Apparently some Polish Zen chatroom has been all abuzz with questions of my legitimacy as a Zen teacher. The matter also came up on the comments section of this blog, so I thought I’d try to explain. I’ve gone through this a few times before and it’s never satisfied everyone. But then again you got the “birthers” in the US for whom no amount of evidence of any kind will suffice to prove that President Obama was born in the USA and is not a Muslim. In any case, here’s the deal on my qualifications.When I established my first Zen website in August of 2001 the hook-line I used on the initial page was “I am a Zen Master.” This was supposed to be funny because it appeared beside a photograph of me dressed in the costume of Alien Benzen from the film Ultraman Zearth aka Urutoramann Zeasu (Tsuburaya Productions, 1996)(see photo at the top of this article). My intention was to try and deflate some of the pomposity surrounding so-called “Zen masters.” I had achieved the same exalted status as all these guys with their pretty robes and their fancy titles and yet I was a total moron.
A lot of people took it far too seriously. I think some of this was because in them days there were people who still switched off image loading on their computers to make web pages work faster, so they didn’t see the photo. Others just didn’t seem to get the obvious ridiculousness. They got mad that I would dare call myself a “Zen master.” Ah well. I agree with what Kobun Chino would say any time someone called him a Zen master; “Nobody masters Zen!” Whenever I have used the term “Zen master” for myself it has been with the intention of being ironic.
The guys in Poland who were worried about the legitimacy of my so-called Zen master credentials apparently didn’t read the things I’ve written very closely and/or are not familiar with the difference between Soto and Soto-shu, since their beef seems to have been about whether I had completed the proper training course required for the title. To put it more diplomatically, perhaps I failed to spell this kind of stuff out clearly. So I’m going to attempt to do that now.
Soto and Soto-shu:
Soto-shu is a monstrous bureaucratic institution formed along the lines of the Catholic church. One of the things they do is certify Zen teachers in the Soto tradition.
Soto (without the shu), on the other hand, is the common name for the lineage that Master Dogen brought to Japan from China in 1228 (some say 1227) after he received dharma transmission from Master Tendo Nyojo in China. But Soto-shu, the organization, does not own a monopoly on Soto the way the Catholic Church is the only form of Catholicism. You can be a teacher within the Soto tradition without being certified by the Soto-shu. I am not certified as a teacher by the Soto-shu, although I am registered with them as a monk. We’ll get to that. Don’t worry.
Becoming a Zen Master:
The process for becoming a certified “Zen master” (for want of a better term) in Soto-shu usually involves completing a specific training curriculum involving time spent in a monastery doing zazen and learning how to run funeral ceremonies. It’s something like the Catholic seminary.
But it doesn’t always work this way. In fact most Western teachers certified by Soto-shu have not followed this curriculum, and neither have a great number of Japanese teachers. When I asked Taijun Saito, a friend of mine who is certified as a “Zen master” in Soto-shu, how I could get certified, she explained the process.
Since I had a Soto-shu certified Zen master (Gudo Nishijima) who would vouch for my training, I could forego the monastery time and would just need to complete three ceremonies. The first was a precepts ceremony through an official Soto-shu temple, which would confirm me as a Soto-shu monk. This I did. The second was a question and answer test of my understanding. This, Taijun said, is highly formalized. The questions and answers are set and I would only need to memorize my responses as well as the various dance steps involved in the ceremony. Finally I would need to do a ritual in which I was symbolically installed as abbot for the day of Eiheiji or Sojiji, the Soto-shu’s two main temples. All of this, she said, would take a few months to complete and would cost me a “donation” to Soto-shu amounting to around $2000-$3000. Oh, and there were special clothes to buy as well, another $1000 or so.
At that point I decided to drop the whole plan. I just wasn’t interested enough to put in the required time, effort and cash. It wasn’t at all related to the things I got involved in Buddhism for. In fact it seemed to me to be the very antithesis of what I was interested in.
The Traditional Ceremony:
By the time I’d asked Taijun about this, I had already gone through a dharma transmission ceremony with Gudo Nishijima. That ceremony occurred April 28, 2001 and is described in Hardcore Zen. One detail I always felt bad about leaving out of the book was that my friend Peter Rocca took the ceremony with me (see photo below -- that's Taijun adjusting my robe). I wrote a different draft of that chapter in which Peter was mentioned. But my editor and I thought that introducing a new person into the narrative at the point in which the ceremony occurs was a little like adding a new character to a novel. The reader would want to know more of his story and that seemed to be beside the point of the story we were telling.
Anyhow, Nishijima is very much a traditionalist about how these things are done, much more so than the Soto-shu. He goes strictly by what Dogen wrote about dharma transmission and performs the ceremony according to those instructions. And Dogen says nothing about registering with the Soto-shu. The Soto-shu itself was not established by Dogen but came into existence long after his death. It’s pretty evident from his writing that Dogen would not have been a supporter of the contemporary Soto-shu. Nishijima calls them a “guild of funeral directors” and this seems a reasonable assessment to me.
Nishijima is not the only Soto-shu teacher to buck the system as far as dharma transmission is concerned. Kobun Chino, whose brother was a high mucky-muck in the Soto-shu, was also famous for giving transmission in what Soto-shu would surely consider unorthodox ways and for failing to register his transmitees with the organization. And there are several others who disagree with Soto-shu and do not do things their way.
Why Register in Japan?
