As you can see, my name is Carl Bielefeld. I'm the moderator for today's panels, which, again, we have two. I wanted to start, as we did yesterday, by thanking all the people who put this together, and especially today's events, the people at Berkeley, like Kila, Bob Scharf, and others. The plan for today is a little different from yesterday, that is to say the substance of the matter. The format is basically the same. We're going to step forward in time, that's the plan at least, and think about Zen today, and in the afternoon perhaps even a little bit about Zen tomorrow. And that will involve not just stepping forward, but also stepping back a bit from the fairly narrow focus we had yesterday on Suzuki Doshi, how he came to America.

[01:01]

and what happened, who we were, how Zen Center got started, those sorts of things. And I think that today's subject will take us into broader issues about Zen in America. That may be in some contrast to what we did yesterday, but the dialogue between those two, that is to say, Zen Center's unique history and the broader questions of Zen in America, I think is very interesting. So I want to just start right out with our panel this morning. And we decided, I decided, and they agreed, that we would just go in alphabetical order since there wasn't any particular obvious order to what I understood the presentations would be. So that means that Gil Franzdahl, will lead us off. I read to you from Gil's bio blurb, as we call them, in the program. The primary teacher since 1990 for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

[02:09]

He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the US and Asia since 1975. In 1998, he somehow received a PhD in religious studies from Stanford University. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982. And in 1995, received Dharma transmission from Mel Weitzman, abbot of Berkeley Zen Center. Gil? Thank you. So two nights ago, I had a dream, maybe in preparation for this. The dream was that I was involved with repairing or redoing a road. And as we were digging into the road, we found these old shards, these old kind of pieces of rock or something, tiles, that people had written on. And it was the people who had built the road originally had written kind of a record of what they were doing when they were building the original road.

[03:15]

And the writing on this was alternately, people have trouble hearing? So I was dreaming, and I dreamt I was repairing a road. And digging into the road, I came across these rocks or shards that had writing on them. They were a record of the people who had first built the road. And the writing was written alternatively in Chinese and English. And in my dream I understood that meant that both English-speaking people and perhaps Chinese-speaking people had built this road. And here I was redoing it, reinventing it, making it, repairing it. And so in my interpretation of this dream is that here we are in America. redoing a road that was laid down long before us that was already a mixture of or cooperatively made by people of different cultures.

[04:24]

And when I thought about it further, I wondered when this mixing began. Did it start in 1959? And I remembered that Suzuki Roshi's college thesis, which was completed around 1930 or so, already exhibited a lot of this mixing right there. And as maybe was said yesterday, in Komozawa University in Buddhist Studies in Japan, in the decades before Suzuki Roshi went to college, There was already a very intense engagement with Western religious ideas, Western philosophical ideas. And Suzuki Roshi was part of that kind of maybe exciting time in Japanese Buddhist studies where he also was coming under the influence of that mixture of Western ideas and Japanese and East Asian Buddhist ideas. And so our encounter with Suzuki Roshi was not with pure Japanese Zen. but rather with a Japanese Zen that was already mixing itself up with its encounter with the West.

[05:31]

A friend of mine translated Suzuki Roshi's college thesis. It was called The Religion of the Great Ancestor, focusing on Raihai Tokuzui. And I wanted to read a few quotes from the conclusion of this thesis. Dogen Zenji's path is always to renew one's religious experience in the water of one's own historical era and then to march forward with the current ideas of the times. So that's interesting in terms of what Zen is and the path. The path requires this mixing of what's happening currently in one's own culture with whatever Zen is. that we're not going back to some kind of pristine, ancient, perfect idea of Zen, of Dogon Zen, but there's already this mixing going on. In contrast to establishing religion through scriptures, this path receives the lively life of the phenomenal universe itself as the light of the Buddha.

[06:40]

So I understand the phenomenal universe to be that which we're kind of experiencing here right now. I believe that absoluteness is not found in specific religious experiences that have already occurred. Those experiences have already lost their value. It is like currency that cannot be converted. It is especially difficult for us with a consciousness or mindset of a different era and more advanced intellectual stage to follow the religious teachings from a previous era. to do so would ignore not only our religious subjectivity but also our capacity to reason. And I love this kind of combination here of religious subjectivity, the way our own religious, our subjective experience and how we live through it and understand ourselves and the world and Zen perhaps through our subjective experience of it, as one of the reference points for what Zen is. And that raises a lot of certainly very difficult and perplexing questions that some scholars certainly I think tear their hair out about when Zen practitioners refer back to their subjective experience.

[07:53]

And also, our capacity to reason. We're rational beings. So Suzuki Roshi here is pointing to the importance of both of these things. And it's wonderful, the interface between subjectivity and rationality, I think, is a very important one as we look at Zen, our Zen practice, and Zen going forward in time. Therefore, Zen, namely the path of Dogen Zenji, emphasizes maintaining the purity of the religious experience without seeking the authority of an established religion or a fixed religious experience. Zen emphasizes the truth found in religious experience. I think probably Robert Scharf can talk a lot about why in the 1920s or so Suzuki Rishi would be calling upon experience as being important for Zen. But here he ends this quote with what I like to consider a koan or a question. what is the truth found in religious experience?

[08:56]

Not the religious experience itself is important, but rather the truth of it. What do we kind of take from it? And then go back to the beginning of the quote, the interplay between the consciousness or the issues of our current historical times and how that interacts with the Zen experience. And this has been certainly part of my quest in being a Zen practitioner is how do I understand and take the Zazen mind, the mind of non-attachment, and live it out in this very kind of full life of our culture, and especially this American culture here in California that we're part of. And I see that as Zen has developed here in the West, that it's changed a number of ways. The interest it has has changed. One of them that interests me a lot is its emphasis on ethics and how ethics has changed over time.

[10:01]

We're here at UC Berkeley where Robert Bella – is he here today, Robert Bella? – wrote Getting Saved from the 60s and there was kind of an antinomian emphasis on ethics in Zen circles back in the 60s. And then by the early 1990s, there was a much more, I wouldn't call it rule-based, but much more interest in the application of the specific Zen precepts in a variety of areas in our lives. Rev. Anderson wrote a book on the precepts. Other people have written, Soto Zen teachers in the West have written books on the precepts. have addressed the precepts in a very different way than the precepts were ever addressed, as far as I could tell, in Japan or in China, taking them seriously as something to help us understand and interpret our actions in the world that we're living. I suppose often in Japan, ethics had much more of a ritual emphasis or simply a prohibitory emphasis.

