Nothing Holy: A Zen Primer
By Norman Fischer
Most of us associate Zen with black robes and rock gardens, but do we really know what it is
Norman Fischer takes us through the principles and practices of the major schools of Zen.
1. A Zen Wave
Like ocean waters, intellectual currents are always in motion. They churn up organic matter from below, creating and extending powerful nutritional mixtures. When groups of people at a particular historical moment begin to experience the world in a particular way, naturally they meet and talk, ponder, read and write. They are open to perse influences. Eventually the energy of their discourse crests and breaks like a sudden wave, and soon people around them find themselves affected. So cultures mix, dissolve and change.
In this way, a Zen wave broke on North American shores in the middle of the twentieth century. It probably didn”t begin as a Zen wave at all, but rather as a reflex to the unprecedented violence the first part of the century had seen. After two devastating world wars, small groups of people here and there in the West were beginning to realize, as if coming out of a daze, that the modernist culture they had depended on to humanize and liberalize the planet wasn”t doing that at all. Instead it was bringing large-scale suffering and dehumanization. What was the alternative
In the early 1950”s, D.T. Suzuki, the great Japanese Zen scholar and practitioner, arrived at Columbia University in New York to teach some classes on Zen. Suzuki was a magnet for the yearning that was at that time still underground. The people who met him, attended his classes or were otherwise influenced by his visit constitute a Who”s Who of American cultural innovation at that period. Alan Watts, whose popular books on Zen were hugely influential, was there. So was John Cage, who from then on wrote music based on chance operations, on the theory that being open to the present moment, without conscious control, was the essence of Suzuki”s—and Zen”s—message.
Cage influenced Merce Cunningham, the dancer-choreographer, who in turn influenced many others in the performance art field. The Zen-derived notion of spontaneous improvisation became the essence of bebop, the post-war jazz movement. For Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and the other Beat-generation poets, Zen was a primary source, a sharp tool for prying the lid off literary culture as they knew it.
Within ten years, lively Japanese Zen masters who, from their side of the Pacific, had also been dreaming a Zen wave, were coming to America to settle. With the 1960”s and the coming of age of a new generation radicalized by the Vietnam war and psychotropic drugs, what had been churning underneath for decades broke out in a glorious and exhilarating spray. The first Zen centers in America were bursting with students willing to make serious commitments right away. It was an exciting and confusing time, perhaps unprecedented in the history of world religions.
I was part of this Zen wave. The cultural undercurrents I have been describing took place during my formative years. A student of literature and religion, I was sensitive enough to feel the brokenness that lay under the placid social veneer of the American culture I was raised in. So when I discovered Zen in the writings of D.T. Suzuki in the late 1960”s, I was dumbstruck. Here was exactly what I needed, a completely new way of experiencing the world. The compromising, experiential and immediate search for meaning that Zen proposed, without need of doctrine or belief, struck a chord in me. Like so many, I wasn”t looking for a new religion: I wanted a way to blast through the options that seemed available to me. I wanted real freedom. Zen promised this.
So in 1970, I mov…
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