Issue Five
FEATURE: "Greed, Anger and Delusion"
Keith Frome explores "The Burning Questions of the Rochester Zen Center."
by K.W. Frome
The Rochester Zen Center, located in the stately, residential neighborhood off of East Avenue in Rochester, New York, is one of the largest and most influential Zen training institutes in the United States. It is an international destination for the world community of Buddhists. Roshi1 Philip Kapleau, whose 1965 book, The Three Pillars of Zen, adorned the bookshelves of so many of my friends in college and graduate school, established the center in 1966. In 1986, Bodhin Kjolhede (pronounced BODE’n COLE-heed), who had been Roshi Kapleau’s student for 16 years, formally became the abbot of the Center.
People from all walks of life–priests and ministers and rabbis, plumbers and carpenters, doctors and nurses, teachers and housewives, cooks and computer engineers–find their way somehow to the Rochester Zen Center with, says Amala, one of the Center’s staff members, burning questions about life and death. For 36 years, with an initial membership of 22, Roshi Kapleau and his students have been facing these questions and nurturing the tradition and practice of Zen Buddhism. They have also taken the next step in a long history of transmission of the teachings (the Dharma) of the Buddha from India to China to Tibet and Southeast Asia, to Korea and Japan, and then, particularly after World War II, to the United States. Each step has marked a difference in the understanding and the practice of Buddhism as it has mixed with indigenous cultural customs and religions. The leap of Zen from Japan to the United States may turn out to be the most radical in terms of traditional practices and also in terms of Zen’s challenge to the West’s most basic assumptions about the nature and identities of persons and their destinies. This challenge leaves the coffeetable-book arena of interesting religious philosophies from around the world and takes on its most difficult implications when it is applied to events like September 11th.
Though deeply spiritual, Buddhism is also practical and rooted in the causal sequences of the world. It is a religion that is very interested in the way reality works. In Buddhism, this causes that which leads to this, which triggers that. One’s suffering and alienation are the result of an epochs-long chain of events. The chain of causality extends infinitely past and into the future.
Bodhin Kjolhede puts it this way, “If you drew a vertical line and a horizontal line and the vertical line is space and the horizontal line is time, Buddhism insists that each one of us is at the intersection of those two lines, so we are the product of a limitless past, our karma, and at the same time we are part of the future which means that we have a very strong responsibility. Every action, every word, every thought that we have affects others and affects our whole being.”
Bodhin’s eyes are kind, forgiving, and still tough. He is thoroughly disciplined in the ways of compassion. Imagine the arc of Tiger Woods’ swing. The same rigorous ease marks Bodhin’s body when he demonstrates the seiza, the Japanese sitting posture. This sense of refreshed awakening characterizes all of his gestures and articulations. This awakened stance is acutely aware of human suffering and so his eyes also carry a ring of sadness. I felt exposed interviewing him. He is a metaphysical radiologist. e.e. cummings’ “33” in his book Xaipe reminds me of Bohdin:
where his heartlike ears have flown adorable him
self tail and all(and his tail’s christmas bow)
–and if, when we meet again,little he(having flown
even higher)is sunning his penguinsoul in the glow
of a joy which wasn’t and isn’t and won’t be words
Acutely aware of the irony of interviewing a “penguinsoul” to find the essence of a joy that can’t be expressed in words, I apologized continually about my timing, my faulty equipment, and the photographer’s interruptions as he moved Bodhin around searching for the perfect light.
Bodhin cut me short: “Listen, Keith, our hope is to function effectively and compassionately in a world of turmoil, so really, this is nothing.” His gentle words revealed a stern side as he was also instructing me that my apologies were merely decorous manifestations of ego. The source of suffering in Buddhism is the ego and the delusion that we somehow have a self that is dear and bloated with attention and that we think is at the center of our experience. But the Buddha says that this misperception of an egocentric universe is a delusion and sets our world on fire.
The mind is burning, mental objects are burning, mental consciousness is burning, mental impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither pleasant-nor-painful, arises on account of the mental impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.
