Susan's Place Transgender Resources

This came up elsewhere,
so I wanted to put it here and elaborate more.

Every so often, I see people use the word "zen" without I think fully understanding it's true meaning.
This wouldn't be so bad, as lots of words get misunderstood and confused, however, since I have at least one good freind who this bothers, and know of it bothering others, I will post it here to clarify any confusion.

There is a lot of sort of confusing use of the word "Zen" out there and I wanted to clarify the difference.
They put it on cereal boxes, on bank advertisements, on furnature re-aranging stuff.
All kinds of things.

For the most part, none of these things have anything to do with Zen Buddhism.


Zen, is a actually a Japanese word that means 'meditation', specifically seated meditation and it refers to the schools of Buddhism that practice seated meditation.
It comes from the Chinese word "Ch'an" which means the same, which is, itself a derrivaive of the word "Dhyana" from Sanscrit. Also the same meaning
It does not mean visualization or concentration of some vague sense of freedom.
It means "meditation".

It's not realy somthing that's a problem, but I do want to clarify as this is somthing I care about and I know it bothers some people.

Thanks!

Sara

I'm kind shocked, I've never hear "zen" out side of the meaning 'meditation', I mean I know about the mp3 player but I never took much in it, guess it was just a name. I do know what you mean about culture destroying meaning and causing cloud of confusion. I'm more of a Taoist and it gets to me when people call the(famous) Taijitu, "Yin and Yang". 

From now on I'll keep my ears open for misuse and try to correct when I can.

 :D
LOL,
There's a cereal(like for breakfast), an oatmeal, an mp3 player, an alarm clock, a score of "and the art of.."books...
I saw an ad once for US Bank that said "Bu-Zen-ness" with the legs of a guy in a business suit, crossed in yoga style with hem floating off the ground.
There (was) as soda (I don't know if there still is).

I get a kick out of it sometimes.
It doesn't realy bother me,
I do know some people it does annoy though and out of respect for them I would post this here.

Sara

Posted on: February 10, 2008, 08:42:11 PM

---

LOL
I know one monk in particular who would probably realy appreceate it if people would stop doing that. LOL  :D
It doesn't realy bother me personally,
But I do care about my tradition.

Sara

The current misuse of the word "Zen" was started by the Beat Niks in the 50's.
The Beat Niks saw pictures of some monks in China burning scriptures and they took this to mean "disrespect for authority" and "do whatever you want" a consequence free-for-all type of 'freedom' without responsibility.
This is absolutely incorrect and what those Monks were actually doing was demonstrating that Truth is not bound by physical means.

This is simply not true.  Not even close.  Your misreading of the Beat writers is as wrong as what you accuse them of.  Besides, "Beatnik" is one word. 

Do you know of a different version?
That is the one I got from people who study such things.
I wouldn't include all Beatniks (did I get it right?) but yeah, that's the version of the story I got.

Sara

Posted on: February 11, 2008, 11:06:33 AM

---

Don't get me wrong, Tekla, I'm not blaming it on the Beatniks, I 'm just saying it started about that time and that movement did have influence on it.

I don't study such things as Buddhism or Buddhist thought, but I do study American countercultures.

Well, to start with, the Beat Movement was perhaps the last literary avant guard in America, the entire lot of them would fit in your living room.  It was not - as is frequently assumed - some sort of mass movement, that would follow with the hippies (i.e. baby hipsters).  The few, Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac (a very conservative Catholic who described the movement thus: It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty? - that does not sound real zen to me, its sounds, as it is, very Catholic), Neil Cassady (Dean Moriarty), and Gary Snyder.

But, as its one of the few entries that Wiki has right, I will quote from there.

Beatnik is a media stereotype that borrowed the most superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s to present a distorted (and sometimes violent), cartoon-like misrepresentation of the real-life people and the spirituality found in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction.

In "Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation" Kerouac spoke out against this distortion of his ideas:

   The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.

Now they did read some Buddhist thought, again from Wiki: In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of Kerouac's immersion into Buddhism. In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993-95.

He chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in the book The Dharma Bums, set in California and published in 1958.

Wow, they actually went to libraries and read books, perhaps the last group to do so.  It was Gary Snyder - who got real into it, took Graduate Level Asian languages and culture at Berkeley, went to Japan, studied there, and came back to the US to become one of the founders of the environmental/ecology movement.

