Zen Scandal Dialogues

For those of you who are tired of all this "scandal talk," I beg your indulgence for a little longer. I want to write about other things. There are so many other things to write about, right? However, this morning I saw this letter from Zen teacher Chozen Bays, in response to the letter from Kirsten Maezumi I wrote about in the last post. Not only is Chozen's letter a great teaching for us all, but below it is a heartfelt response from Kirsten Maezumi which illustrates the fact that the internet is, indeed, a real space with real impact.

Chozen writes:

Zen teaching is a profession. Professionals have an obligation not to betray the trust of their students/clients/patients, trust that is essential to the work of spiritual teaching or therapy. When we take on the profession, we take on the responsibility to maintain proper boundaries with those we are caring for. If a patient tries to kiss a doctor or a minister or a therapist, it is the professional’s responsibility to stop the behavior. A doctor or even a lawyer who has repeated sexual contact with clients can lose their license to practice permanently.

The American Zen teachers also have written letters to the Board of Kanzeon — and before that, to the Zen Studies Society — because we have a special concern about women. When male teachers have sexual relationships with women students, it creates a very difficult situation for these women. They are enrolled in the secrecy that is so corrosive within a sangha. Or within a partnership — one woman told me that her marriage was failing because her husband blamed her for her relationship with a teacher. Also, when a teacher sleeps with a woman and then transmits to her, it puts her credentials in doubt. “Horizontal transmission” it’s jokingly called. If women are to have a respected place as teachers of Zen, this behavior has to stop.

The experiences you described so vividly in your letter struck me and many others to the heart. This is exactly why the Zen teachers acted, so that wives, husbands, children, and students don’t have to experience the kind of suffering you described. And so that your father’s legacy, his wife, you and your brother and sister, and his many Zen descendants, can continue to bring benefit to the world.

I am very sorry for any suffering my role in these events caused in yours or your family’s life. In an earlier letter you asked me how I could have behaved in this way? What have I done about it? I will give you the simplest answers first. Then some longer explanations.

I took my own role in the events at ZCLA very seriously.

I did specifically focused therapy.

I did specific repentance work.

I realized that the best form of repentance was to change my behavior — for good.

I educated myself about clergy misconduct.

My husband and I emphasize the importance of the precepts in their literal form in our Zen teaching.

We have helped other Buddhist groups that requested assistance with issues of ethics and misconduct by teachers.

I have never had an inappropriate relationship with a student, nor has my husband.

I have been in a faithful marriage for 27 years.

Here are the longer explanations.

I left ZCLA in 1984 with the feeling, “If this is an example of what we have been touting as enlightened behavior (and I include my own), I want no part of it. “ For several years I did not practice Zen. I explored other religions. I got a job and spent more time with my children. I met many people who had never heard of Zen or who had no religion at all, who were kinder and wiser than we had been. Gradually I began to sit again, and rediscovered the purpose and power of practice. I felt renewed gratitude to your father for the invaluable gift of dharma that he had given us all.

I decided to educate myself about what can go wrong in spiritual communities, and I did a lot of reading, for example, about the Rajneesh group – which was then making headlines for all kinds of misconduct – and other communities. From that study I concluded that early warning signs that a group is headed for trouble are these.

1. over-adulation of the teacher
2. too much power residing in the teacher, with lots of “yes” men and women, and no checks and balances
3. believing that the ends justify the means (as in having healthy young people go on welfare at ZCLA so they could be on “staff”)
4. talking about us “inside” who know the truth and the “outside world” who do not
5. resultant loss of outside perspective
6. lack of clear ethical guidelines, maintained first and foremost by the teachers
7. resultant misuse of power – monetary, sexual, etc.
8. secrecy
9. manipulation, intimidation, coercion or threats



I also studied clergy misconduct. I read books such as Sex in the Forbidden Zone: Why Men in Power – Therapists, Doctors, Clergy, Teachers and Others – Betray Women’s Trust by Dr. Peter Rutter, and Is Nothing Sacred?: The Story of a Pastor, the Women He Sexually Abused, and the Congregation He Nearly Destroyed by Dr. Marie Fortune. I invited Dr. Rutter to give a presentation at a White Plum meeting in Palm Desert.