Bodhin Kjolhede came to the Rochester Zen Center with burning questions engendered by his own suffering. “I grew up in Rochester, Michigan and I went to the University of Michigan and got a degree in psychology. I was arrested one night going through the Windsor Tunnel from Canada to the U.S. for peyote possession. I spent the night in a Detroit jail. It was Saturday night and I was crammed in there with 11 other prisoners and it was a night in hell. I wasn’t hurt, but it turned me inside out and I said ‘I’ve got to change my life.’” In a later essay, “Standing by Enlightenment Without Resting in It,” Bodhin commented on this time in his life: “My sense of myself and the world had suddenly come loose from its moorings.”
After he got out of jail, he went to Rochester, New York to visit his sisters and to take a workshop at the Rochester Zen Center with Roshi Kapleau to figure out what he should do with his life. “I had two sisters here so I came sort of unconsciously. I had taken a course in Asian philosophy at Michigan, so I came to Rochester three-quarters to visit them and I sort of also had an interest in Zen. I met Roshi and began to practice. I had to finish my probation in Michigan, so I returned and then I came back here in 1971 and have been here now for 30 years.”
Suffering, both profound and mundane, is a central theme in the life and history of the Center. Bodhin traces the beginning of the RZC back to the Nuremberg Trials. “The history of the Center goes all the way back to Nazi Germany when Roshi Kapleau, then Philip Kapleau, was a chief court reporter for the Nuremberg Trials and he began to ask basic questions about human beings and what we do to one another. He also worked at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and while there he visited a Zen monastery. He did not meet anyone but he was very much affected by the feeling of the grounds and the buildings. He came back to the United States and started auditing courses with D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University.” D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese Buddhist Scholar who studied in the United States at the turn of the 20th-Century, wrote the 1949 classic An Introduction to Zen Buddhism and was largely credited with being the leading authority on Zen Buddhism for the post-World War Two generation of Americans bewildered by the horrors of war and the seeming meaninglessness of a victorious but materialistic and spiritually lost society.
After studying with Suzuki, Kapleau went back to Japan to train. “He spent 13 years there training in Zen,” explains Bodhin, “and was sanctioned by the Roshi. He came back to the United States. At that time there were only two Zen centers in the U.S. There was a small Vedanta-oriented group in Rochester, and they invited him to visit.” Vedanta is one of the systems of Indian philosophy dedicated to studying and practicing the teachings in the Vedanta Sutras, explanations of the meaning of the Upanishads, the texts that constitute the mystical teachings of Hinduism. These sutras attempt to explain the world as a constantly changing illusion dependent ultimately on an absolute reality within which all selves participate like the drops of water in the ocean. Without the ocean, each drop would have no existence. Vedanta societies dedicated to meditation, study and service began to form in the United States in 1896 and still exist to this day.
One of the members of the Vedanta group, Ralph Chapin, heard of Philip Kapleau and went to visit him. While in Kapleau’s apartment, he saw galleys for The Three Pillars of Zen. He ordered 20 copies of the book for the Vedanta group and shared one of them with Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography. After reading the book, Carlson’s wife, Dorris, invited Kapleau to come to Rochester to work with the meditation group. Kapleau immediately felt an abiding spiritual seriousness in the group, so he decided to settle in Rochester to establish a Zen teaching center. The initial group of 22 first rented an apartment on Buckingham Street and then bought the house they presently occupy from the Morse Lumber Company. The Center, today, continues to perform its work, including holding daily meditation services, training practitioners, teaching the community, hosting conferences and publishing the magazine Zen Bow, and doing public service. It now has an international reputation and lists over 400 members. Six years ago, Ralph Chapin donated an estate in Batavia to serve as the quieter and more rural retreat center. Construction on phase one of the center was recently completed, and the first retreat was held there.
As there are many branches and approaches to Christianity and Judaism and Islam, so too are there a number of traditions and modes of practice in Buddhism. Zen is one branch that threads its way to the United States via Japan. The other wheels of Buddhism include the Theravada, the Mahayana and the Tibetan. Zen is part of the Mahayana tradition. All of these have the figure and the enlightenment experience of the Buddha in common as well as an acceptance of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: living is suffering; suffering is caused by egotistical attachments and cravings; suffering ceases when we detach ourselves and recognize the self as an illusion (this also liberates our compassionate capacities); and we achieve this cessation of suffering by following the middle or eight-fold path. All Buddhists recognize the “three jewels:” the Buddha, his teachings, and the community, or the sangha, of practicing Buddhists.
