What Makes a Religion?

The Circle of the Way: A Concise History of Zen from the Buddha to the Modern World by Barbara O’Brien.  Shambhala.  316 pp. $19.95. ****

I’ve been asking myself what makes a religion ever since I read Karen Armstrong’s marvelous The Lost Art of Scripture.  There, in that cataloging of the world’s vast scriptures, Christianity almost seems to get lost, with a Bible that came together haphazardly, from a wide variety of sources, a New Testament with varying accounts of Jesus’ life, all of them created some time after his death.  Yet it’s burgeoned into a religion that is vastly important on the world stage.  I happen to think a lot of it is misguided, though there is deep truth in Christianity and the life of Christ.  But it is remarkable what came of it.  And in that story, it almost seems that Paul’s conversion, after Jesus had died, was the most important moment.  Paul’s letters were written before the Gospels, and if Paul hadn’t lived, I’m not sure Christianity would exist.

Buddhism—and in particular Zen Buddhism—is almost more surprising.  Perhaps just because he is further back in time, there is less historical evidence that the Buddha lived than there is for Jesus.  Barbara O’Brien isn’t saying he didn’t live, but the legendary life as it has been passed down to us has its fantastic elements; and is obviously partly made up.[1]  And for the great teacher who supposedly brought the teachings from India to China, Bodhidharma, there is even less evidence of his existence (and the story of his life is even more fantastic).  There are reputable scholars who think that figure is an amalgam, that Bodhidharma never lived (though he did leave behind teachings.  Hmm).

Yet over a period of centuries, and with contributions from all kinds of people and various cultures, a religion that we think of as Zen Buddhism did emerge, and for me it embodies a more compelling truth than anything else I’ve encountered.  It isn’t that Zen is “true” and other religions “false.”  Zen is an extremely effective portal to the numinous.   It is at the heart of my life, and is my religion.

I think that the thing that captures people—or doesn’t; one never knows—is zazen, the practice of sitting meditation that is at the heart of Zen.  If there were no superstructure—no teaching—around that at all, I would still practice it.  But the teachings of the Buddha have also been vastly important to me, and given me a different view of the world.  I was stunned when I first encountered them.

I say the teachings of Buddha, but I’m really talking about the teachings of Larry Rosenberg, with whom I studied for years and eventually wrote a couple of books.  It was his simple sanity, and the sanity he found in the Buddha’s most basic teachings, especially the Four Noble Truths, that impressed me.  He taught vipassana meditation, but he knew the whole tradition, Theravada, Tibetan, and Zen, and taught without regard to where teachings came from.  When I moved back to North Carolina and encountered Zen teachings with Josho Pat Phelan, they didn’t seem different from what Larry had taught me.  They just focused more on one tradition.

O’Brien doesn’t think Taoism had that great an effect on Zen, and in that, I must say, I beg to differ.  I’m no scholar, and can’t trace the influences, but when you begin with Theravada Buddhism and the Pali Canon, then move to the Chinese teachings at the heart of Zen, you are moving from a prosaic, rational view of things (though I believe there is a deeply mystical experience behind it[2]) to a poetic and mystical view which seems very much influenced by Taoism, both in the way it’s expressed and in what it says.  Just look, for instance, at a teaching like Song of the Jewel-Mirror Samadhi.  I don’t think Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism were as walled-off in China as religions are in the West; people studied and learned from everything.  And the traditions blend together.  When you read Red Pine’s translation of the Dao De Ching and all the commentaries he quotes, everybody was commenting.  It wasn’t just Daoists.

For me the Chinese teachings of the Golden Age of Zen weren’t saying something new: they were expressing truths that were already inherent in the teachings of the Buddha, but hadn’t been made explicit (in the same way that commentators on the Torah brought out its real meaning).  The teachings of the Chinese teachers were themselves deepened by the maddeningly difficult and mysterious teachings of Eihei Dogen, the thirteenth century Japanese teacher who is considered the founder of Soto Zen, and whose writings form the basis for it.  It is only through modern teachers—people like Shunryu Suzuki, Dainin Katagiri, Kobun Chino, Kosho Uchiyama, Shohaku Okumura—that I have any understanding of Dogen’s teachings at all.  But the study of his work is the study of a lifetime, and it goes hand in hand with the practice he taught.  His view of sitting meditation is the purest and simplest I’ve come across.[3]

O’Brien traces this history with a practitioner’s heart and a scholar’s attention to detail.  She writes wonderfully and with a great sense of humor, and doesn’t dodge the scandals of this religion’s recent history: the warmongering[4] of some of the twentieth century teachers who were all for Japan’s imperial ambitions, and the sexual scandals of others.  I myself am most interested in this recent story, which she skims over rather quickly, but we have other sources for that, like How the Swans Came to the Lake.  She catches us up on the history we didn’t already know.

And she does a real service to those of us who practice this religion, by showing how it came together.

[1] It’s amazing the liberties people take with it.  I just leafed through a book called The Tao of Meditation, and there’s a story of the Buddha’s life in there that is all over be place.  It bears almost no relationship to the original story.

[2] At one point in the Pali Canon, the Buddha picked up a handful of leaves and said to his followers, “Are there more leaves in my hand or in the forest?”  They replied that there were more in the forest.  He said, “The leaves in my hand are what I’ve taught you.  The leaves in the forest are what I’ve learned.”  He had learned much that he had not taught his students, but he had taught them a practice that would make that learning available to them.

[3] That brings up another quibble I had with O’Brien’s account.  She mentions that Dogen thought that his practice—shikantaza, the practice of just sitting, was what the Buddha taught under the Bodhi tree.  She says “I have been told” that this isn’t true.  (Who the hell told her?  And how does he know?)  But there is a famous story from the Pali Canon that talks about the Buddha remembering a simple kind of sitting he did as a child, wondering if that might be the way to truth, and I have always thought that was what the Buddha was doing under the Bodhi tree (and any scholar who contradicts me by what he “knows” from his study is expressing an opinion.  Nobody knows what happened under the Bodhi tree).  Shikantaza is not really a method of meditation.  It’s what we come to when we’ve given up all the methods.  As Diana St. Ruth says in her wonderful book Sitting, “My belief is that the Buddha himself didn’t teach any method at all. . . .  The Buddha didn’t really have a method other than awareness, and awareness is no method at all; it is a straightforward ‘opening of the eyes,’ a kind of waking up as if from a dream.”

[4] It’s true that some of these men supported their country in its war.  But that’s no different from Christians supporting the war effort in this and other countries.  Jesus wasn’t exactly a warrior.