That's what it said on one of those little light-up signs on wheels with the flashing arrow parked in front of a low slung baby-blue brick building on the road to the Southern Dharma Retreat Center (SDRC) near Asheville, North Carolina, where I led a retreat last weekend. Actually, SDRC is "near Asheville" in much the same was as Tassajara is "near Big Sur." Which is to say it's not really all that near. It takes an hour and some to get there from Asheville up a winding mountain road and then an unpaved single lane driveway that seems to go on forever around a lot of very precarious drop offs. The driveway is shared by some other houses up in them there hills, so at times you have to back up and pull into little tiny, hard-to-see turn-off to let hairy guys in big ol' pick up trucks loaded with firearms pass by. Actually, I didn't get a good look at any of those guys or their trucks. I’m sure they’re nice. But I did hear gunfire during one of our sittings. And when I passed by that church on the way up I was behind a big red pick-up truck with a bumper sticker that said, "I'm a coon hunter." Raccoons, right? Uh-huh. On the way into SDRC I went over several bridges that spanned a winding waterway called French Broad River. I wondered if it was OK to name a river French Broad River without specifying which French broad it was named after.
The retreat was sold-out. The body count was 27 people including me. A transvestite who’d signed up left within the first hour we were there, before we’d done any zazen or talks or even eaten dinner. Apparently he (she?) told someone, “To think I gave up tickets to see the Dalai Lama for this!” and stormed off in his (her?) pick-up truck in a shower of gravel. OK. Bye.*
The retreat itself was fine and dandy as far as I could tell. I had to design the schedule and tried to make it easy enough not to kill any newbies to zazen yet tough enough to qualify as a decent Soto-style Zen retreat. On Saturday we had nine rounds of zazen starting from 6:30 AM, mostly 30 minutes each except for the first one of the day, which was 45. On Sunday we followed the same schedule but ended things at Noon, as per the center’s usual policy. There were two lecture/discussion periods, one each day. I made time for dokusan (private talks with me, like anyone really needs that). Meals were semi-formal, taken in silence with meal chants beforehand, but not served in oryoki style (this video was done at a retreat I led in Shizuoka, Japan). They do buffets at SDRC and they are de-freaking-licious, by the way. They cook all their own stuff and use locally grown ingredients as much as possible. The bread is to die for.
The group was pretty homogeneous. A few college students, a few older people, a few metalheads, a few punk rock folks about my age. About half-and-half women and men. If the transvestite had stayed the balance might have been tipped. But in which direction? Among the metalheads was none other than D. Randall Blythe of Lamb of God. It was cool to see him there. I like Randy and I’m getting into Lamb of God.
At the end of the last day people got to turn in their evaluations of the retreat and its teacher. Most were positive, some positively glowingly postive. But, as usual, I focus on the negative. One review said something like, “The teacher was very close-minded and attached to his belief that zazen is best. The four foundations of mindfulness (or some such thing, I can’t remember) are the basis of Buddhist practice! Immature teacher.”
My response to that is to say that in my considered opinion the person who wrote that assessment is a poopie head. A stinky, smelly poopie head, at that.
Actually, this brings up a point I’d like to try and address. There’s a kind of expectation among people in the USA who are into Buddhism that teachers of Buddhism should be sort of pan-Buddhist teachers. That is, that they should not represent any one tradition, but should, instead embrace and teach all forms of Buddhism. And a whole lot of teachers out there do this. They’ll mix all kinds of traditions up into a sweet ecumenical stew that doesn’t really represent any specific lineage but includes everything. I say fuck that. It’s bullshit Buddhism.
