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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3579 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 5, 2023

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Watts' The Way of Zen. Also reading some essays on here critical of Zen. I'm a bit surprised at how recent the discussion is. For some reason I thought that all the robe-wearing men had their sex scandals long ago. It does appear that it was talked about in the 70s, though few consequences came from it.

Just started Masters and Mages by Miles Cameron. Excellent so far, seems a pretty standard high fantasy trilogy.

His other series, The Traitor Son Cycle, is a breathtaking masterpiece of high fantasy that even manages to be relatively historically accurate. If anyone is looking for a new fantasy series I’d highly recommend it.

Following Scott's recommendation, I'm about a quarter of the way through Samuel Shem's The House of God. The comparisons to Catch-22 are apt, although so far I don't find it quite as satirical/farcical as that book, and a lot of it feels more like straight memoir than magical realism. It's interesting that I'm not a big TV person, and tend to watch the same handful of TV shows over and over again (mostly shows I first watched when I was in secondary school), one of which is Scrubs. I was dimly aware that Scrubs was partly inspired by The House of God, but having read a chunk of it, Scrubs might be better thought of as an unofficial adaptation.

Just reading the summaries on that page, almost all of them seem to be some form of "Zen practitioner did a bad thing". To me, that's not the same as being critical of Zen.

  • "Bell briefly outlines two well-known scandals that have hit two Buddhist centers"
  • "the Sõtõ Zen school has become embroiled in controversies over traditional institutional practices that foster prejudicial attitudes and social discrimination."
  • "this article explores how Eido Shimano, abbot of the New York baseed Zen Studies Society, has been accused of sexual misadventures for over 30 years"
  • "Victoria explores the question '...what is the relationship, if any, of the Buddhadharma with nationalism? ' "

.. and so on. Naively, I would expect criticism to be more like "Zen teachings are incorrect because <indecipherable jargon re: the Way>", or perhaps, "study finds students struck in the face by Zen Masters achieve enlightenment no better than chance", or similar.

In the few I've read there's a fair amount of what I would call "essentialist" views, which argue that the scandals were in some ways directly related to the teachings of Zen. For example, one monk in particular reportedly claimed that since the incident took place in a private room, whether she says he touched her, or he says that she took his hand and made him touch her, are both just subjective views, and the paper (Zen Has No Morals) argued that this was encouraged by the Zen framework.

I'm typically skeptical of essentialist arguments related to bad behaviour, because religion is often just incomprehensibly crazy, but there it is.

Others have argued that Western Zen in particular has some unique issues in D. T. Suzuki's influence (something about far right sympathies), and of course there's talk about Zen during WWII. Another made an interesting claim that Western Zen has a debt to a non-mainstream form of Zen (Sanbokyodan) which did not have a proportional strength in Japan, though I haven't read far enough to know if this is considered a bad thing or just something that muddies the scholarship. The use of the term "new religion" which is often related to "cults" might set the tone, or it might not.

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