UnMind 71. Finding Your Way Trio 2: Dhyanayana II

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Skillful means or not,
it is still all up to you —
not your teacher’s fault!

In the last segment, we ended with Matsuoka Roshi’s simple but stunning summation of the essence of Zen training, or skillful means:

Ultimately, what form the upaya take are the conjunction of a particular teacher, and all that he or she is, with a particular student or group of students and all that they are. In the free flow of Zen the teaching will teach itself as long as the teacher doesn’t interfere, and as long as the student is receptive.

As promised, we reveal his conclusion from the above:

Really, this should lead to a conclusion. Next to conviction and perseverance in Zen training, picking the right teacher is most important. In ancient China and Japan, monks, nuns and laymen used to wander from temple to teacher and teacher to temple seeking the right teacher consonant with their own zeal, temperament and moment of development, a free soul who could show them very effectively the way from blindness to happiness.

It should be remembered that this does not mean that we look for a teacher who agrees with our understanding of Zen, however primitive. It is recommended to find one we do not agree with, in order that we can learn something new and different. After remarking that all the teachers of the past had their quirks and personality traits, as well as different methods of teaching, Sensei explains the mystery of transmission in greater detail:

This is the meaning of the heart-to-heart transmission of Zen understanding in masters and disciples of complimentary or contrasting affinity. Simply stated, how the schools of Zen developed were that the right disciples found the right teachers, and so learned about Zen in the very marrow of their bones. They achieved by that an understanding so deep, so pervasive, as never to be forgotten or disregarded again. This is the source and the life of Zen heart-to-heart transmission, tamashii to tamashii.

This illustrates that nothing is actually “transmitted” from master to disciple, but that the latter comes to apprehend the reality the former naturally occupies.

Then Sensei generalizes the place and process of Zen training in the larger context of history in general:

Whenever one looks at history, it is a play of great men and women in a boiling ocean of popular sentiment, stirred by distinctive currents of patriotism and war, of trade and poverty, and of culture and peace. Personal greatness and tragedy, collective order and chaos, are in continual ebb and flow.

Here is a global embrace of duality from the perspective of nonduality. It sounds as if he is describing the world of the 21st century, though this talk was given in 1985.

He goes on to issue some cautionary tales in looking for and evaluating a Zen teacher for yourself:

I warn you not to rely only on a particular human tradition, or a name alone, as an emblem of true transmission of wisdom. There are lazy, self-important and -indulgent priests who do possess the “right” credentials, not because they have penetrated to the core of life-and-death, but because they are clever in a worldly sense. Absolutely, you cannot trust them. It would be disastrous emotionally and mentally to do so. And yet, you can find this sort in Zen centers throughout the United States and Asia, urging those who are confused and lack conviction to seek the ultimate freedom and pay the proper tribute, or pay the proper tribute first, then seek the meaning of enlightenment later.

So a bit cynical take on the Americanization of Zen, but well-founded, even at that time in history. Unfortunately, his skepticism has been proven out in the decades since.

Then on a positive note:

Seek rather a teacher of genuine understanding, someone who may have a known name and high rank, or someone who may have neither. Nor should you simply judge a teacher by the number of disciples and students gathered around in what appears to be prosperous circumstances; judge rather by the nature and perseverance of the Zen practice of that teacher.

The formal path is something we offer, for those misfits who lean toward Zen as a serious preoccupation in retirement, when family and business obligations have been met. Lay practice may have some of the traditional trappings of the monastic model, but in America it is finding its own, creative path.

Yet more:

Most important in choosing a Zen path and a Zen teacher is your “root connection,” if it is there at all. You may not fully discover your root connection in a meeting, or in a week, or a month, or a short season of practice; but from the first, you will know, something of that connection. It will seem right for you. From the very beginning, the same things that motivate and fool you about the study of Zen have motivated and fooled others before you. They too have sought out a special teacher, school, sect, or way of Zen practice.

So it is on you to be proactive in this pursuit of a true Zen or Dharma father or mother, as the expression goes. We consider our relationships in Zen as an extended family, siblings and cousins, even the occasional in-law. In which we can be deceived, just as within any other family or group. Additionally:

I would like to discuss something about what your predecessors in the sangha, or group of Zen practitioners, have found to be deceptive and effective through the history of Zen. Actually, history is the first great deceiver, or, at least the little bit we do know about history. Just as the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon of enlightenment, neither is the record of history anything like the real experience. The common story, as it goes, is that Zen was handed down from Shakyamuni Buddha to Mahakasyapa, then from Mahakasyapa to Ananda, and so on to Bodhidharma, and so on to Dogen, and so on to the present.
It is true that there is this heart-to-heart transmission, but it is a romantic fallacy that there has been only one person in each generation since the death of Gautama Buddha who has carried the Zen flame of wisdom, who in turn taught and transmitted it to the next generation. The historical Buddha had many disciples, many who were very able.

