As I've been learning about Suzuki Roshi in the last year, one of the remarkable things that for me has been the tremendous cultural difference between his upbringing in Japan and what he came to in America in the late 50s and the 60s and early 70s. I can't almost imagine more separate, different kind of cultures. It wasn't just simply a Japanese culture of that time, but he came out of a very poor, rural part of Japanese culture that seemingly was very traditional. And I think in order to understand Suzuki Roshi, I think we need to understand a little bit that background that he came out of. And so today we have Richard Jaffe and Carl Bielfeldt, who will talk a little bit about that background. Richard Jaffe was a student at Zen Center for many years, was the director at Tassajara. And then he went off to get a PhD in Buddhist studies.

[01:06]

And he did a dissertation on the Soto Zen of the Meiji period of about 100 years ago. It's particularly looking at how these priests ended up getting married. And he's maybe going to touch on that a little bit today. And it's a great privilege that Richard is here. Also, I might say that we have up here in the front images of Suzuki Roshi's teachers. You've got a clock placed very prominently here, I see, as a warning. I'll try to keep my remarks brief. It's a pleasure to be here. One correction, or one or two corrections to Gil's comments. I wasn't director at Tassajara, I was Tenzo. And I have to honestly say, I still feel like I'm on vacation now that I'm no longer Tenzo at Tassajara.

[02:11]

I've felt that way about every day since. In many ways, although I don't know if responsible is quite the right word, but Suzuki Roshi is in some way responsible for the topic I chose as my dissertation. As Gil pointed out to you, like Carl, my path to becoming a Buddhist scholar, which incidentally Robert Thurman has recently written or said in an interview, that a scholar is a kind of Western analog to the monk in Tibet and other cultures. I don't know about that, but I guess in the sense that I'll be poor for the rest of my life. It's probably some element of truth there. Nonetheless, my path to becoming a scholar led through Zen Center, where I did spend a number of years. And my arriving at Zen Center really came about in part because I stumbled on a copy of Zen Mind,

[03:14]

Beginner's Mind, when I was 18, picking it up off a library shelf at the University of Michigan, thinking it was another book by D.T. Suzuki. I grabbed it and read it and liked it, and it stayed with me. And in fact, it served as a catalyst for my own research. There's one passage in particular that I'd like to read to you from that epilogue that really became the seed for what grew into my dissertation. It's a passage at the beginning of the epilogue, which Rick referred to in his talk, where Suzuki Roshi says, Here in America, we cannot define Zen Buddhists the same way we do in Japan. American students are not priests and yet not completely laymen. I understand it this way, that you are not priests is an easy matter, but that you are not exactly laymen is more difficult. I think you are special people and want some special practice that is not exactly priest's practice and not exactly layman's practice.

[04:15]

You are on your way to discovering some appropriate way of life. I think that is our Zen community, our group. The title of my dissertation, which I'm hoping eventually to get published, if I'm going to remain a scholar, is Neither Monk Nor Layman. And when I read this passage by Suzuki Roshi, I didn't realize it, but he's actually alluding to a very famous statement of Shinran's, where Shinran refers to himself as having taken a wife and now being no longer monk nor layman, that he's this double-haired one who's neither monk nor layman. So it's a kind of allusion to Shinran. The passage intrigued me, and as I practiced at Zen Center, I wrestled with the question of what exactly does it mean to be a priest when you no longer are differentiated from laypeople with this fundamental difference of being a celibate or at least unmarried. As I spent years studying this problem,

[05:19]

the emergence of the married clergy in Japan, it also, as I think about Suzuki Roshi's life, it's dawned on me that in some ways he's not just talking about us. He's talking about himself and he's talking about Japanese Soto clergy, about Japanese Buddhist priests from all the monastic denominations in general, that they really are neither a monk nor layman now. And so in some ways the problem that he's talking about us wrestling with is a problem that he wrestled with. And it's important to understand the background out of which he came in order to really, I think, understand his teaching fully. Now, my study of clerical marriage in Japan sort of impelled me to take a look at the origins of that practice. And I have limited myself in my study to a period starting around 1868. I touch on some stuff a little bit before that,

[06:21]

but basically deal with the period from 1868 until the war and then a little bit on the post-war period. And one of the first things I noticed when I began to look at this material was there really wasn't much, that there's a gap. And Japanese scholars and most of us Western scholars who followed in their footsteps have tended to take a look at either modern Japanese Buddhism and people like Suzuki Roshi or even a current generation of teachers or people like Dogen back in the medieval period. And there's this kind of connection between today and the medieval period. And this whole intervening period is something of a black hole. And one of the nice things about a conference like this is that we actually can talk a little bit about how it came about that we got from this period, this so-called Golden Age, to today and the kind of forms and practices that we see in Japanese Buddhism today that have been transmitted to this country.

