..續本文上一頁 this lipstick or I will be unhappy,” would not be free. “Oh, what a cool lipstick,” would be free.

　　But let”s take an issue more pressing for most people: If I say, “I need you to love me” then that”s not free, right

　　 I”m in pain. But what if I don”t need you to love me—I just love you. Or you just love me. What if nobody is expecting to get anything out of it

　　 That”s free.

　　A Zen question about love might be, “What if your attempts to manipulate others to love you are the main obstacle to others loving you

　　” That would be bringing a koan approach into a really normal, everyday situation.

　　This is not common American Zen at the moment, is it

　　No, American Zen is all over the place at the moment, to be honest. That might be good.

　　Most Zen people don”t speak about transformation of consciousness.

　　You can make Zen into a museum of forms. How you sit, what robes, a pre-modern Japanese aesthetic, a minimalist hideaway. You follow a prescribed way to do things and try to relax and find freedom there. A radical idea might be serving a non-Japanese kind of pickle. What happens in the mind is not important. This path has its beauty, yet it”s not to my taste.

　　On the other path: Zen is a method for transformation. It”s fierce, you don”t hide out, you have to appear as yourself. You want freedom, you want to understand the universe. You want to stop building the house of pain. The old masters gave us methods and hints and it”s something we can actually pull off. The earlier generations in Zen with the Beat poets had a good time. Nice to do that too.

　　Zen looks backwards a lot. It suffers from past success. But backwards is not where the answers will be found. The imagination is the crucial thing. It”s like those little dry sponge toys for kids. When you put them in bath water they become amazing dinosaurs. We have to supply the water for Zen. Poetry is important, dreams too. You have to really listen, to do the methods and see how they aid you in your life—in your life—not in somebody else”s life.

　　But isn”t there a risk of perverting the dharma by changing the form

　　 Wouldn”t it be prudent just to stick with the dharma

　　That”s like saying, Stick with the bible. Which bible

　　 You mean the one that says we should keep slaves

　　 The one that says that women are inferior

　　 Plenty of that in Buddhism. Zen is methods and a few road markers, not things to believe.

　　In China, the Zen people hung out, joked around, meditated, tried to address common crises together. They asked themselves, How can we use koan-style thinking to help the generals to rule cities rather than burning them

　　 Those questions hadn”t been asked in India. The Chinese cared about these things. They trusted life and didn”t just avoid it. They had to find out what worked. We have to collaborate that way now.

　　So what”s new

　　Zen has changed a lot. There are kids and women involved, Cajun sutras, new ideas of beauty, taking account of the private sorrows that grip everyone. Meditation in action. In the streets. In basketball. Meditation in places of sorrow and holocaust. Meditation inside art installations. The kids now are interested in the beat poets and that”s good. Enlightenment is more real, embodied.

　　This is a lucky time for Zen. Modern culture has fabulous ideas and art that link straight to Zen. The questions that touch our lives are new or new again: How do we make the natural world sacred once more

　　 What is enlightenment in families

　　 What about the different kinds of love that touch everyone

　　 As empires get more hollow and think that the exterior is all there is, how to encourage the interior life

　　 And the old favorite, how to persuade the generals not to burn the cities.

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