The Art of Living in the World: Awareness, Respect, and Trust

THE ART OF LIVING IN THE WORLD:

AWARENESS, RESPECT, AND TRUST

Glenn T. Webb

Professor Emeritus, Pepperdine University

Academic Advisor, Bukkyo University –Los Angeles Extension

The Japanese cultural historian Okakura Kakuzo was fond of saying that the Tao, the ancient Chinese teaching about truth, the Way, was in fact the “the art of living in the world.” I’ve borrowed that idea for my talk today about Japan-American relations. I think we can say that the Tao – this “art of living” -- consists of being aware of others, respecting them, and then trusting them in a spirit of peace. This applies to other people, cultures, things and ideas alike.

We all live in a world today that exposes everyone to everyone else.  Our awareness of things around us leads to respect for them; and respecting them leads to trusting them.  Or so I believe.  Without trust we’re not going to get anything done.  I am particularly interested in promoting trust between Americans and Japanese.  I was born in Oklahoma.  My parents were school-teachers.  A complicated series of events turned me into a student of Japan – for over 65 years of my life.  

I first learned about Japan on my own through books. I was ten when the Pacific War ended.  Later, at the University of Chicago, I took classes in Japanese language, history, religion, and art for eight years.  From 1964 to 1966 I was a student at Kyoto University on a Fulbright grant.  Since then, until my retirement in 2004, I have been a professor of Asian studies at three American universities, during which I spent a good part of each year in Kyoto.

In addition to strictly academic studies, I have been practicing some of Japan’s most revered spiritual disciplines.  My wife Carol and I both practice the Way of Tea (chado or chanoyu) and have taught that discipline in American universities.  Carol has earned credentials in the Way of Flowers (kado or ikebana), and I have practiced and taught calligraphy (shodo or the Way of the Brush.)  Closest to my heart is the Zen meditation (zazen) that I learned in Kyoto Zen temples.  That discipline has enriched my life over the years and the lives of many of my students, some of whom direct Zen centers here and in Europe.  

In 2011, to my great honor and surprise, I received the Order of the Rising Sun from the government of Japan, a prestigious decoration that very few non-Japanese receive.  In some small measure this talk today is a way of expressing gratitude for my decoration.

I am sure many of you have visited other countries and have been perplexed by some of the customs there.  I’ve heard Americans say, “I don’t understand the Japanese way of thinking!”  And I’ve heard Japanese friends say, “I just don’t understand American behavior.”  In both cases I have recommended examining the beliefs behind the strange ways of thinking or troubling behavior.  If we dismiss the unfamiliar as strange, and consider our own customs to be superior, we may try to force our way on others.  At that point, any hope of reaching an understanding based on awareness, respect and mutual trust is lost.  Our differences can be explained by looking at religious teachings as well at simple human values that we all have.  

Happiness

Freedom and independence are the goals of modern people, who want to live in a society that allows them to make as much money as they want, do what they want (within the law), and let no one get in their way of realizing their dreams. In today’s world, communism clearly is no longer a workable political solution, and democratic societies are flourishing, so reaching these goals appear to be possible only when free-market capitalism is the order of the day.  

People in the United States (and maybe in most parts of the world) believe happiness is found in their independence and freedom, and many of them credit God for the material wealth they believe they deserve.  But is that what makes everybody happy?  Maybe not.  For people in Japan happiness seems to rest firmly in their relationships with others. This difference was pointed out recently by Prof. Mayumi Karazawa, who is a cultural psychologist at Tokyo Women’s University.  

A few years ago a serious survey was taken to find out how happiness is defined in different parts of the world.  Each definition was then graded on a scale of happy to sad, and the degree of happiness in each country was reported as a means of somehow changing behaviors in order to bring a greater measure of happiness to countries that seemed sad.  On that survey Japan turned out to be a nation of very sad people!  This was especially puzzling to the scholars who created the survey.  After all, the Japanese hold the record for living longer than most people in the world.  So why are so many Japanese unhappy?

Prof. Karazawa answered the question by noting that the survey was culturally biased because it presumed that people were most happy when they were free to do what they wanted.  It did not take into account that some people might regard such behavior to be selfish and socially unacceptable. The survey placed “personal freedom” to be happiness-producing whereas “caring for others” was not.  Japanese respondents always marked themselves happiest on the survey when asked if looking after the welfare of others in their families or groups made them happy.  Prof. Karazawa pointed out that there are good reasons why the Japanese define happiness differently.  To conclude that they are sad and in need of psychological help is to be unaware of some core values in Japanese society.

Think about it.  If your happiness is defined by your dependence on your relatives and friends, and their mutual dependence on you, then being independent and responsibility-FREE is not going to be a high priority for you. You may feel obliged to do well for them, so your success is their success. Your feeling of gratitude for what they have done for you may spur you on to efforts that you might never make for yourself alone.  Feeling deeply your obligation to others -- known as on (恩) in Japanese -- is what gives meaning to Japanese life.

If happiness in Japan can be mistaken by Westerners as sadness, who knows what else can go wrong?  The makers and interpreters of the survey I referred to have clearly underestimated the Japanese reverence for ancestors.  That is because the experts were not even aware of the true nature of that reverence. 

There are many other aspects of Japanese life that non-Japanese (myself included) have misunderstood about Japan and its people.  I will talk about some of those things a little later, with personal examples.  But first, I want to talk about something that Japanese often get wrong about arrogant and irresponsible Americans.  They mistakenly blame our behavior simply on our love for independence.  But why are we that way?  Are we just greedy by nature?  I think that’s too simple.  Just as we underestimate the history of ancestor worship in Japan, my friends in Japan frequently underestimate the legacy of religions in the lives of Jews, Christians and Muslims.  People in Japan seem have a hard time wrapping their minds around the Western notion of God.

Do You Believe in God?  

This question puzzles my Japanese friends as much as anything regarding life outside Japan.  There is nothing in Japanese reality that corresponds to the Creator of the Universe, the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve.  A monotheistic God of the universe doesn’t exist, not in Shintoism, and not in Buddhism. 

Japanese almost without exception observe Shinto birth ceremonies and Buddhist funeral religiously, just as their ancestors have for hundreds of years.  And yet a random sampling of people on the street in Japan (and a poll taken recently of 26 Japanese college students) shows that none of them consider themselves to be religious at all! 

Despite that, their adherence to customs emanating from shrines and temples requires a quick look at Shinto and Buddhist history in Japan.  By taking that look it becomes easier to understand how Japanese might struggle when Westerners ask them if they believe in God.

As far as I am concerned Shinto is not a religion.  Non-Japanese (me included) cannot convert to it because we have no native ancestral records. Indeed, Shinto priests are and always have been primarily record keepers for descendants of the immigrant groups that made up the first prefectures of the Japanese islands. 

There are no doctrines that Shinto teaches.  There are prehistoric myths and ceremonial purifications and dances for ancestral spirits, but nothing that you must “believe” in.  Each child is taken to an ancestral shrine, preferably by the paternal grandmother, some two months after its birth, to be “introduced” to ancestors. And at age three, five and seven that child will return to receive ancestral blessings.  Shinto priests who perform wedding ceremonies announce to ancestral spirits the coming together of the two families in a marriage.

Buddhism was chosen as the state religion in Japan by the nation’s first prefectural “court” at Nara in the 6^th century.  Buddhist priests were responsible for the education of children and the cremation of the dead. The teachings of Japan’s various Buddhist denominations were brought from China and faithfully replicated in Japan. Those teachings are not taught so much as they are preserved in memorials to the dead, prayers for the protection of the living, and a variety of practices for lay persons and priests.

People who ask if Japanese believe in God probably know little about Hinduism and Buddhism.  Hinduism originated in South Asia well before 10,000 B.C., and Buddhism emerged from Hinduism in a revolutionary form in the 6^th century B.C., taught by a Hindu of the military caste, Prince Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha. 

Both religions accept the notion that all sentient beings are blinded by an ignorance centered in a perception of themselves as separate from each other.  That ignorance presumably is carried through countless lives (reincarnation) until reaching a full perception of self – called enlightenment or Buddhahood – a perception that is undifferentiated from (or “empty of”) the separate self.

Hindus believe Buddhaood will eventually take place collectively, as it were, at the end of time.  Buddhists, in contrast, believe that individuals can achieve it, and then assist others still caught in illusion, just as their founder the historical Buddha did in his lifetime. 

Buddhism teaches that we may bring a karmic residue from a past life into our present one, but that we all are intimately connected to each other and to all other things.  That, for believers, is where attention truly belongs. 

For that reason, happiness in Buddhism means waking up to the fact that you have no substantial independence and that we ARE in fact each other!  In this sense, the result of the international survey on happiness, mentioned earlier, proves that Japanese people are ideal Buddhists. It is natural that they regard people – especially parents and ancestors – as their source of life. 

