This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Recently, there's been this critique of, I think, partly accurate critique, let's put it that way, of western buddhism in general and and in particular maybe well actually specifically what's called western convert buddhism um you know which san francisco zen center is clearly an example right um not that not that every um Not that every member and practitioner at San Francisco Zen Center is a convert Buddhist, but a lot of them are.

[01:07]

And the critique kind of goes like this. It's due to people like Robert Scharf and Donald Lopez and Gleg, I think is how you pronounce her name, who actually came and gave a talk fairly recently, well, last year or something like that, at Zen Center. It kind of goes like this. In Asia, so Japan, Southeast Asia, a kind of in some ways the heart of Asian Buddhism, particularly in, you know, Burma, Thailand, and so on, the heart of Asian Theravajan Buddhism, and also in Japan, which was, you know, there's a lot of Zen going on in Japan, maybe also in Korea.

[02:24]

contact with the West, and in the case of Burma, colonial occupation by Western powers produced a kind of crisis in Buddhism practice and thinking in Asia. And some people, not everybody, but some people got this idea that that Buddhism and Buddhist practice needed to be modernized so that they were compatible with Western ideas and, interestingly, with science, with materialist scientific thinking. And so that happened. And there's pretty good evidence for that. if you look at the literature. In the Japanese case, you don't have to go much further than DT Suzuki to find someone who was passionately interested in kind of rationalizing some sort of confluence between Zen thinking and Western thinking.

[03:51]

And in particular, Western philosophical thinking. So I think that part of the critique is accurate. And the other part of the critique, which is that this produced a kind of deprecation both in in the eyes of these Asian teachers and in Western Buddhism, when some of those teachers actually landed in the West or started teaching Western students of other aspects of Buddhism, Zen and Theravadan Buddhism and other Buddhist sects as well, that were crucial. And that includes kind of devotional practice, in particular rituals, and also related to that, this kind of community practice.

[05:12]

The critique is that when Buddhism landed in the West, it was primarily concerned with individual effort and attainment through the use of techniques that it was at least possible to argue were kind of framed as self-improvement techniques right and So that's the critique. And like I said, I think it's partially accurate. And, you know, a couple of reasons for my thinking that it's partially accurate is that I grew up kind of in the... I was a kid in the middle of a kind of cultural ferment in San Francisco and in the Bay Area where...

[06:19]

that exactly had to do with the introduction of Buddhism to the West, or Zen in particular, to the West. And I think I've talked about this before. But we hung out with Alan Watts. And Alan Watts famously said, when asked to define Buddhism and address whether it was a religion or not, said, oh, well, you know, it's a way of liberation, right? Which I have to say is true as far as it goes, but it tends to put the emphasis, if you say to somebody, hey, way of liberation, if you, you know, there's a lot of people where if you say, and many of them were in California at the time, if you say that to them, they'll go, I'm going to go get liberated now.

[07:23]

And it sort of underscores that emphasis on individual practice, on attainment of liberation, whatever that means. And it's not at all clear that People sitting in the audience when Alan Watts said that really had a clue what that meant, actually. I think they all had an idea and were kind of jazzed about it. But they may not have, for the most part, had a clue about it. And even going further back than that, If you really dig into the classical literature and you dig into Dogen, there's a lot of emphasis on individual practice and liberation in the literature.

[08:30]

And interestingly, it's also some deprecation of devotional practice. Definitely not... but certainly of devotional practice, right? You know, you read the Muman Khan, and right there in the commentaries on the first Khan, you know, the famous Zhao Zhao's dog, Muman says something like, hey, you could be just like Muman. You could walk along, you could see through Muman's eyes, you could walk along with the ancestral teachers together and wouldn't that be great? And if you want to do that, all you have to do is break down this barrier and here's how you do it. You spend day and night banging your head against Mu and you practice like you're trying to swallow a red hot iron ball.

[09:37]

That's pretty aspirational and also pretty emphatically about the merit and virtue of difficult individual practice, right? And in Dogen, you know, like in the, for Hansa Zengi and some of his early writings, he's also pretty, he's pretty, dismissive of devotional practice and study, at least, right? He says, you know, how are you going to wake up if you're just sitting around croaking like a bunch of frogs or chanting the name of some Buddha and so on? You need to sit zazen and you need to drop off body and mind. Yeah.

