Constance Kassor’s review for Buddhadharma:
As Chan and Zen traditions have been transmitted across cultures, masters and translators have worked hard to convey the subtleties of complex teachings and texts for new audiences. But there is still much that remains lost in translation: Chan and Zen developed within their own cultural contexts in East Asia, relying on certain assumed worldviews that are not necessarily shared by modern-day Westerners. Nelson Foster’s Storehouse of Treasures: Recovering the Riches of Chan and Zen (Shambhala) brings some of these worldviews and assumptions to light, skillfully illustrating their importance for Buddhist teachings.
This book explores different concepts, teachings, and writings from Chan and Zen, and shows the ways that Confucianism, Daoism, and other aspects of East Asian culture have influenced practitioners’ understandings of Buddhism. One chapter of note addresses cases of ethical misconduct among some teachers in American Zen centers. Foster points out that Zen’s transmission to the United States, influenced in part by its popularity within the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, largely ignored the influence that Confucianism had on Chan and Zen in Asia, which provided an ethical grounding to teachings. This lack of understanding of Zen’s broader ethical grounding created “a climate in which dubious conduct could pass for liberated activity.” To illustrate this, Foster then unpacks some Confucian and Daoist teachings on character and conduct to show how they undergird Buddhist teachings, and suggests that “it behooves us to see how deeply [Confucianism and Daoism] are stitched into the fabric of our tradition and to ponder the consequences of stripping them out.” Indeed, it behooves all Buddhist practitioners to see how deeply certain worldviews and assumptions are stitched into the fabric of their own traditions.
[Please note that the text from which this excerpt derives makes use of footnotes and diacriticals; these are not represented in this excerpt.]
Excerpt:
Cutting and Polishing:
A Matter of Character
In the early 1980s, it became apparent that teachers at several prominent American Zen centers had engaged in gross misconduct—covert sexual affairs, lavish personal spending, abuse of authority, heavy drinking—and that a reckoning with ethical issues was overdue. Revelation of the teachers’ failings rocked not only the communities directly involved but virtually all of us who felt deeply committed to, and invested in, the tradition. Aitken Rōshi’s personal uprightness spared us a crisis in the Diamond Sangha, but spurred on by grief about his colleagues’ behavior and the anguish and disruption he witnessed during visits to sanghas at the center of the troubles, he began avidly seeking resources that would help address issues of morality and character in a manner consistent with practice.
Often before the scandals and more often after, Aitken Roshi quoted a dictum by Yamada Rōshi: “The practice of Zen is the perfection of character.” Following this came a lament that his beloved teacher said little more on the subject, never spelling out what “perfection of character” meant or articulating the way Zen practice affects character—or at least ought to affect character. To remedy the perceived deficit, besides seeking out Buddhist precedents, Aitken Rōshi explored Christian teachings on character, taking interest, particularly in Roman Catholic methods for the “formation” (actually transformation) of character. Discussing this with a Catholic friend, noted Benedictine brother David Steindl-Rast, he said,
Whatever process of formation there is in a Zen monastery is incidental, almost casual. I’ve heard more than one abbot use the image of a rock tumbler as a metaphor for the beneficial effect that life in a monastery has on a monk’s character: in the ordinary life of the monastery, people are thrown together over a long period of time, rubbing against each other, so to speak, and polishing their characters in the process, as stones in a tumbler become smooth by rubbing against one another. That’s as far as the tradition of formation goes in Zen.
Imagine my surprise to learn, not long after this statement was published, that the image of “mutual polishing” has an ancient pedigree and represents a coherent system, far from casual, for cultivating good character. It’s imparted in Japanese monasteries under the catchphrase sessa takuma, which appears in the Confucian Analects and ultimately derives from the Shijing, or Classic of Poetry, a text from the earliest stratum of Chinese literature. Of the precious items in the family treasure house, this is one that we in the West have a truly urgent need to rediscover.
In the Shijing, the expression figures in a couplet describing a highly refined youth—“as if carved, as if polished, / as if cut, as if ground.” Confucians made this shorthand for personal cultivation across the board, and in much of society, certainly among the educated, it was broadly accepted as an imperative lifelong task. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to find reference to these lines in the earliest surviving regulations for Chan monasteries, compiled in 1103, or in countless other materials from the tradition—masters’ records, admonitory letters, poems, calligraphy.
Further study brought home to me as never before the enormous debt Chan and Zen owe to Confucianism. That our traditions arose and matured in Confucian cultures hadn’t eluded me, but neither instruction by Japanese and American masters nor my own reading had made plain to me how thoroughly Confucian thought and practices suffused Chan and Zen institutions and how powerfully the Confucian influences, in particular, shaped the tradition’s delineation of proper relationships and character. I’d understood Confucianism as having opposed and resisted Buddhism, which indeed it did in certain ways, at times aggressively. But Confucianism so pervaded Chinese society that it also formed a sort of natural or inescapable substrate for Chan and did much the same for Zen in Japan. While Aitken Rōshi recognized that Zen people in Japan took “their moral guidelines” from Confucianism, he understood that as a failure, manifesting a lack of specifically Buddhist attention to ethics.
How Confucian influence actually guided the lives of Chan and Zen practitioners can be seen in the autobiography of the late Master Sheng Yen, a prominent figure in modern Taiwanese and Western Chan. He recalls that his upbringing in a Chinese village “instilled a deep sense of the Confucian values of loyalty and responsibility” by the time he turned fourteen and began his life as a Buddhist novice. In the monastery, rather than diminishing, Confucian impact increased. Assigned a Confucian tutor, he learned “that to become a moral person one had to regulate one’s thoughts and behavior and to act with moderation and decorum, to carefully weigh the pros and cons of any action” and not to “live only for oneself.” He embraced this principle:
If you’re a layperson you have primary responsibility to your family; if you are a monastic, that responsibility is directed toward your monastery. Confucius urges us to become useful. He teaches a path of interaction with the world that is gentle and subtle and is about cultivating ourselves so that we have beneficial harmonious relations with the people around us. The Confucian sense of responsibility and loyalty would shape my life and fit hand-in-glove with the Buddhism that I absorbed.