Needless to say, God is the source of life in Western religions.  Today’s world is less than 1% Jewish, 32% Christian, and23% Muslim.  All of these people base their faiths in scriptures that came out of the Middle Eastern deserts between about 10,000 B.C. and 700 A.D. 

Those scriptures require the worship of a single Creator of the Universe, the God of the Bible, but they do not agree on how to do that.  Jesus was a Jew who taught a revolutionary type of Judaism in the 1^st century.   Mohammed was God’s “last prophet” who lived in the 7^th century. For the last 2,000 years, Jews, Christians and Muslims have fought and killed each other over whose method of worship of God is correct and whose is not. 

They believe that God made all of us, beginning with Adam and Eve, so we all are God’s children.  But they believe we will be rewarded or punished after we die, depending on how closely we followed God’s teachings, as defined in their particular faith, while we were on earth. Each religion demands obedience to God and “death to the infidels!”

So do Buddhists believe in God?  How should they answer?  My Japanese friends want to know.  If they say “No” they will be in trouble with half the people in the world.  But if they say “Yes” they will be asked to explain which religion (and which denomination of that religion) they follow.

Western societies regard their relationship to God as more important than anything.  They will emphasize each individual’s independence “under God”.  That is the American dream, after all.  Just to make sure everyone gets the point, we even put “in God we trust” on our money and into our pledge of national allegiance.  And everyone says “Oh my God!” (OMG in computer-speak) all the time. 

Now that our religious heritages have been given their proper due, it is time now for a little show and tell from personal experience.  Again, you will find the following topics covered in more detail in the printed transcript of my talk.  They all have to do with correcting misunderstandings between Japanese and Americans.  My topics are (1) taking off shoes, (2) saying goodbye, (3) changing jobs, (4) speaking age-appropriately, (5) saying please and thank you, (6) putting others first with omoiyari, (7) being authentic with kokoro, and finally, (8) how I learned these things.  

1.  Taking Off Shoes. 

Many non-Japanese assume that the custom of taking off shoes in Japan came about because floors symbolize sacred ground, like the floors of Hindu temples and Muslim mosques.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  It’s about keeping floors clean.  The Japanese are very practical. 

One of the first things my family noticed about life in Japan was how people did not wear shoes inside homes, temples, and traditional restaurants.  The shoes stayed on, however, in Western hotels, theaters, banks, universities and businesses. But in our son’s kindergarten and elementary schools shoes were taken off and carefully placed in lockers at the entrance.

We finally learned how to take off our shoes in Japan.  I learned how that is done in a Buddhist temple where I was training.  Many of my colleagues at Kyoto University had apartments with a tiny space for shoes just inside the door. During parties that space would be filled with a jumble of shoes.  But in temples there is a slightly raised wooden platform in front of a wall of shelves for shoes.

At first I thought the platform was there for me to stand on before taking off my shoes.  I was corrected.  Then I thought I was supposed to take my shoes off and stand on the stone floor with my bare feet, and then step up onto the platform to put my shoes away.  Boy was that wrong! 

The abbot himself demonstrated the correct way by making me walk around barefoot on the stone floor.  Then he gave me a clean white cloth to wipe the bottom of my feet.  The dirt from my feet turned the cloth black.  Then the abbot brought a tray of food and placed the food on the floor.  I got the message:  the floors of the temple rooms are where meals are served, so they must be kept spotlessly clean. This also goes for tatami floors in all traditional buildings. From then on my family learned to step out of our shoes and step directly up onto the platform, turn around and pick up our shoes, and arrange them neatly on the floor or in spaces provided. 

The Buddhist message involved here is provided by a design on a 15^th-century stone water basin behind the main hall of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto.  The message says, in four Chinese characters reading clockwise from the top (but with my English in proper order):  “I Alone Know Feet” (吾唯足知: Be content with what you have).  I’m sure the original Chinese phrase had nothing to do with the Japanese custom of taking off shoes inside, because that custom never existed in China.  But the word “feet” had deep meaning for Chinese Buddhist priests.  It was a euphemism for the myriad sentient beings whose importance each priest was to realize in himself.

2.  Saying Goodbye

All goodbyes are probably connected to death.  I guess I learned that in Japan, because Americans don’t like goodbyes and they try to avoid death altogether.  The Japanese face them head-on.  Every goodbye is handled with the mental attitude of “this could be the last time.”  They must consider each goodbye a preparation for the big one, because meeting friends at the airport or seeing them off at the airport or train station is very important indeed.  

Funerals in Japan basically last fifty years, from the time the body is prepared, in front of relatives, to the service in which the dead receives a posthumous Buddhist name, followed by a formal family tea ritual meal, to the crematorium where relatives place white flowers over the body, witness the cremation itself, and then take turn placing bone fragments and ashes in an urn, which is kept at the temple where memorial services are performed for forty-nine years.  After that the family can relax. 

Americans, on the other hand, can hardly wait for the funeral to be over, for the body to be put in the ground (or the ashes in a vault), and there are no special days or ceremonies to help relatives remember the dead, who (according to Western religion) is in Heaven with God.  (Nobody talks publicly about relatives going to Hell!)

All of this comes down to the number-one complaint about American goodbyes that my wife and I hear all the time from Japanese friends visiting the United States:  “Why do Americans close their door in our faces as we leave their home after a party?”

First of all, in Japan it is not the custom to visit friends in their homes.  People host each other in posh hotels and restaurants rather than expose them to a home life that is quite private and “unworthy” of guests.  But after leaving a fancy restaurant the hosts will walk their guests to a taxi or bus or train, where the actual goodbyes take place.  Hosts should wave and bow until their guests are out of sight.  The Japanese expression “one occasion one meeting” (ichigo-ichie一期一会) expresses the proper feeling here:  “This could be our last time together.” 

In this situation on American soil, which commonly takes place in the hosts’ home, the guests are shown to the door, and the door is shut after a “see you later.”  Japanese custom would only allow this if the hosts were trying to sever future ties with their guests.  It is much worse than rude.  No wonder Japanese are curious if their American hosts are trying to say they don’t want to see them anymore!

3.  Changing Jobs

Another American behavior that causes Japanese concern is the habit of American college grads taking jobs with Japanese companies, in Japan or abroad, and then leaving those jobs (usually for more pay) for jobs somewhere else.  That in fact is a feature of the American business world.  You find it also in the American academic community.  I sent out my resume to other universities almost every year to see if they would offer me a salary that was better than the one I had.  The case is quite different in Japan, both in business and in academia.

Young Japanese college students are commonly recruited by Japanese companies for jobs.  Interviews take place before graduation, and afterwards students choose and/or are selected by Japanese companies, rather like pledges joining fraternities and sororities in the U.S.  However, the similarity stops there.  Because the majority of company hires made in Japan this way traditionally last forever, with student employees becoming like adopted family members and companies like adoptive families. 

The Japanese corporation IS a family.  There are responsibilities on both sides.  Employees trust their bosses to protect them, guide them, and almost guarantee their success.  In turn, corporate bosses expect loyalty and an all-out effort to succeed from their employees.  Any doubt that employer or employee is not “in it for the long haul” is unthinkable.  The relationship is long lasting, maybe through the marriage of the employee, the birth of his or her child, and even after the death of the employer. 

The Japanese way in business and education will not change, I suspect, any more than the American way will.  But both sides should understand the expectations.  Only if expectations can be adjusted to fit the realities will there be smooth sailing ahead. 

4.  Speaking Age-Appropriately

I often hear Americans say something like this about showing respect to others:  “Before I show someone respect they have to show me they deserve it.  They have to earn my respect.”  With that attitude, a language that automatically requires a form of polite and respectful speech when speaking to elders or authority figures will be considered “un-American” – or worst of all, “hypocritical”.

It used to be that American children were expected to speak when spoken to by their elders with “sir” and “m’am”.  But even that custom exists today only in the American south, where it also seems to be dying. 

The Japanese case of age-based language may be unique in the world.  Instead of polite phrases added to show respect, spoken Japanese is a complicated system of significant language changes that show your own position vis-a-vis the person you are speaking to -- in terms of dependence and responsibility. We all grow older, of course, and in Japan responsibility comes with age, and your language should reflect your own awareness of that. The younger speaker also must speak in a way that shows dependence and trust.

I came to Japan with a textbook-form of Japanese that I used with everyone.  Little kids thought I was crazy because I sounded like I was dependent on them.  And I’m sure my elders thought I was not dependent enough on them.  Of course everyone excused my ignorance of the language because I was a foreigner.  But with time I caught on and my speech pattern became a bit more appropriate to my age. 

