Cold Stone Zen

Two retreats ago there was a woman who’s husband had just died, and we all either knew them, or one or two people knew, but it was very clear. And what was so interesting is it became this beautiful time together, because she sobbed through almost every day. She ended up sitting behind me a lot, and I had a moment where my impulse, I could feel her so profoundly because we were still, and I had this moment where I just wanted to touch her, and I had to go through all my rules about: “am I allowed to reach out and touch her in a retreat center, blah, blah, blah,” and then … I realized, “Please.” And I reached out and touched her because it’s my human impulse, and she’ll let me know if she doesn’t want that. And I probably did that three times during the week. And at the end of the retreat she said, “Oh my God, thank God, you touched me. I needed contact, I’m in a freefall.”

This passage was part of a fascinating two part panel discussion on Buddhist practice, trauma, the body, healing, and several other topics. Over and over again, the participants bring up challenges they have faced, and questions they have about the ways in which convert Buddhist practice has been set up here in North America. I encourage folks to read it, and I may take up a few other sections of the discussion in future posts.

Back to the story above. I don't know about other branches of Buddhism, but there's a lot of talk about form and the role of a strong "container" amongst Zen folks. This is especially true in retreat contexts, but even during daily services, attention to precise details, from bowing to offering incense, are emphasized. What's important to note is that that attention is directed towards doing things in a certain way. Not really clinging to rules, but certainly maintaining a particular, shared direction.

Chanting. Bowing. Walking. Maintaining silence. Forms for eating meals. All have particular instructions, and everyone involved aims in the direction of embodying those instructions as best they can.

There's a lot of beauty to this. Being in the middle of a group of 60 adults all bowing at the same time in the same basic way can be life affirming. Listening to an even larger group, including children, chanting the precepts together - which we did at our sangha this past Sunday - is often quite exquisite.

And yet, the story above demonstrates something of an absence I sometimes feel. The lack of touch, especially during retreats, is one thing. However, overall, touch or not, I sometimes wonder where the warmth is.

A few years ago, I essentially stopped doing meditation retreats at my zen center. For awhile, I really struggled with the resistance, thinking it was just laziness, or fear. And perhaps some of both of those are true. However, even when I first started developing the resistance, I knew it was more than that.

Do you know the story of the monk whose hut was set on fire?

There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years. She had built a little hut for him and fed him while he was meditating. Finally she wondered just what progress he had made in all this time.

To find out, she obtained the help of a girl rich in desire. "Go and embrace him," she told her, "and then ask him suddenly: 'What now?'"

The girl called upon the monk and without much ado caressed him, asking him what he was going to do about it.

"An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter," replied the monk somewhat poetically. "Nowhere is there any warmth."

The girl returned and related what he had said.

"To think I fed that fellow for twenty years!" exclaimed the old woman in anger. "He showed no consideration for your needs, no disposition to explain your condition. He need not have responded to passion, but at least he should have evidenced some compassion."

She at once went to the hut of the monk and burned it down.

What I have often felt in Zen meditation retreat is similar to that monk, only it's magnified throughout the entire group. With our current teacher, this has been less so, but somehow the combination of the people attracted + the forms themselves, seems to bring out that cold rock in winter feeling.

One of my dharma sisters has been talking a lot about body practice recently. She's gotten interested in Reggie Ray's work, and since I, too, have been interested in body-mind connections, I have listened closely to what she's said. And I think I hear that similar voice behind her words. The one that's saying "Something is missing."

The thing is, it would be really easy to suggest that this voice is just longing and desire. Coming from a place of dis-ease. I do not doubt for a moment that some of it is. But not all of it. Perhaps not even the majority of it.

Something I learned towards the end of my yoga teacher training were some simple massage techniques to apply in classes. Actually, it might be more accurate to say massage coupled with posture adjustments. The thing that stood out for me in practicing these on classmates was the ways in which, when I let go of trying to "do it right," there was a subtle exchange of what I'd call wisdom that happened. It didn't need words. In truth, that same exchange happened when I was fumbling around, or my classmate was fumbling around, trying to get it right. It's just that the depth wasn't there in those cases.

Is there a gender component to all of this?

