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From: david@star2.cm.utexas.edu (David Sigeti)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Zen Buddhism (Is a teacher necessary?)
Message-ID: <1990Nov27.004141.426@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 27 Nov 90 00:41:41 GMT
References: <1990Nov20.033319.15098@nas.nasa.gov>
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In article <1990Nov20.033319.15098@nas.nasa.gov> 
unx.sas.com!sascmc@mcnc.org (Chris Conn) writes:

   I'd like to ask these questions to those of you that are 
   interested or involved in Zen Buddhism:

      Do you think a teacher is really necessary to practise Zen?
      Does a person have to be involved with a teacher or a group in order
	 to consider themselves a Zen Buddhist?

As someone who practiced zazen (Zen meditation) for several years
without a teacher, I would like to encourage you to take up the
practice of Zen on your own if you feel drawn to it.  One can
certainly be a Zen Buddhist without a teacher or a group but I doubt
very much that one can be a Zen Buddhist without doing some fairly
serious zazen.

If you *are* going to do it without a teacher, however, you need some
good alternative sources for instruction.  I thought that I would
provide a few words of advice based on my own experience and then
discuss some books that I have found to be helpful.  I am posting my
comments to the net (rather than sending you e-mail) because there may
be others who would be interested in some of my suggestions for
reading and because it gives anyone who spots a major omission or
screw-up on my part a chance to save me from my own stupidity.

Rather than starting out on a koan right away, I would strongly advise
you to start by practicing mindfulness of the breathing---specifi-
cally, by counting the breath.  Virtually all schools of Buddhism that
still practice meditation start out with mindfulness of the breathing.
In fact, this practice and the way in which it is approached are one
of the principal factors uniting the otherwise very disparate schools
of Buddhism.

I practiced various forms of mindfulness of the breathing for several
years before I took up a koan and I think that I probably got more out
of it than anything else in Zen.  I know that it did a lot to make me
a better listener.  By giving me a better understanding of my own
mind, it helped me toward greater understanding and sympathy for the
actions and motivations of others.  The way one encounters the
activities and limitations of one's own mind in this practice can be a
real eye-opener and it can do a lot to make the teachings of Buddhism
and Zen more comprehensible.  At the same time, the sustained practice
of "bare attention" can be very helpful in dealing with all sorts of
problems of everyday life, both large and small.

Since this practice is the starting point in virtually all the
Buddhist meditative traditions, one can find good written guides
coming from a number of schools.

At first, I used "The Three Pillars of Zen", by Phillip Kapleau.  The
relevant material here is Yasutani-roshi's introductory lectures on
zazen.  A similar set of lectures (inspired by and derived from
Yasutani's) is found in "Taking the Path of Zen" by Robert Aitken.
This is good beginners' stuff in the Zen tradition.  Both books are
very specific, with good advice on matters like posture, frequency and
duration of sitting, physical pain, etc.  In fact, in the case of
Kapleau's book, it may even be a little too focused on the details of
physical posture, breathing, and where in one's body one should place
one's attention.  Some of the books mentioned below should provide an
antidote to this.  Another problem that I find with both books is that
they show a certain ignorance of basic Buddhist principles and
philosophy that leads to some misinterpretation of various Zen and
general Mahayana teachings.

In light of this, I would recommend some books on practice coming from
other traditions.  From another school of Zen is "Zen Mind, Beginner's
Mind", by Shunryu Suzuki.  Everyone loves this book, and for good
reason.  It really captures a lot of the spirit of mindfulness
meditation in a very deep way.  I would regard it as absolutely
essential for a beginning student working on her own.

The Theravadin (Hinayana) Buddhists have also produced some good
introductions to meditation.  I found "The Heart of Buddhist
Meditation", by Nyanaponika Thera to be very helpful in relating
meditative practice to Buddhist teachings generally.  The book
includes a translation of "The Setting-Up of Mindfulness".  This is
the central Buddhist text on meditation and almost certainly a genuine
sutra of Shakyamuni.  There are some creepy parts here (like the
meditation on the corpse) but over all it is phenomenal how well this
sermon speaks to modern meditators across a gap of ~2500 years.

