Abbot's Teaching
A Chapter from The Original Frontier
by Michael Zenkai Taiun Elliston Sensei
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Another Zen Book?
You may feel, understandably, that the last thing we need is another book about Zen. This means you read too much. The purpose of this book is to encourage you to practice Zen. But of course, many books about Zen ostensibly have this purpose. My main reason for writing yet another book about Zen is that, since Zen has become mainstream in the West, there are many books available. Yet there seem to be many misunderstandings of the intent and true meaning of Buddha’s teaching. This must be corrected. However, it may not be possible in words. As my teacher used to say, “You can talk all day and never make them understand!”
I met my teacher, or Sensei, Soyu Matsuoka Roshi, in the 1960s in Chicago. He had the requisite magnetic personality, though to look at him, appeared nothing like your concept of a Zen master. Now it is forty years later, plus or minus. Sensei is dead, and I am left to live up to his legacy. As I look at the practice of Zen today, it is much better known than in the 1960s, and has many more practitioners. However, partly owing to easy access to many books on Zen, I see many misconceptions and compound errors, especially among those who feel themselves to be mature in the practice of Zen. So this is for them, and for you if you are one of that group. Master Dogen recognized and recorded this issue in Fukan zaznegi:
Some people are very proud of their understanding.
People come to the Zen Center for many different reasons. Many, I think most, come from a deep-seated need that has not been fulfilled in their life. Sensei used to say that people feel “something missing” in their lives. They don’t know what it is, and eventually come to Zen to find it. No matter how pleasant or advantaged circumstances may appear, no one is free from this kind of doubt or anxiety. Many come to Zen on the rebound from traumatic experience — the death or estrangement of a loved one.
When asked, many people say that they come to Zen in order to cope with the busy and complex life most of us lead in America today—calming down, achieving greater clarity, et cetera. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the desire to cope better, when it becomes the predominant motive for practicing Zen, it belies its true meaning.
The problem with this kind of interest in Zen is that it creates expectations. While these are not false expectations—Zen practice will probably help most to better cope with the stresses and strains of modern life—the very expectation, and even the achievement of such effects, gets in the way of the real effect—the ineffable state experienced by Buddha and his successors. The other effects, while real, are simply side effects.
When a person comes to the Zen center and begins to practice under a qualified instructor, they are told to set aside expectations, and to sit in meditation without a goal. Right away this creates a conflict, one that is additional to conflicts that will naturally arise in Zen practice without such pre-conceptions. It is, in essence, a cultural conflict.
In the written record, compiled over centuries in countries and cultures of origin such as ancient China and Japan, we find that the Zen Masters also had to deal with misconceptions about Zen. But these were of a different order than what we see today. Students of those times, as young monks and nuns growing up in a culture in which Buddhism was widely disseminated, were already highly familiar with, and educated regarding the basic tenets of Buddhism, and the Buddha’s intent. They were not looking for self-improvement in today’s sense. The course-correction required in the teacher-student relationship would have little to do with the basics of renunciation—understanding the relinquishment of family, home, even health and life itself as beginning steps. Not so today.
The history of Zen is replete with reformers, beginning with the Shakyamuni Buddha himself, whose teaching was “against the current” of the India into which he was born; the Bodhidharma, who carried the direct experience of Buddha to China, establishing the root of Zen; Huineng, the self-enlightened genius of Zen in China; Master Dogen, the full flowering of Zen in Japan; and Matsuoka-roshi, who first brought Dogen Zen to American practitioners. They were all frontiersmen, explorers of the original frontier, and leaders of others into that same rarefied terrain.
The fundamental challenge in expounding the Dharma to the American public today is to counter the tendency to regard it as an alternate religion—to the Judaic, Christian and Muslim belief systems—or one more entrée on the New Age smorgasbord of spiritual delicacies. Buddhism, Zen in particular, has nothing directly to do with New Age values of coping better, being a better person, or living a longer and healthier, more rewarding life. While all these benefits undeniably can follow from Zen practice, they are only the most superficial level of effect. Further, promoting such practical benefits of Zen practice plays to the weakness of the newcomer, and is disingenuous as well. To that degree, it defames the Teaching. If we have to “gild the lily” to attract people to Zen, there is something wrong. In this book, I will try to shine a light on the less obvious, but truly beneficial effects of Zen.
I have titled this book “the original frontier” because that is what I believe the Buddha discovered some two-and-a-half millennia ago—a frontier of spiritual awakening—and that it is still the original frontier today. The meaning of the word “original" here is taken from the time of the founding of America in the late 1700s. Its meaning has turned 180-degrees in today’s vernacular. Then, an “original document,” such as the Constitution, was one derived from another “document of origin,” already established as legitimate, namely documents of English law, thus imbuing the provenance of the present document with respectability. Nowadays, “original” means quite the opposite—something unique, not derivative in any sense. As in, “I am making this up!”
This book, hopefully, is “original” in the original sense—not only based upon documents of origin that lend it credibility, but true to the experience and intent of Buddha, the Great Teacher and founder of Buddhism. It would be the height of arrogance to claim originality, in today’s sense, for the teachings included here.
“Frontier” is a thoroughly American concept, though by no means the sole possession of America. After all, none of the explorers we credit with discovering America were American, any more than Buddha was a Buddhist. Nonetheless, the idea of the frontier triggers images of what is embraced as a quintessential American impulse—to explore the far reaches of the world, and, ultimately, if indirectly, the universe.
The word "America" also conjures certain images and associations—some good, some bad, depending on the conjurer. One icon strongly associated with America is that of the frontiersman. Americans seem inordinately obsessed, say compared to Tibetans, with seeking the "final frontier"—to "boldly go where no man has gone before"—in the memorable phrase of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. And in spite of the fact that we've about run our earthbound tether out geographically, homage is religiously paid to the ideal of the inexhaustible frontier—in the form of television commercials for cars, trucks, and various off-road vehicles relentlessly assailing us with images of the nonexistent open road. Which we watch on our on-board TVs while stuck in traffic jams.
Of course, this longing for the next frontier is not uniquely American. It is a predominant theme in the history of our species' expansion on the planet. Driven by survival needs, or just for the thrill of it, humankind has compulsively pushed the limits of the frontier. Now, some feel we are facing the final frontiers—of deep space and the ocean floor of our home world—as well as newer and scarier frontiers of a non-geographical nature, particularly in the life sciences.
The purpose of this book is to encourage you to try real Zen practice, recognizing that the practice and experience of Zen must be born of continual renewal and reformation. From the beginning it must be understood that this is not like recommending any other practice, such as a program of physical exercise or mental study. Zen is distinct from other practices, in that what it is about does not actually rely on a specific form, per se. It is not a simple method that will work itself, like the endless exercise machines advertised on TV. We have to work it. We have to re-discover, reinvent it. The final truth of Zen is not a simple effect with practice as its cause, but is already inherent in existence. Thus the original frontier is not far away.
I invite you to explore this frontier further with me. It has to do with mortality.