The latest Zen Buddhist sexual scandal concerning Joshu Sasaki recently hit the pages, so to speak, although it has been around for not a short amount time. Adam Tebbe recently covered it in the Huffington Post. It comes in a line of similar scandals, some widely known others not so well known. Some are still going on.
I think we all agree that religious scandals are nothing new under the sun, especially those which are sexual. Looking at Zen, there is an unpleasant side to such scandals, if you’re the victim, and a not so unpleasant side which opens the door to ambitious Dharma heirs who can take off on their own, teaching their own version of Zen now that the big honcho has fallen.
All this leads to the question, “Is this really Zen? And what should Zen really be about?” I think for most Westerners, interested in Zen, a present day Zen institution like AZI (Association Zen Internationale/International Zen Association) is considered to be orthodox Zen. Naturally, I beg to differ. If we strip away the layers of structure, there is not much Zen there to examine, at least not the Zen that makes it possible to know our original nature which is central to Buddhism. This nature, I hasten to add, unties all knots, It causes koans to fall by the wayside. And makes those who sit in zazen look like cloth draped over a pile of dung.
Such a structure make sexual misconduct more difficult to uncover and certainly makes it more likely to occur. Given enough time and experience, religious institutions know how and where to bury the bodies of scandal. As we might expect nothing really changes as far as institutions go. Nor is one really going to learn how to answer koans or have a basic understanding of what Zen is really about.
It is more likely that we would find Zen in China's Zhongnan Mountain range where Buddhist and Daoist hermits live which I mentioned before in an earlier blog about Edward A. Burger’s documentary film, Among White Clouds. On the same score, it has always been my observation that Buddhist Dharma and Zen centers have to be run like businesses which naturally have a heavy influence on how Zen is packaged presented to the public which tends to turn Zen into pop Zen. Underlying this, not enough glitz; and presenting Buddhism at the graduate level, nobody is interested—and no cash flow. So Zen has to have glitz and be dumbed down to just sitting.
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