Zen and the Art of Anything

Book by French Hal

I.

My Story and This Book

my story

The year was 1990, and I was presenting a paper on Zen at a Buddhism conference

in southern Taiwan. In the course of the paper,

I made a passing reference to Bodhidharma,

the traditional bringer of Zen to China from India.

After the presentation, a resident Buddhist monk approached me, and,

with a whimsical smile, pointed to me, and said,

"You are Bodhidharma!"

I was rather pleasantly mystified by that, but could elicit no further elaboration.

The monk simply left, and I was left to ponder the classic Zen koan, or riddle:

"Why has Bodhidharma come from the West?"

And why, then, had I come from the West to talk to a largely Buddhist audience,

about Zen?

In what way was I, late in time, following Bodhidharma's model?

And why, as a Westerner, several years later, should I attempt a book

about Zen?

I am in many ways an unlikely candidate for such a project.

First, I'm an academic, and academics don't write much about Zen.

They may study about it, and teach a small segment or even a rare course about it,

but they don't write about it.

Practitioners do.

Professors write about lots of things religious,

but not much on Zen.

The ones who write about Zen are persons, East and West,

who have spent years in Zen centers and monasteries,

who have received extensive training with Zen masters,

and have been initiated.

I understand that, and am intimidated.

Second, it isn't just the profession, it's personal.

I'm a still more unlikely candidate by way of origins.

So I'm still more intimidated.

But this isn't an expert's book on esoteric Zen.

That might intimidate you, too.

Zen here is "nothing special,"

for "nothing special" people like you and me.

I have to pick up the story a little more than a century ago,

to detail my own journey toward wanting to write about Zen.

On September 1893, over 100,000 people lined up

to cross the border into a section of Oklahoma known as the Cherokee Strip.

Other segments of the Indian Territory were opened a few years earlier and later,

but this was the largest and the most dramatic such entry.

My grandfather was among those who raced to establish a claim.

It was in many ways the closing of a frontier.

Five days earlier, in Chicago, the World's Parliament of Religions had opened.

It was, in many ways, the opening of an incredible new frontier.

My early life was shaped much more by the first event.

Perhaps my grandfather's horse was slow.

At any rate, the land he claimed was poor,

and he came back in a few years to settle in Kansas with his family,

having buried two small boys in the soil of Oklahoma.

As the Indian Territories were opened for settling,

the frontier closed.

Yet, by the time I appeared, elements of it remained.

We lived, in my boyhood, in a small town near Dodge City, "Land of the Fast Draw."

The lore of the cowboy was a living thing,

not just memorialized in the graves at nearby Boot Hill.

The most visible markers in Mullinville, my town,

were windmills and grain elevators.

My father operated one of the elevators, and my mother had taught home economics,

which gave me an early appreciation for wonderful basic cooking,

a subject for further discussion in chapter five.

The vital church in Mullinville, just across the street from our home,

had a strong measure of frontier Christianity,

evangelical in style and content.

It was, and its impress remains, whatever else has been appended,

very important to me.

I did my first public speaking as an early teenager

in a contest sponsored by the WCTU, the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

It was a respectable, sedate group.

Its founder, crusading, saloon-smashing Carry A. Nation,

less than forty years before, had been based in Medicine Lodge,

only a little farther away than Dodge City, in the other direction.

That was my boyhood, growing up in a farming community

in dustbowl, depression days,

with some residual legacies of the frontier still around.

While some of those frontiers remained open for me,

some other far different ones were beckoning in young adulthood,

grafting themselves onto my own root stock.

But it was not until 1966, sixty-three years after the Parliament of Religions,

that I really awakened,

while studying one summer at the University of Chicago,

to the awareness of that event and all that it meant.

Research on the Parliament and one of its leading figures, Swami Vivekananda,

opened to me the world of Eastern wisdom, and that door has kept opening wider.

It led me to Zen.

The religion of South Asia became my primary research area,

but East Asian religion was on my teaching platter, too,

and travel to East Asia deepened the interest.

Most notably, a personal friend and mentor,

Professor Nolan P. Jacobson, quickened that interest.

His books, his lively presentations made me want to know more about Japan and Zen.

With his death in 1987,

and the subsequent invitation to write a chapter in a memorial volume to him,

I knew what I'd contribute.

My chapter, the essay "Zen and the Art of Anything,"

written that same year, was the initiation of a serious study of Zen for me.

Other papers followed, and more travel in East Asia,

with visits to Zen centers,

and by 1994 I felt ready to offer a course for Honors and M.A. students,

again with the same title.

Several days in the Green Gulch Zen Farm were very helpful,

and the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki,

founder of the San Francisco Zen Center that spawned nearby Green Gulch,

was my favorite Zen source.

My students, each time I've taught the course in the University and elsewhere,

have actualized his title: they've been incredible co-teachers and learners—

more than in any course I've ever taught.

We were all beginners, and that democratic Zen spirit

fostered more of a workshop than a classroom environment,

with everybody contributing.

Suzuki refers in his book to the example of his master,

who had joined the Soto Zen order when he was thirty, which is rather late.

And Suzuki shares how his master's teacher would often,

both scoldingly and endearingly, refer to him as "You lately-joined fellow."

What then of me?

To modify the clichŽ, "When he was my age,

he had been alive for thirty years!"

I have come much later to the feast,

and that might be another inhibiting feature.

But Suzuki gave me the challenge of recognizing and speaking

precisely from my beginner's mind-set.

Is there any validity to a beginner's observations?

Can an outsider's freshness of perspective contribute to the discourse,

along with the seasoned wisdom of the insider, long immersed in the tradition?

And if the outsider has been more of an insider in other practices,

can he also bring a useful comparative vantage point to the table?

Suzuki's emphasis on practice and process spoke to me, also;

other sources seemed too goal-oriented, too focused on getting there,

to the all-embracing state called kensho, or satori:

ENLIGHTENMENT!

Some told stories of enlightenment experiences in Japanese Zen monasteries,

but made it clear that no content could be communicated,

for that would take away from the search of other aspirants.

That part left me cold.

I remembered from childhood the teasing jingle,

"I know something I won't tell,"

and I remember resenting it when my father, a member of the Masonic Lodge,

reluctantly said that he couldn't tell me, his son,

about what went on in the Masonic sessions.

I think that I developed an early distrust of the esoteric,

the too tightly held conclusions of any spiritual or fraternal elite.

What appealed to me about Zen, instead,

and in sharp contrast, was precisely

ITS ACCESSIBILITY.

Yes, the reading of Zen sources, time spent in Zendos,

disciplined meditative practice were important for me.

But factors like these are necessary in gaining insight into any religious tradition.

You can't become an insider through study alone,

you need to get an understanding of the experience of an insider,

and to appropriate what elements you can.

What amazed me, despite the esoteric trappings that had so often intimidated me,

was my experience that I could learn something of Zen.

That was itself an "enlightening" realization!

An "outsider" could get into Zen, even one who came from rustic origins

only slightly removed from the frontier of the American West!

Amazing!

And if I could, then that says something about Zen, not just about me.

Zen is far more accessible than some would lead us to believe.

And I don't have to claim, in writing about it,

that I live now in the state of total enlightenment.

There is a delightful story told by Huston Smith in his preface to Suzuki's book

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Smith notes, "In Shunryu Suzuki's book the words satori and kensho,

its near equivalent, never appear." And then Smith shares a story:

"When, four months before his death, I had the opportunity to ask him

why satori didn't figure in his book, his wife leaned toward me and

whispered impishly, 'It's becaus...