[10:40]

My sense is that in those passages and in the spirit of those writers, there was a similar effort, not arising for the same reasons, but to kind of focus people on individual practice and attainment in a way that obviously the writers at the time thought was beneficial. And it goes, and like I said, it goes way back. But if you look at the Zen that we inherited from Suzuki Roshi, it's pretty clear that it may be a way of liberation, but it's also a way of devotion. You know, like... So let's start with how you become a Buddhist.

[11:47]

You take the precepts. But before you can take the precepts, you have to make some vows and take the refuges. And if you look at the bodhisattva vows, I mean, this has been discussed a lot during the last practice period. You're basically looking at some propositions. I'm going to save all beings, even though there's infinitely many of them. There's the opportunities for self-delusion and delusion in general are endless and frequently occurring. And there's more Dharma gates available than anyone can measure or attend to.

[12:58]

And I'm going to enter them. Yeah. And the Buddha's way is, well, we translators is unsurpassable. It would be easy to translate that as unattainable. And I vow to attain it. So what can you do in the face of that but let go of agency and sort of instrumentality and just execute the vow or quit. But if you don't quit, your choices are kind of limited in that regard. You're not going to save infinitely many beings.

[13:58]

And the task of even saving one being is infinitely long. So just to live out the vow, like jizobodhisattva, is fundamentally an act of devotion and nothing more or less. And similarly with the refuges. It's interesting. When we chant the refuges, we chant the refuges and then we say these additional things. you know, immersing body and mind deeply in a way, awakening true mind. There might be this little promise there that if we take refuge, we'll awaken true mind. And maybe that sounds a little bit like a reward or something like that. But actually, the refuges only work if you drop all that.

[15:06]

And if you just... throw yourself in completely without reservation and without condition into the refuges, which again, it's an act of devotion. And it's a connection to the, in the broadest sense, to the activity of, Buddhism and Buddhists since the beginning and back before the beginning. And then if you look at the activities that, as long as we're on the subject of activity, that we do at City Center when we can all be there, they're pretty much the full range of

[16:07]

activities that not just in Buddhism, but in religions all over the world are designated as devotional. The, you know, praising and saying the names of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Yeah, that's devotional. Yeah. chanting selected texts in unison or solo. Yeah. Every religion has that kind of devotional practice pretty much. Well, not every, but lots of them. And the list goes on. There's Oryogi, right? It's a... highly ritualized devotional practice that just the whole, all the rituals around bowing.

[17:09]

And then even more interestingly, the monastic forms, like the, you know, the, the main one that comes always comes to mind when, when I talk about this, it's the one where you use how you step over a threshold. It's, often described and explained as a, as a mindfulness practice, you know, as a way of making yourself more mindful, sort of in the spirit of, you know, doing this thing, awakening true mind. Right. But, but actually it's not really that. I mean, it is that, but it's, it goes way beyond that. It's when you, when you do it, without reservation and without condition or even calculation, it's kind of like you're thanking the building for holding up the door.

[18:33]

beam over your head basically it's it's uh again it feels devotional doesn't so much feel like um doesn't so much feel like instrumental why is this a good thing? And in particular, how does it relate to the kind of, you know, you can't, well, again, nobody would, nobody would do any of this stuff if they didn't think it was going to somehow improve their life.

[19:39]

people have many motivations for joining a monastery or taking on Buddhist practice but they're among the main ones are that they feel suffering in their lives and they want to feel relief and they've been told I was told that that Zen would offer me relief from suffering, and I really wanted it. So at some point in my life, I just decided to come here and start sitting. But there is this, when you read around in the dictionary about the meanings, various meanings of devotion and devotional practice and devotion,

[20:41]

practice in particular in Buddhism and so on and so forth, you start to see this kind of interesting interplay between the notion of devotional practice and then practice that's more like intercessional or or instrumental or that constitutes petitioning or an effort to gain merit. And that goes to this pretty subtle thing about Zen practice and in particular about Zazen. Like, it's pretty easy to see that if you are, let's say, you know, let's say you've taken on the practice.

[21:57]

I know a guy who has taken on a practice of doing a whole bunch of bows and a whole bunch of chanting and poly as part of his morning routine. And I would say that for the most part, he's just doing it because he does it. But obviously, there's this way in which it kind of settles his mind. And it has a little bit of a of an instrumental quality too, which in some ways is OK. That's good. But remember what Suzuki Roshi says about sitting Zazen, that the primary request is to sit without gaining idea. And why is that the primary request?