The Japanese term for this system of speech is joge, meaning “high/low”, which unfortunately sounds like some sort of master/servant system of classic feudalism.  Japan’s society requires a language of mutual dependence and responsibility.  I hope it never dies.  English cannot change structurally the way Japanese does.  But if it could, the fabric of American society would become stronger because Americans would be more respectful. 

5. Saying “Please” and “Thank You”

Americans could become more respectful towards each other if they would say “please” and “thank you” more often.  Nowadays, when Americans ask someone to do something for them, they often say things like, “I need this done by tomorrow.”  That’s a demand not a request.  The “please” in English (and in other Western languages) actually means “if you please,” i.e., “if it is convenient for you,” or “if possible …”  In Japanese, too, it literally is a request:  “I beg of you…” – “onegai shimasu…” (お願いします...)

Americans say “thank you” rather often, but probably without understanding its original meaning.  “Thank you” implies that someone has done something for you that you will remember (or “think of”) forever.  It shows your indebtedness when you say it.  In Japanese the sense of obligation is even stronger.  “Arigato gozaimasu” (有り難う御座います)refers to the difficulty that you have created for the person you are speaking to.  In other words, when you thank someone in Japanese you are in effect apologizing!  As a matter of fact, I wonder if that expression and the other words that amount to saying you are sorry in Japanese (sumimasen, gomen, etc.) are not practically synonyms in conversation.

6. Putting Others First With Japanese Omoiyari

Putting others first in everything you say or do is omoiyari (思いやり).  It is a matter of truly respecting others.  From a very early age, Japanese children are taught to be aware of what other people seem to need and to satisfy that need for them very quietly and without being asked.  People in Japan have done this for my family for years and years. 

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I am talking about.  We first stepped on Japanese soil back in the days when visitors made the trip by cargo ship.  My wife and I, with our 3-year-old son, took an 11-day voyage from San Francisco to Kobe in 1964, year of the Tokyo Olympics. We had five huge suitcases and a trunk, which were still with us on the train ride to Kyoto.  As soon as the train stopped at Kyoto Station, on a hot and muggy July day, our son Burke began to cry.

 Very soon, out of nowhere appeared a maiko-san, a beautiful young apprentice geisha, and asked in English if she could be of assistance. As soon as I explained in halting Japanese how we couldn’t find our luggage, she disappeared for a few minutes, only to reappear with a couple of little goldfish in a vinyl bag of water!  Almost immediately our son stopped crying.  The maiko-san then took us to the taxi stand outside, showed us a taxi that was already packed with our luggage, put us in another taxi, and then bowed and waved as our taxis rolled away towards our hotel.

Some eight years ago our first-born son Burke died, when he was only 45 years old.  When he died many of our Christian friends tried to console us by saying thing such as “God had better plans for him,” or “he is in a better place now.”  These friends meant well, but their words didn’t console us.  To suggest that God is always in control, that He has plans for us including the death of our son, and that Burke is better off away from us – these ideas left us heart-broken.  It was equally hurtful to be told, “You just have to get over this.  Move on with your life.” 

What really helped us was what our Japanese friends did:  they placed a small picture of our son on their home altars where he receives their respectful offerings of incense, candle-light, and food every day.  Now he is a member of their families, too, and that is very comforting to us. Our Christian clergy-friends never mention Burke’s name anymore when they visit us.  But Japanese Buddhist priests go directly to the little altar we have set up for him and offer words of prayerful greeting. Nothing cheers us up more than that. 

7.  Being Authentic with Kokoro

Kokoro (心) is the source of wisdom and compassion in Japan.  It is the fuel of putting others first -- omoiyari. If you always try to be rational and not allow your emotions get in the way of doing what is right, you are living in the modern world.  The mind and reason have been valued over heart and feelings ever since ancient Greek philosophers told us to do so. Once reason became the foundation of Greek philosophy, religion, too, was viewed through the lens of the intellect. Since God was Truth and Truth was Reason, the view quickly grew that emotion was the actual source of ungodliness and sin.

Ancient sages in India and China have given different advice.  They told us to find a balance between reason and feeling, or as they put it, wisdom and compassion. That is the advice that Japanese and other Asians took to heart. The Japanese term kokoro was hridaya or citta in ancient India, terms that refer to feeling, sensation and mental operation.  At the beginning of the Christian era they were translated in Chinese Buddhist texts with the character that the Japanese call kokoro.

Once again, our religions are responsible for these mixed messages. Americans sometimes say, ‘In my heart of hearts I know this is true.”  A modern version, when we think something is unreasonable but true, is, “We need to think outside the box.”  Perhaps that box is reason, and thinking outside it is kokoro.  Several years ago I gave some lectures in Japan I entitled “Heart of Oneness” – using the Japanese phrase “Kokoro wa hitotsu” (心は一つ).  Those lectures proved to be popular with my audience.  I do think we have common needs and aspirations that cannot be defined by our differences in religion or anything else. We have the same kokoro.

8.  How I Learned All This

The things I’ve talked about today I’ve learned through experience, mostly.  But I would never have experienced them at all if my professors at Kyoto University had not shown me the way.  I mean that literally.  “The Way” may be “the art of living in the world,” as Okakura Tenshin put it.  But my professors insisted that I needed to live that art myself.  It was not enough that I should gather documents and do research about Japanese history and culture.  They expected me to put myself in it whole-heartedly.  How could I see the picture if I didn’t get in it? 

In closing I would like to tell you one final story that more than anything else may suggest how you, too, might be more aware, respectful and trusting in the world.  Before I left the University of Chicago to study at Kyoto University in 1964 I had pretty much written my doctoral dissertation and thought I could finish the research in one year.  My research was focused on the art and architecture (and artists and patrons) of late-16^th-early-17^th-century Japan – the Momoyama and Early Edo periods.) I knew I had to know quite a lot about Japanese Buddhism and how it worked.  I had read a lot and thought I knew enough to simply contact all of the temple abbots and set up times for my visits.  My professors, however, strongly suggested that since most of the temples of my research belong to the Rinzai Zen denomination of Buddhism I should actually train in a Zen temple as a practical matter, and to consult with priests of other denominations as well. 

My first temple visit was arranged, the Director of the Kyoto National Museum accompanied me, I brought all my photographic equipment, and the abbot received us in his room overlooking the garden.  We enjoyed tea, and spoke (in Japanese) for well over an hour.  At some point I asked politely when I might actually begin my work.  It was as though I had not asked.  Conversation continued.  Several times I brought up the subject, but each time my request was ignored. 

The last time I asked, the abbot looked me in the eye and said rather gruffly in Japanese, “I have no intention of showing you these materials Mr. Webb.”  Thinking I had misunderstood him, I suggested that I could come some other time.  The abbot (who it turns out spent two years at Yale) then said the same thing to me in English.  I was totally perplexed. We were ushered out to the entrance gate of the temple, put in a taxi, and the abbot waved goodbye until we were out of sight. 

I went back to the temple many times, hoping the abbot would change his mind.  But he did not.  Instead, he invited me to start sitting zazen at the temple with the novice priests.  To make a long story short, I trained there and in other temples for the rest of the time I was studying in Kyoto, and every year when I came back as a professor with my University of Washington students.  Since then I have practiced and taught what I learned for fifty years. My life has changed.

I often came back to that first temple where the abbot seemed so rude, to participate in and sometime lead intensive meditations.  One winter, after the grueling weeklong meditation at the first of each year, I entered the little toilet room, squatted down over the hole in the floor, admired the garden outside, enjoyed the freshly-cut camellia branch in the bamboo vase hanging on the wall, and proceeded to do my business. 

When I finished I reached behind me to the tissue box, and felt not tissues but one of the paintings I had asked to see so long ago.  The abbot must have silently opened the sliding door behind me, unrolled the scroll (a National Treasure) on the tissue box, and left. 

I smiled at the simplicity.  Here was the masterpiece in its natural state, and I didn’t have the slightest desire to take its picture. I think the abbot and I had reached a level of awareness, respect and trust for each other that I could not have reached otherwise.  Now I knew with my own heart-mind how precious everything is, all the time.  And I was supremely grateful.  Before leaving the temple that day I rolled the scroll up properly, handed the scroll back to the abbot, and bowed deeply.  I saw him frequently over the years, until he died. 

9.  My Advice

In light of what recent surveys (such as the one examined by Prof. Karazawa) might reveal about happy and unhappy people in the world, I have advice for Japanese and non-Japanese alike.  First, I would advise Westerners to revive their Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs about putting others first.  Christians may have the strongest mandate, especially when it comes to loving everyone unconditionally.  But all Western religions describe paths of righteousness where taking care of the needs of others is a high priority.