[11:02]

So how are we shifting and changing our understanding of ethics, of precepts here in the West? I think it's very fascinating because it requires us to ask interesting questions. And one of the questions is, what are the principles or what is our Dharma understanding by which we're changing our precepts here in the West? And the Zen precepts are changing here in the West. They're changing not only in interpretation, but also in how we translate the very Chinese characters. that are our precepts. A variety of different Zen centers have different translations and different meanings of what the precepts are. So what are the principles behind those changes? I think it's one of the interesting places where I hope Zen will develop over the next decades. The other thing that's changing, I think, is when Suzuki Roshi came to the West, our Western idea of a Zen master, I think, was relatively narrow. A Zen teacher was relatively narrow.

[12:05]

Perhaps the Japanese community in the West had a broader idea of what a Zen teacher was or a Zen priest was than some of the Western converts. But over these last 50 years, we see an increase in growth. in vocations, where people who are presenting themselves as religious teachers or religious occupations, being Zen, kind of offering themselves as religious In the religious capacity as Zen teachers, Ren Zen something, more than just being Zen masters or leaders of Zen centers or temples. So I'm involved very much with training of Buddhist chaplains. And so a variety of people have found that they express their bodhisattva vow, express their Zen practice and understanding in the chaplaincy environment of bringing interfaith work. There are people who are engaged in, who take their Zen background and all that and do it, offer it in a much more secular basis. For example, doing mindfulness-based stress reduction.

[13:06]

And that's how they offer their Zen practice back to the wider world. There are people who are scholars. People have come through Zen Center, created Zen Center, and then for better or worse, have been given PhDs. And um... And then there are the engaged Buddhist types, people who are long-time Zen practitioners, sometimes Zen teachers, who express their Zen practice primarily in what's nowadays called engaged Buddhism social activism. And that's the approach they take. There are also people who have developed small sitting groups or local temples that are much less like training monasteries and much more like beginning to look maybe perhaps a little more like Western churches.

[14:13]

And people are more ministers to a local community than they are trainers of monks and nuns. these changing vocations of people expressing their Zen life means that they're engaged in our culture in very different ways than if people stay in the monastery, in the training monasteries themselves. It requires different training but also requires a different education, different consideration, different thinking, different knowledge. As does the earlier statement about the ethics precepts. As the precepts have been applied in new ways at Zen Center, it requires that we understand, have greater knowledge and understanding about the impact of our actions, which requires knowledge and understanding and study. If you look at the Zen Center's ethics document, it requires some understanding of environmental issues. Global warming is not an intuitive idea.

[15:15]

To really understand it, we have to have a lot of knowledge and understanding about the impact and what's going on. So what's the relationship between knowledge, rationality, thinking about things, and perhaps the Zen experience of zazen mind, non-attachment? How do these two interact and work together? One more area of development I'd like to mention that I'm involved in now a little bit, and I don't know much about, but I think it's facing a lot of Buddhist groups here in America, especially large ones like San Francisco Zen Center, and that is the issue of governance. How are Zen centers governed? Are they governed hierarchically with an abbot who sits at the top who kind of just dictates what happens and everyone else follows accordingly? Or is it democratic where everyone votes and the abbot has one vote out of 200 and is lucky if people kind of vote along? The issue of democracy, of egalitarianism, is important and is mentioned many times in the process of Buddhism developing in the West.

[16:20]

But one of the more interesting things is the emphasis on process. and process meaning the issue of talking things through, considering things, being able to be in conflict with each other, inclusion, respecting dignity to each person's concerns and voices and feelings. There's an increased emphasis on process, and the governance of some of these end centers, like San Francisco's End Center, a process has become so big that it's probably fair to say that San Francisco's End Center is run on a collaborative basis. and this idea of collaboration, how does that relate to Asian ideas of what Zen practice is? What are the Dharma principles, Zen principles behind how an organization like a Zen center is governed? And what is the role of an abbot? What is the role of a Zen master in governing an organization when we have a process-heavy thing where individual voices are much more important here, perhaps, than they are overtly, at least, in the way I see it, in maybe Japanese monasteries?

[17:30]

So we have this intersection of Western ideas of individual, Western ideas of process, of democracy, Western ideas of engagement as we pick up Western vocational ideas for being a priest, minister, chaplain, prophet, many things going on. Do we know what we're doing? And how do we connect or how do we interface our subjective experience of zazen, the zazen mind, our zazen experience, with our rationality, with our reason, as we understand how we operate in our culture and our wider culture. That's the topics that interest me a lot. So I hope that is a good beginning. Thank you. The format is that we have the speakers present without questions, and then we take a break, and then we open it up. So I want to go directly then to Mioan Grace Shearson.

[18:37]

She is the founder and head of Empty Nest, Raleigh Heartland, and Fresno River Zen Groups. She's trained in Soto Zen in America under Mel Weitzman, and in Ninzai Zen in Japan under Keido Fukushima of Tofuku-ji. She received Dharma transmission in 2005 from Sojin Mel Weitzman. She has a doctorate in clinical psychology and has just brought out a new book, Zen Women Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters. It's hard to top that title. So I want to start by talking about GoAn, which is something that came up yesterday. And actually, I have a presentation that I planned before yesterday. And maybe Daigaku and Valerie could pass the handouts out.

[19:39]

Today, as I was getting ready to come over here, I tuned into Teddy Kennedy's funeral. And I saw the coming together of all sides in honor. And I thought, oh, this is go in. Go in, which Professor Williams brought up yesterday, and he described as mysterious causes and conditions, is literally translated as the honorable go from honorable relationship, n, n meaning relationship. And I was introduced to the concept in Japan by a Japanese friend who couldn't explain how we were friends. There was no way that our relationship connected except, he said, that when you're sensitive to going, your life is really wonderful. So this meeting itself is an expression of going.

