The Future of American Zen

Zen in America: Five Teachers and the Search for an American Buddhism by Helen Tworkov.  Kodansha International.  271 pp.  ****

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America by Helen Tworkov.  St. Martin’s Essentials.  336 pp. $19.71 ****

Helen Tworkov is such a good writer that one can wish she hadn’t spent all those years editing, except that in that case we wouldn’t have “Tricycle: The Buddhist Review,” by far the most important Buddhist magazine over the past thirty years.  When the premier issue included (controversially) an interview with the Dalai Lama by Spalding Gray, we knew this wasn’t going to be a staid, scholarly publication.

As she tells us in her new memoir, Tworkov, the disaffected daughter of a well-known New York artist, came to Buddhism at about the age of 20 when she saw the famous photograph of a Vietnamese monk self-immolating in protest of the way Buddhist monks were being treated in Vietnam.  She was stunned at the thought of someone sitting there calmly as he burned to death.  She traveled to India, then Vietnam, and finally to Japan, trying to understand these cultures and their connection to Buddhism.  For a time she practiced in the Tibetan tradition with exiles that she met in India.  Later she practiced with Maezumi Roshi in Los Angeles, and was inspired to write Zen in America.  More recently she’s moved back to Tibetan practice and studied with Mingyur Rinpoche, helping him with his books.

In the meantime, she met virtually everyone involved in American Buddhism.  She wasn’t networking; her path just seemed to encounter all the notable people.  In the early nineties she and Rick Fields got the idea for a magazine about Buddhism; he eventually pulled out of the project, but she became the founding editor of Tricycle, forming a vision for this magazine and establishing its high standards.  Her memoir—composed in short, beautifully written vignettes—reads like a Who’s Who in American Buddhism.

I don’t remember what compelled me to read Zen in America some thirty years ago, but it was a formative book for me, and it held up to a second reading after all these years.  I vividly remember reading about Robert Aitken, a lay Roshi (I had no understanding what that meant, or how unusual it was) not only discovering Zen by means of a book, while he was a prisoner of war during World War II, but then actually meeting the author of the book, R.H. Blythe, when he too became a prisoner.  I immediately read the book in question, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (Aitken, when he first encountered the book, read it ten times).  But I was also learning about Zen, which had not been my practice up to then.  I’d spent two years with a vipassana group in Cambridge, then batted around aimlessly in North Carolina for a while, practicing with several groups, before I found the Chapel Hill Zen Center.

At the time Tworkov wrote this book there were only seven transmitted American Zen teachers (imagine that!), and two, Walter Nowick and Philip Kapleau, did not want to be part of the book (a big mistake on their parts.  They would have enriched it even more).  Of those who remained, two—Jakusho Kwong and Richard Baker—did their training under Shunryu Suzuki, and two—Maurine Stuart and Bernie Glassman—were largely influenced by Rinzai teachers, especially the enigmatic Nakagawa Soen (my favorite character in this and any other Zen book in which he appears).

Aitken was the outlier, much older than the others, and he got his training all over the place, from a variety of sources.  He was also the most literary of the five, and had already produced a number of influential books by the time I read this one.  In telling this story, Tworkov went all the way back to the beginnings of Zen in this country, not just D.T. Suzuki and Nyogen Senzaki, who spanned the continent at one point, but also Soyen Shaku’s original introduction of Zen to this country at Chicago’s World Parliament of Religions 1893.  This is a deeply researched and beautifully written volume.  It was thrilling to read when I first encountered it.

The personalities came right through.  Jakusho Kwong was a Chinese-American San Franciso beatnik, working as a mail carrier and studying art, when he and his wife became interested in Zen in at least a theoretical way.  Alan Watts had written a famous essay on Beat and Square Zen (Kerouac was Beat Zen; Japanese monks were square), and Kwong had little interest in Square Zen.  He was unimpressed with Shunryu Suzuki at their first meeting, but soon changed his mind and began coming to the Zen Center for early morning zazen, rarely missing a day.  Square Zen turned out to be better than he thought.

Glassman, on the other hand, was very much a capitalist, “designing shuttle systems between Earth and Mars for the aerospace corporation McDaniel-Douglas,” when he began sitting with a young monk named Taizan Maezumi, who came from a long line of Soto priests but had recently been studying koans with a Rinzai master.  Glassman seemed to be a kind of intuitive genius, breaking through koans in record time, and he soon gave up his day job to devote himself full time to Zen, moving to the Los Angeles Center with his wife and children.  He was also a visionary, who eventually moved to the East Coast and founded his own center, then devoted himself to establishing the Greystone Bakery, which would employ the homeless (and a number of his students) and revitalize a neighborhood.  There were those who thought he had abandoned true Zen training.  He thought the whole thing was Zen.