The two women in the retreat story shared something. It was beyond words. Sure, it wasn't part of the "retreat plan," but it does seem to me to be part of the awakening plan. Especially for those of us living in the everyday world, dealing with all the challenges of a lay life.

Your thoughts?

Buddhism and Race Again

This post, written by a young woman from Sri Lanka who lives in Minnesota, has been getting a lot of attention in the Buddhist blogosphere. It's not an easy to read post. And it's gotten a bit of negative attention already, as well as dismissive comments about how she's a just a young, angry, and/or ignorant woman.

This paragraph is probably the one where the rails fall off for many white Buddhist readers.

Much like the commercialization and appropriation of Yoga serves as a profound source of anger and frustration to many South-Asian Hindus, I'm alternately befuddled and angered by white appropriation of Buddhism. No, I don't care how many times Richard Gere used his private jet to visit the Dalai Lama, stripping a belief system of its cultural context and putting it on like a pair of shoes, without acknowledging the struggles and realities of the people whom that culture belongs to, is imperialist, disrespectful, and mostly racist. The shallow ease with which Whiteness claims to understand the experiences of cultures of colour continues to bewilder me. How can you claim something as part of your identity, on par with people who grew up living and breathing that culture everyday? How can you claim to own something you've never had to defend, or fight for? And please, spare me the details of how your white Lutheran parents disapproved of your visits to the meditation center.

I'm not going to write a long commentary on the pluses and minuses of this piece.

While I don’t agree with everything she wrote, I think it’s worth really sitting with her voice if you’re a white, convert practitioner. Yes, she’s young. And yes, she doesn’t really seem to have any sense of how Buddhism has spread, and been re-invented to some extent in every place it has gone. But I have seen some quite hasty and defensive reactions to this post online already, which mirror reactions I have seen in local sanghas to issues brought up by practitioners of color.

Point blank: white practitioners need to stop defending themselves, and pay closer attention to what other Buddhists are saying and thinking. Doesn’t mean we have to agree with each other, but if people are really serious about all the “diversity” talk that goes around convert sanghas, then demonstrate it. Be willing to be with the uneasiness of conflict and difference. Be willing to accept that you might be wrong. Be willing to listen, and perhaps then, you might also be listened to.

This is one of the major pieces of work for the modern, worldwide sangha. I'm convinced of it. So, let's do it.

The Woo in "Western" Yoga and Buddhism

Carol Horton has a new post on her blog Think Body Electric concerning woo and yoga communities. It has a lot of thought provoking stuff in it, as she seeks to - in my opinion - come to a more balanced attitude about ideas and practices that might fall into the "New Agey" category.

I would like to take up the following comment, that comes after some discussion about abusive yoga gurus and manipulative, control based yoga communities that seem heavily reliant on woo. Carol writes:

I strongly believe that it would be helpful if the yoga community developed a much more active connection to relevant dimensions of Western psychology. This has already happened in the convert Buddhist community, where excellent work connecting meditation and psychotherapy has been going on for decades. In the yoga community, however, there’s much more of a default toward New Age thinking. Generally speaking, I think this is a problem.

When I first read this paragraph, I had a pretty strong reaction. Why? Because I believe the marriage of western psychology with Buddhist teachings in North America has been the penultimate double-edged sword. On the one hand, there have been books like Harvey Aronson's Buddhist Practice on Western Ground, which have offered practitioners a wonderful window into exploring the connections, as well as great differences, between psychological theories and Buddhist teachings. And certainly, for those coming from psychologically damaged backgrounds who have entered Buddhist communities or taken up Buddhist practices, having an emphasis on the psychological element of Buddha's teachings has often meant the difference between sanity and insanity. Probably even life and death for some folks.

However, there is another side of the coin. It's quite easy to find teachers, books, and entire Buddhists communities that have reduced the dharma to primarily or solely about the psychological and emotional dimensions of life. Amongst this subsection of Western convert Buddhists, teachings that are vast and subtle, and which contain layer and layer of pointers, get shunted into what amounts to a self-improvement project in Buddhist clothes. While everything in the dharma points to the extremely fluid and limited life span of emotional reactions, this is where the bulk of time is spent amongst these folks, fixating on every last tinge of anger, fear, and sadness, as if in doing so, perhaps one day they might become the "perfect" human animal, able to exude some peaceful calmness, not influenced by anything in their past (especially their childhoods) under all conditions.