[20:40]

I also am aware of the term going in another context, which is enkiri, which means divorce. Cutting, kiri, from cutting the relationship. And I came across a term, enkiri, in studying the women's practices in Japan. When there were no means of divorce, some of the women of powerful position created Tokaiji Temple as an enkiri temple, where women who were in abusive relationships could be smuggled, if they got as close as the town, Kamakura, where Tokeji was, they could be smuggled into the temple. There are pictures showing a woman leaping over the threshold of the temple with someone in pursuit with a couple days growth of beard, some abusive husband supposedly, and making her way in to becoming a nun of the temple as a way of receiving the precepts and being freed of her former

[21:49]

Karma, which Wendy Adamek talked about yesterday, the importance of salvation. So N is very important. And the fact that we're here together is an example of Go N. each of us in our own way had some small connection to Suzuki Roshi. I also, in thinking about going from yesterday and how it came up, thought about myself and Barrows Hall. Barrows Hall actually saved my life in the 60s. I was, I had actually infectious hepatitis. I think it was 1966 or 67. And being a hippie, I thought, oh, I know this is a result of some trip I'm on. And when the doctors gave me the results of my liver test, I said, I'll deal with it and left. And when you have hepatitis, you're not having a good day. And I wasn't having a good day. In fact, I sat down to eat. It was very hard to eat. You lose your appetite. And a dog, a black dog, came and bit my hand.

[22:50]

I said, well, that's strange. Something's going on. And then I came on campus. I was a student at UC Berkeley. And as I walked by Barrows Hall, someone jumped off and committed suicide. That got to me. I immediately went up to the hospital and admitted myself. So it's very interesting for me to be returning today to Barrows Hall, which in a sense saved my life. Also, I studied with Robert Bella during that time and was looking forward to seeing him. When I think about the going, the connection between Suzuki Roshi and ourselves, I think about his strength being built on failure, such as what he experienced after the war. Our strength, in a certain sense, doesn't come from what's obvious, what our attributes are, but the ways that we meet our circumstances and fail. And this is when we have to turn to our practice.

[23:52]

And I think an example that we went over yesterday that Hoitsu Roshi brought up was that after the war when everyone was so devastated, Suzuki Roshi held a jukai to which 600 people showed up to receive the precepts as a way of healing from the war. So he had insight into the power of a practice if one puts one's faith in the practice, the power of healing that emerges from that. In thinking about my own failures coming here today, you know, of course I read the program and I see, jeez, there's only three out of twelve women, I mean three out of twelve presenters that are women. And I think to myself, I get oversensitive as a woman, this being a failing of mine. think even no matter how hard we try to make it right, this is something that Wendy Adamac referred to yesterday, no matter how hard we try to get it right, we can't ever get it quite right.

[25:00]

So it's how we deal with this not getting it quite right and stay together and follow the path together that matters. So in keeping with my failure by identifying myself as a woman, I always over-prepare. So not only did I bring my slides on the memory stick, as I was told, I brought my own computer, my own projector, just in case it failed, and we'd all have something to use, but I also brought handouts. So as you have in your hands my handout, you're holding my heart. you know, my heart that's been broken as a woman and has gone on. You're holding my failures and what it is when we feel something, how we overcompensate, how we don't let it run away with us because of the practice. I apologize to the trees. I don't think anyone else did handouts, but I want you to understand how these mistakes play out in our life and how we work with them in our practice.

[26:06]

For those of you who don't believe in Goan and these mysterious forces that bring us together, it reminds me of what one of my teachers, Eknath Eshwaran, said regarding gravity. He said, you can say you don't believe in gravity, but try jumping off a building and you will know that it's there. And for those of you who would like a less dramatic presentation of Goan, try speeding on the freeway and see if you get a ticket. The mysterious forces appear. In fact, I not only have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, I have a Ph.D. in traffic school. And my students pray for my integration of my right foot, which is on the accelerator, with my greater self so that I drive a little more slowly. So I've been doing that, but recently I also tested going because I pulled up to a stop sign. And I said, well, there's nobody around. I don't see anyone around for blocks. Why am I stopping at this? Actually, it was a red light. So I said, well, my impulsivity got the better of me, and I made the left turn.

[27:10]

And much to my surprise, I received a picture of myself doing so in the mail. So this is an example of the workings of go-ins. Also, part of the workings of going is that I have, even though I met Suzuki Roshi in the 60s and he had a profound effect on the course of my life, I did not spend much time practicing with him. As Rengetsu wrote about in her poem about the life of women, the waters of Lake Biwa being tossed, I followed my husband to Canada and when I came back, Suzuki Roshi was dead. Furthermore, due to karmic causes and conditions, I'm allergic to all grains and soy, so I've never been able to eat well at Zen centers, and wanting to stay alive for the Dharma to mature, I have never been able to live at one. The last reason was that my husband and I lived in a commune in the 60s,

[28:12]

After we came out of that experience, he said, I will join you in a formal practice, residential practice place when hell freezes over. And since I couldn't find that on any schedule, I had to find a way to continue my marriage and practice. So I've been someone who has been trying to pour practice into situations that are not formal situations. And I think this is what Suzuki Roshi really brought to us. He brought himself transformed by the Dharma. Let's see here. Slide show. Let's make this a little better. Okay. So for those of you who are in the back, I'm not sure if you can read it. But I think that Richard Jaffe in presenting Matsunaga's vision of what it would take to bring Zen to the West talked about yesterday, simplicity, profundity, and vital freedom.

[29:23]

So the simplicity really was without artifice, profundity expressing the deepest meaning in our everyday life, and with the most subtle of movements, and our vital freedom to meet each situation. You know, there's a wonderful teaching story, one of my favorites with Joshu, which says, someone asked Joshu, what is meditation? And he says, non-meditation. And the student says, how is meditation non-meditation? And he says, it's alive. It's alive. And this is the quality, I think, that one has to bring to practice really being alive in each moment. I wanted to do PowerPoint, you know, in my overcompensation for my failures. And I hope you can read it, but otherwise, overcompensating for my failures, you have a handout.

[30:30]

I think we saw the fertile field that was created not only by Suzuki Roshi's experience of the war, but the interesting way that post-war babies responded to the rigidity of their parents and the need to make everything uniform, mass-produced, and safe. And so we went in the other direction. You know, it was interesting for me because I left for Canada in 68, and when I came back, I had a son who was born in 1970, who was technically a baby boomer. And as we returned to the Bay Area, I was so proud to return to my cultural roots. And I remember the first time my sons saw a hippie. And I was happy. There's still hippies here. It was in the 80s, I think. And both of my sons went, oh, look at the stoner. And I was horrified. Obviously, things had changed. And what I thought was an example of the counterculture had now become a stoner to my children and not something that they would really be interested in understanding.

