Beginner's Mind, Ordinary Mind. (Review Essay).

James Ishmael Ford, In This Very Moment: A Simple Guide to Zen. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2002. l28pp. $14.00 (paper).

Robert E. Kennedy Roshi, Zen Gifts to Christians. New York: Continuum, 2001. 144pp. $19.95 (cloth).

Soko Morinaga Roshi, Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity Translated by Belenda Attaway Yamakawa. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002. 144pp. $19.95 (cloth).

Barry Magid and Charlotte Joko Beck, Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002. 208pp. $22.95 (cloth).

Tom Chetwynd, Zen and the Kingdom of Heaven: Reflections on the Tradition of Meditation in Christianity and Zen Buddhism. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001. 224pp. $16.95 (paper).

Zen is a form of Buddhism that defines itself as being outside of the tradition of sacred texts, known as sutras--a mind-to-mind transmission that begins with the Buddha and continues in the face-to-face encounter of teacher and student. The classic story of this form of spiritual learning goes like this:

Long ago with the World-Honored One [Buddha] was at Mount Grdhrakuta to give a talk, he held up a flower before the assemblage. At this all remained silent. The Venerable Kasho alone broke into a Smile. The World-honored One said, "I have the all-pervading True Dharma, incomparable Nirvana, exquisite teaching of formless form. It does not rely on letters and is transmitted outside scriptures. I now Hand it to Maha Kasho." (Zenkei Shibayama, The Gateless Barrier, 58)

But in Zen, as in Christianity, there seems to be no end to the number of books that might be written about it. The inexpressible is irresistible. These five books are only a fraction of the Zen titles published in recent months. They reflect three popular subjects: books about Zen and Christianity, about Zen and Something Else (in this case Psychotherapy), and Introductory Zen.

James Ford's In This Very Moment was first published in 1996 as an introduction to Zen for Unitarian-Universalists. It is being reissued in Fall 2002 as a simple guide for anyone. The book has two great virtues in both versions. First, it reveals the author to be a compassionate, appealing man. Since Zen is often imagined to be an austere, even cold practice, the human or, more accurately, spiritual dimensions of Zen practice as Ford embodies them, offer us an appealing form of spiritual practice. This quality is even more pronounced in the revision, which begins with the story of an encounter between Ford and a man brought to tears in a face-to-face encounter during an extended Zen retreat called sesshin ("to touch the heart/mind"). As Ford practices it, Zen is a way into the emotional body. Zen shows us the ordinary mind through the practice of seated meditation. It reveals the "clinging consciousness" behind which we hide from ourselves. When we give up clinging, Ford explains, we discover compassion. We g ive up ourselves.

Second, Ford provides an unusually helpful introduction to koans and their use in Zen. Most of us have heard of the koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It is almost a joke. But koan practice is actually the practice of life itself. The questions are impossible, but as Ford's teacher John Tarrant Roshi writes, "they support us not in belief but in discovery." By forcing us to face the seemingly impossible, we learn in Zen practice to come to terms with the imponderables of our own lives--death, for example. The death koan goes like this: when you are dead, how are you free? As Ford writes, "Encountering a dying person is like encountering a Zen master. It is all out on the table. All our secrets are plain for anyone who cares to notice." That kind of transparency is the goal of Zen practice, and Ford's book is an intimate introduction to what in the end is the spiritual practice of intimacy: intimacy with one's self.

Novice to Master is also an introduction to Zen that takes us back to Japan, the source of much of Zen as we know it in the West. Soko Morinaga was a Rinzai Zen master (a form of Zen that emphasizes koan practice) and one-time abbot of Daitokuji Monastery. His appealing book describes his journey from a brief, fearful stint in the army near the end of World War II to his corning to terms with himself as a realized human being.

Self-deprecating in tone, and often very funny, Morinaga's book offers a Zen that is almost off-hand. The first part of the book is about the "breaking of the ego" that is essential to Zen training. The second. takes us into the monastery, where the author begins to understand his life as "a succession of realizations of my own misunderstandings." He puts it this way:

The novice lives the life of a young monk, a stage in which they must pass through many gates of self-denial. I do not mean denial of the original self. I mean, rather, facing head-on and acknowledging, no matter how bitter, the unripeness and the artificialities of the self in existing circumstances: denial of the self in its present state and recognition of the dignity of the original self. (73)

In the final section, Morinaga talks about his experiences as a Zen Master, a teacher of others. The progression in consciousness that the book chronicles is itself revealing. What does the novice come to learn? What makes him a master? What makes us masters? Realization that:

When you maintain the straight-forward frankness of your own mind as it comes to life each instant, even without effort, even without training, you are beautifully born each instant. You die with each instant, and go on to be born again, instant by instant... .Always now-just now--come into being. Always now--just now--give yourself to death. Practicing this truth is Zen practice. (132)

It is not uncommon to meet a Zen teacher who is also a practicing psychiatrist or psychotherapist. The Buddha offered not only the foundations of a religion but the outline of a psychology. His teachings are about the structure of the self, how the mind works, and so it is not surprising that people trained in the arts of revealing the self would be attracted to Buddhism, and especially to Zen. Barry Magid is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in New York City, as well as the founder of the Ordinary Mind Zendo in Manhattan. His book is an account of Zen practice informed by his psychoanalytic perspective.