Furthermore, because psychology and Western convert Buddhism have been so cozy, it is has attracted a lot of psychologists, including active therapists who have risen to the ranks of teachers. And unfortunately, this had led to some troubling blurring between spiritual practice and therapy, between Buddhist teacher and therapist. The exchanges between Brad Warner and Barry Magrid during a recent dharma talk at Ordinary Mind Zendo constitute a weird example of this dynamic in action. But on a more mundane level, you have all those students who struggle to not treat their interactions in the sangha with others, especially the head teacher, as a form of therapy.

All of this is to say that I think merging western psychology with any spiritual practice is best done with great care.

And when it comes to the North American yoga community and it's "woo problems," I'd argue that this more so due to the continual efforts to divorce the spiritual teachings and philosophy of yoga from the physical practices. As well as the failure to integrate meditation, and the other subtle practices, into the physical work (asanas) in such a manner that it brings people the foundational ground upon which to unfold their lives on. Too many people want to drink Yoga Lite - something heavy on body work, and less filling on everything else. And they'll defend that almost to the death if necessary, never mind that non-attachment is at the core of everything yoga.

In some ways, the sweaty, physical asana classes peppered with happy sounding phrases and self improvement cliches is the yoga community's version of the Western convert Buddhist self-improvement project. Both offer an opportunity for better health, less destructive thinking, and more grounded behavior. All nice benefits, and certainly not something to dismiss. But at the same time, neither of these approaches are focusing on the profoundly vast awakening teachings at the core of both Buddhism and yoga.

Reducing the woo in yoga communities comes when there is an increasing focus on the whole works of yogic practice and thought. It comes when teachers, students, studio owners and yogic writers stop offering placating sugars, and start offering holistic, well-balanced meals. That can include servings of intelligently considered psychology, but must be more than just using psychological theories as the missing "healthy vitamin" to an otherwise fast-food like practice diet.

Maha Council - Meet Some Asian Buddhist Statistics

Over at the blog Dhamma Musings, Shravasti Dhammika writes today on the decline in Buddhist affiliation amongst younger folks in Singapore. What's interesting to me is that some of the reasons I, and others, have suggested as to why younger folks North America and Europe aren't coming into Buddhism at the same levels as their older counterparts appear to be at play in parts of Asia:

Sorry to say statistics from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan show a similar trend. Buddhism is failing to speak to young, well-educated, modern people. A visit to a good number of temples and Buddhist societies will show the reasons for this trend; commercialized spirituality, absence of Dhamma education, lack of social engagement, poor leadership, etc. The almost complete absence of networking between Buddhists also doesn’t help either. ‘You do your thing. I’ll do mine’ is the norm for Buddhist groups, temples and organizations.

I made a comment on David Chapman's blog related to the Maha Council conference that fits in here. In part, the comment went as follows:

I currently am the board president of a Zen sangha in the Midwest, and am also amongst the Gen X practitioner crowd, for whatever that’s worth. My experience as part of the leadership here is that for the most part, each sangha is on it’s own. We had a teacher scandal several years back. Got help from some teachers of other sanghas, but the lion’s share of debate, discussion, policing, and moralizing was internal. It was a much smaller version of what happened with Trungpa, Baker, Shimano, Genpo, Maezumi, etc.

My point in mentioning this is that I don’t think there’s ever been a strong collective effort to do much of anything in Western Buddhism. We don’t have a large-scale ethics body to appeal to when teachers abuse power. We don’t make collective public statements about anything, political, social, or otherwise. In fact the “we” has always – in my view anyway – been largely about individual groups that are loosely associated with each other, partly in religious name only, and partly through some form of teacher lineage.

Furthermore, when I think about some of the major natural disasters in North America in recent years, I'm hard pressed to come up with any significant Buddhist-driven aid and/or support effort. At least amongst Certainly, individual Buddhists have helped, and certainly individual sanghas have done things like given money to the Red Cross and whatnot. However, the kinds of efforts that regularly come from, for example, teams of Christian churches working in tandem to raise money, bring in supplies, and help people rebuild houses and other structures just isn't easily found amongst convert Buddhist communities.