Maurine Stuart was a different kind of person altogether.  She had spent her early life as a serious student of the piano (like Joko Beck), and for her the word practice might refer to either her life as a musician or her zazen practice.  She too studied under Soen Roshi, and he told her he was entrusting her to teach, but she was apparently the only person he said that to, so her transmission was mildly suspect.  But she also hooked up with a longtime Buddhist practitioner named Elsie Mitchell, who founded the Cambridge Buddhist Association and appointed Stuart the teacher.  And Stuart—though she varied from the macho image often presented by Zen teachers—was warmly praised and much appreciated by her students.

Richard Baker was perhaps the most controversial of the teachers Tworkov profiled, at least at the time she wrote the book.  Like Kwong, he was a student of Shunryu Suzuki, but he came from a patrician New England background, had attended Harvard, and was a forceful, dynamic, charismatic teacher.  He was also a superb fundraiser and helped secure not only the San Francisco Zen Center itself, but also it’s satellite practice places at Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm.  He was Suzuki Roshi’s chosen heir, perhaps because he had an organizational capacity that Suzuki lacked.  But once Suzuki Roshi died, Baker became more and more of a public presence, courting luminaries like Jerry Brown and sometimes neglecting teaching in the zendo.  He also committed sexual indiscretions, which eventually led to his being dismissed from San Francisco Zen Center and left the place is disarray for some time.  He eventually re-established himself in Santa Fe and has continued to this day.

For a second edition of the volume, Tworkov filled readers in on some subsequent happenings (sadly, Maurine Stuart had died of cancer in 1990), and we can add to that now: Robert Aitken eventually died at the ripe age of 93; Glassman took off his robes, grew  his hair into a pony tail and began calling himself Bernie, teaching in a more informal way, but continued his expanding vision of Zen until his death; Jakusho Kwong continues teaching at the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center to this day, and has written two excellent books on Zen.  Interestingly, though, Tworkov finished her new afterword with a long disquisition on enlightenment, and that’s what caught my interest this time around.

What she said is that enlightenment is the ultimate goal of Buddhism; it is normally achieved after long hard work in a monastic setting; the tendency of American Buddhism is toward domestic centers and lay practice, where people may practice meditation but don’t make the kind of commitment that monastics do, and therefore the practice loses sight of its ultimate goal.  She worries that American Buddhism is becoming diminished and watered down.

When Dogen returned to Japan from China, he was quite enthusiastic about lay practice, and promoted it in his early writings, including Fukanzazengi and Bendowa.  Later he focused on monastics, but that may be because the circumstances in his life pushed him more into monastic practice.  In the meantime, around the same time period, both Pure Land practice, in which people chanted the nembutsu, and Nichiren practice, which believed in chanting the title of the Lotus Sutra, flourished among lay people, and the founders of these practices—Honen, Shinran, and Nichiren—asserted that lay people had Buddha nature just like everyone else, and could discover their Buddha nature in the midst of householder life.  But zazen is as valid a householder practice as chanting.  It has become a major practice for householders in this country today.

I have no idea what enlightenment is (maybe I’m a good illustration of Tworkov’s argument), but I’ve spent the last thirty years doing a daily practice, attending my Zen Center regularly, doing all-day sittings and one or two longer retreats a year.  I have friends who do less than that, others who do more; other friends have ordained as priests.  But if Buddhism is to be a widely influential religion in this country, it can’t be one (as it was in Asian countries) where all the lay people do is financially support the monks while the monks do the real practice.  That doesn’t support the spiritual life of common people.  And while I’m not enlightened, and don’t expect to be, I do feel that my practice is a huge support for my life.  I think that the future of American Zen is in lay practice.

Perhaps—instead of that elusive word enlightenment—the point of meditation lies elsewhere.  I recently discovered this quotation from Mother Teresa:

“You should pray and meditate every day, so you know that you are loved, so you feel the presence of God’s love in your life. This is the only way you can truly help others and serve the poorest of the poor. We have to give from a full heart, one that is saturated with love, overflowing to others. Before we can give freely, we have to know that we are loved. This is why you should pray and meditate every day. So you can remember you are loved, letting it fill your heart and your body. Let it fill every cell of your being. Then give it all away.”

Buddhists shy away from that word God, even the word love, but long-time practitioners know what she’s talking about.  We find something in practice that feeds us.  And it doesn’t require any kind of achievement.  It goes on forever.