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“Beautiful Women Dig Graves”: Richard Baker-roshi, Imported Buddhism, and the Transmission of Ethics at the San Francisco Zen Center

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Jason C. Bivins
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Abstract

There is little reckoning with the development of religions in the United States without confronting the related processes of importation and appropriation. This article explores these processes specifically as reflected in the story of the San Francisco Zen Center. Partaking of an interpretative ethos established by the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and refined during the 1950s “Zen boom,” the architects of the SFZC's communalism shaped this complicated tradition specifically for disaffected young practitioners seeking an experiential path beyond their middleclass, Judeo-Christian backgrounds. It was during the 1983 scandals surrounding SFZC leader, Richard Baker-roshi, that many of the interpretive lacunae—specifically, a relative inattention to ethical languages—became readily apparent. This article accounts for these scandals historically (by situating them in the history of American appropriations of Buddhism and of the religious disaffection of the post-World War II period) and theoretically (by reading the SFZC's patterns of transmission and interpretation through the category “interpretative double movement). This double movement among practitioners captures the ways in which those in search of an alternative to their religious culture impose their own idiosyncratic values onto another religious tradition, all the while remaining paradoxically within the interpretive confines of the culture they hope to escape. Reading this complicated history—including both its “scandals” and their aftermaths—through such categories sheds light on the ways in which American religious exchanges are enacted and identities constructed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Winter 2007 , pp. 57 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2007

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References

Notes

I am grateful to my friends and colleagues Richard M. Jaffe and D. Neil Schmid for reading this essay and offering such helpful advice.

1. Quoted in Fields, Rick, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (Boston: Shambala Press, 1992), 230 Google Scholar.

2. In “The Long Learning Curve: An Interview with Richard Baker-roshi,” Connection Magazine (Winter 1994): 34.

3. Studies of Buddhism in North America typically use terms such as “abbot,” which are appropriated from Christian models of classification. I use this terminology here because it is customary in the field and, indeed, is fairly common in the discourse of converts to Buddhism in North America.

4. Downing, Michael, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 2001), xiv Google Scholar. It is worth noting here that Downing's text, while a useful source of information on the SFZC, projects a highly idealized and static version of Japanese Zen. 5. Downing's version of the contrast is between “groovy” and “gravitas.”

6. A useful source for understanding the cultural, as opposed to the merely linguistic, dimension of creolization is Ulf Hannerz, “The World in Creolisation,” Africa 57, no. 4 (1987): 546–59.

7. Prothero, Stephen, “Henry Steel Olcott and ‘Protestant Buddhism,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (Summer 1995): 281–302 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Olcott's role in the globalization of Buddhism, see Obeyesekere, Gananath, “Buddhism,” in Global Religions: An Introduction, ed. Juergensmeyer, Mark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63–77 Google Scholar.

8. The term “double movement” has its origins in Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, but the uses to which I put this term are obviously quite distinct from Kierkegaard’s.

9. As this is not a work of ethnography, I rely on secondary sources to fashion my interpretation of these events. Aside from Downing, there has not been much substantive treatment of the SFZC's history. What little there is can be found in larger histories of American Zen, which are of limited use in focusing on the scandals. It is for this reason that I rely on secondary sources such as news media articles written between the 1980s and 1990s and on Downing's book (which, while admittedly selective and impressionistic as a history of the institution, usefully devotes considerable space to the voices of practitioners themselves). My claim, then, is not to represent the attitudes and the voices of all students at the SFZC during the relevant period; even if this were possible, which it is not, it would be an unhelpfully totalizing gesture. Rather, my aim is simply to construct one interpretive frame—of necessity a partial one—through which to examine these events, their histories, and their consequences.

10. Jan Nattier, “Visible and Invisible: The Politics of Representation in Buddhist America,” Tricycle 5 (Fall 1995): 43.

11. This may distinguish American double movement from versions of it that occur elsewhere in Zen's history. Indeed, as Downing writes, “For 2,500 years, the Buddhism that filtered into the West was the provenance of scholars, philosophers, curators and collectors, and poets.” Downing, Shoes Outside the Door, 53. As later importations occurred, the idioms of white Buddhism became more populist, but much of the bias and rescripting present in the earliest importations remained.

12. My use of the term “audience” is distinct from that of Stark, Rodney and Bainbridge, William Sims in their The Future of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 Google Scholar). As opposed to the more colloquial usage, Stark and Bainbridge use “audience” as part of a typology of new religious movements. As opposed to a fully developed new religious movement (with rigid structures of belief, authority, and community life) and to a “client cult” (where religious practitioners interact with a religious leader and adhere to identifiable beliefs and practices, but where participation and exit are voluntary), an “audience cult” refers to a loose-knit cluster of beliefs or practices that make few demands on practitioners, instead existing as “services” of which interested “consumers” may avail themselves.