I feel the Western world in modern times has put freedom and individuality (along with rampant ambition and greed) ahead of service to other for too long.  We instinctively know our happiness does not really depend on those things in life.  But we haven’t replaced them with the kind of consideration for others that the Japanese call “omoiyari”.  We should.

My advice to Japanese, who scored so badly on the aforementioned happiness survey that they appear to be “the world’s most unhappy people,” is to take pride in your score!  That is because you have something still alive in your culture that the rest of the world has lost.  My challenge to you is to show the world how all of us can put others first.  Thank you.   

Meditations on Meditation - A Personal Story

MEDITATIONS ON MEDITATION – A PERSONAL STORY

Anyone who writes a paper, such as the ones presented at this conference on Buddhist meditation, must answer an important question, which is, “Why did you write it?  What is the point of your paper?”  When writing my paper for this journal, I confess that I did not ask the question until after the paper was almost finished.  I think I should share with you my answer, up front, so to speak.  I wrote the paper to clear up something in my own mind:  I am conflicted about a dispute that has arisen recently in Buddhist ranks, largely in America and Europe.  People in Asia, for thousands of years, have accepted Buddhism in whatever form they learned it, without much dispute.  In Japan the various denominations go their own ways, for example, without arguing with each other.  But Westerners, it seems, cannot.

We Westerners only began to pay attention to Buddhist teachings about a hundred years ago.  We are babies in the faith.  The number of non-Asian Buddhist scholars and priests presently active today cannot be large.  Some of us have even been taken seriously in Asia for what we have written about Buddhism.  I am honored to be among them.  Almost all of us began practicing the religion and took Buddhist priest vows after studying Buddhism in books.  But a rift has arisen in my own Buddhist community that is gathering momentum and threatens to destroy the advances that have been made outside of Asia. 

At issue is the question of whether it is permissible to call yourself a Buddhist without accepting on faith all the tenets of the religion.  One side says yes; the other says no.  Put directly, the question is this:  “If you do not believe in reincarnation and other Buddhist teachings about what happens after death, can you still practice meditation as recommended in most forms of Buddhism and call yourself a Buddhist?”  On the liberal side, you can.  On the conservative side, you cannot.

Every Anglo-European Buddhist priest I know was raised in a Christian or Jewish family.  Even those who were non-religious before accepting Buddhism share the tendency we all have of choosing sides.  We are Westerners, after all.  We tend to fight wars over religion.  Our egos are very big.  It is our legacy.  The dispute that inspired this paper is between an ordained American student of Tibetan Buddhism and a fellow scholar-priest with credentials in both Tibetan and Zen traditions, and who was born in Scotland.  The former has charged the latter with misrepresenting Buddhist teachings.  I use quite a bit of space in this paper defending the accused simply because of my own background in Japanese Zen Buddhism.  My criticism of the accuser should be seen in that light.  I am as guilty as he is of taking sides. I am defending myself, basically. 

Meditation in the religions of Asia puts emphasis on reflection and transformation.  The goal is insight, not obedience.  It offers everyone, especially me, liberation from my own small mind right now rather than my salvation from hell after I die.  Reflection and transformation are expressed in various ways within Hinduism, and the Buddhism that emerged from it.  My time spent studying both religions is about equal, but my experiential knowledge is anchored in Buddhism, mostly in Kyoto’s Zen Buddhist temples where I have trained for nearly fifty years.  My reflection on Asian meditation here, then, is focused on Zen meditation.  In doing so I will give special homage to Daisetsu Teitaro (D. T.) Suzuki, and consider the criticism of Zen by a popular proponent of another Buddhist denomination. 

Nowadays lots of people practice Asian meditation of some sort.  In the hippie days of the 1960’s, of course, it was commonplace, and now meditation is at least known if not practiced in all areas of society.  Meditation and yoga classes are taught everywhere.  But when I was a little boy growing up in Oklahoma only Indians engaged in meditation.  My parents, both with advanced university degrees, were paid by the U.S. government to teach in the Ft. Sill Indian School and keep records detailing the welfare of Indian families living in Comanche County.  The seasonal gatherings of local Indians involved meditation and prayer -- usually accompanied by communal dancing.  Our family Bible has an inscription dated one week after my birth in 1935, documenting my presentation to tribal elders and “The Great Father.”   

Ironically, my parents’ job was to discourage such traditional ways and bring the Indians into civilized American society by teaching classes in English, history, math, mechanics and the Bible.  My father R. O. Webb also was a Church of Christ minister and U. S. Army chaplain.  But he secretly tried to keep Indian customs and languages alive.  He made sure the children sent to the school shared with him all the folk tales and family ways they knew about before being brought to Ft. Sill from reservations elsewhere in the country.  For his efforts, local Indian leaders honored my father shortly before he died, in 1970, with a big powwow celebration, attended by Kiowa, Comanche, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Black Foot, Caddo and other Plains Indian tribes.

It was in this setting, oddly enough, that I first heard of Zen meditation.  I’ve told the story many times of how I grew up fearing and hating the Japanese during WWII.  They were the bad guys that my playmates and I pretended to capture and torture to death.  We did that for years in the schoolyard.  And then the war was over.  I was ten in 1945.  America had won the war with Japan!  I listened to the radio reports and saw movie newsreels of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I needed answers.  Every week I borrowed books from the public library. That week I asked for a book on Japan.

The librarian gave me a book called Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture, by D. T. Suzuki.  According to the preface, the author was working on the book about the time I was born, and it was published in 1938, well before the U.S. joined the war against Japan.  Somehow that book was on the shelf in a library near my home.  Ironically, some twenty years after the war, in 1964, Dr. Suzuki was one of my doctoral dissertation advisors when a Fulbright scholarship took me to Kyoto University for graduate studies.  Looking back, I can see that what he wrote about Zen in his book so long ago, and that I read when I was so young, has stayed with me and is the foundation for everything I subsequently have learned about meditation. (fn 1)

So what did Daisetsu Sensei say about Zen meditation?  I now know that what he wrote was highly personal, and much of it must have sounded heretical to Buddhist scholars and priests of various traditions.  But I appreciate that he cut to the chase, sailing across two thousand years of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Judeo-Christian history, in order to tell his readers in a convincing voice exactly how Zen came to be and how it works in the modern world.  Even as a child I was enthralled.

In the preface to a volume in a set of seminal books on Zen by R. H. Blyth, Suzuki would write:  “The aim of Zen is to open the eye to the ‘supreme wisdom’ (aryajnyana), that is, to awaken the inmost sense which has remained altogether dormant since the beginning of the human consciousness.  When this is accomplished one sees directly into the truth of Reality and confronts a world which is new and yet not at all new.” [fn 2]

In 1945 I knew by heart every answer offered to life-and-death questions by the particular Protestant Christianity that shaped my childish view of the world.  That was my Reality.  But I had no clue about the things Daisetsu Sensei wrote about.  I hung on every word in the ideas he presented, captivated by their breadth, logic and compassion.  And I vowed I would go to Japan some day.  

At the beginning of the book that inspired me so, Suzuki asks,  “What is Zen?” And he answers with a nod to Buddhist history (and the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese languages that informed it) and with the doctrine that lists meditation as the last of six spiritual exercises -- known as paramita -- which the historical Buddha taught his followers to practice in order for them to reach the goal of self-fulfillment, i.e., enlightenment.  Buddhist texts dealing with the sixth paramita describe it and give names to the various levels of its achievement, which some Buddhist denominations (including all of those in the Tibetan lineage) claim to be able to validate in each practitioner. 

But Suzuki’s approach is to explain Zen not as a difficult, multi-level form of meditation, but more broadly as a way of life in which meditation plays a part.  In so doing he removes almost all orthodox narratives of all the religions on earth.  He boldly argues that you could be Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim or anything else and still practice Zen.  (That alone probably gave me the courage some 67 years ago to keep reading his book.) 

When recounting how Buddhism came into China as a foreign religion, which was contrary in many ways to the teachings of centuries-old Taoism and Confucianism, Suzuki suggests that the “Taoist mind” of China’s antiquity was probably attracted to the practical side of Zen Buddhism, or what he calls “its complete democracy.”   Its “penetrating analyses and speculations” may also have seemed compatible with Taoist ones, and better than Confucianism’s society of the educated and land-owning class over peasants.

Instead of striving for oneness with nature and immortality after death, as Taoists did, or being reborn countless times in hopes of bringing enlightenment closer and closer, as both Hindus and Buddhists believed they would, Suzuki suggests that a Zen master often is skeptical about either possibility.  He cites a case in which a believer in reincarnation asked a Chinese Zen master what he expected to be reborn as in his next life.  The master said he hoped to “work for the villagers” as an animal.  He in effect believed in doing what needed to be done instead of speculating over the unknown.