[07:22]

In fact, as I found in my research, in many ways the Japanese clergy, Japanese Buddhism as we know it today, is really a product of a massive re-engineering that took place in Buddhism in the late 19th century, beginning around 1868 at the time of the Meiji Restoration. In fact, I think that without these changes, if these changes had not occurred, it's quite possible that Suzuki Roshi wouldn't have been born, that his descendants, his familial descendants, would not have remained in control of Rinso-in, that we would not refer to him in any case as Suzuki Shunryu, and that he would not have come to the United States. The Soto-shu itself would also have quite a different structure had it not been for these changes. We wouldn't be talking about So-ji-ji and E-hei-ji

[08:27]

as two head temples with one essence. And we wouldn't be talking about what is now the largest single denomination in Japan. It would not be headed by a single chief abbot or kancho, the position which alternates between So-ji-ji and E-hei-ji. It would not be comprised of around 90% married clerics as it is today. Many of these changes, many of these institutional structures that we see are really a product of the Meiji period and changes that were instituted in the Meiji period. And I think it's important to see Suzuki Roshi not just as a pioneer here in the United States, but actually by default. He and his generation, in many ways, were pioneers in Japan. They had thrust upon them a situation that was new. He was in the first generation of openly married, the child of an openly married Buddhist Soto cleric, for example,

[09:31]

and was dealing with all these institutional changes. So in these ways, he actually was sort of exposed to a kind of change and openness of situation that I think served him probably in good stead when he came to the United States. Having to wing it here may have been a little easier for the fact that he'd grown up among a generation of Soto clerics that had to pretty much wing it. Well, to a large extent, had to wing it in Japan because of all these changes. Well, what are some of the ways in which a cleric like Suzuki Roshi would have been affected by these changes? What kind of interventions and withdrawals and changes took place in the Meiji period? And how did Soto Zen, as we know today, really get built during that time? Let me just add a little note here that there really was no one Soto response to these changes either. The Soto Shu was something, in the 1880s, there was something like 14,000 Soto temples in Japan,

[10:34]

probably about 12,600 abbots. And there were a lot of very diverse responses to these changes, different reactions to these changes that were taking place. But one of the changes that I think would have had an impact on Suzuki Roshi's life in Japan is the overwhelming loss of status. Now, status really can mean a lot of things. There's a kind of informal status, a respect that you receive from the laity, from the non-Buddhist world, as a result of being a monk or a cleric. And over the hundreds of years of the Edo period, the Tokugawa period in Japan up until 1868, the Buddhist clergy had been losing that sort of status. What I'm referring to more pointedly here is that formal status, that is, formal recognition by the state, was also lost at the beginning of the Meiji period by the Buddhist clergy. In an effort to modernize Japan, the system of status that had been in place,

[11:38]

in which the Buddhist clergy were placed relatively high and were almost quasi-government officials with a whole number of perquisites that came with that position, for example, lenient treatment for minor legal missteps, responsibility for taking care of census-related issues, freedom from certain state service, and so on, those sorts of privileges were all lost at the beginning of the Meiji period by the Buddhist clergy. All legal recognition during the Meiji period, foreordination, disappeared. In effect, becoming a monk went from being a public act in which one was changing one's actual official status in society, shifted to being just an occupational choice, like becoming a brick mason, a funeral home director, a school teacher. It was a private decision. It became a private decision.

[12:39]

At the same time, the clergy also lost the deferment from the draft and they lost the ability to run for public office when elected assemblies came into being in the mid-1880s in Japan. Another important factor that, again, the fact that we call Suzuki Roshi, Suzuki Roshi, that came about in Meiji as well. In 1872, the Buddhist clergy were ordered to take surnames. Now, this may not seem like that big a deal, but again, for hundreds of years in East Asia, and as a practice in Japan, the clergy had abandoned their family name, had left the family household register, and became part of the clerical family when they were ordained, when they underwent shukke, which literally means leaving home. That's one of the important things about leaving home, is that you give up your identification with the family. Well, at the start of the Meiji period,

[13:39]

the government ordered all the clergy to take surnames. It was in order to circumvent this law, this order to take surnames, just a little side note here, that a number of people took the surname Shaku, which means Shakyamuni, the Japanese for Shakyamuni, like Shako Soen, the teacher of D.T. Suzuki, took the name Shaku as his surname. There was also some clerics, as a way of protesting this decision, took the surname Jiku, the Indian, and one cleverly guy, Fukuda Gyokai, took the name Fukuda, which translates as Field of Merit, his name, Fukuda, as his surname. It's a punyakushetra, Field of Merit, a good name for a cleric as well, as one way of circumventing this requirement. Suzuki Roshi's father, Sogaku, who became abbot of Zaunin around 1891,

