Tourists often visit the renowned Zen
garden in Kyoto but few Japanese practice Zen anymore. (John McQuaid/Religion News
Service)
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KYOTO, Japan -- Every morning, Buddhist priest Taiun
Matsunami invites the public to participate in zazen -- seated Zen meditation -- from 7 to
8 a.m. at his small, well-tended Kyoto temple, Ryosen-an. A sign announcing the schedule
is posted outside in Japanese and English.
Most mornings he sits by himself.
Zen Buddhism is deeply woven into Japanese culture. Its fusion of
philosophy, spirituality and art is one of the world's great cultural achievements. The
Zen emphasis on spontaneity and the abandonment of fear shaped the samurai warrior code.
Zen rituals, which point to the transcendent in ordinary life, spawned the intricate
choreography of the tea ceremony.
But over the past 200 years, Zen has fallen far from its peak of
cultural influence. Today, it's neither popular nor particularly influential in modern
Japan. Zen temples still draw visitors on holidays and some turn to Zen priests to
officiate at funerals. But few Japanese actually practice Zen and the numbers are
declining, especially among the young.
That decline has coincided with Buddhism's flourishing in the West. Zen
and other forms of Buddhism are steadily growing in popularity in the United States,
Europe and elsewhere. Practice centers are drawing new members, and Buddhism has become a
force in popular culture through books and movies.
This seesaw effect has created tensions between the past and present,
between East and West -- and poses a kind of Zen riddle for Japanese and foreign Zen
practitioners alike.
What happens when a traditional religion, tempered by one culture,
crosses boundaries and takes hold somewhere else? In both Japan and the United States,
practitioners say Zen must change and adapt to different cultures.
"The basic principle in Zen is the same everywhere. Like Mount
Fuji, there are different paths to the summit," said Kusho Itabashi, the abbot of the
Soji-ji monastery in Yokohama and the current head of the Soto school, the largest Zen
sect. "Americans don't have to go through the medium of Japanese culture or language,
and that can be a purer practice of Zen."
But in Japan, the changes are sparking anxiety. Japanese feel
proprietary about Zen. They worry that its characteristic "Japaneseness" may be
almost impossible to separate from the universal philosophy it espouses, and that
something will lost when it takes root somewhere else.
Zen has a distinctly different feel in the United States than in Japan.
"American Zen practice is creative," said Matsunami, who
spent several years in the United States and whose temple has a tradition of hosting
Westerners. "They don't have meditation halls, traditions. They have to create
everything. They have to sew cushions . . . and they have to turn the cowhouse into a
zendo."
But at the same time, he noted, American Zen has been plagued by a
number of scandals among its leaders, partly because it lacks the hierarchies and checks
on priestly power found in Japanese Zen.
The Japanese system is much more established and institutionalized, he
said, focused around monastic practice in small monasteries rather than the more
lay-oriented Western approach. But it has also lost some of its vitality and discipline.
"Here, everything is established, we have good facilities,"
Matsunami said. "But here they also accept not pure, not real Buddhist monks'
practice. In other countries, priests don't marry, they don't drink."
A loosening of monastic rules a century ago allowed Japanese monks to
marry. That created a dynastic structure in temples, with sons following in their fathers'
footsteps. Many Zen priests and scholars agree with Matsunami that this has created
problems: It placed an emphasis on the temple as a moneymaking business to be passed on to
succeeding generations, and meant that many young men became monks mainly out of family
obligation. Sources of fresh blood and new ideas were choked off.
As a result, the monastery system seems outmoded. Religious life is no
longer viewed as a viable vocation for outsiders. If your family is not in the Zen
business, choosing to become a monk may be viewed as a sign of mental imbalance. And maybe
it is. The requirements and hardships of the priesthood -- which in a premodern world
seemed like a reasonable tradeoff -- today can present almost insurmountable obstacles.
In the Rinzai school, one of the two largest branches of Zen,
"there are 39 Rinzai monasteries and 50 roshi (masters) who can give the whole
transmission of the teachings. So there's just about one per monastery," said Michel
Mohr, a professor at the International Research Institute for the Study of Zen Buddhism at
Hanazono University in Kyoto. "It takes 15 to 20 years to go through the whole
system. So if you start in your 30s, you won't get there till your 50s."
Japanese Zen practitioners feel deeply ambiguous about this state of
affairs. Many look to the West as the best hope for carrying on the tradition. But some
are dismayed at what they see when Westerners are left to their own devices.
Kosen Nishiyama, a Zen priest in Sendai who oversees some groups in
Europe and the United States, has tried to restore a clear line of religious authority by
giving the shiho -- the authority to teach -- to priests abroad.
At first one group of Westerners, followers of the late expatriate Zen
teacher Taisen Deshimaru, didn't want it.
"After Deshimaru died, I went to talk with his disciples about
ceremonies. They said we have the teaching, we don't need shiho," Nishiyama said.
"But you need to have this, I explained, to be a Zen teacher." They eventually
agreed.
Western Zen practitioners in Japan live on a fault line. Since they
typically lack a connection to a family temple, Japanese may question their motivation or
sanity. They must wrestle with the idea of what "authentic" Zen practice really
is.
Jeff Shore, an American professor of Zen at Hanazono University in
Kyoto, has lived in Japan 20 years, most of them while practicing first as a monk and
later a lay person at the Tofuku-ji monastery. It is an unusual arrangement that has made
a deep mark on his life. "I feel like the frog in the well here. It's very deep but
very narrow, full of rocks, old," he said. "Then when I go to Europe or the
United States, it's like being thrown into the ocean."
Shore says that Japanese Zen is so entwined with culture, history, and
geography that transplanting a particular set of customs wholesale would be folly. If Zen,
or any religious tradition, moves into new territory it must reinvent itself, usually bit
by bit. That does not automatically make the altered tradition less useful as a path for
its followers (though it may). But it also means losing something of the original -- and
being able to let go is, indeed, a central idea in Buddhism. |