Why bring that up? Well, because we don't seem to be to good with being part of a larger community. And this plays out internally, where groups of individuals sanghas can exist within 50 miles of each other, and yet rarely, if ever, collaborate on major projects and endeavors. And it exists externally, where a given sangha might be located within a particular community, but has membership that primarily is from outside of that community, and also doesn't do a whole lot of connecting with others in that community, regardless of their affiliation.

Now, from what I have seen, organized religion in general is tottering on the edge of oblivion. It might be a slow death, but it is possible that holding this stuff together may be like practicing on a sinking ship. However, at the same time, there are plenty of people longing to be a part of more vibrant communities, ones that acknowledge and even aid in uncovering the deepest, richest parts of our lives. So, there's kind of a push-pull going on between individualism and community, one that seems to offer the best of each side (while condemning the worst of the opposite side), but which fails to bring any fruitful reconciliation.

I don't know where any of this is going to go in the future. It does seem though that those statistics from Asian nations about Buddhists are linked, in some way, to the some of the struggles sanghas are having here in North America and other parts of the "West." And certainly, whatever the goals of the Maha Council (and other meetings like it), there's a desire to address said struggles.

Convert Buddhists Hangin' With God and Other Revelations

God talk. Seems like I'm surrounded by it, no matter where I go. Plenty of it floating around the yoga studio where I take my teacher training. Some of it hangs about in my zen center - sometimes offered just as a gesture of connecting with the dominant cultural paradigm, other times maybe it's something more. And for whatever reason, I've noticed a fair amount of it on Buddhist flavored blogs lately.

There was a time when this used to bother me. A lot. I was tired of hearing Bible quotes. Tired of hearing people putting all their faith and energy into a grand deity that may or may not exist. And - if I'm really honest - I was tired of feeling marginalized, ignored, and even held with contempt for not going along with such stories.

Most of that, for whatever reason, has passed on. Finding myself in the middle of a conversation filled with God talk doesn't phase me much. I don't feel the need to identify or not identify with it. I can say what I think on a given day (it changes you know) and let it be. Or say nothing. Or pose some questions. Or just agree with statements like "God is great," knowing that our conceptions of all that are probably entirely different.

But then there's this issue, from Barbara's current post:

I was a bit dismayed by this bit of dialogue I found at Huffington Post

"Once, when I was on a live radio show being interviewed by a Christian talk show host, her first question to me was, "Do you Buddhists believe in God?"

I had only a few seconds to think of an answer.

"Yes," I said.

"Good!" the host said. "And how do you pray?"

I said that we prayed in silence to reach our divine nature.

"I like that!" the host said."

The author, Lewis Richmond, said he wanted to establish common ground with the audience, and I appreciate that. Even so, I think it was a dreadfully unskillful answer. No matter what Richmond means by "God," his "yes" conveyed something to a western Christian audience that is not true.

After a discussion about dating with a fellow yoga teacher student last night, I had a bit of a realization: I still sometimes am too identified with notions around relationships. In other words, I place too much emphasis on either "being single" or "being coupled" - believing, somehow, that one or the other (which one it is changes) is a core identity. Some "thing" that "I" view as "myself."

For people who grew up in Judeo-Christian dominant nations, and/or spent significant parts of their lives as members of one of those religious traditions, it's pretty easy to maintain a certain allegiance with God. Or even identify yourself with God, while still practicing Zen, or any other form of Buddhism.

And, as Barbara's post goes on to point out, there are others who push in the opposite direction, maintaining that one must absolutely have an atheist stance. That because Buddhist teachings deconstruct and dismantle notions of God, we must reject anything remotely sounding like a great divine power out of hand.

Debates about whether there is a God or not were something Buddha put off to the side. Being wise enough to realize that such debates are probably never ending, he sought to point people in the direction of liberation from suffering instead.

And yet, the debates role on, and people go on identifying themselves as atheists, or theists, or agnostics, or whatever. Which seems no different to me than the fussing I do over "being single" or "being coupled." Talking about either is just fine, but when that talk becomes about fixing who I am in this world, then trouble is right behind.

