Today a link to this article by James Ford appeared in my Facebook news feed. It’s a good article. I read it twice and want to make some comments about it. So read the James Ford article and come back here and we’ll chat.So you’ve read the article now? Good! Remember I’m saying here at the beginning that I like the article a whole lot and I agree with most of it. I want to be very clear about that right from the outset before saying some things about it I think need to be said.
Much of the article concerns the recent hubbub about Eido Shimano Roshi and his alleged affairs with students. Someone posted one of the letters written by one of those students in the comments section of the previous article on this blog. It was posted three times, so I deleted the two extra postings, but left the first one.
Here’s the letter:
August 5, 1993
The Board of Trustees
Zen Studies Society
223 E. 67th
New York, N.Y. 10021
Dear Board of Trustees,
On September 3, 1992, I arrived alone at Dai Boatsu Zendo with much anticipation. This was to be my first experience at a Buddhist monastery and I naively did not know what to expect. I looked forward to zazen, Buddhist studies, Dokusan, and koan study with Eido Roshi. He had been highly recommended as a great teacher by my well respected peers and instructors in XXXXXXX.
From the very beginning, I felt Eido Roshi "noticing" me. He would often stop me in the hall or call me into his meeting room to give me a small gift, I assumed he was this way with everyone. However, my assumptions changed the first night o f Dokusan during Golden Wind sesshin when he pulled me toward him and kissed me on the mouth! He said, "The first time I saw you, something clicked into place for me. Perhaps something will happen between us in the future... hmmm?" This was the first time physical contact had occurred between us. This same behavior continued during 80% of subsequent Dokusans, but he progressed from hugging and kissing me to touching my breasts. At one point, he told me that he wanted to make love with me. I told him, "No." He looked directly in my eyes and said " don’t wait too long." I experienced his statement as a veiled threat that he would abandon me spiritually and emotionally if I did not comply with his wishes. So, due to my own weakness and fear, I did as he wanted. At the end of "Dokusan" he would make a date with me to visit him in his quarters that night where we would have sexual intercourse, He made it clear to me that no one was to see me entering his quarters as it would cause him "a lot of trouble."
During three different occasions I expressed my concern to him that I was deceiving my dear friends, XXXXXX and XXXXX, and my fiance, XXXXXX. I told him that I wanted to tell them because I did not feel right about keeping a deliberate secret of this magnitude. He said, "Lie." I was literally sick after he said this. I felt poisoned. On one hand, I did not want to cause trouble for him, and on the other hand, something was extremely wrong for me! This miserable affair lasted until I left the zendo on December 11. 1992.
That’s some pretty heinous stuff! But then again, I wasn’t there and this is not my Zen center. I feel like it’s not really my business to comment on the specifics in detail. So I won’t.
What strikes me about James Ford’s article responding to this material is when he says, “Here I see the lack of larger institutions that oversee teachers and communities is a major problem. Not just about sex, but it is a good placeholder for all the complex issues of human relationships.” Then he says, “At this point the only larger institutions to emerge that have ethical codes with teeth are the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) and the Kwan Um School of Zen, both institutions having experienced very rough times around sexual conduct of teachers pretty early on. It would be very good if we can find a pan-lineage organization with some teeth, as well.”
So James Ford seems to think the solution to the problem is that we should have a large Zen institution in the West (specifically the US) that has an ethical code with teeth. I hope I’m not misrepresenting his position. Any even if I am, I feel like there are many who believe this. If there weren’t, then SFZC and the Kwan Um School wouldn’t have those toothy ethical codes.
But I have to completely disagree. Because the Holy Roman Catholic Church is a gigantic institution with a very toothy ethical code and still sexual abuses of all kinds continue. Sure, when ethical abuses occur there are consequences. But only when the code is properly enforced by ethical people. And I’ve seen too many instances where that has broken down to believe that the simple existence of a big institution with an ethical code with teeth will always prevent abuses, or even prevent most abuses, or even prevent the worst abuses.
In the case of Zen, there is also something much more fundamental at stake, and that is the very existence of Zen itself. I don’t believe Zen can really be practiced at all unless its teachers are totally autonomous and not beholden to institutions.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I feel that Zen teachers are more like artists than like religious instructors. If you bind artists to institutions, you kill their ability to create art.
Let’s say we required all poets to be part of the International Poets Association because we felt too many poets were taking sexual advantage of their students. Maybe you think the losses wouldn’t be so great. A few less poems about heartache and deception, perhaps.
