Bodhisattva

I visited the Milwaukee Zen Center last weekend and gave a talk there. This is the what I wrote out in a a draft for my talk. In the end I really didn't talk about much of this stuff...

I thought that a good topic for my talk here might be the topic that first got the attention of Tonen Sensei (Tonen O'Connor is head of the Milwaukee Zen Center) when I wrote about it on my webpage a year or two ago — the topic of the proper posture for zazen practice, and also the topic of Zen teachers who are very dogmatic and intolerant of points of view other than their own.

I wrote an article called Proper Posture Required in which I said that the full or half lotus postures were the best way to do zazen and implied that those who didn’t sit that way were a buncha no-account wimps. Well, not quite. But I did say that I thought a lot of people who could do those postures wimped out and did something easier.

See. Whenever my teacher, Gudo Nishijima gives zazen instruction he only ever mentions two positions for the legs; full lotus and half-lotus. Those are the only two positions mentioned by Dogen and if they were good enough for Dogen they’re good enough for you. End of story.

A lot of Japanese Zen teachers say pretty much the same thing. But in America we’re prone to want to try to take all different kinds of people into account. A beginner’s instruction in a typical American Zen center is likely to mention half a dozen or more acceptable postures. You can sit Burmese style, or in seiza, or sit on a bench. The list goes on.

I got a lot of flack for my proper posture article and one of those critical responses was from Tonen. But what was interesting about her response was that while she disagreed with me, she encouraged me to keep on insisting what I was insisting. She’s a strange woman, Tonen. Actually, that’s when I felt like she was someone special as a Zen teacher.

In the article I stressed the idea that the posture itself was a critical part of zazen practice. There are many types of practices which stress the “spiritual” side of meditation. Their teachers view the posture you take during your meditation as being a secondary matter at best. It’s what goes on spiritually that really counts. To these teachers it is just as easy to achieve the desired meditative state while lying down or while seated in a comfortable chair. You can find ads for comfy meditation chairs in the back of any good Buddhist magazine at your local Barnes and Nobles.

Zazen is not like that. Zazen is not a spiritual practice. It is every bit as much of a physical exercise as it is a mental one. If you emphasize the supposedly spiritual aspects over the physical ones you have missed the point of zazen entirely.

The problem most folks seem to have with my insistence upon the lotus posture is that, according to them, it’s just too difficult for most Westerners to do. And I grant you, it’s not easy. But what I’ve also noticed is that lots and lots of people won’t even give it a try.

The funny thing about Nishijima is, as dogmatic as he is about posture, when a student comes up to him and says he really can’t do the full or half lotus position, Nishijima will show him some of the same alternate positions American teachers talk about. So if these are OK, howcum he doesn’t just mention them to everyone? Why’s he holdin’ out?

The difference may be that if you give your audience a whole lot of choices, most people will opt out for the easiest way, even if they might be able to do the harder practice if they really tried. When someone comes to you privately and asks for specific instructions, it shows they’re really sincere, not just going for the easy way out.

But wait! There’s more! It’s not just lotus posture that Nishijima is so dogmatic about. He’s also very insistent that the Rinzai style of using koans as a focus for zazen is a big pile of horse crap. He does not believe in reincarnation at all. And he doesn’t think Tibetan Buddhism deserves to be called Buddhism. He is, in short, the Archie Bunker of Zen, an intolerant and narrow-minded bigot who believes his own way is the only way.

That attitude really got on my nerves when I first started listening to him. But after a while I noticed that it was that attitude that let me know I could trust him. It’s all about posture. It’s an interesting word, posture. Because it can also mean attitude. The right attitude is vitally important.

If a surgeon tells you that the procedure he’s recommending for you is pretty good, but that there might be other surgeons out there who could achieve the same results another way are you really going to trust him with your life? I don’t know about you, but I’d want a surgeon who insisted that the procedure he was recommending was the absolute best thing for me and, not only that, that he was the only person in the world who could do it right. I would trust him because he’s willing to put himself on the line. He has complete confidence in his way.

I’m not real impressed with teachers who’ll tell you that there are many different paths and all of them are right. I mean, if all of those other paths are right then why should I listen to you?

I’m also not a big fan of the kind of teachers you’ll often see here in America who say they’ve studied all kinds of different practices and combined the best elements of those into one. For starters, each one of the practices these guys usually claim to have studied takes decades to master. Yet here’s some 45 year old guy from Toronto with a set or orange robes who’s somehow mastered 197 years worth of arcane meditative techniques. I’m more impressed with someone who’s taken one single practice all the way to its conclusion. If I hire a bass player for my band I don’t want someone who’s just dabbled with the bass. I want someone who knows that one instrument inside and out.

To me, Shikantaza is the only kind of zazen. Every other kind of zazen — koan zen, mindfulness practice, breath counting, etc., etc. — just ads something unneccesary. I’m not interested at all. It's weird, but I run into people all the time who really, really want me to approve them to do other kinds of practices. Look. You wanna waste your time with that stuff, I ain’t gonna stand in your way. But I’m not going to stamp my seal of approval on anything other than the type of practice I teach.

Cuz I’ve been on that side of the fence. I was one of those guys who desperately wanted my teacher to say that reincarnation might really be true, or that koan introspection might actually be good for you. But he wouldn’t.

And after a while, instead of getting all upset over his intolerance, I started to take a look at why I so desperately wanted his approval on these things. I mean, if that stuff was really all right what did it matter if he said it wasn’t? He couldn’t stop me from doing those things. In fact I suspected he wouldn’t even so much as argue with me about it if I said I was going to leave and go study with the Dalai Lama or whatever.

That’s when I began to see that it wasn’t just bigotry or sectarianism. See. A bigot or a religious fanatic doesn’t just have his own warped views, he believes that everyone else in the world must hold those same views. He’ll hold you at gunpoint and try to force you to say you agree with him. The attitude of a true Zen teacher isn’t like that at all. He isn’t trying to convert anyone to his way of thinking. Yet, at the same time, his own stance, his posture, is rock solid. And that's important.

Solid doesn’t mean rigid or ossified. It means perfectly balanced. If you try to balance a pencil on your finger there is one spot — and only one spot — where the pencil doesn’t fall to one side or the other. The Buddhist way is to find that one spot, that perfect center of gravity. Even the best teachers lose it from time to time. But you always need to keep coming back to that spot because that spot is where the true meaning of Buddhist practice can be found.

http://homepage.mac.com/doubtboy/

-Brad Warner

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Lions & Christians (PB)

i didnt realize the lotus positions where causing such a problem.

they seem pretty simple to me.

nice read though.

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The most dangerous drug on this planet has to be oxygen.

A gateway drug to say the least, further more people use without even consideration, not consenting to moderation in the least, and dont even get me started on the withdrawels.

the goal of alchemy is to turn lead into gold. to take a substance and combine it with another substance that makes it more than it's origenal worth. in this sense, you really need to start making bronze statues of your pharmacist or local chemist, for they have made gods own medicine, morphine, and in contrast, a shiney rock doesnt seem to compete.