We have a couple of hospital chaplains amongst our Zen sangha. And they often speak about having to offer services and support for the mostly Christian families and patients they're working with. It's been interesting for me to hear both of them talk about letting go of the language and teachings of their Zen practice, and speaking to their patients and their patient's families in the spiritual tongue and forms that they know and love. I don't get the sense that either person has suddenly decided they believe in a God, or identify their lives with God; it's more that they offer up themselves for the others' benefit.

You might think of it as a kind of "identity bardo," which I think is actually a major aim of our practice.

However, it's much easier to just choose a view (I believe in God or I don't believe in God) and then defend the crap out of it. Makes it feel like there's some ground upon which to stand. Some place to call home.

But "home" itself, as we tend to know it, is also just another story we tell.

Creating Potentials for Liberation: More Notes on Osama Bin Laden's Killing

Over at Barbara's Buddhist blog is a post continuing the discussion about Osama Bin Laden and Buddhist practice. One of her main points was that those who are out there judging other Buddhists' emotional reactions are missing the boat on practice. And I totally agree. Whether someone felt horribly sad, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifoutraged, or elated upon hearing of bin Laden's death, all of those are passing human emotions, nothing more or less. If you were like me, you probably watched a whole stream of these emotions running through you around this particular event. I still am, days later.

Here are the further comments I made, partly in response to Barbara's post, but mostly in response to the combined offerings I have read around the Buddhist blogosphere this week.

What I have noticed, though, amongst folks who clearly believe the killing is justified – including some Buddhists – there is an interesting set of patterns that underlie their responses.

1. As long as Bin Laden was alive, he was an imminent threat to the U.S.

2. The killing was a manifestation of self-defense, and thus justifiable.

3. Bin Laden was like Hitler, Pol Pot, and other historical dictators responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands or even millions.

4. Bin Laden’s death was “needed for closure to come,” and that the celebrations in U.S. cities were more about closure and hope than about rejoicing in bin Laden’s death.

And finally, 5, that there are “evil people” in the world, and so we have to be “prepared” to deal with them.

Now, I personally greatly question all 5 of these conclusions. But mostly, I’d like to say something about “being prepared” for “evil.”

I don’t believe in evil people, but I’d say we could easily label many of bin Laden’s actions as evil. However, what I see missing in a lot of the Buddhist posts and discussions where people are either justifying killing bin Laden, or saying it was wrong, is this:

Even if the ultimate outcome is that someone is harmed or killed, a central theme of Buddhist practice is aiming your life towards non-killing and non-violence. When someone chooses to train themselves, “prepare” themselves through deliberately seeing the seeds of violence and destruction within, and deliberately working to grow the seeds of non-violence within and without, then how they act – even in a highly volatile, violent situation – is markedly different from someone who doesn’t.

So, my main point here is that once any of us accepts the narrative that killing is justified, it’s quite easy to use that as an excuse to ignore the seeds of violence within ourselves.

I honestly figured that bin Laden wouldn’t make it out alive if he ever got caught. But I see that killing as the result of numerous people, including bin Laden himself, having internally justified killings in some form or another before the actual killing occurred.

Another thing I have noticed is that there is - in my view - a false dichotomy that comes up amongst Buddhist writers that appears nearly every time some majorly violent act happens in the world to cause us all to reflect on out practice.

On the one hand, you have a subsection of practitioners who offer a sort of soft pacifist stance, saying things like people just need to do more lovingkindness meditations and the like. The lack of nuance to these positions leads me to suspect that they are coming from quite privileged places, where threats of frequent, imminent violence and/or oppression aren't experienced.

On the other hand, there is another subsection of practitioners who think that any talk of non-violence is basically the stuff of 60's counterculture hippies and idealists. That there is such a thing as "just warfare," and also that some people are "evil," and must be treated as such. There's a lack of nuance to this kind of position as well. It creates a split between good and evil which isn't part of Buddha's teachings. It justifies a kind of pre-emptive murder based on one's previous actions and the possibility that they will do the same again (as opposed to killing someone in direct, real time self-defense.)And furthermore, it creates images of people that are fixed, instead of the fluid reality in which we live in. Bin Laden was evil, a bad man, end of story. Oh really, that's news to me!