[31:39]

But we shouldn't be surprised in a certain way that the culture has changed because Suzuki Roshi, when asked by David Chadwick to define Buddhism in one sentence said, everything changes. So these are the changes that we meet, and the question is, how do we meet them? But the institutional goals have changed, too. So when you look at the confluence between the institutional, personal aspirations, and cultural values that we had in the 60s, the institution was really talking about spiritual liberation in a way that made a lot of sense to the counterculture. Yvonne and several other people mentioned yesterday, you know, once you get the building, you know, it's like in a certain way, you didn't say this, but a certain way, you become a conservative. You have something to take care of. You have something to conserve and that changes the energy. I think the energy of not having the building is very much out there in the fringe groups, such as myself.

[32:41]

And in the last point on centralized information and processing versus the change nowadays to distributed information and changing and distributed information and processing. We have these small groups now who are all affiliated on the internet. When we have a question, we don't necessarily call Zen Center. We put it out on the AZTA listserv, the Association of Zen Teachers, and we're all in communication. There are all kinds of affiliations of small groups. And it's actually on those fringes that so much is happening. So there's a circular kind of communication of which Zen Center is in that circle. But it's not as it was where maybe some of the larger Zen centers were the hub of a wheel and the spokes were all relating to it. So there's a lot of changes there. Regarding the type of person or hippie that came to meditation in the 60s, you know, we came out of, many of us, an existential or an activist political background.

[33:44]

And I remember being instructed by Hoitsu Roshi when I was at Rinzō-en with a group of women. We were all working with Zen as this existential process, non-attachment. We were very serious. And he instructed us, after we were there for a week, that when we went to town, we ought to smile at people. And we ought to say hello, konnichiwa, because if our practice didn't increase our friendliness to other people, it really wasn't worth much. So this is a change that we might observe. Let's go on. Oops, wrong one. I know, but I did something else, so I have to fix what I did first. Thank you. So where there was one voice of dissent, and it was kind of a roar, this voice of dissent, now we have many.

[34:48]

And where we had a counterculture, now we have really historical. I'm sorry, we have a cross-cultural interest. And so Moving into sharing the values of Suzuki Roshi with an understanding of where we are now is going to help us a lot to meet the current generation of potential practitioners. So as I was saying about Zen centers, the spiritual inspiration aspect of it perhaps has changed. And now it's about, because there are so many forms of Buddhism and also so many things that we do, whether it's yoga, tai chi, est, so many ways of awakening awareness. We've been focused on actually differentiating ourselves as Soto Zen people and what does the Soto Zen way mean. But we need to also remember what Suzuki Roshi said about that.

[35:52]

He said we are not Soto Zen people. We are just people following the Buddha's way. And the question I think that came up yesterday is how well are institutions reflecting that as following the Buddha's way. Also, when the institutions were established, there was a big emphasis on that these communal living situations would change the world, just as Chan masters believed they were utopian societies. Now, I'm not so sure that the residential communities are seen as utopias. I wonder about that aspect of it, and I think we've seen that even though they offer a counterpoint in the culture, they haven't maybe changed the world to the extent we would like them to. So personal aspirations have changed too. I think Lou mentioned yesterday the call of Timothy Leary, turning our back on materialism,

[36:57]

turn on, tune in, and drop out. This was a roar. People are not so interested in doing that. I really wonder what we would say now would be the words of this generation. Maybe something like, become well-rounded, get on the program, and have it all. And I don't mean have it all in only a materialistic way, but really have a spiritual life, have a family life, and have a successful life in the world. So Suzuki Roshi realized that in our coming to practice, we were trying to create perfect circumstances. And in answer to this, he taught that we needed to practice right where we are, right in the midst of our delusions, not to try to create some kind of perfect place. Also, we were very interested in renunciation.

[38:00]

We're interested in renunciation. In some way we were going to get away from material things, I don't know, to some other planet maybe. But he taught renunciation is not getting rid of things, but knowing that they all go away. Anyhow. So as far as the attitudes towards sex, I think Yvonne expressed yesterday, she said, I really don't understand what you guys think you're doing with sex. And so don't ask me about it. So we've certainly learned with AIDS and other technical problems that this sexual freedom movement that we founded I also was not going to change the world in the way we had in mind, and now most people, many young people anyway, see partnership and marriage as a path to development, spiritual development and wholeness and actual satisfaction with their lives. You know, when I was doing these PowerPoint slides, I asked my son to help me, my son, my younger son, who's

[39:05]

36 now. And this is what he does for a living. So he said, but mom, you know, you're saying that there's all these problems with Zen and it's matched to the culture. Why is it that we see Zen everywhere? The word now has become part of the vocabulary that it was not in the sixties. How do you explain that? And as Wendy said yesterday, you know, whenever you're doing something, the other side is falling apart. So I said, well, I'm not sure what they understand about Zen. And I think it's really important for us to return to what is it about the name Zen, about the word Zen, that continues to offer appeal to people. in their fantasy. I was just back in Savannah, Georgia, and in very safe circumstances when I was with university people, I would mention that I had this interest in Zen Buddhism. And there was this positive response.

[40:07]

So what was that positive response to, I would say, I asked because I know I was coming here to talk to you about what was that positive response. And what I heard was that this was a religion that didn't judge, that accepted everything, and that there was this wisdom that was inherent in this. And I think it goes back to what Matsunaga said, simplicity, profundity, and vital freedom, which Suzuki Roshi himself embodied. So I'm not suggesting that we do focus groups, as my son does, to determine the market value of Zen and therefore change our practice based on that. But I'm wondering how we can identify the changes in the culture. and also identify what it was that was the essence of Suzuki Roshi's teaching, the essence of his teaching, not the specific techniques that he taught us, but the essence that he taught us about being present.