[23:03]

Well, the reason that's the primary request, is that fundamentally zazen is impossible. I hate to break this to you in the, what is it, the 25th minute of this talk, which I'm hoping will only last about five more minutes, and then we can have some Q&A. But zazen is impossible. And and it's impossible in a, in a very particular way, but, but, but the, the, you know, the classic kind of paradox in it is that how do you square what essentially constitutes spiritual ambition, like, you know, Mooman saying, Hey, look, you can be like Jojo. All you got to do is, is, you know, is, Swallow this red hot iron ball.

[24:04]

How do you square that with sit without gaining idea, which in the end is the only way you can let go enough to experience the kind of that gets into your mind and body and affords the ability to drop off body and mind and so on. More subtly, what you're faced with in zazen is a process, the sort of default process of mind, which has a... Everyone's is different, but as far as I can tell from talking to a lot of people, all the ones I've discussed with people have a similar flavor.

[25:15]

And that flavor is this. They're a mix. This is a little bit like what Paul was saying in his talk on Saturday. They're a mix of... broad, unloaded, spacious attention, and highly focused, self-constructing, agenda-executing what we normally think of as conventional thought. And a couple of other details that might be worth discussing there, too. The mode of broad, receptive attention can give way to focus attention and then take it back easily and seamlessly.

[26:24]

You can sample this any time you're you're sitting and watching the sensations arise into perception. And if they're not particularly loaded with sort of a valence or emotional content, they arise a little bit of sort of mental activity, a cruise around them, and then they just drop. They're like flowers that bloom for a second, right? And you can watch them pop up all over your sensorium, in your knee, when your knee twinges slightly, in your auditory system, when you hear a sound outside, et cetera, all that, right? Also, when you're in that mode and you focus on a particular physical activity, the unquestionably in San Francisco Zen Center, the most famous one is chopping vegetables, right?

[27:28]

It's possible to be utterly focused on that activity in a way that has the same quality as that receptive attention, but also has a focus, right? And then it lets go, right? For reasons that, you know, I don't think anybody really understands, but that receptive attention also has a cyclical giving, you know, back and forth sort of ping pong with our mode of self-construction and rumination. That people that do studies in cognitive psychology and so on and so forth can time it.

[28:30]

They're like, yeah, you know, usually a half a minute or so at the outside, sort of on the average, right? That process is not under your control. It's under no one's control. to drive it under your control in the sense that you can use a concentration exercise as a kind of like chopping vegetables with your whole body, right, in order to hold off the passing back to your attention from the your mode of ruminating and self-construction. But the effort that's required for that is really a form of self-assertion.

[29:40]

And it's not Zazen. Dogen explicitly in the Fukanzazangi and lots of other places says that's not Zazen. It's not Shikantaza. It's not total absorption and upright sitting. It's mental gymnastics, right? So that's the sense in which tazen is impossible. And the sense in which it's just to say, I'm going to sit zazen is like saying beings are numberless. I vow to save them, right? Or delusions. In fact, it's exactly like saying delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Actually, that's what it means to say I'm going to sit zazen now.

[30:45]

So... So in some ways, in exactly the way that the bodhisattva vows are acts of devotion, just sitting down, the best way to treat a period of zazen is as an act of devotion. You just sit down. You don't worry about being good at it. You don't worry about getting it, whatever that means. You just let the... the mind, the activity of mind play out. And if you, if you need to extend to expend a little effort to, for example, you know, bring extra focus, a little bit of extra focus in during some part of the period of Zazen, the intention is that that effort tails out to zero as you're, as you're, your mind settles so that in the end, you're not making any effort.

[31:52]

And the interesting thing that happens then is that it actually doesn't matter if you're thinking you're not. So when Duggan says, I forget who he's quoting, but he's quoting a Tang Dynasty teacher who said, I remembered. Anyway, you know, think about not thinking. How do you think about not thinking? Well, non-thinking, actually, somebody asked him, he said, what are you doing there? And he goes, I'm thinking about not thinking. And the guy says, well, how do you do that? And he says, well, non-thinking. It's a form of non-thinking. It's not that thinking is absent. It's that it's not centered. It has a it has a radically different place in the whole frame that presents itself when you're sitting.

[33:00]

And in that place, the Again, the emotion that arises is the emotion that's most closely associated with devotional activity, which is gratitude. That's the fundamental feeling tone of that space of unloaded attention. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[34:06]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:09]

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