For him: Independently, a number of the Beats, such as Philip Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them. He, in fact, became a practitioner, spending most of the period between 1956 and 1968 in Japan, studying Zen first at Shokoku-ji and later in the Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto under Oda Sesso, working on translations with Ruth Fuller Sasaki, then finally living for a while with a group of other people on a small, volcanic island. His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition (with its roots in Tang Dynasty China) and enabled him to take on certain professional projects while he was living in Japan.

Snyder decided not to become a monk and planned eventually to return to the United States to 'turn the wheel of the dharma'. He was married from 1960 to 1965 to another American poet, Joanne Kyger, who lived with him in Japan.

During this time, he published a collection of his poems from the early to mid '50s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). (This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s.) Much of Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things.

Ever the participant observer, during his years in Japan Snyder not only immersed himself in Zen practice in monasteries but also was initiated into Shugendo, a form of ancient Japanese animism, (see also Yamabushi).

That does not sound like a misuse at all.  Sounds pretty serious.  It ain't looking at pictures at any rate, its full immersion in the tradition.  He might have got some of it wrong - and does anyone ever get it perfect? - but I don't think they were misusing it.

The hippies, Allen Watts and Ram Dass in particular might have taken bits and pieces from it (as they did with everything) but that is not the fault of the Beats.

Yeah, animism is not Zen.
I think the point of the person I heard was that they didn't get it right.
That seems to be true.
Someone who doesn't stick to the practice is no authority on Zen.
Some of them did establish a practice and later became teachers, that was later though.
at the time , there was a lot of confusion regarding.

They were nice folks, we have a Beat bookstore here in town, but that doesn't mean they got it right with regard to Zen.
There has been a lot of clarification since then as a wealth of knowledge has come into our country since and people have grown more mature.
Whole generations of American and westen disciples have come into thier own.
We now don't have any issue on finding a expert on Zen, there are many.
In the 50's this wasn't the case, and the books available on Zen to even the Beat writers were badly translated often by people with a limited knowledge of the language or what they were talking about.

Now, this isn't the case and accurate translations are everywhere.
And good Teachers are readily available.

At the time though, and seeing as how new and novel it was, the confusion is understandable.
Not a mark on them.

Sara

Without them, there may well be no Zen in America.  And Snyder never proclaimed himself an expert or master, but rather a student.  Big Diff.

And for all the good teachers, and masters, I'm sure there are many bad ones too.

Sure.
This doesn't have anything to do with thier merits.
I was stimply quoting history.
There's nothing wrong with them.
It's simply just the history of what happended.
There's no judgement there.
But people do make mistakes. Sometimes of which must later be corrected with furture knowledge and wisdom.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Or either.
I know many Beats-turned-Buddhists.
What does that have to do with anything?

It was a movement, not a people.

That's my impression anyway.

Sara

I noticed this phenomenon too.  I've seen "Zen" used to describe events or practices that have nothing to do with Zazen meditation or Buddhism.

I generally don't think about such sillyness.  It just disturbs my seated meditations.

Any real "Beat" turned Buddhist would be in their 70s now, or dead, as most of the Beats are.  People 'play' at being Beat the same way that they 'play' Civil War solider.  But doing the SCA knight deal, Renn Fairs, or Civil War reenactments does not make you that.  You could no more be a Beat today than you could be a contemporary of Jane Austin.

I know some old monks Tekla!
They were kids once too!
Great folks!
I love em!

Sara

I saw some "Zen" dishes at Target the other day.  It said so on the package, so they must be zen dishes.  They were kind of pretty actually, they had this nice tint of blue to them and this crackled glaze. 

Maybe I could buy the dishes and serve a "beet" salad on them?  Everyone would have to eat in silence of course, because otherwise that wouldn't be very Zen-like.  Afterwards we could recite haiku, and hit bongos and wear fake goatees (even the women, ala Cleopatra) and watch reruns of Maynard on Dobie Gillis.

Quote from: VeryGnawty on February 12, 2008, 09:18:56 AM
I generally don't think about such sillyness.  It just disturbs my seated meditations.

If you sit long enough, you won't be disturbed by it any more.

I want a new car named The Zen - you don't actually drive it, you just think about going, and then you're there.  And the misuse of the word 'zen' ain't got nothing on the rampant misuse of the word 'rock.'  As in:  "That dress rocks!"  Really?  What's it doing, and can you make it stop?

Quote from: siouxsie on February 19, 2008, 10:02:55 AM
I saw some "Zen" dishes at Target the other day.  It said so on the package, so they must be zen dishes.