[41:15]

So that's where the opportunity lies, not in changing the culture or the personal aspirations of the people we encounter, but really changing how we offer ourselves in the institutional settings or even in the small groups that we lead. Shantideva, you know, the 8th century Tibetan teacher said, When you're walking on a rough road, it would be better to put leather on your own feet than to try to pave the whole world. So this is why I say it's up to us in a certain way to embody this practice in a way that makes sense. I had my own personal experience of this recently when I was on one of my regular rants about how when I'm in the supermarket, people refer to me as sir. I guess I shouldn't complain about that, but you know, I do. And one of my students heard me and say, you know, if you wore a little makeup, had your hair a little longer, and wore a little jewelry, people would recognize you as a woman.

[42:31]

So in order to save all sentient beings from embarrassment, I have done so. And both myself and various people in the supermarket are all now happier. So seeking to stick to a rigid view of how we should be rather than what works in our life is one of the problems that comes with practice. I learned something about, so I've outlined for you some of the things that I think would be useful. The emphasis on cross-cultural, the emphasis on service, because we're all touched by any religion that offers humanitarian services to people. The emphasis on personal well-being. After all, yoga, tai chi, and all kinds of practices are thriving because they offer people some comfort. What do we say?

[43:32]

It's not good for anything? Well, it's not exactly appealing in terms of taking care of oneself. So the emphasis on service in what we present, I know in Japan where I've practiced some to try to intensify my practice experience because I haven't been able to live in Zen centers. I see them offering flower arranging classes, just as is beginning to happen at some of the Zen centers, sewing, Baika singing, and so on. And we could be offering the yoga, tai chi, the shin-shin-jitsu, acupressure, and all kinds of things that actually are a match and also part of our core values. The emphasis on a range of needs. ranging for the whole life course from developing. I had a nine-year-old come to meditation because he wanted to improve his pitch in Little League. So I'm not saying that's something we should advertise, but letting people know that, you know, focus will help them make a match between their own unique qualities and the environment in terms of a career, and going through helping people in middle life with their families and relationships, and also going on to helping people in the declines, in the declining years with aging.

[44:57]

and illness, as already is happening at Zen Center, and the 12-step programs. I wanted to say in conclusion that this returning to the core values, the essence of Zen Center, and the 12-step of what Suzuki Roshi brought, rather than the outer container is what's really important. I learned something about this when I traveled with Hoitsu Roshi and Chitose-san in Japan to the shuso ceremony of their son, Shungo, who's also here. And it was such an amazing event. There were more than 100 students in any one class of Eheiji, so that he was chosen to be shuso was a very big deal. So 200 congregation members went in tour buses to a heiji and I got to ride on one of those tour buses as part of my practice. But what I saw about Hoitsu Roshi and Chitose-san was that when those meals were passed out for 200 people, they waited until everyone had their meal to eat.

[46:00]

So they were priests who were serving the congregation, not taking a position at the front of it. And that was what they taught me about being a priest. I also had an offering myself on the tour bus during the karaoke sessions. I sang In My Life by The Beatles, and I received great congratulations on my English pronunciation. It's a little bit disappointing, another failure, but we have to live with it. So I think this, what Gil brought up about religious subjectivity, Each of us expressing the Dharma as we are in the world as it is, is more or less what our task is and what we need to keep returning to. You know, we can't help but make these mistakes and we all have done them and do them. And I say they're our best teachings. The question is, how long? To notice these mistakes after a few days is good.

[47:03]

Maybe after a few years is good. Maybe after 50 years is good, too, to readjust. So thank you very much. Finally, this morning on our panel of speakers, we have Jeff Wilson. Jeff is an assistant professor of religious studies and East Asian studies at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. He received his PhD in religious studies in 2007 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research specialties include Buddhism, Japanese religion, and ritual studies. Jeff? All right. Yeah, I don't need the computer. I have nothing to show you. You just have to listen to me today.

[48:04]

Just a quick point of clarification. Actually, my PhD is in religious studies, not Buddhist studies, although I did do Buddhist studies as part of that degree. So good morning, everyone. Minna-san, konnichiwa. I'm not sure, actually, if our Japanese contention is here today. I am speaking today on Zen in America from Counterculture to Subculture. That's the title of my talk. I had another title that I was playing with called How Zen is Like Mormonism, or maybe even Zen, the New Mormonism. just to see if people might perk their ears up and pay a little attention if I did something like that. But it's not quite accurate for what I'm going to say, so I'll leave that aside here. So some of what I want to talk about today has been gestured at a little bit by our previous speakers, particularly this sort of way in which Zen 50 years ago was countercultural, and arguably it is no longer.

[49:09]

I'm going to certainly make that argument that rather than being a counterculture, it's now a subculture. Let's see here. Counterculture to subculture. I'll also start off just by qualifying what my subject is specifically. The title of this very interesting symposium that we've been having over the last two days is Zen at 50. But just to make sure we understand, Zen is actually close to 100 years old at this point. The first 50 years mainly belonged to Japanese immigrants and their descendants. Whereas the last 50 years have primarily been dominated by primarily Caucasian converts into the Zen tradition, and they've brought something very different to the table. And it's that side of American Zen that I'm mainly focusing on my talk here today, but I did want to mention that there's a larger context that all this takes place within. So back to the counterculture. Alright, so my argument is that Zen in 50 years has gone from being a counterculture to being a subculture.

[50:12]

So let's define these things a little bit. What is a counterculture? Actually, unlike myself, I think a great many people in this auditorium today actually live through the counterculture, so maybe I don't have to define it. But for those few of us like myself who were born after the end of the Vietnam War, I'll just discuss what that is. A counterculture, we might define countercultural groups as non-mainstream groups that critique and separate from the mainstream. So they have a definite critique of what they perceive to be mainstream culture and they withdraw to some extent. They separate themselves out in order to sort of live that critique. These countercultures, they tend to embody the emerging ethos of a particular era, so they're very tied into particular times and places, countercultures, which also means that they're inherently unstable and they're inherently temporary. They tend to rise, they make a lot of noise, sometimes to make a definite impact on the culture, and then countercultures are usually not sustainable over the long term, and so something changes there.