My husband Hogen and I took a professional workshop on clergy misconduct sponsored by the Alban Institute and Faithtrust Institute. We have since been invited to give this training at Buddhist teachers’ conferences and at the invitation of Buddhist groups in crisis. I’ve learned a lot by talking to many survivors of abuse by Buddhist clergy. Their stories are poignant, their wounds long-lasting.

I learned that often, in the chaos of an acute crisis, the wife of the offending teacher gets pushed aside. As I read your letter, I realized that nothing has been written about the suffering of the children. I’m glad you have begun our education about how children in the community are traumatized, too. (I had assumed, wrongly it seems, that when your father went into recovery and your parents reunited and moved out of LA to Idyllwild, that you had eleven years of good family life before your father’s untimely death in 1995.)

There is even more to her letter, but I have offered the bulk of it because it's just so powerful. Personally, the last paragraph rings painfully true. I've seen it in my own sangha, where what happened continues to impact both our former teacher's ex-wife and his children, still part of our community, years later.

Kirsten Maezumi's response is also illuminating, and shows that one point I made in the post yesterday was false.

Dear Chozen,

I was so happy to talk with you the other day and I appreciate the candid way you answered my frank questions.

Honestly the most helpful insight I got out of our illuminating conversation, is the one into the nature of the affair you had with my father as you say, ” It was mostly an affair of the heart, taking intimately about dharma and translating Dogen Zenji.”

That you didn’t feel her victimized you, or that your vulnerability was preyed upon, or that sex was the only reason for the affair.
I think that is important… NOT that it makes it right, or appropriate, but that it was not, in its nature, an abuse of power.

It was a love of the dharma.

I think this could be the case in many of the consensual affairs that happen in sanghas between teacher and students.
Again, NOT that it makes it right at all! ; it is just another shade of grey in the black and white of right and wrong…and of being human.

It makes the line so much more complicated.
That there are other reasons than abuse of power, desire of position, lust or addiction, that cause these lines to be crossed.
How will these be judged?

I am saddened that many responses seemed to think that I thought forgiveness was all that was asked of us in this situation concerning Genpo Roshi.

I was just a shocked and devastated as his family and the Kanzeon sangha, and absolutely something should and is being done.

I was also very happy to hear about your “reformation”, spiritual re-awakening, and the work you are doing at your Zen Center with your husband.
And although it is healing to hear, what compelled me to write my letter, was not a personal attack on you.

It was the fact that I knew no one who was involved in this investigation who was not at one time directly involved in a similar situation. I am not saying they do not exist, just that I don’t know a single one.
And yes, times change, thank god! but could there be something else at play?

Jealousy? Fear? Resentment? Guilt?
Or like a reformed smoker, more sensitive and intolerant to smoke?

It is just such an ironic, dark corner to shine light into.
I am sorry it was seen as a bitter attack on the messenger.

I cannot blame you for my fathers drunken bad behavior, or many affairs, which were the cause of mother to taking us and leaving, but the affair between you and my father stands out in my mind because of the close personal ties you had with our family and the length of the relationship.

I honestly don’t know that names of anyone else.

The point I was doing my best to make was, if my father had been removed from any position of teaching from that time on, indefinitely, and you stripped of your titles as well, even the Inca received from Genpo Roshi, that would not have been justice either.

I am also very happy that you addressed the fact that many of the women that have affairs with teachers also receive transmission.
This is of course a VERY VERY dubious, irresponsible and almost always hurtful way to establish a link in a lineage, but coming back to what you described as the “heart connection” you shared with my father, it may be one of the reasons.
I of course have no answers, its just knowing some of the “victims” myself, well, they don’t seem like victims at all.

It is great that you outline your own reformation for others to consider.
And your safeguards for your delusion and rationalizations. :)
We all need that, and I think that is the role of the Sangha in its truest sense.

I know, with all my heart, that when a person is ready to accept responsibility for their behavior, and have seen where their ego and self will take them, they can change.
Most of the time it seems to take a rock bottom to have this opportunity.

I wish we could have had this conversation years ago; its true as Al Rappaport said in the sweeping zen thread, “Maezumi is dead and gone”, yet this karmic knot is something we are left with to unravel.

I appreciate Kirsten's nuanced view of all of this. (Please go and read the rest of her response here). Even though I have written quite fiercely about the need for teachers to be held accountable, as well as the ways group dynamics reinforce destructive behavior, I agree with Kirsten that seeing all of this in a totally black and white way doesn't aid us in finding the skillful means necessary to develop and maintain healthy spiritual communities.