This whole registration with Soto-shu stuff has been an issue within Soto Zen Buddhism outside Japan for a long time. It’s considered perfectly legitimate, even in Japan, for a Soto-shu teacher to grant dharma transmissions in any way he or she sees fit without registering them with the organization. Given this, is there any good reason any non-Japanese dharma heir of a Japanese teacher ought to register with Soto-shu of Japan?
If you ask me, the answer is no. But many choose to register anyhow. Some see registering with Soto-shu as a way of making their status more legitimate. Others do it for the experience. They feel that they establish more of a connection to the lineage by doing the ceremonies. Some do it for the prestige involved. But many, like me, are just not interested in that stuff.
And when it comes to the non-Japanese heirs of non-Japanese teachers, is there any reason at all to register with a Japanese organization? None that I can see.
Towards a Western Version of Soto-shu:
These days there are a few organizations in the West who would like to provide the kind of certification to Zen teachers that the Soto-shu does in Japan. Like the Catholic Church, such an organization would in effect take responsibility for the teachers it registers. That way you could know if the Zen master you met in, let’s say, Dandelion Springs, Nebraska was OK’d by them by checking the organization’s website or whatever.
Such an organization would check each registeree’s pedigree and make sure all their ducks were in order. If a registered teacher later got out of line, the organization would be able to cross him off their list. Or they could try to reform him, I suppose. The organization could also make it difficult for teachers with forged credentials or guys like “Zen Master Rama,” who received his transmission in a dream, to operate.
The problem with this is that such an organization would need to decide what it considers the minimum qualifications for a teacher. And there would be teachers who are perfectly legit whose dharma transmissions do not measure up to the standards of the organization -- like me, for example, and like many of Kobun Chino’s heirs, and a number of others in different lineages. These teachers would then be seen as less legit unless they went to the organization and did whatever the organization required of them. Do you see where this is going? Good. Enough said.
What To Do:
I don’t have the solution to this dilemma. But I do believe very strongly in lineage. Please understand, though, that this does not mean I think someone must have a Zen lineage in order to have something relevant to say. In fact, a lot of people outside the Zen world have plenty to say that puts most Zen teachers to shame.
But if you call yourself a Zen teacher, you’d better have some kind of lineage. Because by calling yourself a Zen teacher you are drawing upon the collective history of Zen as a sort of authority. Or at least as advance advertising. It’s like how you can choose to start your own perfectly delicious burger stand or you can purchase a McDonald’s franchise. If you go with Mickey D’s you get the benefit of their name, their logo, the ads they take out on TV and so on. If you start your own burger stand, you have to do all that stuff yourself. Your independent burger stand will probably be way better than any MacDonald’s, but you’ll have a much harder time making it in the business.
Calling yourself a Zen teacher without having a proper lineage and transmission is cheating. It’s like calling your indie burger stand a McDonald’s. Maybe you serve great burgers. But you’re not a McDonald’s. For better or for worse.
I’ve often considered dropping the whole Zen thing, like I think Bernie Glassman did. Glassman’s not my favorite example in the world. But I can see why he dropped the Zen thing. It’s got a lot of drawbacks and ties you to a lot of people and institutions you might not agree with. Like the way I’m now tied to Genpo Roshi in some manner.
But, in my own case, I would consider it also a form of cheating to drop the word "Zen" from my lexicon and thereby pretend I came up with whatever it is I’ve come up with strictly on my own. I did not. I did it through Zen training and practice. And whatever you may think about the garbage I now spew, I was authorized by a legit Zen teacher to spew it. My transmission comes from Gudo Nishijima, his transmission comes from Renpo Niwa, and I’ve got a piece of cloth at home that lists the whole lineage right back to Buddha his-very-self. Whether you believe the entire lineage or not -- and I don’t -- it does go back through verifiable generations at least a few hundred years.
It’s perfectly OK to ask anyone who says they’re a Zen teacher about their lineage. And if you don’t get a decent answer, it seems reasonable to me to leave. Because if they can’t or won’t tell you their lineage this indicates that something is being hidden, and quite possibly that they are lying. That seems to me to be reason enough to be very suspicious of the rest of their schpiel.
In the end, though, it’s a buyer beware situation. It’s really up to you to do the investigative work. I don’t believe in institutions enough to trust them to do this sort of thing for me. So even if there were a certifying organization, it wouldn’t really matter a whole big bunch to me personally. As far as I’m aware, the Rinzai line does not have anything analogous to the Soto-shu and they seem to function just fine without it.
So take care, beware, my children. And happy hunting for your dream Zen teacher!
*****
Sidebar: Senseis and Roshis
Once I met a person in California who shook my hand and said, “Hello. I’m XXX Roshi!” Actually the person used a real name, but I don’t want to end up making this seem like a personal criticism.
It sounded bizarre to me for anyone to introduce themselves as “Roshi.” The word 老師 (roshi) literally means “old master.” It’s the kind of thing someone else calls you. You don’t apply it to yourself. That sounds rude. It’d be like me introducing myself as “Brad the Lady Slayer.” It’s just one of those things you don’t call yourself no matter how much you’d like other people to call you that.
The use of the words sensei and roshi as terms of rank is a particularly American development and sounds kind of silly in Japanese. Sensei (先生) is a mild honorific for “teacher” that is applied to a wide range of people. It used to be my nickname at the international office of Tsuburaya Productions because I’d been an English teacher before I entered the company. This use of these terms as ranks only occurs within one specific lineage, which is very minor in Japan but very prominent in the US. I don’t think the folks in that lineage make this clear to their members, who often end up in Japan saying things about senseis and roshis that leave their Japanese friends confused.