From China, Buddhism was exported to Japan and Korea, where it became known as Zen. Zen uses meditation and ruminations into the illusory foundations of what we take to be logical and rational to bring about sartori, or the sudden insight into the delusions of reality and the self.
Multiple schools of thought and practice have developed within Zen, as Bodhin explains: “Most of American Zen traces itself back to Japan where there are two main schools: the Soto and the Rinzai. There is an old saying that the Rinzai School is for generals and the Soto for farmers. The Soto School places emphasis on the intrinsically enlightened nature of all beings, insisting that by simply ripening into that original nature we eventually awaken to. The Rinzai School shares the Buddhist premise that we are all inherently whole and complete, endowed with wisdom and compassion, but places more emphasis on awakening to that reality. To use a peach tree as an analogy, the Rinzai practitioner would vigorously shake the tree to get the peach down sooner. It’s not ripe yet, but at least it’s down; and it can be ripened later. In the Soto School you just leave it there (on the tree) to ripen untilit falls, fully ripe on its own.”
The Rochester Zen Center is a blend of both Rinzai and Soto. “Philip Kapleau’s teachers formulated a school where they wanted to take the best of both and make an amalgam, an integral Zen with elements of each. We definitely believe in the need to awaken, but at the same time we don’t want to get crazy about it.” Awakening is achieved through sitting, or mediation, practice. The Center’s retreats take the form of marathon meditation sessions, some lasting more than ten hours. The atmosphere is intense as practitioners are exhorted to sit for as long as they can. “In sitting,” explains Bodhin, “we assume our most basic attitude. Sitting in a straight, collected posture that is relaxed at the same time so that the mind settles; when the mind settles, that is the whole point, our thoughts are like dust and when the dust settles then we see things as their potential; we see things as they are.”
When sitting, a person counts their breaths and works through koans, logical conundrums meant to rid us of illusions about the foundations of our selves and our logical systems. “A Koan is a semantic device based on an ancient dialogue between master and monk or two masters or a story or dialogue that has an illogical or contradictory element to it that the intellect cannot resolve. Here’s the most famous koan.” Bodhin suddenly smacks his hands. “Here’s the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand? You take a koan like that seriously and have faith that you can resolve it, that you can understand it in a direct, experiential way, it forces the mind to leap beyond the limitations of the rational intellect and slip into Buddha-mind or Original-mind.”
Buddha-mind is all encompassing and includes reason but does not fetishize it. As Bodhin explains, “There is nothing outside of (Buddha-mind). Zen has no quarrel with the intellect. The intellect is a marvelous endowment that we can do wonderful things with. Zen maintains, however, that all too often we are dominated by the intellect. It’s like a motor that we can’t turn off. So we want to use the intellect, not be used by it.”
The transmission from Japan to America has tended to liberalize its practice and structure. Women have more of a place in American Zen. Psychology is emphasized more here, as well. There is more of a moralistic and ethical focus in the Western practice of Zen, hence the Rochester Zen Center does more community service than might be found in an Asian Zen center. American Zen is sometimes called “engaged Zen” because it sees an active role for Buddhist teachings in trying to transform societal and political institutions.
As Western culture has pushed Zen in new directions, so too has Zen pushed Westerners to change old habits of being and thinking. Perhaps the most foreign concept is the doctrine of no self. “This is the hardest thing,” Bodhin comments, “for us as Westerners to grasp because Americans are arguably the most individualistic, self-oriented people in the world, in history, I believe. From everything I’ve ever perceived and read this sence of a separate self is woven into us. Buddhism doesn’t deny that the self has a certain validity to it. You get up in the morning and look in the mirror, you recognize the person in the mirror; there’s a continuity that moves through in life, a certain integrity to this personality. But it is only a relative thing; there is no self that is absolutely real. In fact this body-mind, call it self, is constantly changing and this has enormous implications. It’s not just a technical thing to say that our selves are changing every second. It means that we are not stuck with a self. We have the capacity to evolve and reshape our selves.”