Beyond this, I'm kind of in awe right now at how the public discussions and offering of letters like these are leading people to do the work of untangling old karmic knots. That Buddhist blogs are offering sites where people might spring board into healing and reconciliation from. Pretty amazing. May it continue to be so.

Zen, Rats, and Landmines

After all this discussion about American Zen scandals, and whether there is a need for institutional oversight or not, I offer the following post excerpt from the Buddhist Geeks website:

The dojo of Morogoro

Africa. Is it possible to make a Soto Zen sangha flourish in a small rural town in Eastern Africa? Apparently, it is. This article describes the dojo of Morogoro town, in rural Tanzania, but also explores my feelings of amazement when I visited it. For years, I have asked myself how to reconcile the need to attend the sangha back home, in Europe, with my deep passion to work in developing countries as a humanitarian nutritionist.

In February this year, during a sesshin in Spain, I asked my Zen Master Roland Yuno: “…I have lived for many years in developing countries and I have realized that my practice has become stiff, lonely and sometimes sterile because of the absence of a sangha. Soon I will go back home to Kenya and I do not know what I should do really”. The Master, in the most direct and easy way ever, popped up the solution I had been seeking for years (and I never dared to ask): “Well, my Belgian disciple lives in Tanzania (neighboring Kenya!). He also works in humanitarian activities, and has set up a sangha. He is an ordained monk. Why not get in touch with him?”

A few months later, I started my two-day journey from Nairobi to Morogoro, a pleasant small town in a green hilly region of inland Tanzania. An appointment was previously arranged with the responsible of the only Soto Zen sangha existing in this part of this huge continent.

It's totally fascinating to me how Soto Zen, a school of Buddhism slowly disappearing in it's native Japan, has been popping up on nearly every other continent in the world, often in places you wouldn't imagine it to do so. Anchorage, Alaska, Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Morogoro, Tanzania, just to name three locales, are all home to Soto Zen temples. Pretty wild, don't you think?

In February, I did a post on Buddhism in South Africa. Like that post, I do think there are some potentially challenging issues around race and class that could be present in the post quoted from above. The author himself points to this when he says the following:

I met with one of the Tanzanian guys, Francis, nineteen years of age and studying to become a tourist operator. He answered with a question to my question about the reason why he practiced Zen: “Why do all you wazungu (white men in Kiswahili) keep on asking me why I practice? A German guy visiting us here asked the same thing a few months ago. Zen helps me. That is it”. Thanks Francis, good lesson you gave me.

It's excellent that this white European guy was able to take a quick race lesson from a Tanzanian teenager, but it does make me wonder what will happen when black African Soto Zen practitioners become "seasoned" enough to be teachers and sangha leaders? Will their white European teachers be as generous and supportive as many of the Asian immigrant teachers were, and continue to be, to their primarily white American students?

The author's sincerity and excitement about Zen practice in both Tanzania, and in Kenya, where he now lives, is infectious. And clearly there are people coming to practice. I will be interested to see what happens over the coming years, if Soto Zen will be a point of convergence for a multiracial, shared-leadership kind of practice, or if it will become yet another battleground of race and class.

Many bows to the experiment. May it continue to go well.

*photo is of Alfredo Adamo, a member of a team working with trained rats to rid Tanzania of unexploded landmines. The Zen teacher leading the temple there, Bart Weetjens, wrote the following paper about the project. Zen, rats, and landmines are a combination almost beyond the imagination, yet there it is, in real life.

Developing Patience with Communal Samsara

Maybe this post won't interest too many people, but I have a little extra time, so I'm going to write it.

The post I wrote this morning about the Treeleaf online community, and the tussle they recently had with one of their members, wasn't one of my better ones. I didn't want to take a firm stand for or against the leaders of Treeleaf, who decided to eject the member in the middle of the tussle, because I really don't know what to think of the situation. It raised a lot of questions for me about online Buddhist practice, and communities - many of which don't have clear answers. So, I wrote the post this morning without a lot of clarity, and failed to make it clear that I wasn't sure what I felt would be the best approach in dealing with challenging behavior in an online setting.