But could you buy all of them for the price of One?

Quote from: VeryGnawty on February 27, 2008, 06:10:08 AM

But could you buy all of them for the price of One?

I'm not sure what that means, but I think they sold it as a 4-place setting package deal.  So, yeah, one price would get you the whole set  :)

Look people. Every Now and Zen people will misuse words that have some particular religious significance.
Like for the name of a rock album, say.



Ya just gotta be Zen about it.   ^_~

Quote from: tekla on February 19, 2008, 10:49:51 AM
I want a new car named The Zen - you don't actually drive it, you just think about going, and then you're there.  And the misuse of the word 'zen' ain't got nothing on the rampant misuse of the word 'rock.'  As in:  "That dress rocks!"  Really?  What's it doing, and can you make it stop?

You know what Tekla? I think you rock too!  :-*

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" might be considered one of the more 'recent' trend setters in the use of Zen in the United States.

When it came out in the 1970's, LOTS of people read it.  I even had it as assigned reading in one of my architecture classes.

Since then, there have been a lot of copy-cat "Zen and the ..." type books, at least as far as the title is concerned.

Though it might misuse 'zen', it it a most execellent meditation on technology, and has an interesting subtext about grad school.

i didn't understand Zen even when i was studying it. (though i really like Alan Watts)

i always though it meant that to really do Zen you had to be sure and not do it.

hmm, one-hand clap, indeed...

-ellie

ps.
where is Kate when ya need her?

Quote from: tekla on February 11, 2008, 01:10:34 PM
Without them, there may well be no Zen in America. 

found again, doing some old post reading...
Well,
I can tell you that our lineage (meaning the one practiced by my spouse and I) was brought to America by a British native coming from Japan. Who was trained, and fully certified, by some of the most honored teacher's in Japan at the time.
She, as far as I know, was asked to by Her Teacher, to bring our tradition to America. Whether or not Her Teacher's asking her depended on the existence of beatniks, I do not know. I somehow doubt it. It is a tradition to bring the Dharma to new countries.

Whether Buddhism would have existed or not in America without the Beats existence in a way, is sort of a mute point really, as the Beats did exist, and we have no way of knowing how things would have turned out had things been different.
One thing's for sure though...
Buddhism was brought from India to China without thier influence, and from China to Japan later on. (this is how things went in our tradition). The idea that in a country that ports freedom of religion, that Zen Buddhism would never have come here, especially in this modern age of mass communication, I find unlikely.
But that's just my thoughts.

-Sara

i don't think zen really means much at all.. its more like 'umm' or 'oh' its just something you put through your conversation/life to bring attention to whats actually going on, any attempt at definition is just people who are trying to use it for other purposes, usually to be cool or to become zen masters, i prefer just to grab a nose.. but gotta be kinda polite or they start saying ur crossing personal boundaries blah blah
zen people go everywhere, and they especially like people acting cool, on a certain wave length of cool, a particular cool area in the mind  :o

I'm aware that the Beats had some interest in Buddhism, but I was always under the impression that Zen was "brought to America" - or rather, brought to the attention of people other than Asian-Americans - by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who capitalized on the interest of the Beats and art folks at the time to create a real non-Asian-American Zen movement in San Francisco. This eventually led to the formation of the San Francisco Zen Center, where Suzuki Roshi is still revered as a great teacher. Now, there's Tassajara up in the mountains, Green Gulch Farm across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, and Berkeley Zen Center, as well as other non-affiliated Zen temples and centers sprinkled around the country (mostly, but not all, on the coasts). Of course, many Buddhist movements of very different stripes have since made their way over to America, especially during the hippie era. The Soto Zen folks have always struck me as the most sincere, though.

---

Post Merge: February 24, 2010, 01:08:39 AM

---

It seems Wikipedia has a timeline of Zen in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Zen_Buddhism_in_the_United_States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Zen_Buddhism_in_the_United_States)
I was aware of the earlier arrival of D.T. Suzuki, but it looks like I underestimated him somewhat, and I had forgotten about Soyen Shaku and several others. Oh well. I guess my history's a bit shaky. :D

zen beginner's mind 1:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KXFTWBAC (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KXFTWBAC)

'resume boundless original mind'

I have a "zen" watch.  It is a beautiful silver face with a jeweled band, and it does not work.  It is always in the moment.
I wonder if this is the correct use of the word?