A book by an American trained in the Theravadin tradition is "The
Experience of Insight" by Joseph Goldstein.  This is a collection of
lectures that Goldstein gave while leading a month-long meditation
retreat so it is entirely practice oriented.  This might be the best
practical introduction to mindfulness meditation in the Theravadin
tradition. 

Thich Nhat Hanh is a remarkable Vietnamese monk who was a leader of
the Buddhist peace movement in Vietnam before the Communist victory in
1975 and is now a leader of the Vietnamese community in exile in
Europe and the United States.  He wrote a little book called "The
Miracle of Mindfulness" for his friends in the peace movement in the
United States because he felt that they suffered from a lack of the
spiritual resources necessary for sustained political work for peace.
You can read it in an hour and get all the basic ideas necessary for
beginning Buddhist meditation.

I don't want to imply that mindfulness of the breathing is the be-all
and end-all of Buddhist meditation.  Zen in general and koan practice
in particular arose as reactions to problems experienced in earlier
schools of Buddhism and specifically to problems that tend to show up
at a particular stage of the practice.  I don't want to get into this
in detail (mostly because I don't have it well sorted out in my own
mind) but you may find that, after a fair amount of practice with
mindfulness of the breathing, you really feel a need to move to koan
practice.  For me, this happened after maybe three or four years of
practice.

Don't do it lightly.  In general, it is not a good idea to bat around
too much with the practice.  Find a practice and stick with it for a
while.  Moreover, moving to koan practice is complicated by the fact
that doing this kind of meditation without a teacher is a much more
iffy proposition than practicing mindfulness of the breathing.  In my
case, I worked on a koan on my own for the better part of a year and
then developed a very informal and occasional relationship with a
teacher, Albert Low (a former student of Philip Kapleau's who now
teaches at the Montreal Zen Center).  In hindsight, I realize that
this relationship, occasional and informal as it has been, has been
vitally important for the koan work that I have done.  I take sole
responsibility for what I am about to say about working on a koan on
one's own but you might want to know that some of it comes from my own
experience and some from conversations with Albert.

There are some koans that are fairly well suited to work without a
teacher and some that probably are not.  The most frequently assigned
koan is Joshu's Mu, probably better translated as "No!".  "No!" is
probably not a good koan to work on without a teacher.  Two better
candidates are "Who am I?" and "What is it?" (or "What is this?").  

In "The Three Pillars of Zen" there is a dharma talk and a collection
of letters by Bassui, a medieval Japanese teacher who always taught
with the koan "Who is the master?".  This is just a more focused
version of "Who am I?".  I strongly recommend that you read this
material if you are contemplating taking up this koan (or any other)
on your own.

The book that convinced me to take up a koan (by giving me a sense of
how one actually goes about working on one) is "The Way of Korean Zen"
by Kusan Sonsa.  This contains some excellent basic advice on how to
work on a koan that I have not seen anywhere else.  The book
emphasizes the koan "What is this?" but I recommend it as highly as
Bassui's writings no matter what koan you might choose.

Finally, I recommend Albert Low's book "The Iron Cow of Zen".  This
does not contain advice on how to work on a koan but I think that it
is a good first attempt at explaining to modern people the *human*
meaning of a number of the classic koans.  Each one is an intense
human drama pointing to a basic dilemma or contradiction in human
existence.  Really getting to the root of the contradiction (as
opposed to just understanding it intellectually) is essential to
"solving" the koan.

That's about all that I can say about koan practice except to repeat
that you should not take it up lightly and not, I think, without a
solid body of experience with mindfulness of the breathing.  You
probably also need a good understanding of basic Buddhist principles
if you are going to try koan practice on your own.

Once again, I want to encourage you to take up zazen if you feel drawn
to it.  Tens of millions of women and men have started down this road
over the last 2500 years and, although some may seem to have traveled
farther than others, we are all really beginners in the practice.  The
Zen Buddhists say that even Shakyamuni Buddha is still practicing, and
he is only half-way there.

Gassho!
--
David Sigeti    david@star2.cm.utexas.edu    cmhl265@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu