Your trusted reporter, reporting today from a bagel shop in Brooklyn where he has just finished a pumpernickel bagel with butter and a too expensive cup of orange juice.The place I slept last night was not fit for human habitation. That's not a judgment call, or even my personal opinion. I was actually OK with the place. But it was inside a disused factory and definitely not up to code. Someone had carved out a living place in what had probably once been a storage room or something on the top floor. You had to go in through the industrial doors at the back by the loading dock and walk up like seven flights of wrought iron industrial stairs probably constructed around the beginning of the 20th century. Once you got up to the top it opened up into a giant room that had been divided by all kinds of plywood structures and lofts. It was actually pretty cool. The guys who lived there took me to see some interesting bands and then put on Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which I slept through most of.
When I do these tours I take pretty much whatever I can get as far as living situations go. Mostly it works out well. On this trip to New York I spent the first few days in the swank Soho apartment of Jacopo Buora, the guy who set up the retreat I did last weekend at the Brooklyn Zen Center. Then my good friend Suicide Girl Bee Jellyfish offered me a spot on her couch in Brooklyn. Sweet! I got lots of pussy there! Yep. Cuz they had not one but two cute little kitty cats! What did you think I meant, pervert?
Problem was Bee forgot that one of her other roommates had promised the couch to someone else last night. So Bee very kindly put calls out to a bunch of her friends asking if anyone would be willing to lend a sleeping space to a wandering Zen monk and writer of bad books. The rest of the story is as described above.
The retreat in Brooklyn was very cool. But I mentioned that earlier. I also did an interesting gig at an animation studio called Asterisk in Manhattan. That was fun. I'd read about authors doing talks in unusual venues, like people's apartments and stuff. So I asked my friend Marc Catapano if he knew of any place I could do something like that in New York while I was there. He set up the thing at Asterisk and it was a lot of fun. Just a little room full of people interested in Zen. Nice. Anyone else who wants to suggest some kind of similar gigs, please feel free to get in touch.
There has been some talk in the comments section about Dogen Sangha. So I said: "I feel that Dogen Sangha should not be an institution of any kind. It should be a loose affiliation of like-minded people. Like an association of artists.
Maybe it could be like an association of painters who had the same art professor. These painters would not have to share the same style. Nor would they need to compare notes and align their techniques with each other. In fact, it would make them lesser artists if they did. They wouldn't necessarily have to even like each other or each others' work.
But they could acknowledge their common roots by being part of the association and benefit from the existence of that association. They could do gallery openings as a group or something.
It's not a perfect analogy. But it's a far better analogy than thinking of Dogen Sangha as a not very good (lazy) version of the Catholic church or the Soto-shu."
I think there are already far too many religious institutions in the world. If people want a Zen version of the Catholic church they can join Soto-shu. The existing associations in the US sort of scare me the way they seem to want to imitate the Soto-shu and foster standardization among the Buddhists of America.
It worries me to see them trying to set up standards of accreditation for Buddhist teachers. I understand the reason for this. It's too easy to just call yourself a Roshi without any real training, look at Zen Master Rama and a few others.
But trying to standardize what steps one must have completed before one calls oneself a Zen teacher would eliminate a lot of very good Zen teachers whose own teachers did not require them to jump through these hoops. And most of the hoops we're talking about here are pretty arbitrary and ridiculous institutional games that have nothing to do with anything. It may indicate a certain level of commitment if, for example, you've spent a whole truckload of money and time to go to Eiheiji and serve as abbot for a day -- paying the requisite hefty fees to Soto-shu, of course. But in the end, does stuff like that really make much difference in day-to-day practice?
I don't want Dogen Sangha to turn into an institution because institutions always have to justify their existence by being busybodies and getting up in people's faces about nonsense like this.
I've got some more thoughts on this that I'll eventually put together in some coherent form. In case anyone hasn't noticed, this blog is mainly just for off-the-cuff commentary from the road rather than well-reasoned position statements. So that is decidedly not what I'm offering here.
So, OK. Next stop is Baltimore on April 10, 2010 at 7-9 pm at the Baltimore Zen Center 913 Reece Road Severn, MD 21144 for info contact contact@BaltimoreZen.org. Then I got 2 gigs on the same day in Richmond, Virginia as follows:• April 12, 2010 1 pm Barnes & Noble VCU store 1111 West Broad Street, Richmond, VA 23284
• April 12, 2010 7-9pm, Ekoji Buddhist Sangha 3411 Grove Avenue Richmond, Virginia 23221
Full info and links are at this link. So click it and be there!!!
After that I'll see all y'all in Europe!