When I read this story for the first time I found nothing enigmatic about it, perhaps because this seemed to corroborate Christian teachings about the first being last and the meek inheriting the earth.  Indeed, the abbot of a Zen temple in Kyoto where I first did some training criticized Christians (and indirectly, me) for having a martyr-complex, because they seemed to make self-sacrifice the main goal in life. He warned me that that was not the goal of Zen, even if Suzuki claimed it was.

In his book on Zen and Japan (and in many other books and articles)  Suzuki cited many of these conversations between Chinese Zen masters and their disciples.  These cases are called koans, which Suzuki refers to as “barriers” to full realization (satori, the Japanese word for enlightenment.) Koan “practice” began in China as formal exercises in which a teacher and student “looked at the words” in temple records of conversations between the first Chinese Zen teachers and their students.  The word koan literally means “princely plan” – implying that in ancient China the plans of a land-owning scholar contained wisdom that was beyond the grasp of an ordinary peasant.  The word might be translated less literally as “spiritually advanced views.”  The point of the training is for the student to grasp the true meaning of the master’s words for themselves.

Only the Rinzai and Obaku branches of Zen in Japan use koans in formal training of novice priests. Now, after experiencing koan training myself (and providing it in the Zen centers I established), I am convinced that koans all have practical moral lessons.  But the majority view of them seems to be that they are puzzles without answers, to be used as nonsense mantras that help us break through linear thought. They do that, too.  But they are loaded with practical advice about how to live a useful life.

Let me give one example of what I mean.  Zen masters in Japan assign koans to their students one at a time, taking them from well-known koan anthologies.  They often begin with “Joshu’s Mu” koan from the Mumonkan anthology [fn3], which involves a famous master, his disciple and a dog.  A 9^th-century Chinese master, the “Admonisher from the State of Zhao” (Joshu in Japanese), was asked by one of his disciples if a dog had the Buddha Nature or not, to which the master Joshu answered, “No!’  This account does not tell us what the disciple thought, but he probably was puzzled, as any student of Buddhism would be, knowing that a basic premise of Buddhism is that all beings are born with Buddha Nature (S. buddhatva, J. busshou), the potential for Buddhahood.

In another account of the conversation, given in the same anthology, the disciple did question Joshu’s “No” on scriptural grounds, which got him in trouble with Joshu for being too attached to ideas.  So when the disciple asked the question again, Joshu replied “Yes!” The disciple then asked “But how can Buddha Nature get into a lowly creature like a dog?”  Joshu’s response seemed a non-answer:   “The dog was ignorant.”  Such admonitions from the famous Admonisher from Zhao seem to relate somehow to Zen teachings about false opposites. 

 Suzuki Sensei explained it this way, in a later article, where he wrote:  “… to speak logically of things that cannot be put into logic …” or “to bring into the ‘arena of logic’ things that go beyond logic is a necessary teaching ploy, a method of instructing students of Zen.  It is one way of understanding ‘holy truth’ and is usually described as ‘the non-duality of the highest truth and everyday truth.’” [fn 4]  After all, the 6^th-century Indian patriarch of Zen himself, Bodhidharma, also responded to such discussions of yes-no duality by equating emptiness with fullness and the holy with the profane.  But for those of us raised to believe in dualities, the idea of the non-dual is a hard teaching.  We seem to get caught up in logic. God’s ways and man’s ways are different and can never be the same, we think.  

One of my Japanese Zen teachers came to my rescue by dramatizing the Joshu story in a way I’ll never forget.  He said maybe a real dog was right outside Joshu’s room that day, a starving dog that gave birth to several puppies and then died right in front of Joshu and his disciple.  Then, what if only one puppy survived, blind and on the verge of death.  What if that dog was the one the disciple was asking about?  And instead of worrying about what Buddhism taught about Buddha Nature, maybe Joshu was trying to admonish his disciple to wake up.  Just feed the dog!

At that moment I think everything fell into place for me.  Joshu’s words became like the “Argh-h-h!” in a Peanuts cartoon.  He was telling his student in the best way he could that all of his concerns were worthy enough, but that time was wasting!  Those concerns were not enough.  Somebody had to do something!  It was then that I saw why none of my Zen teachers, the abbots of the Japanese temples I trained in, wanted to discuss anything about the Buddhist teachings behind this koan with me.  They were tired of answering my questions and knew I had given everything enough thought. 

At this point I quit being critical of how this koan is always used in Japanese Zen temples.  The training is very formal.  At certain times during the day, usually during a group meditation, the novice priests get up and line up in front of the teacher’s room.  Upon entering they prostrate themselves in front of his seated form.  He asks them what their koan is and what it means to them.  In this case specifically, “What is the meaning of Joshu’s MU?”  They have been told to “place his answer on your breath” and they do so – with moans like cows mooing.  I always found it funny and felt even funnier the first time I tried to do it. [fn 5]

But here’s the thing:  each of us has breath that animates our bodies while we are alive.  We breathe in and we breathe out.  In seated Zen meditation we gradually get used to turning down the volume in our heads of the noises our brains make.  We listen.  We feel.  And we become more aware of everything.  Koans provide answers that only each of us can discover for ourselves.  However, with this koan of Joshu’s MU, there is a special teaser that may leave us trapped in our thoughts.  

The Japanese word “mu” (無)-- pronounced “wu” in Mandarin Chinese -- means “No”.  At the same time it is used in Buddhist texts to refer to the totality of reality, the Not-One-Thing, the “I Am That” of the so-called Void, a gateway to enlightenment  (S. nirvana, J. satori).  You have it at the end of every out-breath, which may be your last!  Mu can indeed stand for enlightenment itself.  But it also means No.  Words can get in the way.  Here, you think maybe No is a trick.  And that can lead you nowhere.  (Oh, no! Nowhere? Everywhere?)  You’d better just shut up and listen to the universe, your home, and allow it to show you its rewards and its needs.

OK.  So you think you got it.  Duality is a trap.  But the question is, even after understanding a koan intellectually, how the hell does a trainee express TO THE UNIVERSE exactly how he (or she) plans to FEED THE DOG?  Do you do it with words?  By your actions?  How?  This approach to meditation is very much a part of the history of Buddhism.  It is found in the lineage that encourages you to trust your own Buddha Nature.  It is the very opposite of the dominant Tibetan approach of reaching the same levels of Buddhist meditation with a systematic method that is carefully described, level by level, and buttressed at every turn by scriptural explanations (in Tibetan, of course) of exactly how each level should feel.

Before I touch on Tibetan Buddhism, and its very different views on meditation, I feel obliged to say a word about the Japanese tradition of the priesthood and the physical pain involved in training.  First, unlike Buddhism in other countries, Japanese Buddhism does not require priests to be celibate.  Most novice priests are eldest sons of priests, so they have to be there to train and carry on the tradition.  They have no choice.  It is quite unusual for an ordinary Japanese person (or foreigner like me), whose family is not from a long line of priest families, to choose to be a priest. 

Secondly, there is the physical side of sitting in meditation in a Japanese Zen temple.  It is strict and very painful at first.  Even young Japanese novice priests in their teens have trouble today.  They are bigger than their fathers and grandfathers, and less accustomed to sitting in the proper positions:  full lotus (kekka fuza) for meditation, and legs folded under the body (seiza) for everyday sitting positions.  They may spend months just dealing with the pain signals their bodies send their brains because of sitting in one position up to eight hours each day, in intervals of 30-60 minutes. 

Only after novices learn to sit almost indefinitely “on top” of their pain will they have to deal with the other thoughts and “barriers” (including koans) that will fill their heads. In my experience, zazen is a tried-and-true method of entering a world that all of us can visit, a world of dhyana, the deepest levels of reality, which make us a bit kinder and understanding in a world filled with pain and suffering, but leaves us otherwise unchanged.  Some of us will be inclined to probe texts for meaning and write down our thoughts about them.  But that doesn’t necessarily make us wiser.

Speaking of words, brains, and pain, Tibetan Buddhism adores words, takes brains as seriously as neurosurgeons, and abhors pain, especially in training.  It is this vast difference between the Tibetan and the Sino/Japanese approach to Buddhist meditation that is at the heart of the rift between two groups of Western Buddhist converts.  It is a dispute over both methodology and philosophy.  It brings into question which method is faithful to the historical Buddha’s teachings.  Which of the traditions is more authentic?  Western converts to Buddhism want to know.  Dyed-in-the-wool Asian Buddhists don’t seem to care so much. 

I know few other teachers of Buddhist doctrine and practice in the Tibetan tradition as impressive as B. Alan Wallace, whose writings are prolific and to be treasured not just by people interested in Buddhism, but by anyone interested in the history of religion and science.  His five volumes in the Columbia Series in Science and Religion will be the lighthouse for those of us paddling our little boats of understanding to the other shore.  I have read his Mind in the Balance: Meditations in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity (2009), and am well into his latest book, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice (2012). 