[51:21]

So also, in particular, in the United States, countercultures have tended to be religiously based, and they very often have manifested themselves as perfectionistic communities. We see this time again in American religious history, which is actually one of my primary areas of research. So let's say you're a countercultural religious group. Pretty much you have one of three fates lying ahead of you. Most of these groups fall into category one, they die off. So usually countercultural groups tend to die off, which is to say they go out of existence, after a few years or at best after a couple of generations. That's the usual pattern. We see this with these perfectionistic countercultural groups in the 17th century, the 18th century, the 19th century here in U.S. religious history. Some famous names of previous incarnations of countercultural groups from those earlier centuries are things like the Oneida Group, the Hopedale Community, the Shakers, Brooks Farm, and my personal favorite, the Public Universal Friend.

[52:36]

I don't know if people know about the public universal friend very well. This was before the internet. This is in fact in the 1700s. Public universal friend was the second coming of Jesus Christ. I'm sorry to inform you, it already happened. She came in the body of a woman this time. declared herself to be the public universal friend, toured around in the colonies, got kicked out of a lot of colonies, attracted a lot of attention, formed her own perfectionistic separating group, and go figure, isn't on the scene anymore. So she's in that category of those that died out. This is where the large majority of religiously based countercultural groups fall into category number one. They tend to fall out, tend to die out. But before they do that, there's some aspects of them that they share in common. And as I read these here, we might reflect on how they probably apply to Zen 50 years ago as well. So, what ties Oneida, Hopedale, Shakers, Brooks Farm, Public Universal Friend, and others together?

[53:40]

Well, all of these groups, they attracted significant outside attention. They all believed that they provided an alternative to the mainstream culture and to mainstream religion. They all focused on self-perfection and on personal religious experience, something they felt the mainstream did not do. They all formed separate communities to embody their ideals. All of them promoted specific religious practices designed to achieve that perfection or to achieve some sort of religious wisdom. They all existed in high tension with the mainstream culture. That's very important. And they all died out. So, thankfully, Xin hasn't fallen into that category yet, and I'm actually going to argue that there's a good chance that it may not. But that's sort of the background here on the general fate that countercultural groups face in the U.S. All right, so there's another possibility, fate number two. Some groups assimilate and they actually end up becoming completely folded back into the mainstream and absorbed and digested and they too tend to often go out of existence over a period of time.

[54:51]

Some examples of this, well actually we can say the Puritans to some extent. They were certainly a separating group that left the mainstream Church of England and sailed off to create their own religious utopias where they were going to have their own practices and their own structures and everything. And gosh darn it, the Puritans aren't around anymore either. They eventually changed over time. They assimilated more into the developing mainstream American culture, and they certainly bequeathed many things to us, such as Thanksgiving and pictures of guys in black with funny hats, and also a certain stickiness around sex and morality that seems to persist today. But they as a particular countercultural group certainly don't exist anymore. A more recent example of something like this, of an assimilating counter-cultural group, might be something like the Disciples of Christ. This is a Protestant denomination that began as a counter-cultural group, separated, they had a lot of these perfectionist tendencies and everything, but over the generations they have assimilated very easily back into the mainstream.

[56:06]

They have not ceased to exist, but they have assimilated to the point where there's nothing that's very particularly distinct about them versus any other given mainline Protestant denomination at this point. And they may go on in the future or they may not, but they certainly, there's nothing that's unique and countercultural about them really at this point. So that's another example. What happened with both of these and with other examples that we can pull out from the history is that over time they lowered that level of tension that they had with the outside culture. Once that tension ceased to be so high, once it's lowered to the point where they sort of ceased to have any unique distinctiveness, then they just become part of general society. Their institutions may go on, but they are part of mainstream society at that point, right? Okay, so there's a third fate. Well, I should say that Xen could go either of these ways, I suppose. It could die out if it remains in super high tension, and if it's tied indeed to a specific time and place, if it's truly countercultural, then it will not survive the passing of the generation that gave us the counterculture of the 1960s.

[57:22]

And that is one possibility. I mean, it may survive their passing for a generation or two. That sometimes happens with these. But it wouldn't exist as a robust form of religion in, say, one or certainly two or three centuries. As a historian, I do tend to take the longer viewpoint on these things, even in the U.S., where we have quite a bit less history than Japan or somewhere else I study. So that's one possibility. Too tied to the counterculture, they're on their way out. That's one possibility. Another possibility, of course, is total assimilation into the mainstream. Some of us may fear that that's as bad a fate as the first, as when I heard the groans about Zen sex and Zen jewelry and all this stuff that we were seeing a minute ago. That could be a fate worse than death, I think, for some people, particularly former hippies or stoners. Take your choice. So that's a possibility.

[58:26]

I, however, want to argue that there is a third fate that we see with some countercultural groups. And it is, to me, the most likely scenario when we talk about Zen, particularly that convert-oriented Zen of the last 50 years. So a rare few of these countercultural groups, they evolved to become no longer countercultures but to become subcultures. So these are subcultures that find a middle way between terminal uniqueness and total absorption back into the mainstream society. One example of this that I'll use is the Mormons, so getting back to that. I am aware that this is probably the first time in history that Zen has been compared to Mormonism. Bear with me here, I have a point. The Mormons, which is say the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, let me use the official title in case I offend any members here today. Mormons successfully found a way to be fully American and at the same time to have a distinctive, identifiable, sustainable subculture that participates in the larger culture today but without being totally absorbed into it.

[59:40]

So basically what this means is that over the period of time that the Mormons, they went from being a religious counterculture originally, very clearly in the 19th century, especially at their beginning in the 1830s and in the 1840s, and still continuing throughout the 19th century even after Joseph Smith Jr. died, I should say was assassinated. They went from being a religious counterculture in the 19th century, which operated in very high tension to the surrounding mainstream culture, a level of tension, I have to say, that Zen did not experience. In fact, few groups in America experience the high level of tension that the Mormons did. Nonetheless, over time, they managed to transition to being a subculture that today operates comfortably within the larger culture. And yet, at the same time, while operating comfortably, they're nonetheless distinct unto themselves. They have their own institutions, their own media, their own practices, their own clothing, their own religious imagination, and their own spiritual vocabulary.