Take the flip side. People going wild over the Dalai Lama's recent comments, which suggest that he wasn't against the murder of bin Laden. Whether or not the Dalai Lama supported killing bin Laden, I'd argue that a lot of the negative reactions towards his statements were coming from a fixed view of the guy as "a good man, always." This is one of the major problems that appears in the "soft, pacifist" narrative I mentioned above.

Both of these narratives strike me as exercises in confirming the views one has always had, or long held - as opposed to working practice. When I was younger, I fell more into the soft, pacifist camp side of things, but the longer I worked with my own heart and mind, studied the teachings, and probably most important in my case - spent large chunks of my life actively engaged with people from oppressed and marginalized groups - I began to realize that the most important thing is working deliberately, unflinchingly with the seeds of violence and non-violence within yourselves, and then figuring out ways to spread that kind of work to others.

Which is all about liberation of suffering if you ask me. It's realizing that yes, causes and conditions might be coming together in a violent way and that each of us might end up adding something to the total pile of violence, but that we ARE NOT condemned to doing so. In fact, because of the months and years of watching our minds and hearts, checking out actions, questioning our motives and understandings - we might actually have a chance to shift the entire course of history through our actions. That a single person, or small group of people, or even large group of people who have built up the inner reserves and discipline to not react, but respond by waiting out the most intense conflict without resorting to maiming and murdering.

This is all about doing whatever you can to create the POSSIBILITY during a dangerous situation, as opposed to either coming in with an untrained, naive mind, or with an attitude that everything is already fucked, so we best bust some heads.

Bin Laden's dead. Instead of justifying his murder, or outright rejecting everything associated with that murder, including emotional joy and relief, how about taking some time to consider how you might liberate all of this going forward.

How might you train yourself to be able to enter a conflict - be it a simple disagreement or a life threatening situation - in a way that might open the doors of liberation, instead of close them?

I'll leave everyone with that, and offer that pat answers won't cut. I've been living with a variation of this question for most of my life. And I doubt it will be resolved anytime soon, if ever really.

Questioning Universalizing Statements about Buddhism

I have long enjoyed David Loy's writing. In particular, I very much appreciate his willingness to apply Buddhist teachings to broad, social contexts and to point out how suffering and karma, for example, do not just reside in individuals, but also manifest in collective patterns as well.

This interview from Sweeping Zen takes some fascinating turns, and is worth reading in full. However, one of the turns the discussion took really grated on me, as it went into some of the very territory that a recent post by Arun questioned, and which I followed up on in a post over the weekend.

Loy comments:

Today Buddhism has begun its most radical and challenging transformation of all in its encounter with the modern West. Again, we should expect transformation on both sides, which I see as necessary because each needs the other. I lived in Japan for many years and have traveled throughout most of Buddhist Asia, and it’s obvious that Asian Buddhism is stuck in various ways. The ways Buddhism has been institutionalized, and especially the way in which karma has degenerated into merit-making, is very problematical.

On the other side, the West is encountering Buddhism not a moment too soon. We are in a time of great crisis if not collapse. The globalization of the West has created enormous problems and much of it has to do with a basic worldview that is deluded and unsustainable. So Buddhism has something very important to offer the West. At the same time, Asian Buddhism brings with it a lot of cultural baggage that doesn’t work well in the West, where it tends to get in the way of Buddhism’s liberative potential. Buddhism needs to benefit from the best that the West has to offer, and not only scientifically. There are many magical and mythic elements in Asian Buddhism that we need to let go of. So it’s an exciting encounter on both sides. We are still in the early days but it’s started.

Let's pull a few issues out and consider them. First, the terms "Asian" and "Asian Buddhism." As Arun pointed out in his post "For one, there’s the issue of referring to “Asians.”The category “Asian” is simply too broad. Asia represents 60 percent of the world’s population and an untold diversity of cultures." So, I'd argue that a statement like "Asian Buddhism is stuck" is to broad to be accurate. It doesn't offer people an entry point into specific issues being faced, nor does it assign a clear enough location to where these issues are occurring. Furthermore, a statement like "Asian Buddhism is stuck" universalizes problems that are probably not universal. It's like accusations that American Buddhism is a self-help program for the bourgeois. This might be true in some locations, but certainly not in others. So, while it's clear to me (from readings, reports from other Buddhists, and discussions I have had) that issues like sexism and excessive institutionalization are playing out in many Buddhism communities in Asian nations, the specifics occurring within a given temple, Buddhist school or lineage aren't so clear.