13. My source for this term is Hodder, Alan, “Concord Orientalism, Thoreauvian Autobiography, and the Artist of Kouroo,” in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Capper, Charles and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 190–226Google Scholar. A detailed discussion of this particular predecessor would require another paper altogether. It is worth noting, however, that Emerson and Thoreau specifically responded to what they believed were corrupting or degrading changes in American culture by embracing heavily interpreted versions of Hinduism and Buddhism, seizing upon them as ready-made alternatives to the “mainstream,” vehicles for selfexpression that were free of the “limits” of Western spirituality. Thoreau and Emerson absorbed the idioms of Asian religion only after having previously sutured what they believed to be the meanings of those idioms to their extant critique of American life; they had made up their minds about what they expected to gain from Asian religions from the very start. The result was a fusion of the vocabulary—but not necessarily the ethics or even the ritual practice—of Hinduism and Buddhism with the Transcendentalist obsession with self-expression. This critique was clearly reductive in many ways, focusing on self-expression, the good life, and philosophical wisdom; yet the character of their interpretations and the social uses to which they were put helped establish a pattern for importing Asian religions that is broadly similar to that of the postwar era. See also Ralph Waldo Emerson, , Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990 Google Scholar); Thoreau, Henry David, Walden and Other Writings (New York: Bantam Books, 1981 Google Scholar); and Dahwan, R. K., Henry David Thoreau: A Study in Indian Influence (New Delhi: Classical Publishing Co., 1985 Google Scholar).

14. Hoshino, Eiki, “The Birth of an American Sangha: An Analysis of a Zen Center in America,” in Japanese Religions in California: A Report on Research within and without the Japanese-American Community, ed. Yanagawa, Keiichi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Department of Religious Studies, 1983), 30 Google Scholar. On the role of Shaku and other global Buddhists during this period, see Jaffe, Richard M., “Seeking Sakyamuni: Travel and the Reconstruction of Japanese Buddhism,” Journal of Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 65–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jaffe's essay gives a clear sense of the ways in which cultural constructions and reinterpretations of Zen were taking place in Asia as well as in the United States.

15. Layman, Emma. Buddhism in America (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976), 54 Google Scholar. See also Prebish, Charles S. and Tanaka, Kenneth, eds., The Faces of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 Google Scholar); Prebish, Charles S. and Baumann, Martin, Western Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 Google Scholar); Prebish, Charles S., Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 Google Scholar); Seager, Richard Hughes, Buddhism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000 Google Scholar); and Tweed, Thomas A. and Prothero, Stephen R., Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 Google Scholar). Porterfield, Amanda, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth-Century Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 CrossRefGoogle Scholar), has an informative chapter on Buddhism in post-World War II America.

16. Downing, , Shoes Outside the Door, 25 Google Scholar.

17. While the juxtaposition of Soto and a relative disregard for ethical precepts is helpful in understanding the SFZC's particular history, this juxtaposition cannot explain all such crises in practice at other centers. For example, the Los Angeles Zen Center, which has a mixed Rinzai- Soto lineage, has experienced similar kinds of problems (and, apparently, less thoroughness in responding to them).

18. Nattier, “Visible and Invisible,” 45. Most forms of Japanese Buddhism have attracted the belief that they are amoral religious systems. For example, these kinds of interpretations clustered around Jodo Shin Buddhism in the early twentieth century. Indeed, one could also point to longstanding debates about the role of the precepts (specifically, whether or not they must be followed by one who has achieved awakening) and the relevance of karmic cause and effect that stretch back nearly to the inception of Zen as a distinct tradition. I am indebted to Richard M. Jaffe for this contextual point.

19. See Tweed, Thomas A., The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 Google Scholar).

20. See Sharf, Robert H., “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” History of Religions 33 (August 1993): 1–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. There was a fascination in the 1950s popular culture with the exotic and the horrible. In pulp literature, comic books, motion pictures, and in the ideological imagination as well, the mysterious other (whether in the form of communists from the East, the third world savages encountered by American soldiers in war movies, or the horrible monsters of the atomic era in comic books) enjoyed a marked prominence.

22. Many readers have noted the Buddhist influences on Salinger's novels, particularly Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.

23. Quoted in Miller, James, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 329 Google Scholar.

24. Quoted in Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, 205.

25. Ibid.

26. All Watts citations from ibid., chap. 10.

27. Ibid., 220.

28. Philip Whalen, quoted in ibid., 214.

29. Interestingly enough, these same impulses would surface later in the poststructuralist fascination with Nagarjuna and the concept of emptiness. See, for example, Coward, Harold and Foshay, Tobay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992 Google Scholar).

30. Downing, , Shoes Outside the Door, 247 Google Scholar.

31. Coleman, James William, The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17 Google Scholar.

32. Tipton, Steven M., Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 121 Google Scholar.

33. Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 433 Google Scholar.