[60:52]

So they have found a sort of a middle way. They've steered themselves to becoming a subculture, not a counterculture. Countercultures are always on their way towards the end of the counterculture and not totally assimilated to where the salt loses its savor so much that it ceases to really be anything at all. That's what I think we can see Zen doing as well. Zen also has transitioned now to have these institutions, media practices, clothing, religious imagination, spiritual vocabulary. These things still exist for Zen as well. All right, so let's go back in time briefly to the counterculture, which we were introduced to a minute ago. Zen 50 years ago was definitely a religious counterculture. It formed new communities, such as the San Francisco Zen Center, which were at pretty relatively high tension with the mainstream culture of the time, I think it's fair to say. And they formed these based on very selective elements of the Japanese Zen tradition, which were creatively repackaged for Americans.

[61:56]

And there's been some talk about that here already today. go too far with that. For instance, I would pull out in particular Zazen, which is silent seated meditation, and study of Dogen's Buddhist philosophy. These are two things that were not mainstream, to say the least, or perhaps to say the obvious. American religious history did not have a long history of silent seated meditation, nor did it have much of a long history with advanced Buddhist philosophy. So these were things that definitely put them outside of the mainstream and also the monastic model which was popular particularly in some of the earlier years, that was very different too. American religion and culture has not been very interested in the idea of monasticism on the whole. Monasticism is quite rare in American society. Much of that has to do with the primarily Protestant roots of this nation.

[62:59]

Protestantism has no form of monasticism, but even to the extent that Roman Catholicism has flourished here and has certainly had monasteries and such, nonetheless they haven't been nearly as central as some of these institutions used to be back in the old world. So America, not a very monastic-friendly environment, and yet here we had people counter-culturally doing a form of monasticism within Zen, and then doing Zen practices that were new, and studying Zen Buddhist philosophy, which was not like anything that previous religious communities in America had any contact with. So I think in a lot of ways this Zen 50 years ago was countercultural in the way that the same 17th, 18th, and 19th century perfectionistic countercultural groups I mentioned were. Again, all this idea about attracting attention, believing that they're an alternative to the mainstream, having these separate communities, focusing on self-perfection, particular practices, and that high level of tension with the outside.

[64:03]

I think that really hooks them into an older narrative. So even if the Zazen and the Dolgen, that's new, some of the patterns are nonetheless the same and go all the way back even to the founding of the colonies to some extent. So this then was part of the counterculture of America in the 1950s and 1960s. We had a lot of beatniks and hippies and such who were interested in it and these were people who were self-consciously part of a counterculture, beatniks in the 50s, hippies in the 60s, people who were indeed sort of dropping out and looking for something different. It was expressed yesterday in one of the sessions for people who were there and remember. Someone said that people were seeking ways to, quote, be real, that that was sort of an underlying drive behind the counterculture and the many different groups that we saw that flourished during that time period. People were looking to be real. They felt that the mainstream culture and that the mainstream religion was not real, and they wanted an alternative, which is to say they were strongly critical of what they considered to be a sort of fake mainstream, and that included mainstream religion.

[65:16]

So again, we see these sort of countercultural critiques coming up. Well, there's certainly been a shift over the last 50 years from that sort of initial point of contact, hasn't there? So some of the slogans that people announced in our sessions yesterday were things like, power to the people. I don't really say that with any conviction, do I? You need to start shouting with your fist, sorry. All right, power to the people. I just, what can I say? Different generation, I can't get behind it. So, nonetheless, we've gone from power to the people to sort of, you know, nowadays, Zim practitioners are liberal voters. We just say they vote, something a lot of hippies didn't do. They sit on the PTA board and all this sort of stuff, and they are the people these days, and they have plenty of power, I would argue. particularly because Zen tends to be aligned with a certain overall white upper middle class segment of the society which is relatively enfranchised.

[66:19]

So they do have the power. That's just how it is. Okay. So I won't beat that one too much. Here's another one we heard yesterday. Don't trust anyone over 30. Strange that I can say that one with a little more conviction since I'm significantly younger than any of the other presenters yesterday or today. All right. So don't trust anyone over 30, the rallying cry of 50 years ago. Today, of course, the average Zen practitioner is 60 years old. So something has changed there. And then finally, as we heard, turn on, tune in, and drop out. I wouldn't say that that's primarily the message that Zen sends today. I think the main message that people are getting out of Zen is don't drop out. Use meditation and other aspects of Buddhism to be real. in your mainstream activities. I think that's a real message that we're hearing these days, for better or for worse. I'll leave that judgment to you. So we can see this, for instance, in the real proliferation of books and other media that talk about

[67:24]

whatever, and mindfulness and whatever, right? So we've got Zen and work, or mindfulness at work. We've got Zen parenting, mindful parenting. It's a big subgenre now. We already saw an example of Zen sex. That's out there too. Practice Zazen and it'll make you better in bed, apparently. I haven't tried it. There's mindfulness-based stress relief is big these days and mindfulness-based pain management, sort of a variety of that. There's lots of mindfulness-based substance abuse recovery programs out there. This is another growing edge of what Zen is doing in interaction with the mainstream culture. And there's an awful lot of books out there on mindful eating now, too, because, let's face it, food is an American obsession, both eating it and then feeling guilty afterwards. So the mindful eating is sort of tapping into that there. So over the last 50 years, Zen has become a subculture which has much less tension with the mainstream than we saw 50 years ago.

[68:35]

The proliferation of all these different types of books and the ideas and the concerns that they express show how much less tension there is with the mainstream. Now instead it's found, I would argue, a middle way between terminal uniqueness and assimilation, total assimilation. So it takes from the mainstream. It's a much more dialogue with the mainstream now. What does it take? Well, lots of things. For instance, psychology. Psychology has made an enormous, indelible impact on Zen and Buddhist practice in the United States over the last 50 years. We understand Zen fundamentally through a psychological worldview and a psychological idiom. Even just the words that we use, things like ego and conditioning and all, which we've heard very much about over the last 24 hours, show how much that psychology has really penetrated. Many people who are involved in Zen as teachers, they certainly, they are trained as Zen teachers, but they often come from a background in psychology or in the health-related helping professions of some sort, and they often read these books or, you know, psychologists to some degree.

[69:52]

Even if they don't, let's face it, psychology is everywhere in the culture. We can't get away from it. So I would say that Zen has been very impact from the mainstream in that way. Another example is more democratic forms of organization. You know, there is an American ethos of democracy and everyone having a say in these sort of things, and we've seen this in the shift from a more hierarchical or more centralized form of authority within Zen earlier to, on the whole, a much more decentralized, more democratic approach in the various Zen centers. The flip also goes on. Zen, because it's in so much less tension with the mainstream, it also much more easily gives things to the mainstream. And this mindfulness is probably the preeminent example of it. It has things that it can offer and it can offer to people in the mainstream with all their various mainstream concerns. And these things flow across that border between the subculture and the main culture very easily these days, I would say.