His arguments with Buddhists in other traditions remind me of the public debates that my father and other Biblical scholars used to have.  What are the essential New Testament texts and what did they mean in the early church?  Does it matter what they may mean today?  Can you trust any scholar who does not have a working knowledge of New Testament Greek as well as Latin and Aramaic Hebrew? Wallace’s most recent public spat with Stephen Batchelor over “distorted views” of Buddhism is my case in point.  (fn. 6)  

I met Alan in 1980, when he accompanied H. H. the Dalai Lama to Seattle, and I was on the committee arranging his appearances at the University of Washington, Seattle University, and the Seattle Zen Center.  Alan was still a robed monk, after studying in Dharmsala, India and serving as one of the Dalai Lama’s interpreters for fourteen years.  After that Alan distinguished himself as a scholar at Amherst and Stanford in physics, science and religion.  He is the founder/president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. (fn. 7)

It is no surprise, considering what he has said and written about at length, that Wallace disapproves of half-baked Buddhists.  In his words, he is “skeptical” of Buddhist groups that put practice over study.  From the Tibetan point of view, that could be an apt description of Japanese Buddhist priests (excluding those who are scholars, of course!)  But, at the same time, Wallace criticizes any tradition that reverses that process, putting study over practice.  Alan demands of himself more intense study than any Tibetan teacher I have encountered.  His own approach is rigorous study and practice, and his books convey the results in compelling ways.  

No one should get the wrong idea when Wallace calls himself a Buddhist Skeptic, meaning a doubter, because he is in fact a devoted Buddhist scholar and practitioner who carries the flag for a rich Buddhist tradition.  I take comfort in the opening sentence of his Meditations, where he defines his Buddhist skepticism in the Greek sense of “seeker” – in which case perhaps we all (including him) are seekers following the historical Buddha’s admonition to “learn through our own experience which theories and practices are wholesome and which are unwholesome.”

That English version of Shakyamuni Buddha’s exhortation some 2500 years ago contains two essential characteristics of Tibetan Buddhism as it is known in the West.  Reading, analyzing, and testing Buddhist scriptures -- against one’s own experience and comparing that against the theories, interpretations, and experiences of others, very much as scientists do – that strikes me as the quintessence of Tibetan Buddhism.  Also, the use of the English terms wholesome and unwholesome (instead of true and false, right and wrong, wise and ignorant, etc.) comes right out of the translation lexicon of B. Alan Wallace, whose elegant English fairly flows over the page, amazing readers with its confidence.

It often seems that Wallace wants to prove Buddhist teachings to be true by explaining them with physics and neuroscience.  But he demurs on that point by quoting philosopher William James, to underscore the fact that faith trumps science where ultimate truth is sought.  James says our “faith-ladder” can offer visions that deserve to be true, and that can make us behave as if they were true.  Wallace concurs:  “Without such vision, Buddhism dies,” he says.  (fn 8) 

That being said, the Tibetan vision is complex, and the achievement of its goals is demanding.  Unlike a Japanese Zendo -- where newly arrived novices are plopped down on cushions, their bodies and legs pulled into position, long lists of temple rules and regulations given out verbally (and expected to be memorized and followed immediately), with the meditation leader’s horrifically loud “Die on your pillows!” ringing in their ears -- something more humane and gentle is offered to the new students of Tibetan Buddhist teachings. 

General accounts of Buddhism blandly point out that three types of Buddhism exist in the world today:  Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana.  Theravada (Teachings of the Elders) is practiced in south Asia, most notably in Sri Lanka and Thailand.  It is a monkish version of Buddhism in which monks aspire to achieve (as closely as they can) what the historical Buddha achieved, whereas the majority of the population lives separated from monks but reveres them as though they were already Buddhas. There are substantial national differences in Theravada as it is practiced in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma (Myanmar).  

But the various forms of Theravada practice are few in number compared to all the forms of the so-called Great Vehicle Leading to Enlightenment, Mahayana Buddhism.  For Mahayana is the dominant form of Buddhism in the world, covering all the rest of Asia, including Japan.  It is common to place Vajrayana Buddhism, too, under the wide umbrella of Mahayana.  But Tibetan Buddhists and others in the Himalayas prefer to be placed in a separate category, as I do here.

(A Japanese version of Vajrayana is at the core of Tendai and Shingon denominations, but I find its focus to be more on iconography and ritual than on doctrine.)

Within all forms of Mahayana Buddhism there is the promise that the essences of enlightened beings, whether historical or supernatural, are standing ready to assist human beings escape from the cycle of rebirth and attain full realization of what really is going on.  Zen basically says we can get there on our own (self-power, known in Japanese as jiriki.) Pure Land says we should admit how difficult that is to accomplish by ourselves and humbly depend on a higher power (tariki), namely, the Buddha (Amitabha), or in specific texts such as the Lotus Scripture.  Vajrayana offers us spiritually evolved teachers, many of whom are reincarnations of past Buddhas, who show us how to personally experience an awareness of the truth of all things leading to spiritual liberation. 

Before going to Japan in 1964 I had read everything I could about Buddhism in English and Japanese books (and a few things in Sanskrit and Chinese) at the University of Chicago.  After taking the post at the University of Washington I met some Tibetan monks in Seattle, which had become one of the largest Tibetan immigrant communities in the world after the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959.  They were quick to further my interest in Buddhism with instruction that would lead me step by step to my goal.  I expected something like that from my Japanese mentors, but what I received was very different.

My doctoral research centered on how the paintings of Chinese and Japanese Zen priests became identified with the ruling military class (buke or samurai) in Japan.  I wanted to understand how that connection came about, and in terms of religion, I needed to know how Zen and other forms of Buddhism functioned at that time. I needed to examine Chinese and Japanese documents and paintings kept in Japanese temples, dating to the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  My focus was on ink paintings executed by Toyo Sesshu (1420-1506), his Chinese predecessors, and his followers, including the painters of the Kano school, who were the official artists of the ruling military class. 

Once in Japan, my research advisors were professors at Kyoto University and abbots of over three hundred Zen temples in the area that were built during my period of interest.  My questions to priests were answered with polite suggestions that I sit in meditation before asking any more questions.  How long?  Oh, two or three years!  Academic advisers were willing to help me find resources to explore the answers to my questions, but they agreed with the priests that sitting (J. zazen) was a good idea.  My true motivation, therefore, for what turned into a lifetime of zazen and Buddhist studies was not religion, but to make connections between the art and the religion that inspired artists and their donors during a relatively short period of Japanese history.

If I had met a Tibetan teacher before I met Suzuki Sensei I might have taken the path that Alan Wallace did.  (The timing was off:  in 1945 few Americans knew about Tibet and Alan had not been born.)  But I find Wallace’s descriptions of how our minds work and the correlations he makes to mental states described in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist literature immensely useful.  A metaphor that often appears when Wallace describes what Buddhist practice is like, is that of setting out to climb a tall mountain like Everest, which takes days of preparation, skill, and determination just to make it to the base camp, and then more of the same for the higher levels leading to the summit, representing full self-liberation.

A basic starting point of Buddhist training for Wallace is approximately what Japanese Zen priests regard as the time when you finally settle down on your sitting pillow and get to work.  That is the state of shamata, which Wallace calls “meditative quiescence,” consisting of three features:  ethical discipline, meditation, and wisdom.  He compares it to building a night-sky observatory in a place without obstructions (ethics), then setting up a high-power telescope (meditation), and then using it to see the sky (wisdom). (fn. 9)

He puts emphasis on the telescope, which corresponds to the meditative state known as samadhi, or meditative concentration.  In the practice of samadhi the mind is “calmly, continuously focused inward and both body and mind are imbued with exceptional degrees of pliancy and well-being.” For Wallace, samadhi is superior to vipashyana (insight) meditation because it is partnered with the two other features, viz., ethical understanding and wisdom. (fn. 10) And he reminds us if we reach the first dhyana (meditative stabilization) level we can sustain samadhi for a night and day! 

To quote Wallace at length, “A great advantage of resting in this state of meditative equipoise is that the five hindrances, or obscurations, temporarily become dormant:  sensual craving, malice, laxity and dullness, excitation and guilt, and uncertainty.  These hindrances obscure the essential nature of the mind – the subtle, luminous continuum of mental consciousness from which all ordinary states of waking and dream consciousness emerge… “ Only correct practice, shamata practice, establishes the mind “in meditative equipoise” leading to “renunciation and compassion …” allowing us “to see reality as it is.” (fn. 11)

Going further, simply “engaging in insight meditation alone, such as zazen and vipashyana” … even Vajrayana insight practices “such as Mahamudra and Dzogchen” are misguided, says Wallace.  Meditators who stop there are not as far along towards the summit as they could be.  They may think, “I’m already as ethical as I need to be for advanced meditation practice,” but that is “like a surgeon who thinks, I took a shower this morning, so there’s no need for me to scrub before entering the operating room.”