If I go to a Baptist minister I might be impressed if he’s well read in the Torah and the Koran. That would be a nice little bonus. But I don’t go to a Baptist minister for a Bar Mitzvah or advice on how to celebrate Ramadan. Any Baptist minister who offered such services could only ever do them in a really half-assed way anyhow. In fact, I’d personally prefer my Baptist minister to have focused specifically on studying the teachings of the Baptist lineage of Christianity and not know much about the Torah or the Koran. Furthermore I’d be far more confident in what he had to say if he told me straight up that he thought that Judaism and Islam were fundamentally flawed. If he didn’t think so, why would he choose to be a Baptist minister and not a Rabbi or Iman? Of course it’d a whole different matter if he went from that idea to saying let’s convert all the Jews and Muslims and kill all the ones who fail to see the light. But that would be something else entirely.
See, I don’t know shit about Vipassana or Tibetan Buddhism or even Rinzai style Zen, or any other sort of Buddhism. In fact I don’t even know a fuck of a lot about any forms of Soto style Zen outside of the ones I specifically learned from Tim McCarthy and Gudo Nishijima. I’ve never practiced the other ones in any serious fashion and I’ve never been very interested in trying. I’m aware of some teachers within those other lineages whose work I think is pretty decent. But I’m still just not all that intrigued by them. I don’t want to destroy any of those other lineages. But honestly speaking I think the lineage I studied in is better and closer to what Buddha really intended. If I didn’t think so, why would I teach it? Why would anyone teach a style of Buddhism they were not convinced was the best one? Who would bother listening to such a teacher? Not me.
Buddhism is essentially an oral tradition passed down face-to-face from one teacher to the next. It is not necessary for a teacher in a specific lineage to know anything at all about any form of Buddhism other than the one they received from their teacher. It might be a nice little bonus if they do. Or it might just get in the way (it usually does if you ask me). In any case it’s not a requirement, nor should it be an expectation of their students. It’s good to get along with other lineages, and we all pretty much do. Some of my best friends are Rinzai! But we don’t need to try and incorporate their teachings into ours in order to satisfy some misguided notion that all Buddhist teachers should embrace all forms of Buddhism. Why should they?
The “four foundations of mindfulness” or whatever the fuck that person wrote are just words that try to frame what Buddha was getting at in a specific way. But what Buddha was getting at was not a matter of words. My words or Nishijima’s words or Kodo Sawaki’s words are exactly the same. But if you go to a teacher within a specific lineage, don’t expect that teacher to frame the truth in the same way as someone from another lineage.
However it is vital that a teacher be true to his (or her, but I’m gonna skip the “or her” from here on) tradition and – even more importantly – to his own personal understanding of that tradition. All that touchy feely pan-Buddhism is nothing but watered down teaching. It satisfies folks who strive for some kind of illusion of political correctness. But it’s false. You see guys running around these days claiming to be versed in twenty different traditions each of which takes decades to even begin to understand. Unless they’re 400 years old they’re feeding you a line and you’re a sucker if you fall for it.
Whatever. Hope you enjoyed the rant. Feh!
If you're not too pissed off at the foregoing come see me at the following places:
April 29th at 7 PM, talk at Warren Wilson College’s Buddhist Studies Group in Asheville, NC.
May 3rd my band 0DFx will play at Pat’s in the Flats in Cleveland with This Moment in Black History.
And on May 4th, 0DFx will play at the Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio in commemoration of the 38th anniversary of the infamous shootings by the National Guard.
On Friday May 10th we'll play an in-store show at Square Records in Akron's Highland Square.
Saturday May 10th at 7 PM (or maybe 6, they need to decide yet, call before you go) I'll do a book signing and talk at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Ohio’s Tremont neighborhood. I think we're showing my movie Cleveland's Screaming! afterwards.
On May 17th and 18th I'll lead a 2-day retreat at the Milwaukee Zen Center.
I'll be one of the teachers at this year's Great Sky Zen Sesshin August 9-16. Check out their webpage for details.
The annual Dogen Sangha retreat in Shizuoka, Japan will be September 20-23.
*No offense intended to those who choose to cross dress or change sexes. I just honestly don't know the appropriate term of address.