[70:53]

All right, so we were asked yesterday, what happened? What happened? A lot of people actually tried to shy away from that question, I think, Lou, but I'll grab the tiger by the tail and I'll talk about what happened, at least what I see. A lot of what happened in that successful transition from being a counterculture to being a subculture has to do with the tremendous diversification that Zen has undergone in the last 50 years, and especially in the last 30 years. So what we see today as part of that diversification, we see that there are monasteries and there are also non-residential Zen centers and there's also systems of support for loan practitioners out there in a farmhouse in Nebraska or something with no Zen center around. They nonetheless can plug into a network which is far more robust today than it was 50 years ago. They have advantages. we see that there's been an enormous importation of various lineages that's part of this diversification and having that diversity allows them for this sort of success.

[72:02]

So this means multiple lineages within, for instance, Soto. Many different Soto people teaching Soto in many different ways. It also means other Japanese lineages, Rinzai, multiple lineages. It means Zen from beyond Japan, Korean and Chinese, and to some extent Vietnamese lineages as well. So this tremendous diversity allows different groups to find different ways to fit into the society. We see diversity in terms of groups being led by, on one end of the spectrum, Asian immigrant monks, and on the other end of the spectrum, perhaps Caucasian people who are just lay people and have no ordination at all. and everything in between, so we see a great diversity. We see male and female leadership, something we didn't see at the very beginning. We see all sorts of media that Zen uses these days. There's books, the Internet, there's films, a lot of magazines. I've worked with Tricycle Magazine for many years, perhaps

[73:05]

I know some people hate that magazine, so maybe I shouldn't have said that anyways So another thing we see is various rituals that have have been adapted into Into the Zen community over the last 50 years. I think when Zen started out. It was relatively non ritualistic in The American mode it was a lot of focus on Zazen in a few particular Ceremonies such as Jukai the precept ceremonies sort of thing now. We see a lot more different types of ceremonies. Lots of funerals and even coming of age and all sorts of other things that deal with various sort of life transitions or milestones and such. And one that I did my PhD dissertation on is a ceremony for before they've been born in most cases. So abortion, miscarriage, this sort of thing. This is a ceremony that's been adapted for the American situation and has proven to be quite successful.

[74:10]

It starts with just a few people doing it. And in a very short period of time, it shows up in many multiple Zen centers. And indeed, even people well beyond the boundaries of Buddhism are very interested in this ceremony. So this diversification of practice and ritual allows them to then provide new resources for a society that sometimes lacks these things. Another big part of this diversification is combination with other forms of Buddhism, something that Zen in the convert mode has done very well. And I would argue this has been part of its strength and part of its ability to survive. So we see Zen absorbing selective elements of what we'll call more newcomer types of Buddhism onto the scene. They're not actually new historically, but they're newer to America than Zen is. Things like Tibetan Vajrayana, That mainly comes into its own at a later date than Zen came into its own here in the U.S. and we see a lot of people involved in the Zen communities who are primarily Zen but have been influenced by certain aspects of Tibetan Buddhism.

[75:16]

So they've been able to selectively appropriate parts of that that help further Zen. They add something new to it. Also Vipassana, another movement which the Zen people have done a lot of networking with and have successfully taken on board some of the perspectives and practices as ways to rehabilitate Zen. You always have to be reinventing yourself in a way. And then, of course, it has been highly impacted by elements of both mainstream America and the counterculture. So things like psychology, also the self-help movement, human potential movement, the new age, all these things have made major impacts on Zen over the last 50 years. So this really allows Zen to exploit the audience for these various things. You know, the New Age, big audience. Self-help, big audience. And as Zen finds ways to partially take from their vocabulary and their practices and their approach, it is then able to appeal to a larger audience than just, you know, countercultural people or Japanophiles or whatever who might have been in some of the earlier intakes.

[76:25]

I think I really am using a lot of time, aren't I? Okay, all right. Well, let's see. I'll say just a little bit more then, and then I'll let us take a break. I'll also argue, though, that part of this successful transition from a counterculture to subculture has to do with some unique factors, perhaps this go-in that we've been talking about. There were some very intelligent, very creative, very savvy people who have been involved in Zen over the last 50 years. Not all religious groups are nearly so blessed with just human resources the way that Xen has been and that has definitely allowed the people involved to steer it in these directions that have allowed it to persist. And I would also argue that versus other countercultural groups, Zen really, it had an ethos of self-discipline, something that your average hippie did not, in my impression. Again, I wasn't there, but it seems pretty hedonistic, looking back on it from my perspective. It seems, you know, very hedonistic.

[77:29]

the Zen people successfully combined the ideals of the counterculture with a very intense self-discipline, both in terms of learning to rigorously sit zazen, which is quite a difficult practice, and taking on precepts as well. And so they had a form that they could put those ideals into and that self-discipline allowed them to ride out some of the stormier parts of the counterculture when more hedonistic groups or people who indeed had no ability to affiliate with groups because they were too individualistic, they don't persist for obvious reasons. So Zins moved from being the property of hippie dropouts to being that of urban professionals in many cases today, and this reflects changes both in the baby boom generation itself and in American society at large. And so I'd say that Zen is now a successful religious subculture, and it has a lot of ongoing strength still in it. It's really successfully penetrated many, maybe most parts of the country at this point.

[78:36]

It's successfully penetrated the pop culture, again, for better or for worse. And it faces some serious challenges, but that's true of all subcultures at all times. We who study Buddhism are very aware that everything changes, and that's certainly true for Zen and for any subculture. So there are challenges, perhaps we'll talk about them in the next session, but I do feel that at least at this point, Zen has very successfully gone into that rare third category the Mormon category and has neither died out, doesn't look like it's on its way to immediate death, nor has it totally assimilated and it hasn't been absorbed and digested at this point. It's found a way to exist in light or moderate tension with the outside culture and therefore to work creatively with that culture. And I think that's what has largely allowed it to survive. So thank you very much.

[79:34]

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