Wallace takes his criticism of inadequate Buddhist denominations right to their doors. “In Zen practice, it is clear that even without having fully achieved shamatha, one may experience a transitory realization (Jap. kensho) of one’s Buddha nature” but such “breakthroughs … rapidly fade away.” “… Mindfulness of breathing is commonly practiced in the Zen tradition to stabilize the mind.”  But, insight acquired that way will “vanish as suddenly as it arose… The Japanese term “Zen” translates from the Chinese Ch’an, which in turn derives from the Sanskrit dhyana, so it would be odd for such meditative attainment to be overlooked in these schools.” (fn. 12)

Odd, indeed.  What’s wrong with those guys anyway?  How can they be so stupid as to miss the boat?  Is it because Chinese priests misread the texts – for two thousand years?  And deceived countless Japanese converts to boot!  Did only Tibetan Buddhists get it right?  Here is where I lose patience with Wallace.  He is a genius, no question about it.  But he can sound like some fundamentalist preacher on a rampage. (Or quite frankly, like a reincarnation of old Joshu’s disciple!) His confidence in his own reading of Buddhist texts seems unlimited.  I remember asking in Sunday school if all the people who were born before Jesus of Nazareth was born were going to hell, as Christian texts suggest. My logic at the time was a small-fry’s version of Alan’s:  tight as a drum.

Buddhism, like most religions, admits we live in a dualistic universe and shows us how we should live and die in it.  The desert religions that dominate the Western world tell us the duality is real, that we must take the path of goodness, which is God’s path, and that there will be a judgment at the end as to how close we came.  Hinduism and Buddhism tell us to look instead into our own minds, find the true nature of the duality there, and go through its tunnel leading to a non-dual perfection.  The tunnel is reincarnation, which is much longer for Hindus than for Buddhists, and it stops in the realm of the Not Two, commonly called enlightenment or liberation. 

The dispute between Zen and Tibetan Buddhism that conflicts me now has echoes in the past.  It always has been about how we should navigate the tunnel to liberation.  Can we do it once we intuitively reach the core of consciousness, in a dream fashioned in China?  Or must we distrust the core’s own reality and trust the navigation manual (the vinaya) that Indo-Tibetan travelers have preferred?  The dispute has its earliest origin in the second century, then bubbles to the surface in the late eighth, and comes to a head in the 17^th. 

Ashvaghosa, the famous Brahmin-born Sanskrit orator and musician is said to have beguiled and converted huge crowds of Indians of all castes to Buddhism, including kings and princes.  His name implies that even horses who brought riders to hear him wept for joy as he described the core of consciousness, the alayavijnyana (阿梨耶識), which gives birth to each rebirth containing all seven of our sense consciousnesses (somewhat like the Higgs boson “God Gene” of modern physics, which gives mass to particles that inhabit our universe, including the ones that make up the structure of humans.) By claiming that this alaya was something to be trusted as inherently real (instead of unreal like our dualistic and thus unreal senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, ideas, and instincts), Ashvaghosa did come close to heresy.

This hero at the beginning of Buddhist history in the Christian era even converted the Westerners, the Kushans, who controlled much of India at the time.  We used to think of Ashvaghosa as having originated the Great Vehicle of Mahayana Buddhism, largely due to the text known as The Awakening of Faith.  But we now suspect that he was not the author of that work.  Instead, it shows the hand of an anonymous Chinese writer, whose view of the alaya is shared by early Chinese Zen (Ch’an) teachers.

Some 700 years after Ashvaghosa, a northern Chinese Zen monk by the name of Moheyan (摩訶衍) was invited by the Tibetan King to come face the wrath of Tibetan monks for his “gazing-at-mind-with-no-examination” message.  Some of the monks, who later developed Dzogchen meditation in Tibet, were influenced.  But Moheyan was run out of town.  Then, in the 17^th century the Fifth Dalai Lama outlawed this teaching (called zhentong in Tibetan) and punished its proponents. [fn13]

I have to say, Ashvaghosa is my man, as he is for most Zen students (and was for Dr. Suzuki.)  My own self-satisfaction with my understanding of Buddhism recognizes Wallace’s at a glance, but mine is in religion and the arts; his is in religion and science.  Music and science often produce different kinds of brains.  I cannot prove that, of course.    I only know my artistic temperament grows uncomfortable around certain brains.  Even so, satisfaction is where you find it, so I am not surprised that Wallace’s descriptions of samadhi (and beyond) match my experience as closely as words allow.  It fascinates me, because the Zen tradition discourages me from writing about it.

Any attempt I might make to describe deep meditation, and try to match my experience with ancient Buddhist texts in any language is seen in Zen as self-serving and at cross purposes with a quest for insight with some usefulness to the world.   As a child I found myself in music.  Not as a composer but as a performer.  My career as a child piano prodigy (another story) did not allow me to write about the music I performed or how I felt when I performed.  Performance held no attraction, but I lived to bring to life great music through my mind, heart and fingers.

 And I did.  The little Bach C-major Prelude that every beginner learns triggers my alayavijnyana every time I play it.  As does the Scriabin Prelude in G-flat, which I expect will accompany my final liberation.  When I played well (which I no longer do) I assure you I had no sense of me at all. Eight hours a day at the piano seemed normal.  Countless composers, compositions, and recitals:  were they played in dhyana?  samadhi?  kensho?  What and who was realized?  With thanks to Shakespeare’s Juliet, or Gertrude Stein, a rose by any name is a rose.   

What many mystics, Buddhist or otherwise, call the True Self, lying  “dormant since the beginning of the human consciousness,” as Suzuki Sensei so beautifully put it, was awakened even in my last public piano performance, in 1953, of Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto.  I remember sitting at the piano for a very long time after it was finished, then thanking the orchestra, and walking backstage.  I played no encores.  The next thing I knew, I woke up in a hospital bed, and was told I had suffered a nervous breakdown.  And art, religion, love and Asian studies – not necessarily in that order – appeared on my horizon that day. 

My own mellowing (another word for meditational bliss) came first through music and art.  Bringing great piano compositions to life with my fingers was like conjuring up the souls of great musicians.  They lived.  I disappeared.  My fingers were having a field day.  But I was infinitely dead, and deeply alive.  Where I went nobody knew.  Not even I.  The same thing happened when I saw great paintings, or lost myself in the art of painting.  I never talked about that.  But when the ten-year-old me read Daisetsu Sensei’s words on Zen meditation, I knew instantly what he was talking about.  Samadhi?  Authentic?  Inauthentic?  Whatever.  I only knew that words were almost useless.  And I had found someone who knew that better than anyone. [fn14]

If almost all words are useless, some are not.  I’ve come to believe that to describe Buddhist enlightenment in so many words is dangerous.  Maybe our attempts to describe meditation and enlightenment, like salvation, heaven, hell, and even God, should be prefaced with the warning that they are in the category of things that are simply indescribable.   Religious sages have tried to put such things into words anyway.  Mystics in Western religions have offered God-centered definitions for centuries.  Let me try one for Buddhism:  We are connected to each other and to every thing that is alive or ever has lived in ways we cannot know until we examine ourselves the way the Buddha examined himself; but we perceive ourselves as separate from others, and that blinds us to the truth of things and makes us do and say things that miss the mark. 

Better yet, let me share with you something that the Rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Chicago, the Rev. Bonnie Perry, said in a sermon recently.  When telling her listeners about the intricacies of Christian doctrine, she said, “But you know, actually, the Gospel isn’t worth a rat’s ass if it doesn’t change people’s lives.”  As a Buddhist I feel sorry that rats rank so low on her value scale.  But I think she may be onto something where the Buddha-dharma is concerned:  its teachings, too, don’t mean much if our lives are not changed by it.

We have to be very careful not to confuse our own intellectual understanding of Buddhism with the gifts it offers us.  Regardless of the denomination that follows the Buddha-dharma and its prescriptions for practice, and whether the practice is based on surrender to a higher power or the personal responsibility to do it basically by ourselves, we should keep our eyes on the goal: letting go of our misperceptions and actions that benefit no one but ourselves.  Meditation as taught by Zen Buddhists and Tibetan Buddhists provide us with two ways to change our lives.  But there are many more.  For example, the great Japanese teacher of Pure Land Buddhist teachings, Honen Shonin 1133-1212), provided us with another, equally authentic way.  