Magid introduces a psychology of the self expressed in the word "selfobject" that derives from Heinz Kohut. This approach is nondualistic, in contrast to Freud. The key to such a psychology of the self is to understand that

a person's sense of self never exists in isolation; the self is actually the combination or interaction of the individual self, as traditionally conceived, with its world of selfobjects.... With the concept of the selfobject, Kohut transformed the psychoanalytic picture of the separate, autonomous self into a contextualized, interdependent self, a self much closer to the picture of dependent co-origination that we find in Buddhism: not only is everything part of an interconnected whole, but each "thing" has no fixed or separate identity apart from its myriad, mutually causal relationships. (21)

This interconnected whole, which Buddhists call dependent co-origination, is also known as emptiness.

Magid uses koans in his book to highlight dimensions of his argument, even though he prefers a style of Zen that does not use koans--what some call "just sitting." His major point is that oneness, of the sort that selfobject suggests, is not a condition we return to, as psychoanalysis maintains, but things as they are. Dualistic thinking prevents our seeing the oneness. Zen and the psychology it reflects cuts through subject/object divisions. The implications of Magid's work are important for understanding the ills of our time that show up as alienation from nature, social life, and what he calls subjectivity. At the heart of these ills are self-centeredness. The end of self-centeredness is not the end of our "self" but a discovery of the self that is different from what we thought. This is the insight of Zen and the psychology it fosters.

Magid deals with several issues that arise from this perspective, including how we account for constancy and change in the place of emptiness and no-self. Zen, he points out, is useless, in the sense that one does not practice it to solve a problem or "fix" what is broken. Zen and psychoanalysis share a common perspective that runs through Magid's book and perhaps is the clearest explanation of what Zen "does." Magid puts it this way:

When we stop trying to run away from our own mind, the content of our mind is no longer the problem. In the initial session of psychoanalysis, the new patient was traditionally told simply to say whatever comes to mind, without censoring or holding anything back. When the patient is finally able to follow that simple rule--usually after many years of working through a lifetime of inhibition and expectation, the analysis is over. What has changed? Everything and nothing. (162)

Zen says it somewhat differently:

On each moment's flash of our thought
there will grow a lotus flower
and on each lotus flower will be revealed perfection
unceasingly manifest as our life,
just as it is,
right here and right now.

At first is seems odd that so many Christians find Zen appealing. Tom Chetwynd begins his book by describing his "uncomfortable and boring" initial encounters with Zen. They are familiar to anyone who has ventured uneasily into a zendo, about as far from the atmosphere of a standard-issue Christian church as one might find. There is that sense that the Christian is transgressing and trespassing, all at once, but the attraction can be surprisingly powerful. Chetwynd thinks that part of the appeal can be found in early Christian meditative practice and, indeed, in the prayer life of Jesus himself.

He makes a good case for Jesus and the early church as meditators, calling on scripture and early church documents. He traces this meditative (and lost or abandoned) tradition to the present, touching on the most Zen-like texts (Cloud of Unknowing) and speculating on why this fertile tradition has more-or-less disappeared. Although I think he is pushing the notion that Jesus and the early church were Zen-like meditators, the suggestion is appealing. The problem I have with the book is that, in the end, it seems like Chetwynd is going a long way around the barn to get to the conclusion that Christian meditation is just like zazen, which is the same thing as saying that zazen is zazen. We all knew that. The fact is that Christians who practice Zen often adopt only the meditative practice and leave aside the more "Buddhist" dimensions of the discipline by "seeing" in Christianity what they find in Buddhism.

Robert Kennedy, S.J., is a Zen master, or Roshi, who has managed to integrate his Zen and his Christianity more fully than Chetwynd. His new book, Zen Gifts to Christians, identifies in the series of ox-herding pictures that are a traditional model of the progress of human development images of Zen gifts to the Christian tradition. The gifts, Kennedy Roshi says, are practical: "that is, they lay down a path of action for us to follow and they offer us a spiritual experience rather than a theory or a theology of religion" (2).

The ox in the pictures stands for our true nature; the ox herder represents those in search of the truth about their deepest self, and the ten pictures represent the successive steps one must take to realize one's true nature. Both the pictures and the poetry are designed to inspire those who desire to practice the gifts, to become insightful, and to enlist in the compassionate service of others. (5)

This is a pretty statement of what religion is up to in general. What distinguishes Kennedy's work is that openness to the other, to genuine interreligious dialogue in which one's own faith is put at risk in the service of the other.

Kennedy is a lover of poetry, and through poems he is often most successful at opening windows on the heart of Zen (and Christian) practice. He forces the reader to use all of the senses, to see and hear, so that the pleasures of the text multiply. Like the writers of the other books I have been discussing, Kennedy is concerned with the matter of the self and the transformation into no-self that is the heartwork of Buddhism and so many other traditions. "For Christians transformation into Christ entails becoming what Zen Buddhists call a no-self and although this gift may be painful for us to contemplate and accept, we know that to find our life in Christ we must die to self" (103). Understanding transformation is at the center of the enterprise, for both Christians and Buddhists: "The Zen experience of no-self can remind us that there is no transformation from one thing into another thing. Transformation in the Eucharist means that we are brought to see the one reality that is present always. As Bodhidharma, the founder of Chinese Zen, said in the sixth century A.D., your true nature is always right 'in front of you'--you yourself just do not see it" (110).

All of these books in one way or another insist on the same truth, and it is one that is not unique to Zen, although it is more visibly at the heart of Zen than perhaps any other tradition. Kennedy says it clearly, and this sentence can stand for the goal of Zen and the goal of spiritual practice: "The mind, Zen insists, is not a thing we possess; it is whatever we see or hear: bread and wine, mountains and rivers" (111).

Kenneth Arnold is a contributing editor of CrossCurrents.