So take your dose of Zen history with a large dose of salt. Historicity in Zen is trumped by direct experience, which reduces reliance on the brute facts of what in fact happened; the only important fact is what happens in your experience in the presence. The testimony of history is only valuable as a form of encouragement and a prod to your practice.

From such a practical perspective, Sensei continues:

You will find if you read enough, or reason it out long enough, that there have been many capable students throughout the past 2,500 years. Some were famous. Some made it their business to teach in large monastic communities, and some did not. Some were householders, as many of us are, who went about their regular lives. Those lives never got recorded by the historians, but they are there. Perhaps it is nothing more than a personal opinion, but my view of transmission is that in each generation, there has been one, or maybe several teachers, that have stood out, and who have embodied the spirit of that age in their personalities. These greater teachers have been more skillful at “skillful means” than their contemporaries.

Here is the parallel track of householders and monastics. Householder practice has always been held in high regard, from India through China, Korea and Japan, and the far East, and should be in the West of current times. Monastics change clothes and environment, but the basic elements of existence do not change, no matter how romantic or severe the surroundings. Further, the writers write the history:

There have been others in each age who have led enlightened lives who may have been teachers, but who simply were not remembered in collective history. Those who were in fact remembered were so popular in their time that historians could not have deleted their accomplishments from the record. Or perhaps, those Zen masters were very literary, or very talented at the arts. Because of this, either they, their literary disciples, or contemporary journalists and historians, wrote some account of what they did. The farther in time a generation or a century receded, the dimmer our collective recollection in oral stories is.
In retrospect, then, the notion surfaced that only those one-in-a-generation teachers carried the flame of Zen. In all that time, the heart-to-heart transmission has been occurring many times each generation as it did between Shakyamuni Buddha and Mahakasyapa. Very, very few have had the talent or words to even hint at this most subtle culmination of the Zen teaching. So, they did not.

The different perspectives of the scholar-historian and the practitioner of Zen also come into play, and this is a point of contention yet today, in consideration of continuing Buddha’s and Dogen’s mission:

Most historians of Buddhism, then, drew misleading conclusions about the lineage of Zen from the great silence and the few generational great voices. However, it is not one or two in a generation that are the sangha and who stand in the lineage of Zen. It is all of us who do study Zen seriously in any one generation who stand in the lineage of Zen in the Rinzai, Obaku and Soto sects.

The misleading conclusions of scholars include the notion that Master Dogen experienced a “decline” when he had established Eiheiji, and stopped actively writing. From our perspective as practitioners, that was the opposite of a decline, when he started live teachings to his monastics, who wrote them down. Then, with a typically creative turn of a phrase, he proposes:

Perhaps we will have to employ an army of psychics to reconstruct what actually happened in the history of the transmission of Zen.

This is a great example of Sensei’s ironic sense of humor.

Then with the practical twist of the observer, he suggests a dispassionate view of the present, to inform our rear-view-mirror impressions of the past:

Or, maybe we can just look at what is going on today that is similar. There are many teachers and many, many more students in any single generation. Just look at Zen in our own time in all of the United States, Western Europe, China, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam and all the other places that Zen is practiced.

Of course, we cannot follow all the living Zen teachers in the world today, nor can we rely on the visibility and celebrity of a given individual to sort out the who’s who of contemporary proponents of Buddhism. Social media and online access have opened the door to a far more ecumenical and interfaith approach to apprehending and appreciating the spreading of the gospel of Zen, but we must remain skeptical:

In all the world now there are many genuine teachers and many more pretenders. The popular Zen teachers of today may fade in a year or two. It may be someone else who is remembered better five hundred years from now, and will have a profound impact of the development of Zen.

The view from 30,000 feet, as we say today, is different from that of the boots on the ground. We may be in the traditional period of semblance, or even decline, of Buddhism, but that should not dissuade us from plodding on with our own practice, be it ever so humble. Whether we are remembered or not, five hundred years from now or next week, makes not a spitting bit of difference to our Zen lives today.