One Time, One Meeting

In the summer of 1965, shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I booked passage from London to New York on the Castel Felice, a storied old Sitmar liner with rock-bottom fares. For the previous nine months I had been an American student at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, England. Now I was coming home.

Midway through the ten-day voyage, something quietly momentous occurred. Winston Churchill once remarked that America and England are two nations separated by a common language. And during my time in England, although I shared a common tongue with my British hosts, I seldom forgot that I was a foreigner: a guest, as it were, of the British nation. But somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, I began to feel myself on native ground again. I began to feel like a host. And the British subjects on board, with whom I had many conversations about American culture, began to feel like my guests. Although it was never openly acknowledged, this reversal of roles could be felt in our language, our attitudes, even our demeanor. And the closer we came to the Statue of Liberty, the stronger the feeling grew.

Something analogous has been happening in American Zen. Recently Shohaku Okumura Roshi, an esteemed Zen master and abbot of the Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana, abandoned the lotus position, the traditional, cross-legged posture of Japanese Zen. He now sits in a chair. Likewise Susan Moon, an American writer and longtime Zen practitioner, has traded her traditional zafu (meditation cushion) for a straight-backed chair. In both instances, these decisions were driven by physical considerations. But in their broader cultural import, they might well be seen as symbolic.

For the past fifty years, American Zen has played guest to its foreign host, whose postures, forms, language, and liturgy it has struggled mightily to emulate and adopt. We Western practitioners have worn our hipparis and rakusus, our robes and tabi. We have chanted the Heart Sutra in Sino-Japanese. But slowly and sometimes painfully, American Zen has been coming into its own. Such unconventional practices as sitting zazen in a chair or chanting the sutras in English translation have been introduced in many Zen centers and widely, if sometimes reluctantly, accepted. Such adaptions are now no longer seen, as least by the more liberal-minded proponents of the practice, as concessions to comfort or as inauthentic, Western replicas of the real thing.

Looking back on my own essays on Zen practice, I see that they, too, reflect this tectonic shift. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, to whom I have so often referred, went out of his way in his talks and writings to make the Asian practice of Zen palatable and accessible to interested Westerners. The word Zen was never mentioned; he spoke rather of “mindfulness” and the “energy of mindfulness.” Zazen became “seated meditation,” kinhin became “walking meditation,” and prostrations—that most foreign of Buddhist practices—became “touching the earth.” In this way “Thay,” as we called him, not only repackaged the practice. He also contributed, in no small measure, to its naturalization in the Western Hemisphere.

By and large, most of the leading Western teachers and writers on Zen—Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Roshi Joan Halifax, Charlotte Joko Beck, Edward Espe Brown, Zenkei Blanche Hartman, James Ishmael Ford, to name a few—have done the same. Their teachings and writings are deeply rooted in the traditional Asian teachings, particularly the seminal writings of Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Soto tradition of Japanese Zen. But all of these teachers grew up in the United States and were conditioned by the mores, values, and language of mainstream Western culture. And in their talks and writings, they too have made an effort not only to translate the teachings into Western terms but to make this ennobling practice relevant and understandable to people living in our present place and time. Such terms as “ordinary Zen” and “everyday Zen” reinforce the image of a practice that originated in the East but has found a home and a nurturing environment in Western society.

To be sure, not every Zen practitioner is comfortable with this development. Those who assert that the full lotus is the only truly authentic Zen posture are unlikely to be at ease in such venues as the Ordinary Zen Sangha in Sarasota, Florida, which features on its website a photo of airport-style chairs lined up next to a wall on one side of its meditation hall and a row of zafus on tatami mats next to the facing wall. This image of an accommodating cultural change might also be read as a symptom of a deepening cultural divide: the innovators on the one side, the traditionalists on the other. Will that image prove to be a symbol of a broadening, inclusive practice—or a harbinger of a splintering spiritual community?  I for one would hope that a strict and formal Eastern practice whose motto is “include everything” will find ample room for the West and its often informal ways.

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Photo: The zendo of the Ordinary Zen Sangha, Sarasota, Florida. https://ordinaryzensangha.org/.