The lack of a permanent self actually entails a heightened sense of personal and cosmic responsibility, for we are in a causal relationship with time past and time future. The ramifications of this idea become particularly difficult for most to grasp and to accept when applied to a tragedy like September 11th. The Rochester Zen Center’s response to the events of that brutal day are based on their radical understanding of compassion and karma.
When asked to offer a Buddhist explanation of the evil of 9/11, Bodhin, without hesitation says: “Ultimately there is no adequate explanation, except in terms of causation. The doctrine of cause and effect is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist teachings, and this means that we need to see that event as the effect of causes for which we have some partial responsibility. Of course our immediate response to what happened is anguish, and sympathy for those who suffered such terrible losses. So we conducted memorial services here for those who died on that day. We designed a ceremony that included chanting and sending spiritual aid to the deceased and those close to them. In that ceremony we also directed our compassion to the perpetrators of the violence, in recognition of the horrendous suffering they will face as a result of their hatred and violence. They sowede horrible karma for themselves, and we wanted to include them in our rites.
As for how the terrorists could do such a thing, it’s hard to comprehend. But the short answer is “ego.” Buddhism says that our suffering is rooted in the notion of of a separate self, the belief that we are separate in some fundamental way. Yes there are differences among people, of course, but none of us is really apart from anyone else. Out of this basic, dualistic sense of self-and-other grows a whole superstructure of identification, of “us” and “them,” of attachment to religions and political parties, ethnic groups, even sports teams, and from that clinging identification comes conflict. We suffer because we are ignorant of the true nature of reality, which is oneness. We are all interconnected. From ignorance arises what we call the three poisons: greed, anger and delusion, and those three poisons is what 9/11 is all about.”
On the surface, Bodhin’s response will certainly raise the ire of many Westerners. How, they will ask, can you assign any sort of responsibility for the events to any person or community other than the terrorists and their supporters? The semantics of the Center’s response itself demonstrate how difficult the transmission of Buddhist principles to the West really is. The equation of karmic consequence with personal responsibility is inexact. Indeed, as long as one maps western notions of the individual onto the idea of karma, it becomes more and more difficult to explain and understand the meaning of karma. Elsewhere, Bodhin has been careful to distinguish the consequences of karma from a concept of punishment meted out by a god-like scorekeeper. His statement about the responsibility of Americans in the event of September 11th, though assuredly controversial, is not meant to implicate any individual person or to be insensitive to suffering. It is meant to begin a process of understanding that will lead to healing. For a Westerner, to bind our fates to the hijackers is an appalling idea; it is just this kind of application of Buddhist precepts that will alienate so many Americans, for we do believe, as a fundamental reality, in the efficacy and the responsibility of the individual self. It is in situations like these where the Eastern and Western horizons seem so untranslatable to one another. Yet, this is the very project of engaged Zen in America.
The Buddhist diagnosis is familiar, when you consider the core narrative of many of the world’s religions. The typical religious story goes something like this: there is something very wrong with the world; it is a place whose inhabitants are out of balance in their relations with others and with themselves and with creation. We need a radical break in our history, in our habits, and in our actions to save this fallen situation. In certain religions, this radical break takes the form of a savior or a prophet or God, unmediated. At the Rochester Zen Center, the meditation room, austere and comfortable, is where the fractures of the world are meant to be healed, for the fractured world is a refraction of the fractured self. From the serenity and peace of this beautiful house comes an awesome and frightening challenge, which is to let go of the chains of our particular personalities. To get a sense of the challenge, peek into the meditation room, pick a seat and imagine sitting still for ten hours and coming face to face, with nowhere to hide or to go, with the contents of your self. I tell Bodhin how much the room intimidates me. He laughs, and we exit the house and stroll instead in the garden.
1 Roshi means “venerable teacher”. In Buddhist practice, a roshi is teacher who has mastered the tenets of the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha but also the ultimate reality of the universe) as a mode of being. It is traditionally a rare and distinguished title conferred on only a very few.