To be honest, what most interests me about the situation is how everyone, including the teachers involved, struggled to work online with the messiness of the various narratives playing out within their community. I saw similar strugglings in my own sangha several years ago, during a major upheaval. And I've seen them at my workplace, in my family, and most everywhere at different times.

Working with communal samsara is tough, sometimes brutal. And even people with great wisdom don't know how to proceed all the time, or maintain the peace. There isn't always clarity available when circumstances arise, and action is called for. You have to do the best with where you are at, and who you are with.

I'm interested in this lack of clarity because I've been experiencing a lot of it in my own life lately. What I have found in my own experience is that not being clear can manifest in many different ways. You can become mousy and subservient, afraid to say or do anything. You can become loud and defensive, feeling like everyone is against you. You can become pious, thinking that if you act the "right way," maybe you will find the way out of the mud. And you might even become nihilistic, saying fuck it to everything because hanging in the murkiness for a long time is just too challenging.

One of the things I've seen online over the time I have been active on here is that there isn't a lot of tolerance for this kind of muddiness. The various kinds of "acting out" that occur in peoples' writings tend to be responded to with another form of acting out. Not always, but pretty often. People struggle to be kind and generous when others are acting out, myself included, which is why I think it's too much to simply slam Treeleaf and call it a day.

This post feels a little clearer then the last one. Maybe some of you would rather I shut up until I knew what I was talking about.

But that is precisely my point. If there is no place in sangha - online or "brick and mortar" - for struggling, confusion, and messiness, then what's the point? If the teachers must always be beacons of wisdom and excellent action, and the students always good and righteous followers, then why bother having a community at all?

"Twilight Zone of Buddhism"

There's a thoughtful post over at the blog The Dojin Roku addressing some of the many ways people get attached to the forms, rituals, and ceremonies of Buddhist practice. It's an interesting issue that brings up all sorts of madness. Some people want to be rid of all that stuff and just meditate together. Others want to be "perfect" at every form, and can't stand the "sloppiness" that comes with entire sanghas full of people doing the forms and rituals together. Still others are attached to debating the merits or lack there of when it comes to such things as zendo etiquette or oryoki meals during meditation retreats.

However, the thing that struck me most about the post didn't really have to do these issues. Or, more precisely, the stuckness around these issues brought up another set of issues for me. Yesterday, I posted this link to a guest post over at Sweep the Dirt Push the Dust. One of the things Andrea, the author of the post, wrote about was the lack of a sense of welcoming she felt amongst Buddhist communities in the U.S.

She was speaking particularly as a woman of color, but I know that this issue exists to some degree regardless of a person's background. Despite its arrival in pop culture, actual Buddhist centers and temples are still foreign territory for most Americans. People have all kinds of crazy ideas about what we Buddhists are doing, and why. And those who actually are curious and want to experience a Buddhist service, or learn about meditation, often have to make a leap into the unknown. Some will argue this is a good thing. A real taste of the practice if there ever was one, and I partly agree. And yet, if this leap is followed by anything less than kindness and openness to the mixture of curiosity, anxiety, and confusion many people have coming into a Buddhist community for the first time, then what you get is a lot of one time visitors who never return.

So, what struck me about the Dojin Roku post was the following:

I remember when I decided to return to practicing Zen beyond just zazen, I searched for a sangha in my local community and found a Zen center. I was thrilled and contacted them right away. I was informed I would need to attend a mandatory class before I would be able to attend and sit with the group. Thinking that was for people unfamiliar with zazen, I let them know I had been practicing meditation for a minimum of 20 years. “It doesn’t matter. You have to come to the class, and we aren’t doing another class for a couple of months.” I wondered what could be so incredibly critical about sitting as to require such deep instruction. Had I crossed into the Twilight Zone of Buddhism? I wondered. Through the years I have heard similar stories from many frustrated zenners. “I was so panicked about making sure I was doing everything just right that I couldn’t meditate!”

I've heard stories like this about other centers across the country. They are, in my opinion, extreme examples, but they cause me to pause every time I hear them.

My own sangha has made many efforts around manifesting welcome-ness. We have greeters at the door during all services and events. We have introduction sessions that are open to all, but not required of all who walk in the door. We offer beginning level classes on a regular basis to support the budding practices of newer members and others in the community. And we have been more recently expanding the social element of community through all sangha events like camping weekends, and through individual members kindly opening their homes to have others over for meditation and socializing. I'm sure we could come up with other ways to enhance what we're already doing, but it's a far cry from the exclusiveness that the Zen center mentioned above seems to display.