When Yamada Rōshi spoke of perfection of character, no doubt he had similar virtues in mind, and evidently, it didn’t occur to him (or to many other Asian masters) that it was necessary to educate Westerners about them. On the receiving end of his instruction, we had some native understandings of good character that, along with a mainly unconscious universalism—people are essentially the same everywhere, right?—made it easy to suppose that we understood what he meant when he referred to character. But Western understandings of character derive, inevitably, from precedents and influences very different from those that shaped him or Master Sheng Yen. Rather than presuming that Chan and Zen understandings about character had much in common with our own, we might more logically have anticipated significant differences.
Complicating East-West communication on the subject was the way writers presented the tradition’s orientation to ethical concerns. All too often in introducing Western readers to Chan and Zen, they dismissed social mores as the products of such dualistic fallacies as good and bad, right and wrong, that any awakened practitioner would have jettisoned. Part of the responsibility for this misconception rests with D. T. Suzuki. In the first volume of his Essays in Zen Buddhism, published in 1927 and thus one of the earliest books about Zen in English, Suzuki flatly asserted that for an enlightened person,
…propositions will be true—that is, living—because they are in accordance with his spiritual insight; and his actions will permit no external standard of judgment; so long as they are the inevitable outflow of his inner life, they are good, even holy. The direct issue of this interpretation of Enlightenment will be the upholding of absolute spiritual freedom in every way.
What a claim, what an offer—absolute spiritual freedom in every way! As if this weren’t bold or definite enough, Suzuki went on to declare that Mahāyāna Buddhists “advocated perfect freedom of spirit, even after the fashions of antinomians. If the spirit were pure, no acts of the body could spoil it.” Theravada Buddhists he considered rule bound, unable “to enter a liquor-shop” or a house of ill repute.
But to the Mahayanists, all kinds of ‘expediency’ or ‘devices’ were granted if they were fully enlightened and had their spirits thoroughly purified. They were living in a realm beyond good and evil, and as long as they were there, no acts of theirs could be classified and judged according to the ordinary measure of ethics; they were neither moral nor immoral. These relative terms had no application in a kingdom governed by free spirits which soared above the relative world of differences and oppositions.
Suzuki Sensei borrowed the term antinomians from Christianity, where it named a sect preaching that God’s grace released the elect from the need to adhere to moral laws, and he later regretted applying it to the freedom that flowed from awakening. Seeing that some of his readers and most ardent fans had taken such statements as justification for transgressing social norms, in 1960 he made a public about-face, writing that “Zen is decidedly not…antinomian” and explaining,
What Zen emphasizes most strongly in its disciplinary practice is the attainment of spiritual freedom, not the revolt against conventionalism. The freedom may sometimes consist merely in eating when one is hungry and resting when one is tired; at other times, and probably frequently, [it consists] in not eating when one is hungry and not resting when one is tired. So it is, that Zen may find more of its great followers among the “conformists” than among the rebellious and boisterous nonconformists.
From early on, Suzuki had foreseen a risk of Zen degenerating into what he termed “libertinism,” and he’d cautioned against it repeatedly, but evidently he overlooked the possibility that his own trumpeting of spiritual freedom might increase the hazard. He also seems to have overlooked the fact that, during his lifetime and even to this day, Westerners likely to take up Zen could be classed as “nonconformists.” Sitting silently for long hours, reciting old Asian texts, studying kōans—these are hardly common behaviors in the West.
At any rate, by the time he issued his clarification, the damage was done. He and fellow enthusiasts had established a lasting image of Zen masters as people exempt from any “external standard of judgment,” at liberty to behave however they pleased. It took hold especially in the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, its grip on American imaginations strengthened by writers who lacked Suzuki’s experience with the actualities of Zen practice. Chief among them was Jack Kerouac, whose romantic view of Zen permeates his 1958 bestseller Dharma Bums.
All this helped create a climate in which dubious conduct could pass for liberated activity and even for Dharma teaching itself, but contributing to the confusion was a perfectly legitimate, longstanding aspect of Chan and Zen and of prior Buddhist schools: the doctrine of “emptiness” (Ch., kong or k’ung; J., ku). I’ve put the word in quotation marks not to devalue it, only to mark its canonical status and its nature as metaphor. For centuries, this name for a nameless nonentity has proven helpful to some and extremely problematic for many, and I’m not going to launch an assault on its mysteries here. For now, it’ll suffice to say that teachings on this subject destabilize all concepts and, in doing so, open a pathway to “libertinism.” Ancient and authentic Buddhist expressions like “Samsara is exactly nirvana,” which have always been susceptible to misunderstandings and corrupt construals, became more dangerous than ever when they fell on the ears of ethically disoriented young seekers overseas.
From Storehouse of Treasures: Recovering the Riches of Chan and Zen by Nelson Foster © 2024. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.
OTHER NEW & NOTEWORTHY DHARMA BOOKS THIS MONTH:
Paranormal States: Psychic Abilities in Buddhist Convert Communities by D.E. Osto (Columbia)— Read Constance Kassor’s review and an excerpt from the publisher now.
A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism: The Path of Awareness, Compassion, and Wisdom by Cortland Dahl (Shambhala)— Read an excerpt
See also the latest reviews from Lion’s Roar magazine.
Visit Buddhadharma for more on the latest dharma books and to read more excerpts.