2 From The Fire Sermon, trans. by Walpola Rahula in What the Buddha Taught, p.96. The idea of a person in need of a purging, cleansing fire is a common motif in many world religions. Compare this sermon, for instance, with Luke, 3:16,when John the Baptist foretells that Jesus “will baptize you with (or in) the Holy Spirit and fire.”
3 The Columbia Encyclopedia (5ed.) offers a succinct explanation of Vedanta as well as suggested readings.
People from all walks of life–priests and ministers and rabbis, plumbers and carpenters, doctors and nurses, teachers and housewives, cooks and computer engineers–find their way somehow to the Rochester Zen Center with, says Amala, one of the Center’s staff members, burning questions about life and death. For 36 years, with an initial membership of 22, Roshi Kapleau and his students have been facing these questions and nurturing the tradition and practice of Zen Buddhism. They have also taken the next step in a long history of transmission of the teachings (the Dharma) of the Buddha from India to China to Tibet and Southeast Asia, to Korea and Japan, and then, particularly after World War II, to the United States. Each step has marked a difference in the understanding and the practice of Buddhism as it has mixed with indigenous cultural customs and religions. The leap of Zen from Japan to the United States may turn out to be the most radical in terms of traditional practices and also in terms of Zen’s challenge to the West’s most basic assumptions about the nature and identities of persons and their destinies. This challenge leaves the coffeetable-book arena of interesting religious philosophies from around the world and takes on its most difficult implications when it is applied to events like September 11th.
Though deeply spiritual, Buddhism is also practical and rooted in the causal sequences of the world. It is a religion that is very interested in the way reality works. In Buddhism, this causes that which leads to this, which triggers that. One’s suffering and alienation are the result of an epochs-long chain of events. The chain of causality extends infinitely past and into the future.
Bodhin Kjolhede puts it this way, “If you drew a vertical line and a horizontal line and the vertical line is space and the horizontal line is time, Buddhism insists that each one of us is at the intersection of those two lines, so we are the product of a limitless past, our karma, and at the same time we are part of the future which means that we have a very strong responsibility. Every action, every word, every thought that we have affects others and affects our whole being.”
Bodhin’s eyes are kind, forgiving, and still tough. He is thoroughly disciplined in the ways of compassion. Imagine the arc of Tiger Woods’ swing. The same rigorous ease marks Bodhin’s body when he demonstrates the seiza, the Japanese sitting posture. This sense of refreshed awakening characterizes all of his gestures and articulations. This awakened stance is acutely aware of human suffering and so his eyes also carry a ring of sadness. I felt exposed interviewing him. He is a metaphysical radiologist. e.e. cummings’ “33” in his book Xaipe reminds me of Bohdin:
where his heartlike ears have flown adorable him
self tail and all(and his tail’s christmas bow)
–and if, when we meet again,little he(having flown
even higher)is sunning his penguinsoul in the glow
of a joy which wasn’t and isn’t and won’t be words
Acutely aware of the irony of interviewing a “penguinsoul” to find the essence of a joy that can’t be expressed in words, I apologized continually about my timing, my faulty equipment, and the photographer’s interruptions as he moved Bodhin around searching for the perfect light.
Bodhin cut me short: “Listen, Keith, our hope is to function effectively and compassionately in a world of turmoil, so really, this is nothing.” His gentle words revealed a stern side as he was also instructing me that my apologies were merely decorous manifestations of ego. The source of suffering in Buddhism is the ego and the delusion that we somehow have a self that is dear and bloated with attention and that we think is at the center of our experience. But the Buddha says that this misperception of an egocentric universe is a delusion and sets our world on fire.
The mind is burning, mental objects are burning, mental consciousness is burning, mental impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither pleasant-nor-painful, arises on account of the mental impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.
Bodhin Kjolhede came to the Rochester Zen Center with burning questions engendered by his own suffering. “I grew up in Rochester, Michigan and I went to the University of Michigan and got a degree in psychology. I was arrested one night going through the Windsor Tunnel from Canada to the U.S. for peyote possession. I spent the night in a Detroit jail. It was Saturday night and I was crammed in there with 11 other prisoners and it was a night in hell. I wasn’t hurt, but it turned me inside out and I said ‘I’ve got to change my life.’” In a later essay, “Standing by Enlightenment Without Resting in It,” Bodhin commented on this time in his life: “My sense of myself and the world had suddenly come loose from its moorings.”