I have always loved studying other languages, and I believe I learn things about other people through that study that I cannot learn any other way.  But I find the time spent arguing that one Buddhist tradition is authentic and the others are false – or insisting on specific English translations of Pali and Sanskrit terms over their Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese translations -- to be a great waste of time.  Deciding that someone has reached a certain level of meditation, even when that decision comes from a highly evolved teacher, also makes me cringe.  Such decisions are by nature misleading if they are based on conceptualizations expressed in words, in any language.

________________________________________________

[fn 1]

Dr. Suzuki was born in 1870 to a samurai family in Kanazawa.  The name given to him at birth, as the fourth son, was Teitaro (貞太郎), or “Obedient Good Boy”.  The democratization of Japan in 1868 took away the status that samurai families had enjoyed for centuries.  When his physician father died, leaving his family destitute, the Pure Land Shin Buddhist denomination of his mother’s family supported her and educated the children.  D. T. Suzuki is regarded as the premier spokesman for Zen Buddhism in the world today because of his many books on Zen in English and other languages.  But he is disregarded by most Japanese Zen priests, who regard him to an outsider because of his affiliation with Shin Buddhism. However, Soen Shaku, a Japanese Zen priest who encouraged his disciples to study English and to share Zen teachings with Westerners, took Suzuki on as a student in 1894 and gave him the enigmatic priest name Daisetsu (大拙), which in effect means “such a klutz.”  As an author writing in English, Dr. Suzuki adopted the name D. T. Suzuki, taking the first letters of his birth and priest names to distinguish himself from all other Suzukis.

In his twenties Suzuki became acquainted with many Westerners, discussing religion and philosophy with them and living for extended periods in their homes in Illinois and New York.  He and his American wife, Beatrice Erskine Lane, maintained homes in both Japan and America, and their journal The Eastern Buddhist was read world-wide.  As a professor in Kyoto at Otani University, the school affiliated with Shin Buddhism, Dr. Suzuki linked up with other Zen Buddhist priests and scholars (such as Hisamatsu Shinichi) who shared similar views on the value of Zen in the world.  The study of world religions and their relationships to each other were explored through such organizations as the Theosophical Society.  Suzuki’s lectures in New York and London were wildly popular during the 1950’s.  At the same time, his efforts in maintaining orthodox training in Zen meditation, even for Westerners, and in the careful study of the writings of Shinran, the 12^th-century founder of Shin Buddhism, occupied Daisetsu Sensei right up until the end of his long life in 1966.

fn. 2

Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. IV (“Mumonkan”) by R. H. Blyth (Hokuseido Press: 1966).  The Chinese Zen priest Wu-men (J. Mumon) wrote this book in 1228, based on several centuries of student-master encounters.  The Japanese priest Shinchi Kakushin (1205-1298) trained under Wu-men in 1253-54 and brought a copy of the book back to Japan. It is one of a few well-known classics of the genre available in Japanese and other languages. The bulk of those written in China and Korea since the 13^th century (including the four mentioned by Suzuki in this preface) have still not been translated.  In Japan the classic koan cases are normally given to trainees orally, and in an abbreviated form. Reading the texts is in fact discouraged.

fn. 3

Ibid., p.18-38.  Reginald Horace Blyth (1893-1964) dedicated this volume to “Suzuki Daisetz, the Greatest Japanese of This Century.”  The two men were lifelong friends. Blyth was an Englishman who went to India in 1924, and then took a university post in Korea in 1925.  While there he studied Zen under a Japanese Rinzai master for ten years before moving to Japan, teaching at the peer’s school (ShiGakko) in Kanazawa, where he first met D. T. Suzuki.  During the war he was imprisoned, but after the war he served on Gen. MacArthur’s staff.  As a professor at Gakushu-in he tutored the Crown Prince (Emperor Akihito).  Blyth is buried next to Suzuki in Kamakura.

fn. 4

The Eastern Buddhist, October 1977, p. 81-82.  In order to further emphasize the relationship of the holy and non-holy, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (1889-1980), one of Suzuki’s closest friends, put it this way:  there is something in Zen that “strives for the highest reach of the religious in the ‘non-holy’” (The Eastern Buddhist, May 1977, p. 4.)

fn. 5

In my experience, Japanese novices know going into the abbot’s room that Joshu’s response should be their response, literally, even if they know their meditation has not reached maturity.  Putting some sound to a lengthy out-breath is thus a kind of holding pattern.  In temples outside of Japan students sometimes try to give a conceptual, scholarly or nonsensical response, which usually gets them dismissed at once.  Manifesting for your self the awareness of things is not easy.

fn. 6

Stephen Batchelor may be our generation’s D. T. Suzuki.  The number of his books does not match the master’s, but could someday come in second. He was born in 1953 in Scotland, raised near London, and at 18 went to Dharamsala, India, where he studied Tibetan Buddhism with Geshe Dhargyeye for ten years, then with Geshe Rabten in Switzerland for five years, and after a couple more years as translator for Geshe Thubten in Germany. During that time (in 1979) Batchelor was ordained as a monk.  In 1981 he went to South Korea to train in Zen Buddhism under Kusan Sunim. There he met Martine Fages, who had been ordained as a nun in Korea in 1975, and in 1985 the couple disrobed and married, settling in Sharpham in Devon, England, where they lived throughout the 1990’s, establishing a college for Buddhist studies and a meditation center.  In 2000 the couple moved to Bordeaux, France, and they hold teachings all over the world (see their busy schedule on his website: stephenbatchelor.org).  Wallace’s review of Batchelor’s Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is in the October 2010 issue of Mandala Magazine.  Batchelor’s response, “An Open Letter to B. Alan Wallace,” is in the January 2011 issue.

fn. 7

www.sbinstitute.com)

fn. 8

Page 148 of Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic.

fn. 9

In Sino/Japanese Buddhist dictionaries, shyamata is 正受 (in Japanese, shouju) and literally means “proper reception.” But other Chinese characters are listed as synonyms:   定 (S. J. jou) meaning “stable or fixed”;  禅定 (J. zenjou) meaning “confident meditation,”  and even 三昧 (S. samadhi, J. sanmai) meaning “three foolish concerns,” i.e., of birth, life, and death.  Their differences are noted, but not described in detail.  They all refer to reaching a point of quiet awareness and being able to see into the nature of things and avoid what Wallace calls unwholesome obstructions. The Sino-Japanese word for “mind” is always used in the definitions of what is being quieted and made aware.  That word is what in Japan is called kokoro, which all Japanese take to mean the heart of humanity we all share.

fn. 10

J. shikan (止観) – lit., stop and see; and other “seeing” meditations such as sangan      (三観) and kensho (見性) are supposedly more shallow, according to Wallace.  He follows Indo-Tibetan tradition in the rankings of these levels as well as the terms in the previous footnote.  Suzuki Sensei always favored the Chinese character 妙 (J. myou, C. miao) above all others because it is not a translation of an Indian term, and has the sense of  “mystery” or “wonder” in English.  But he insisted it was a mystery that could be experienced in the here and now and at any time.  I think it was his private word for the most profound dhyana (i.e., Zen) of all.

fn. 11

Meditations, p. 151

fn. 12

Ibid., p. 153

fn. 13

The Jonang School of Tibetan Buddhism, founded by Sakya teachers in the 12^th century, espouses the zhentong philosophy of emptiness, the religion’s core belief. Jonang says that only the non-dual nature of the mind (the God gene) is inherently real; everything else is marked by duality, and thus is not real. Zhentong views have been criticized as unorthodox by all the main schools of Tibetan Buddhism, but particularly by the Gelug School, the predominant school for over 500 years.  The orthodox teaching on the subject is called rantong, which says ALL phenomena are empty of inherent existence, and that nothing (including alaya, the mind’s core that is the source of all consciousness) is inherently real … OR (wait for it) unreal.  In short, rantong trumps, because both assertions are seen to be groundless in the face of Buddhist teachings about reality.  Today zhentong does not cause very many Tibetan Buddhists (except Alan Wallace) much of a problem. 

fn. 14

My admiration for Daisetsu Sensei is limitless, obviously.  In fairness to B. Allan Wallace, his criticism of Zen and Suzuki in particular is gentle compared to attacks by other young Western scholars of Buddhism who have made it fashionable to ridicule Suzuki because he “lacked formal transmission in a Zen lineage” and created an “intellectualized, free-floating Zen.”  Robert H. Sharf has made that charge with a straight face in several books and articles, pointing also to the late Abe Masao and other Kyoto intellectuals as creators of a “Zen of Japanese nationalism.”  In as much as Suzuki was a life-long teacher for me, and Dr. Abe was my landlord when I was a doctoral student at Kyoto University, I can perhaps be excused from that discussion.

Glenn T. Webb

December 2012