But institutions have to justify their existence somehow. They have to keep doing something. When legitimate problems fade away they tend to start making up new things and labeling them as problematic so that the institution has something to do. That’s when all poetry starts to have to follow the same rhyme pattern and be about what the institution considers uplifting subjects and so on and on and on and on…
I've talked here before about how the so-called "negative" aspects of punk rock saved my life. They let me know that there were other people out there who were as frustrated at society as I was. Without that "negativity" I might have continued believing I was alone. An institution that governed what kind of music could and couldn't be produced would certainly have banned that kind of music as having detrimental effects. And I would have committed suicide for sure. An institution that governed what was and was not acceptable Zen teaching -- and I'm certain any large institution eventually would start doing so -- would produce sterile lifeless Zen that did no one any good at all.
Also, institutions tend to reflect the lowest common denominator of what their members understand as acceptable behavior. They are bound to come up with the most conservative definition possible. People who don’t agree that democracy is best often speak of democracy as the “tyranny of the masses.” And this is what happens with Zen institutions. It becomes more about what the greatest number of members think they want than what’s actually necessary for Zen teaching to occur. This can never be decided democratically.
There's another aspect to this I also think needs stating. I ought to be careful saying anything negative about SFZC since I have been invited to speak at Tassajara in September. But I don’t think I’m saying anything members of SFZC haven’t said themselves when I make my observation that about 97% of the available time, effort and energy at SFZC seems to me to be directed at maintaining the social structure of the institution. This leaves very little time, effort and energy for the real meat of Zen practice. The fact that any kind of Zen manages to get through at all at that place is a minor miracle. And it does sometimes get through or I wouldn’t have recommended to numerous people to go study at SFZC. So maybe I ought to start believing in miracles.
When SFZC was going through all of its troubles in the 80s, several people told them, “It doesn’t need to be so big.” They could have solved their problems a different way. They could have dismantled the gigantic institution that had developed and instead broken up into smaller more autonomous units. As a matter of fact, both Kobun Chino Roshi and Katagiri Roshi did just that, they broke away from SFZC and created something far smaller. Mel Weitsman at Berkeley Zen Center is another example of this.
As Ford says in his own piece, “I don’t think I’m going into anything in great detail, it isn’t what blogs are made to do.” Such is the case with this piece, too. The very nature of blogging prevents being able to give this the depth it deserves.
But I really believe that large institutions are not the way to go with Zen. They may be able to preserve the superficial structures. But they will damage the real core of the practice itself.
*****
Another somewhat related matter is how one defines what is and is not acceptable. James Ford touches on this issue in his piece, but I'd like to say a little more.
When someone hears that So-and-So Roshi had sex with his student many immediately imagine a lurid scenario like the one described above regarding Eido Shimano Roshi. But it’s not always like that. In fact, I’d venture to say it’s almost never like that. I do not believe that teachers taking advantage of students the way Eido Roshi allegedly did is really a major problem in Zen as a whole.
Remember we are talking here about relationships between consenting adults. If we were talking about something other than consenting adults we wouldn’t need a Zen institution to take care of that. The law already deals with those kinds of things.
Sexual relationships between consenting adults are complex matters. They happen for a lot of reasons and develop under a lot of different and often highly unusual and surprising circumstances. Think about some of the ones you've been involved in yourself if you have any doubts.
Also there’s the issue of what constitutes a teacher/student relationship in Zen. To me, simply going to a few meditation classes does not make one a student of some Zen teacher the way, say, signing up for Mr. Sprankle’s 10th grade biology class makes you Mr. Sprankle’s student. The formal teacher/student relationship in Zen is something very different. It’s almost like a marriage. Which may be part of the problem. But I digress.
From the sound of it, Eido Shimano Roshi violated this formal teacher/student relationship. But again, I think his case is not the norm when it comes to instances of relationships that develop between teachers and students in Zen in general.
And then there’s the whole issue of the words “teacher” and “student,” which immediately makes one imagine an adult and a child whether one chooses to do so or not because of the deep unconscious associations these words have.
Like James Ford said, a blog is not the place to get into the depth these discussions deserve. But I thought it was important to put this out there anyhow, even if I can’t get into it the way it ought to be gotten into.
*****
In a completely unrelated aside, I recently came across this gem on the Internets that expresses very clearly what’s wrong with Big Mind™ and other stuff of that ilk:
It reminds me of the Indian guru back in the 60's, who, when a hippie was extolling the virtues of LSD and how it promised instant insight and a path to liberation, said to the hippie, "Show me a drug that can make someone a doctor or a lawyer or a university professor just by taking a little pill, and then I'll believe that someone can become an enlightened guru just by taking a little pill." To paraphrase: Show me a two-day workshop or a book that can turn someone into a doctor or lawyer and then I'll believe that someone can become a profoundly awakened being in minutes.