After he got out of jail, he went to Rochester, New York to visit his sisters and to take a workshop at the Rochester Zen Center with Roshi Kapleau to figure out what he should do with his life. “I had two sisters here so I came sort of unconsciously. I had taken a course in Asian philosophy at Michigan, so I came to Rochester three-quarters to visit them and I sort of also had an interest in Zen. I met Roshi and began to practice. I had to finish my probation in Michigan, so I returned and then I came back here in 1971 and have been here now for 30 years.”
Suffering, both profound and mundane, is a central theme in the life and history of the Center. Bodhin traces the beginning of the RZC back to the Nuremberg Trials. “The history of the Center goes all the way back to Nazi Germany when Roshi Kapleau, then Philip Kapleau, was a chief court reporter for the Nuremberg Trials and he began to ask basic questions about human beings and what we do to one another. He also worked at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and while there he visited a Zen monastery. He did not meet anyone but he was very much affected by the feeling of the grounds and the buildings. He came back to the United States and started auditing courses with D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University.” D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese Buddhist Scholar who studied in the United States at the turn of the 20th-Century, wrote the 1949 classic An Introduction to Zen Buddhism and was largely credited with being the leading authority on Zen Buddhism for the post-World War Two generation of Americans bewildered by the horrors of war and the seeming meaninglessness of a victorious but materialistic and spiritually lost society.
After studying with Suzuki, Kapleau went back to Japan to train. “He spent 13 years there training in Zen,” explains Bodhin, “and was sanctioned by the Roshi. He came back to the United States. At that time there were only two Zen centers in the U.S. There was a small Vedanta-oriented group in Rochester, and they invited him to visit.” Vedanta is one of the systems of Indian philosophy dedicated to studying and practicing the teachings in the Vedanta Sutras, explanations of the meaning of the Upanishads, the texts that constitute the mystical teachings of Hinduism. These sutras attempt to explain the world as a constantly changing illusion dependent ultimately on an absolute reality within which all selves participate like the drops of water in the ocean. Without the ocean, each drop would have no existence. Vedanta societies dedicated to meditation, study and service began to form in the United States in 1896 and still exist to this day.
One of the members of the Vedanta group, Ralph Chapin, heard of Philip Kapleau and went to visit him. While in Kapleau’s apartment, he saw galleys for The Three Pillars of Zen. He ordered 20 copies of the book for the Vedanta group and shared one of them with Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography. After reading the book, Carlson’s wife, Dorris, invited Kapleau to come to Rochester to work with the meditation group. Kapleau immediately felt an abiding spiritual seriousness in the group, so he decided to settle in Rochester to establish a Zen teaching center. The initial group of 22 first rented an apartment on Buckingham Street and then bought the house they presently occupy from the Morse Lumber Company. The Center, today, continues to perform its work, including holding daily meditation services, training practitioners, teaching the community, hosting conferences and publishing the magazine Zen Bow, and doing public service. It now has an international reputation and lists over 400 members. Six years ago, Ralph Chapin donated an estate in Batavia to serve as the quieter and more rural retreat center. Construction on phase one of the center was recently completed, and the first retreat was held there.
As there are many branches and approaches to Christianity and Judaism and Islam, so too are there a number of traditions and modes of practice in Buddhism. Zen is one branch that threads its way to the United States via Japan. The other wheels of Buddhism include the Theravada, the Mahayana and the Tibetan. Zen is part of the Mahayana tradition. All of these have the figure and the enlightenment experience of the Buddha in common as well as an acceptance of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: living is suffering; suffering is caused by egotistical attachments and cravings; suffering ceases when we detach ourselves and recognize the self as an illusion (this also liberates our compassionate capacities); and we achieve this cessation of suffering by following the middle or eight-fold path. All Buddhists recognize the “three jewels:” the Buddha, his teachings, and the community, or the sangha, of practicing Buddhists.