34. Quoted in Prebish, Charles, “Two Buddhisms Reconsidered,” Buddhist Studies Review 10, no. 2 (1993): 197 Google Scholar.

35. For a discussion of this cultural break, see Gussner, R. E. and Berkowitz, S. D., “Scholars, Sects, and Sanghas,” Sociological Analysis 49, no. 2 (1988): 165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Quoted in Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, 196. Those familiar with Cage's music will recognize that “chance operations” was but one of many methods the composer used, albeit an extremely significant one for him.

37. Hereafter, the Suzuki referred to in the text is Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, not D. T. Suzuki.

38. Shunryu Suzuki was not the only Japanese immigrant to participate in such processes of transmission. Suzuki was assisted for a time by Dainin Katagiri and Kobun Chino Otagawa-roshi at the SFZC. Additionally, Suzuki had arranged for Tatsugami-roshi, a famously rigorous teacher at Eiheiji in Japan, to lead sessions at Tassajara (students apparently responded poorly to his rigors, both at Tassajara and on visits to Eiheiji). Because of Suzuki's prominence, his writings, and his links to Baker, I have focused primarily on his role in these processes. These teachers and missionaries collectively played a part in shaping the American audience for Zen as well as the distinctive ethical understandings at the SFZC; and they did so over time in exchanges with the young practitioners who eagerly sought out their teachings.

39. Lewis MacAdams and A. Atterbury, “Love Conquers Zen,” California (March 1988): 75.

40. Baker went to the famous Eiheiji Temple on Suzuki's recommendation but, apparently, could not withstand the institution's strict discipline. He walked out of Eiheiji and ended up in Kyoto, where he became involved in the import/export trade and purchased a number of significant artworks with which he later adorned the SFZC, partly to serve as a conversion device for new students and partly to signify the SFZC's authenticity. It is said that Baker asked students, who were given a monthly stipend of $50, to make a contribution to purchasing the art.

41. Downing, , Shoes Outside the Door, xix, 107 Google Scholar.

42. Ibid., 128.

43. Ibid., 174.

44. Ibid., 129.

45. Ibid., 147.

46. Ibid., 102. Many practitioners later reported, however, that even the reinterpreted Precepts were widely flouted at SFZC. See ibid., 166ff.

47. Ibid., xi. 48. On this point, see Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties, 109.

49. It is widely thought that Tipton's “Pacific Zen Center” is not as much an aggregate, as he suggests, but is really the SFZC.

50. Tipton, , Getting Saved from the Sixties, 138 Google Scholar.

51. Ibid., 114.

52. Ibid., 110.

53. Ibid., 116.

54. Ibid., 137.

55. It seems worth mentioning that the Zen center is located on Page Street in a somewhat downtrodden section of San Francisco, where the realities of political and economic disenfranchisement are evident.

56. Tipton, , Getting Saved from the Sixties, 170 Google Scholar.

57. Quoted in Downing, , Shoes Outside the Door, 215 Google Scholar.

58. Ibid., 34.

59. This material is available from numerous sources, but I draw mostly from MacAdams and Atterbury, “Love Conquers Zen.”

60. Butler, Katy, “Events Are the Teacher,” CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1983): 117 Google Scholar.

61. In MacAdams and Atterbury, “Love Conquers Zen,” 80.

62. Serious attention to this issue would warrant its own essay. Yet I discuss it here, however briefly, as another important lacuna in the SFZC's importation of Buddhism. Important to my understanding of this issue has been Boucher, Sandy, Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993 Google Scholar).

63. Butler, “Events Are the Teachers,” 116.

64. Boucher, , Turning the Wheel, 247 Google Scholar.

65. Ibid., 250.

66. Downing, Shoes Outside the Door, 97. Italics in original.

67. Boucher, , Turning the Wheel, 254 Google Scholar.

68. See Coleman, , New Buddhism, 87 Google Scholar.

69. Ethical Principles and Grievance Procedures (San Francisco Zen Center, 1996).

70. Ibid., 1.

71. Both from ibid., 2.

72. Ibid., 4.

73. Ibid., 6–7.

74. Ibid., 8. Interestingly, the February 1995 draft of the statement also includes the students’ right to information about community decisions. In the final version of the statement, however, there is more emphasis on the confidentiality bounding certain conversations among teachers and practice leaders. Further, the injunction to see “each Sangha member, regardless of seniority or level of commitment, as Buddha” has been replaced by the recommendation that consultations are “done in a sensitive, fair and respectful manner.” I leave it to the reader to make conclusions as to the significance of these alterations.

75. All citations are from www.sfzc.org.

76. Above material from Ethical Principles, 15–25.

77. Fields, , How the Swans Came to the Lake, 367 Google Scholar.