[14:44]

would have been among the first generation of clerics to keep his surname after ordination. And Suzuki Roshi would have been among the second generation to keep their surname when they were ordained. And that brings me to another major change, and the one that I devoted a lot of energy to over the last few years, and that is that Suzuki Roshi was born in a temple, openly. Now, this was legal in the eyes of the Meiji authorities. It had not been legal during the Edo period. It was prohibited, and in fact there were very, very severe punishments for a cleric who openly fornicated, or had relations, liaisons with a woman, or lived with a woman. Exile, beheading were among the penalties, or public exposure, where you'd be made to kneel in some public place for a long period of time to be derided by the subjects,

[15:46]

were all penalties for a cleric who'd been caught fornicating. If the state decided to actually enforce the rules at that time. In 1872, the government, however, the Meiji government, passed a law that basically decriminalized marriage. The law stated, and this is a translation of that law, from now on, Buddhist clerics shall be free to eat meat, marry, grow their hair, and so on. Furthermore, there shall be no penalty if they wear ordinary clothing when not engaged in religious activities. There was enormous protest among the Buddhists in Japan against that law, particularly people like older clerics, like Fukuda Gyōkai, the more conservative clerics, who felt that it really was going to destroy Buddhism. And as a result, the government sort of backed away from its original position around 1878. And what the government did was, they basically said, OK, you guys are complaining so much about this,

[16:47]

you decide what you want your clerics to do. Should they marry or not? It's up to you. This was in 1878. And in the wake of that clarification policy, one of the sternest measures taken against clerical marriage was in the Sōtō-shū, actually, which by 1885 adopted a law that banned the lodging of women in temples. And in that law, it also stated that as before, marriage of the Sōtō clergy would be completely banned. That law stayed on the books until 1906, when it finally, without a word of comment from the Sōtō establishment, disappeared from the regulations. There was never a positive statement made, it's OK to marry, it's OK to live with a woman in a temple. But the law prohibiting that, the sect law prohibiting that, disappeared from the books. As a result, when Suzuki Roshi's father married,

[17:54]

when Suzuki Roshi's father and mother gave birth to him, when his mother gave birth to him, that was all in violation of a law, a sect law that was on the books for the Sōtō-shū. Now, they weren't the only ones to disregard this rule. Disregard for this rule was widespread. And in fact, by late Meiji, by the end of the Meiji period, around 1911, as best as I can determine, something like half of the Sōtō clergy were already married, many of them in direct disregard of this rule. And how sternly it was ever enforced by the Sōtō leadership is very, very unclear. But having been born into a temple family at the turn of the century, the way Suzuki Roshi was, would have had an impact upon him. For one thing, the temples were very, very poor. This was partially a result of other Meiji policies that had been enacted by the state, a stripping of the temples of their lands and so on. But the situation, the lot of temple families,

[18:58]

when he was a boy, was a very, very difficult one. Let me quote here from a newspaper article published by a Komazawa University professor who was an advocate of open marriage and was trying to get the denomination to change its policies, describing the lot of temple families when Suzuki Roshi was young. This was written in 1911. A guy named Maruyama, Professor Maruyama, is how he's identified in this article. And it reads, Most of those who are members of temple households are miserable individuals. They are wretched old maids forced into marriage. He's talking about the wives now. Or they are former licensed prostitutes who serve as daikoku, the woman in the kitchen. Daikoku was the god of the kitchen, the woman in the kitchen, the wife of a monk, kind of a slang for the wife of a monk. The temple household is an ephemeral thing. The temple wife is not a legal wife taken through proper procedures. She is a de facto wife. Or she is manipulated as if she were a mistress.

[20:01]

The temple household is a pitiable, sad thing. If the abbot were to die, his wife and children would not be given the means to provide for themselves. The worst thing is that outsiders will gang up on the family and forcibly transfer all of the so-called temple possessions to the next abbot. The wife had no rights to remain in the temple should her husband die. She wasn't really a legal wife. And oftentimes these women were just thrown out, destitute, to fend for themselves with two or three children should the next abbot decide they didn't want them in the temple. If the successor should despise the female successor, the widow, then that especially is the end for he will happily find an excuse to dismiss her naked and barefoot. It was that way in the past. It is that way now. And it will probably be that way in the future. The children also were the subject of derision. And again, this is something that Suzuki Roshi would have encountered as a boy going to school. Education was compulsory. It was clear he was from a temple household.

[21:03]

He would have been teased and derided as the son of a priest. He was, in the eyes of many parishioners, in the eyes of many people, a bastard, basically because clerical marriage was still illegitimate in the eyes of many people. Writing as late as 1917, there's another Soto cleric who became abbot of Sojiji, a man named Kuriyama Taion who was in favor of open acknowledgment of clerical marriage. He wrote about the children and the wives in the following way. He said that, quote, the children born at temples are called Venerable Rahula, the name of Shakyamuni's son, kind of teasingly. The temple wife and the mother of the children is called Princess Yashodara, the wife of Siddhartha. Or it is common to call her Daikoku, or Bonsai, meaning Buddhist wife, not the little trees. They endure vehement reproaches that truly are the extremes of insult. Are these not unavoidable

[22:04]

phenomenon during the transitional period in which the problem of clerical marriage remains unresolved? These problems continued well into the 1930s. And at that time, in 1938, something like 81 percent, there was a survey done of the Soto school, 81 percent of the clergy had married. And it was finally at that time that some Soto regulations were put into place that actually legitimated at least succession from father to son in the temple to a blood descendant and made provisions for the wife should the husband die before the son could take over the temple. That was in 1938 or so when that took place. Now, I'm running out of time here. That's one of these big changes that would have very much been part and parcel of Suzuki Roshi's life. Now, what he made of that, what he thought of this, how he experienced it is an open question for me. And

[23:06]

something that maybe people who have been working on his biography may know something about. But in any case, it must have been a big influence. Now, just briefly, organizationally, the Soto Shu had changed in dramatic ways as well. As I mentioned to you at the start of the Meiji period, the government in an effort to centralize Buddhist institutions created Buddhism as we know it today, sort of structure as we know it today. They created the system of chief abbots with each denomination, Tendai, Rinzai, so on, each having a chief abbot in charge of that denomination with a sect headquarters, a shumucho, in Tokyo. At first, actually, the Meiji government only had seven. There were seven denominations. And, for example, they must have figured you've seen one Zen school, you've seen them all because Rinzai, Soto, and the third school of Japanese Zen, Obaku, all had one chief abbot. And that quickly broke down. There was so much disagreement about, you know,

[24:07]

how do you even go about choosing the chief abbot for all three, that by 1874, Rinzai and Soto had gone their separate ways, and by 1876, Obaku was a school. But that whole centralization under a chief abbot, who would then, with a committee, draft uniform sect law, would draft, compose a sectarian organization, the ranks of abbots and so on, all of that is a change that would have taken place shortly before Suzuki Roshi was born. One bit of fallout from this, that he certainly would have been privy to and would have had an influence on him, is the rivalry that it reignited between Soji-ji and Eiheiji, which anyone who's spent any time in Japan knows still exists. There's incredible disdain for Soji-ji monks by Eiheiji monks oftentimes, and vice versa. The people out from one segment or another, there's incredible tension there that manifests from time to time.

[25:08]

The other issue that I'd like to just mention briefly that I think may have, or certainly did have an impact, was the growing conservatism of the Soto school during Suzuki Roshi's lifetime, through the Meiji period and on into up to the end of the war. And by conservatism, I mean support for imperialist ventures, active support for Japan's imperialist ventures in Asia, in Korea, support for the annexation of Korea, missionizing in Korea. The Soto shu took a very prominent position in that effort, and in fact won a Eiheiji monk that when Suzuki Roshi was at Eiheiji, he held up as a bit of an example, Kitano Genpo, in 1911 was appointed the second supervisor of missionary activity in Korea. When Suzuki Roshi was a young boy that bugbear of socialism and anarchism really was beaten out of the Soto school

[26:11]

with the execution of a Soto monk named Uchiyama Gudo, who was an anarchist communist who was wrongly implicated in a plot to assassinate the emperor. He was put to death in 1911 and Suzuki Roshi would have been seven at the time. Whether or not he remembered it or not is very, very difficult to say. Of course, probably not. But this sort of growing conservatism as the Soto shu really joined arms, linked arms with the state would certainly have been a major factor, played a major factor in the environment in which Suzuki Roshi came to maturity. So with that, I've gone over by a few minutes. I'd like to stop and we can open this up for further questions later, but I do think it's important to emphasize that all of these changes there really weren't forms for dealing with temple succession, with being a married

[27:11]

cleric, with these new institutional structures. So he came of age learning how to deal with those and I think that that certainly must have made him a little more adept and agile when he came to the United States and where there was even more chaos and fewer forms for him to turn to. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much for your attention. applause applause applause I'll stop there.

[27:41]

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