From China, Buddhism was exported to Japan and Korea, where it became known as Zen. Zen uses meditation and ruminations into the illusory foundations of what we take to be logical and rational to bring about sartori, or the sudden insight into the delusions of reality and the self.
Multiple schools of thought and practice have developed within Zen, as Bodhin explains: “Most of American Zen traces itself back to Japan where there are two main schools: the Soto and the Rinzai. There is an old saying that the Rinzai School is for generals and the Soto for farmers. The Soto School places emphasis on the intrinsically enlightened nature of all beings, insisting that by simply ripening into that original nature we eventually awaken to. The Rinzai School shares the Buddhist premise that we are all inherently whole and complete, endowed with wisdom and compassion, but places more emphasis on awakening to that reality. To use a peach tree as an analogy, the Rinzai practitioner would vigorously shake the tree to get the peach down sooner. It’s not ripe yet, but at least it’s down; and it can be ripened later. In the Soto School you just leave it there (on the tree) to ripen untilit falls, fully ripe on its own.”
The Rochester Zen Center is a blend of both Rinzai and Soto. “Philip Kapleau’s teachers formulated a school where they wanted to take the best of both and make an amalgam, an integral Zen with elements of each. We definitely believe in the need to awaken, but at the same time we don’t want to get crazy about it.” Awakening is achieved through sitting, or mediation, practice. The Center’s retreats take the form of marathon meditation sessions, some lasting more than ten hours. The atmosphere is intense as practitioners are exhorted to sit for as long as they can. “In sitting,” explains Bodhin, “we assume our most basic attitude. Sitting in a straight, collected posture that is relaxed at the same time so that the mind settles; when the mind settles, that is the whole point, our thoughts are like dust and when the dust settles then we see things as their potential; we see things as they are.”
When sitting, a person counts their breaths and works through koans, logical conundrums meant to rid us of illusions about the foundations of our selves and our logical systems. “A Koan is a semantic device based on an ancient dialogue between master and monk or two masters or a story or dialogue that has an illogical or contradictory element to it that the intellect cannot resolve. Here’s the most famous koan.” Bodhin suddenly smacks his hands. “Here’s the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand? You take a koan like that seriously and have faith that you can resolve it, that you can understand it in a direct, experiential way, it forces the mind to leap beyond the limitations of the rational intellect and slip into Buddha-mind or Original-mind.”
Buddha-mind is all encompassing and includes reason but does not fetishize it. As Bodhin explains, “There is nothing outside of (Buddha-mind). Zen has no quarrel with the intellect. The intellect is a marvelous endowment that we can do wonderful things with. Zen maintains, however, that all too often we are dominated by the intellect. It’s like a motor that we can’t turn off. So we want to use the intellect, not be used by it.”
The transmission from Japan to America has tended to liberalize its practice and structure. Women have more of a place in American Zen. Psychology is emphasized more here, as well. There is more of a moralistic and ethical focus in the Western practice of Zen, hence the Rochester Zen Center does more community service than might be found in an Asian Zen center. American Zen is sometimes called “engaged Zen” because it sees an active role for Buddhist teachings in trying to transform societal and political institutions.
As Western culture has pushed Zen in new directions, so too has Zen pushed Westerners to change old habits of being and thinking. Perhaps the most foreign concept is the doctrine of no self. “This is the hardest thing,” Bodhin comments, “for us as Westerners to grasp because Americans are arguably the most individualistic, self-oriented people in the world, in history, I believe. From everything I’ve ever perceived and read this sence of a separate self is woven into us. Buddhism doesn’t deny that the self has a certain validity to it. You get up in the morning and look in the mirror, you recognize the person in the mirror; there’s a continuity that moves through in life, a certain integrity to this personality. But it is only a relative thing; there is no self that is absolutely real. In fact this body-mind, call it self, is constantly changing and this has enormous implications. It’s not just a technical thing to say that our selves are changing every second. It means that we are not stuck with a self. We have the capacity to evolve and reshape our selves.”
The lack of a permanent self actually entails a heightened sense of personal and cosmic responsibility, for we are in a causal relationship with time past and time future. The ramifications of this idea become particularly difficult for most to grasp and to accept when applied to a tragedy like September 11th. The Rochester Zen Center’s response to the events of that brutal day are based on their radical understanding of compassion and karma.