In my opinion, having places that are open and welcoming to all are vital to developing a lively lay Buddhist community, which is what most of us will be a part of for better or worse. There just aren't that many people who can, or will, become monastics, and you have to have a thriving lay community to support the monastics anyway.

So, this is our work as I see it, to be more open and welcoming in whatever ways we can. Cause the Twilight Zone might have been fun to watch on TV, but I doubt many of us actually would want to go and spend any time in a place like that.

"This Trans Formative Shit Called Zen"

John's blog, Sweep the Dust, Push the Dirt has been home to some interesting guest posts. (The idea of having people guest post is also a nice way to keep your blog running when you don't have much new to say.) I wanted to share today's guest post because it was enjoyable, and a different perspective on Zen.

Here's a juicy snippet to get you started:

Typically, when Black folks have problems, we don’t sit and we don’t go to therapy. Some drink, some use drugs, some sit around hating the world. But we almost always end up in church. We’ve learned generation after generation to look up, not in. The church is like going home after a long vacation. My momma, her mamma, their grand mamma and all them, go to church. Everybody knows and it doesn’t have to be explained. And if your next question is ‘knows what?”, that is exactly my point. People who look like you, care about you, and sometimes gossip about you, welcome you with open arms. This home away from home is usually in the middle of a neighborhood that people move out of as soon as they can. They are not just in the neighborhood, they are a part of it. From feeding the hungry to neighborhood legal clinics.

I’ve yet to come across a “help the local community,” “grassroots” type of activity organized by Buddhist. I am unaware of any Zen centers in a neighborhood where I can guarantee there is a church. So how exactly are my fellow sufferers with no money, nothing but problems and no inkling of the world outside of their own neighborhood going to discover this trans formative shit called Zen?

Enjoy!

All Things Carrying Out Buddha Work

Our sangha took over a pair of campsites at one of our state parks this weekend, and my girlfriend, her children, and I made it down for the day today. What a great time! I'd recommend it for any sangha interested in enjoying life together outside the zendo.

We did meditation around campfire pit. Our teacher gave a dharma talk on a piece of a Dogen fascicle. A large group of us did a walking meditation along one of the park trails. The children and some of the adults played games in a field. We all ate lunch together, and then some of us hiked down to the river to take a dip, and have fun in the sand.

There was nothing extraordinary about any of this. Nor really ordinary. Birds squawking in the trees; mosquitoes biting, being murdered one by one. Even though the trillium blossoms had faded, and the wild strawberries hadn't ripened yet, everything was just as it should be. Even the rain that drove most of us out around 3 o'clock, that too, felt just right.

Here is a snippet of the snippet of Dogen (from Bendowa) we studied this morning:

At this time, because earth, grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles, all things in the dharma realm in ten directions, carry out buddha work, therefore everyone receives the benefit of wind and water movement caused by this functioning, and all are imperceptibly helped by the wondrous and incomprehensible influence of buddha to actualize the enlightenment at hand.

Some minutes of our meditation period, I was visited by flies, mosquitoes, and a few ants. There was squirming, thoughts of "how can I get rid of them?," and movement from my legs. A few hours later, the hiking group took a wrong turn and ended up on a narrow path, almost tropical looking with it's huge ferns, bent over trees, and mushy river bank soil. It was already humid, and the insects were out in full force. And yet, somehow, it was simply joyous to go on, not knowing for sure if we were on the right path or if we would get there. Bodies of water frequently do this for me, through me, through the water, each breath buoyed by the continuous movement.

This continuous movement is so easy to forget, to miss, even to deny, in the middle of our busying that we do. How strange it is to think that doing too much, being too busy, actually blurs out the continuous movement of the world. But it does, don't you think? We get fixated on gross actions and miss the subtle. Get fixated on tomorrow's work, and miss the slow wearing away of stones. Get fixated on the poke of a mosquito, and miss the coming rain.

And yet "all things in the dharma realm in ten directions, carry out buddha work," even our fixations, if we'd only let them do so. Everything is your sangha. That's one of the blessings of spending time in sangha - that you can begin to see the truth of this for yourself.