"Altho really frankly I think an American zendo with no rules and all the cats talking all day when they feel like it and orgies at night with shaktis would be the best thing . . . ." -- Jack Kerouac, letter to Gary Snyder, 1956, quoted in One Bird, One Stone, by Sean Murphy
Subtitled "108 American Zen Stories,"
One Bird, One Stone is a loose history of Zen in America, a series of dialogs between teachers and students, and a wide-ranging series of anecdotes about various American Zen practitioners drawn from interviews and archives. It's enjoyable on a number of levels; at the most basic, it's extremely entertaining, showcasing a broad array of personalities and experiences. I find it historically interesting, as well, because I know only somewhat about the history of Buddhism in America. While I knew about the Beats and Alan Watts, I didn't know that a Zen master first visited the States in 1893 for the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. I'd mentally connected the American Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau) with Buddhism, but I hadn't known that Emerson printed Buddhist texts in his magazine, while Thoreau drew inspiration from the Lotus Sutra for his retreat to Walden.
And, of course, the stories are often enlightening in and of themselves:
An electric news screen has a lot of lightbulbs and shows letters by lighting some of them up . . . . When you look at it from afar, it certainly seems as though the letters are flowing, but when you go up close and look at it, it is just some lightbulbs going on and off, and there is not a single flowing letter. In the same way as that, everything in the universe seeming to exist and seeming to be active is completely untrue. . . .
Everything in the universe is like that.
Yasutani Roshi, One Bird, One Stone, p37
What has struck me the most, however, is how similar, in some ways, the rise of Zen in the 50s and 60s parallels the rise of Paganism since then -- and the differences are just as intriguing.
The way that Kerouac talked about Buddhism, as encapsulated by the quote at the top of the post, sounds very much to me like a Pagan festival. For that matter, the initial view of Zen in the West has a lot in common with Paganism. The first great popularizer of Zen in the West, D.T. Suzuki, although formally trained, consciously transformed traditional Japanese Zen practice. As author Sean Murphy puts it:
Suzuki's eloquent writings about the freedom inherent to Zen, its iconoclasm, distrust of authority, and absence of ritual or dogma, sent a compelling message to an American society whose spiritual traditions appeared to be running out of steam.
Thus have I heard many American Pagans praising their own paths. And, since Paganism is a recent creation (albeit partly based on older forms) there's nothing to gainsay this view. Not so Zen.
Some of these statements, however, have turned out to be, strictly speaking, not entirely accurate -- as many of the Zen boomers discovered when they went on to train with traditional masters and discovered that form and hierarchy were very much in place. . . . Suzuki frequently neglected to mention the essential practice of zazen. Why?
I once asked an American Zen priest, a vocal admirer of Suzuki, what he thought the reason was for these omissions.
"He was trying to invent a new tradition," replied the priest. "He felt that Asian forms had grown stale and the spirit had gone out of the practice. He was trying to save it by creating a new Zen of the West -- a Zen Westerners could handle. That he could handle. And he probably thought trying to get us to actually sit still and be silent was a hopeless mission!"
One Bird, One Stone, p45
As I lay in bed last night, somewhat delirious, all of this went swirling about, keeping me from the sleep I needed. Somehow, Suzuki became Scott Cunningham, and Kerouac became Silver Ravenwolf. Look, Ananda -- fluffy Buddhists!
But, then, the mind whirled on -- if that were some kind of parallel, how come Zen got Kerouac and Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Philip Whelan and John Cage? What'd Paganism get ... Stevie Nicks & Godsmack?
Of course, I heard the Greek chorus in my head, "Oh, but Pagans are persecuted against. How can we get anything out there, since everyone thinks we're Satanists?" I am sure that no Zen Buddhist, Japanese or American, ever experienced difficulties on account of the fact that the US had just gone to war with Japan. The 50s being a time of great acceptance and all.
Furthermore, Zen does have an actual series of traditions, of discipline, of an aim beyond "what feels right." Some Pagan trads do, some are trying to, but most are stuck in solipsistic ego preening. I used to think that form, discipline, and devotion were traps for the weak, that authority only existed to be resisted. I was so wrong.
"Emptiness is not other then form and form is not other then emptiness." I think a stick upside the head, or maybe just a hearty, "
Kwatz!" would do them some good.
But that just may be the cold medicine talking.
