Three Zens - Which "Zen" Are You?

This started as a brief journal entry, then I decided to send it to a friend. Then I remembered I have a blog.

What follows is an excerpt from Joshua A. Irizarry's excellent article "Putting a Price on Zen: The Business of Redefining Religion for Global Consumption" and my thoughts about the right way--for me--to be a Zen Buddhist.

These voices [D.T. Suzuki and charismatic clergy in the mid-20th century] introduced Zen to three key demographics in the United States: first, the set of wealthy and stylish conspicuous consumers; second, avant-garde creative types—artists, musicians, and writers, most famously the Beat Poets—who would deeply influence the American counter-culture movement of the 1960s; and third, earnest spiritual seekers looking for alternatives or supplements to institutionalized religion.

To each of these groups, Zen was a mirror which reflected that which was most desired. To the group of fashionable conspicuous consumers, integrating Japanese and “Zen” aesthetic elements into design, fashion and high culture granted an aura of class, cosmopolitanism, and sophistication. For the artists such as the Beat Poets, Zen lent itself to ideals of creativity, spontaneity, altered consciousness, social protest, and irreverence for established authority. To the spiritual seekers, Zen was positioned as a traditional, but non-religious “philosophy” or “practice” free from doctrine, ritual, and hierarchy. Binding all three conceptions together was the persistent aura of the Japanese “Other,” embodied most famously in the person of Suzuki (Iwamura, 2011: 31-32).

By Suzuki’s death in 1966, these three perspectives on Zen would be well along in their evolution. For the next several decades, these three zens would intermingle and reverberate throughout American popular culture and everyday language, reinforcing one another even as they competed for primacy in the public’s imagination. The identification of Zen with Japan likewise meant that when Japan’s miracle economy reached its full economic potential in the late 1970s and ‘80s, it was a knee-jerk reaction to attribute Japan’s economic successes to Zen, paralleling the narrative that had been created for Japan’s military victories against China and Russia less than a century earlier. Zen, by extension, Japan, and by further extension, Japanese products and services were permeated with a sense of cosmopolitanism, creativity, and tradition—all qualities that, not coincidentally, were reflexively perceived as lacking in American culture and industry.

A Zen pilgrim. A Zen Buddhist pilgrim? I don't know, maybe.

This rubric of “three zens” gives me a handle on a slippery fish I’ve been struggling to land. There’s much to say. In outline form, 0. D.T. Suzuki’s counterfeited a form of Zen that has all but replaced “authentic” Zen. 1. These are modern, strategic self-characterizations (i.e., marketing). "Zen for export." 2. They are at least somewhat contradictory and sometimes mutually exclusive. 3. The three demographics (or hybridized cultural descendants thereof) come to Zen practice with different values, expectations, agendas, and demands. This range accounts for the difficulty in steering a big ship like San Francisco Zen Center. 4. There are definite strains of upper-class Zen and lower-class Zen, hoity-toity and hoi polloi. Whereas the traditional Buddhist sangha eradicates class conflict, class war is definitely carried over into Zen. 5. I would make the normative claim that Zen is and should be fundamentally a form of “Buddhism”—that Buddhist values must override Zen’s historical deviations. Zen may be allowed its unique timbre, but it must be re-attuned to the pitch of the Buddha’s teachings. 6. Aesthetics and poetics must be made subordinate to soteriology (enlightenment) and ethics (making the world a better place). 

I finally learned how to make a Venn Diagram just for this.

          Speaking more personally, just as I came to identify myself as “monk” over and against “priest,” I am gaining confidence in allying myself with a certain vision of Zen monk, with particular its particular constellation of values, that entails rejection of competing visions. My Zen prizes spiritual transformation, i.e., actual attainment of enlightenment, through committed Buddhist practice. It is Zen Buddhism, a Japanese variant of the historical Buddha’s teaching and way of life. I value meditation, precepts, voluntary simplicity, contentment, renunciation, and the like over the values of “sophisticated” Zen. My Zen could give a fuck about polished wood. My Zen meditates, does good, renounces the floating world, and wears the ragged robes of a beggar.

          Thanks for listening. Oh, here is my latest fundraising thing.