Reading Zen, especially, older works, can be a difficult task, especially, if we are looking for something in Zen that is not there. For example, looking for a panacea to help us solve our psychological problems. To be frank, Zen will not take us there. It's road is not like that—nothing is permitted to pass through Buddhism’s no-gate which includes our psychological problems. Zen's teachings are not therapeutical. We may wish to see a forest of trees, but Zen is describing, let's say, a desert. The approaches are each different, as they should be, because one is Zen and the other is not the Zen we find in much older works.
A psychologized Zen, in the example of Joko Beck's book, Nothing Special: Living Zen, is nothing at all like reading Jeffrey L. Broughton's excellent work, The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen. Let’s imagine we sat down and read books back to back. So what is the connection between the two books besides the word ‘Zen’? One is like a forest of trees; the other is a desert. Their terrain is altogether different. Yet, to expand my point, both are in California.
Zennists can make and wear robes, build temples, teach zazen and even give sermons. But this is not the terrain of Zen that Broughton’s book is looking at. The two are quite different. I should also point out that modern Zen is have less and less to do with what the Buddha taught. It’s all moving in the direction of what can only be characterized as Zen psychology—which is not real Zen.
Back in the early 1960s my thinking was not like the popular thinking today. If a person had mental problems they usually went to a psychiatrist or to the state hospital for ECT—not a Zen center to sit in zazen hoping things will get better. Zen appealed to me because of its mystical orientation which was still connected with philosophy. I will even go so far as to say that Zen, for me, was closer to the emerging category of psychedelic drugs. I viewed satori as a kind of natural mind expansion. Enlightenment, I thought at the time, was a new way of seeing our old reality.
The Zen, shall we say, of Joko Beck is butting heads with the Zen of Jeffrey Broughton. There is hardly any connection between them except in name only. With such a wide separation, I expect Zen to go the way of yoga. It will be watered down, dumbed down, institutionalized, and split, itself, off from Buddhism. The last thing will be the formation of Zen nihilism (Zen has no meaning) along with secular Buddhism which is already nihilistic.
You fail to mention an important causative factor in the rise of psycho-Zen (though it is apparent in your book choice): the feminization of Buddhism. I once sat a sheshin with Beck, many years back. There was a lot of hugging, tears, singing, as I remember. She played emotive classical music at certain times. Her daughter was helping her. Not a bad experience; just not what many males would consider authentic Zen. She didn't care.
Posted by: rick | November 29, 2014 at 07:03 PM