It’s an odd thing to sit in the zendo study group and watch the fabrication of a “timeless” tradition. I do not understand this desire to see religion as a “timeless” truth, which in American Zen takes the form of revering the interaction between teachers and students as moments of immediate contact with ‘reality.’ And the truth is, I fear this desire and the reverence to which it leads. In the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche identified the inculcation of a feeling of indebtedness for life itself, for its first causes and principles, as the very ‘origin’ of religion: how the power of our wishing and the sense of our fullness become a fetter. Nietzsche has Christianity in his sights, which he excoriated for making this sense of debt infinite: God sacrifices his only son for your sins. Yet not believing in the Christian God is not enough to escape the power relations that history has embedded in its forms of truth. “After the Buddha was dead,” Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, “they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadows.” For Nietzsche, these shadows included ostensibly secular games of truth (like science) insofar as the scientific will to know remains moralistic in its drive. In declaring God dead, Nietzsche affirmed a tension between truth and life: “To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?—that is the question; that is the experiment.” That, I contend, is the real sticking point—not attachment to claims of immediacy: we do not want the agon(y) of a politics of truth.
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When American practitioners of Zen proclaim the immediate nature of truth (and thereby cut off uncomfortable questions of historicity), the apple is not falling far from its tree. Consider the reformist movement Sanbokyodan, which was established formally in 1954 by Yasutani Hakuun (1885-1973). Many of the key teachers in the West were certified by Yasutani: H.M. Enomiya-Lassalle (who was the first to hold Zen retreats in Germany), Philip Kapleau, Robert Aitken, Eido Tai Shimano, and Maezumi Taizan. Buddhist scholar Robert Sharf depicts Sanbokyodan as a typical Japanese ‘new religion,’ noting in particular its rejection of scriptural study and its controversial promise of rapid spiritual progress. Yasutani changed the nature of spiritual attainment: rather than being identified by (or with) doctrinal knowledge or ritual mastery, “spiritual success lies in the momentary experience of satori—a state that students in the Sanbokyodan have been known to experience in their very first seven-day intensive retreat (sesshin).” This version of Zen differs starkly from the more standard view of nirvana as an impossibly distant ideal, so that morality, study, and merit-making were the core of a traditional monk’s life in Japan. This stark difference was Yasutani’s point. By proclaiming this break, Yaustani portrayed himself as returning to Zen’s “true” nature with Dogen.
From an academic point of view, Yasutani speaks the standard “fundamentalist” narrative—with a colonial twist. Meiji reformers fashioned Zen as not really a “religion,” but rather as a spiritual technology through which practitioners are believed to observe the mind without mediation. In the Meiji reformers’ choice to make ineffable experience the core of this “new Buddhism,” Sharf sees an attempt to insulate Zen from critical analysis. This Romantic desire to cordon Zen off from the corrosive effects of critique and historicity persists in American Zen today. At best, the impulse to insulate Zen from critique is about siding against the cultural arrogance and imperial inclinations of America, which show no signs of abating, end of Empire notwithstanding. Yet when Zen truths are shorn from the politics of their history, this impulse seeds another fundamentalism, this time of the left rather than the right.
Zen in America unfolds within this problematic. One result was a series of scandals that posed sharp questions about enlightenment experiences–their-idealization, what we think enlightenment is ‘good for.’ What is the nature and value of life-changing experiences whose power does not totally transform all of the dimensions on which life is lived?
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One Saturday at the zendo the dharma talk given by my teacher, Barry Magid, could have been taken straight out of any Intro to Religion course. What a relief! He spoke of Zen as true “in the way that Anna Karenina is true.” We do not expect novels to be accurate descriptions of facts, and we commit a category mistake when we relate to religions as if they were factually rather than fictionally true. The fictioning and fabricating are the power of their truth.
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