There's also the problematic nature of the first half of the "stuck" statement. Loy says "I lived in Japan for many years and have traveled throughout most of Buddhist Asia..." What's concerning about this is the likelihood that Loy's experiences in Japan, which probably far outweigh the rest, color the whole story he's offering. He spent several years in Japan, and experienced some of the issues they are having. During that time, or afterward, he goes to several other Asian nations and sees or experiences some things that look similar, and thus returns to the U.S. and offers people the story that "Asian Buddhism is stuck." Differences between nations, between regions within a nation, or even from temple to temple, are totally glossed over. And given the experiences in Japan, there's also the question of whether something like confirmation bias is also operating here. You see too much emphasis on male dominated institutions, and merit making in Japan. You head to China or Burma or Thailand, and you locate more of the same. This isn't to say that these issues aren't a wide spread problem, but that the thinking behind the conclusions really needs to be examined.

Along those lines, it's interesting that Loy brings up science. Consider the ways in which scientists and other researchers set up experiments to test their theories. Any scientist worth a grain of salt will make a good faith effort to find opposing views, and allow conditions that might disprove their ideas to be included. Where do people like the Japanese "hip hop" monk and his followers fit into the "stuck" narrative, for example? Or what about the decided plugged in, hip, and modern Kenchara Buddhist center in Malaysia? It would be interesting to know how counter-examples of Buddhists doing creative, outside the box stuff in Asian countries are considered within the larger framework offered.

Finally, what grated on me most was the statement on "cultural baggage" and the sentence "There are many magical and mythic elements in Asian Buddhism that we need to let go of." Now, whenever a religious/spiritual tradition moves from one place to the next, there is a blending of the inherited with the ways of the new locale. And certainly, some elements associated with the previous cultural situation will be dropped in favor of the new locale's ways. This isn't a problem. However, the term "cultural baggage" itself imputes a negativity upon inherited cultural elements that is not only unnecessary, but is also insulting.

In addition, when we get into wanting to shed "magical and mythical elements," this implies a few things that need to be more carefully considered. First of all, there is clearly a privileging of reason and empirically comfirmable phenomenon here. Is that really wise? Second, given that Loy is speaking to a convert Buddhist audience - nearly all of whom have taken up Buddhism only in the past half century, it might be worth considering the question "Do we even understand why those mythical and magical elements are present in the tradition, or if they might be valuable to us in our practice?" It seems to me that even if the majority of convert American practitioners don't literally believe that Buddha was born from out of the side of his mother and that the earth shook upon his birth, there might still be something very important going on in that story for us to practice with.

Mostly, I point all of this out to get people thinking about the way in which board assumptions tend to miss the mark. Over the time I have been blogging, I have offered posts that done the same about different issues. One that comes to mind is a post I made a long while back about the lack of social outreach and social action projects amongst convert American Buddhist communities. In fact, the mistake I made there was to try to get specific based on the general view I had - which has some accuracy for sure, but for the example I brought up - San Francisco Zen Center - was terribly inaccurate. And I got quickly called out on that by a regular reader.

One of the challenges is that there are times when broad statements are helpful and/or necessary to convey a sense of what's occurring. And yet, the mind loves to take such statements and turn them into universalized truths, instead of seeing them as attempts to point in a certain direction. This is true in discussions about large scale social dynamics, and it's also true about more simple, deeply personal issues. Consider how often you make a mistake and then generalize that as meaning you're a screw up. Or for those with an overly strong sense of self cherishing, how often you do something well and think "I'm a bloody genius!"

It's a game we like to play. It's really just another effort to think we have some solid ground to hold on in this ever-changing world of ours. Somehow, it's easier to handle "being a complete screw up" than it is to just be, moment after moment. Just as it's easier to make statements like "Asian Buddhism is stuck," rather than spend the time parsing out all the patterns and manifestations occurring, and then pointing out ways in which they are similar across locales, and ways in which they are quite different.