the caveat and making the correction.

It should go without saying that I’m not writing from a position of a particular orthodoxy, but from a particular perspective.  The point is not that these corrections are intended to establish objective dogmatic views that everyone must adhere to, but that they reveal the “truth of perspective” itself, which is a central aspect of the core teachings of the Buddha Dharma, i.e., having an “Aligned View” is the first of the folds of the Eightfold Path that is basic to Buddhism.     

Here, the Buddha Dharma view we are centrally aligning with is the One Vehicle. This mind-only perspective “stands on zero” as the nondual teaching of emptiness (sunyata) and manifests Buddha Nature as the coming and going of thusness (Tathagata) for the great matter of bringing people to hear of, learn about, and enter into the Buddha’s seeing and knowing in order to alleviate the imbalance and off-centeredness (dukkha) that inevitably arises with self-consciousness and causes the general distress and dissatisfaction inherent in our lives that leads to our greed, hatred, delusions and the whole plethora of vexations, and ultimately to our killing, harming, stealing, lying, and generally bad behaviors towards each other.   

My initial anticipation is that many of first blogs of the series will circle around the areas of confusion between the One Vehicle and the Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha themes of Buddha Dharma as understood by scholastics in the West. 

This page will act as the introduction and table of contents for the blogs posted in this series, as well as a preview of blogs I hope to include.  The posted blogs can also be found by clicking on the “CCC” link in the list of Labels on the side of the pages.

If you have any suggestions or pet peeves of your own about how Buddha Dharma is being accommodated and acculturated in the West, please let me know in the comments.

_/|\_

Gregory

Posts in this series:

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications: The meaning of ‘ Mind-only’

Anticipated Topics for Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications:

~ Manas, the 7^th Consciousness
~ Alayavijnana, the 8th Consciousness
~ Mind Only (citta-matra), Consciousness Only (vijnana-matra), and Notification Only (vijnapti-matra)
~ Lankavatara Sutra, The Sutra of Going Down to Lanka
~ Zen and Zen Samadhi
~ Samatha Vipassyana and Samadhi Prajna
~ Tendai Shikan and Zen Shikantaza
~ Five Types of Zen

Householder Zen Lineages

I recently had my attention drawn to a blog at the Wild Fox Zen blog titled "What the Heck is a Zen Priest?" that was written just about a year ago. The topic is one that will remain current for many years to come as it is about the development of Zen in the West and the role of Zen priests or monastics in the transplantation of Zen to the West.

Here are some thoughts that blog has stimulated.

In Siddhartha Gotama's time the priests, known as Brahmins, were part of the ruling class structure that Siddhartha the Buddha walked away from. The Buddha Dharma was about stepping outside the caste structure and its hierarchy. Buddha became a wandering mendicant called a “bhikkhu” or more politely a “sramana.” The samanas would congregate around well known teachers (sattha). Siddhartha Gotama studied under several satthas and especially with two such satthas of great renown. When two wandering sramanas met on the road, their customary greeting was not to ask “How are you?” but “Who is your Master (Sattha)?” “Whose Dharma do you find most agreeable to you?” or “What is the Dharma you have adopted?”

Thus there were no sects per se, but there were networks of followers of one Master (Sattha) or Dharma or another. The wandering almsmen (Pali bhikkhus, Sanskrit bhiksus) and women (bhikkhunis, bhiksunis) would follow a teacher as long as their Dharma was agreeable and if they found it lacking they could find another teacher whose Dharma was more agreeable. This was the same pattern that Siddhartha followed when he moved from teacher to teacher, Dharma to Dharma.

When Gotama became a Buddha and so became a teacher himself, he became known as a Great Master ([i]Mahasattha[/i]) and more and more wanderers found his Dharma to be most agreeable to them and so they formed a network of samanas around him.
To other sramanas outside of his Dharma, his followers were known as the “Sramanas of the Son of the Sakyas” (Sakyaputtiya Samanas), but the Buddha’s followers called themselves by the more simple name of the “Guild (or Union) of Bhikkhus” (the Bhikkhu sangha).

Thus the Buddha did not directly challenge the caste system but instead set up an alternative “system” based on the craftsmen-guild model called the sangha. At the time, the social culture and structure was that a craft sangha was allowed to police itself so that the members of the craft’s sangha would answer for wrongdoing to the craft sangha instead of to the public authorities. As long as the craft sangha showed a real system of laws of good conduct and enforcement of those laws, the sangha was allowed to have their own separate system of keeping their members in order without being subject to civil authority. By establishing his band of followers in the sangha model the Buddha was able to set his sramana followers apart outside the jurisdiction of the usual civil authorities.