When asked to offer a Buddhist explanation of the evil of 9/11, Bodhin, without hesitation says: “Ultimately there is no adequate explanation, except in terms of causation. The doctrine of cause and effect is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist teachings, and this means that we need to see that event as the effect of causes for which we have some partial responsibility. Of course our immediate response to what happened is anguish, and sympathy for those who suffered such terrible losses. So we conducted memorial services here for those who died on that day. We designed a ceremony that included chanting and sending spiritual aid to the deceased and those close to them. In that ceremony we also directed our compassion to the perpetrators of the violence, in recognition of the horrendous suffering they will face as a result of their hatred and violence. They sowede horrible karma for themselves, and we wanted to include them in our rites.
As for how the terrorists could do such a thing, it’s hard to comprehend. But the short answer is “ego.” Buddhism says that our suffering is rooted in the notion of of a separate self, the belief that we are separate in some fundamental way. Yes there are differences among people, of course, but none of us is really apart from anyone else. Out of this basic, dualistic sense of self-and-other grows a whole superstructure of identification, of “us” and “them,” of attachment to religions and political parties, ethnic groups, even sports teams, and from that clinging identification comes conflict. We suffer because we are ignorant of the true nature of reality, which is oneness. We are all interconnected. From ignorance arises what we call the three poisons: greed, anger and delusion, and those three poisons is what 9/11 is all about.”
On the surface, Bodhin’s response will certainly raise the ire of many Westerners. How, they will ask, can you assign any sort of responsibility for the events to any person or community other than the terrorists and their supporters? The semantics of the Center’s response itself demonstrate how difficult the transmission of Buddhist principles to the West really is. The equation of karmic consequence with personal responsibility is inexact. Indeed, as long as one maps western notions of the individual onto the idea of karma, it becomes more and more difficult to explain and understand the meaning of karma. Elsewhere, Bodhin has been careful to distinguish the consequences of karma from a concept of punishment meted out by a god-like scorekeeper. His statement about the responsibility of Americans in the event of September 11th, though assuredly controversial, is not meant to implicate any individual person or to be insensitive to suffering. It is meant to begin a process of understanding that will lead to healing. For a Westerner, to bind our fates to the hijackers is an appalling idea; it is just this kind of application of Buddhist precepts that will alienate so many Americans, for we do believe, as a fundamental reality, in the efficacy and the responsibility of the individual self. It is in situations like these where the Eastern and Western horizons seem so untranslatable to one another. Yet, this is the very project of engaged Zen in America.
The Buddhist diagnosis is familiar, when you consider the core narrative of many of the world’s religions. The typical religious story goes something like this: there is something very wrong with the world; it is a place whose inhabitants are out of balance in their relations with others and with themselves and with creation. We need a radical break in our history, in our habits, and in our actions to save this fallen situation. In certain religions, this radical break takes the form of a savior or a prophet or God, unmediated. At the Rochester Zen Center, the meditation room, austere and comfortable, is where the fractures of the world are meant to be healed, for the fractured world is a refraction of the fractured self. From the serenity and peace of this beautiful house comes an awesome and frightening challenge, which is to let go of the chains of our particular personalities. To get a sense of the challenge, peek into the meditation room, pick a seat and imagine sitting still for ten hours and coming face to face, with nowhere to hide or to go, with the contents of your self. I tell Bodhin how much the room intimidates me. He laughs, and we exit the house and stroll instead in the garden.
1 Roshi means “venerable teacher”. In Buddhist practice, a roshi is teacher who has mastered the tenets of the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha but also the ultimate reality of the universe) as a mode of being. It is traditionally a rare and distinguished title conferred on only a very few.
2 From The Fire Sermon, trans. by Walpola Rahula in What the Buddha Taught, p.96. The idea of a person in need of a purging, cleansing fire is a common motif in many world religions. Compare this sermon, for instance, with Luke, 3:16,when John the Baptist foretells that Jesus “will baptize you with (or in) the Holy Spirit and fire.”
3 The Columbia Encyclopedia (5ed.) offers a succinct explanation of Vedanta as well as suggested readings.