It is interesting that this development of the sangha model led to the confusion between the followers of the Buddha Dharma (i.e, the greater sangha or mahasangha) and the Bhikkhu sangha. There were four recognized groups of the followers: the male bhikkhus and female bhikkhunis (collectively referred to with the male term bhikkhus as the inclusive) and the male and female householders. The Bhikkhu sangha had to be developed as a separate institution to provide the institutional protection and insulation from the civil authorities while the householder sangha continued under the jurisdiction of the civil government (regardless of whether the civil government was a monarchy or republic). However by developing its own institutional identity the Bhikkhu sangha then came to usurp the greater sangha and to call itself “The” sangha and relegated the role of the householder side of the greater sangha to the status of merely providing physical support for “The” sangha, i.e., the Bhikkhu sangha comprised of the bhikkhus and bhikkhunis.

So it is ironic that the Buddha Dharma in adopting the Bhikkhu sangha model in order to be free of civil laws and authority and the caste system had to establish its own internal laws and authority, and thus an internal system of hierarchy that was every bit as structured and rigid as the caste system. Of course the Buddha’s Bhikkhus sangha was patterned as a meritocratic seniority system rather than the inherited birthright caste system. The Bhikkhu sangha system with its two values of meritocracy and seniority has a built-in tension between the seniority rights and privileges of the members of the Bhikkhu sangha and the recognition of the meritocracy of a member’s personal awakening to the Buddha Dharma.

In our current societies, this irony is now represented by a priestly caste within the greater sangha in the same way. One response to this dilemma as it was recognized in Japan in the 20th century, was by Yatsutani Hakuun Roshi, who, with the blessing of his teacher Harada Sogaku Roshi, set up a Zen lineage outside the priestly caste system called the Sanbo Kyodan. One of the hallmarks of this new branch of the Zen lineage was that it was not controlled by the modern version of the Bhikkhu sangha found in the Japanese priest system but was to be a wing of the greater sangha that is “of, by, and for” the householder or so-called “lay” sangha. This was the creation of a householder sangha that recognized that the religious aspirations and realizations of householders was every bit the equal to those of the “ordained” when it comes to maintaining the true Buddha Dharma. In the Sanbo Kyodan Zen lineage the ideal is that teachers become recognized purely on the meritorious basis of their realization and ability to teach, not on their seniority as a priest or monastic.

This new Zen lineage was accepted widely in the West by and through the numerous authorization and certification of Westerners as Roshis (literally “old teachers”). Though in this process, some lineages, such as the Diamond Sangha stemming from Robert Aiken Roshi and others, became institutionally independent of the Sanbo Kyodan, all lineages stemming from the Sanbo Kyodan continue to maintain the practice of being a householder Zen lineage not dominated by a priest or bhikkhu class.

This does not mean that the new householder Zen lineage is inherently disparaging of the priest or bhikkhu sangha, but that there is an assertion of independent equality for householders. This independent but equal status was actualized by Yatsutani Roshi himself when, at the same time that he established the Sanbo Kyodan for housholder Zen, he continued to work with Zen priests such as Taizan Maezumi Roshi whom he certified (inka) as a lineage holder of his koan practice lineage.

Zen in the West is developing on these two separate but related tracks that have crisscrossed, that of the priest controlled lineages of traditional Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese Zen and the lay or householder controlled lineages. In this new Western context, some of the priestly or bhikku ordained teachers or roshis of the most conservatively priest or monastic dominated Zen lineages have actually authorized lay or non-priest teachers within their lineages, such as Chan Master Sheng Yen who, prior to his death in 2009, had authorized both monastic and lay Dharma heirs.

In this continuing Western evolution of householder-centric Zen lineages alongside monastic- or priest-centered Zen lineages, how the two branches will grow in relation to each other and whether they become synergistic or competitive is yet to be determined. At the present time the competitive aspect of these two branches of Zen lineages is minimal, but given our human proclivity for discriminating the One Mind into sectarian competition, it remains to be seen whether the stress of developing resources and organizing students affects the continuing relationships between monastic-centered Zen and householder-centered Zen.