Writing as Enlightenment

Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century

John Whalen-Bridge, Gary Storhoff, John Whalen-Bridge, Gary Storhoff

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438439211
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

This timely book explores how Buddhist-inflected thought has enriched contemporary American literature. Continuing the work begun in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, editors John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff and the volume's contributors turn to the most recent developments, revealing how mid-1970s through early twenty-first-century literature has employed Buddhist texts, principles, and genres. Just as Buddhism underwent indigenization when it moved from India to Tibet, to China, and to Japan, it is now undergoing that process in the United States. While some will find literary creativity in this process, others lament a loss of authenticity. The book begins with a look at the American reception of Zen and at the approaches to Dharma developed by African Americans. The work of consciously Buddhist and Buddhist-influenced writers such as Don DeLillo, Gary Snyder, and Jackson Mac Low is analyzed, and a final section of the volume contains interviews and discussions with contemporary Buddhist writers. These include an interview with Gary Snyder; a discussion with Maxine Hong Kingston and Charles Johnson; and discussions of competing American and Asian values at the Beat- and Buddhist-inspired writing program at Naropa University with poets Joanne Kyger, Reed Bye, Keith Abbott, Andrew Schelling, and Elizabeth Robinson.

PART I

WIDENING THE STREAM

Literature as Transmission

Chapter 1

The Transmission of Zen as Dual Discourse

Shaku Soen and Okakura Kakuzo

Jane Falk

The seemingly widespread awareness of Zen Buddhism in American culture today is evident from the use of Zen as a catchword in everything from beauty advertisements to self-help manuals. A recent edition of Books in Print lists approximately 450 titles under the subject of Zen, although many of these books deal with the arts and self-help rather than with religion. Zen and the Art of Modern Eastern Cooking and Zen Key to Your Undiscovered Happiness are prime examples of this phenomenon. Whether writers or readers of such texts have a firm grasp of Zen as spiritual practice is questionable. To gain a better understanding of how Zen is understood, the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions provides a general definition, beginning with a summary of Zen tenets in the four lines attributed to Bodhidharma, Zen's first patriarch: “A special transmission outside the scriptures / Not founded on words and letters / By pointing directly to mind / It allows one to penetrate the nature of things to attain the Buddha nature.” It concludes by emphasizing “the immense cultural consequences of Zen” (Bowker 1066). Although one might find variations on this definition in other Western reference books, Zen usually is understood as having both a spiritual and a cultural dimension. Transmission of Zen to the United States in the 1950s, for example, relied heavily on a Zen of dual dimension, with an emphasis on Zen and the arts. It is the transmission of what I have termed this dual discourse of Zen to America and the privileging of the aesthetic that is the particular subject of this chapter. Such an understanding of Zen has its originary moment in the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and its World's Parliament of Religions with two Japanese figures, Rinzai Zen priest Shaku Soen and art historian Okakura Kakuzo, instrumental in this process. Shaku Soen is best known as the first Zen teacher to visit the United States as delegate to the Parliament, whereas Okakura Kakuzo most often is associated with his 1906 work, The Book of Tea, a key text for the understanding of an aestheticized Zen. This work strongly influenced American perceptions of Zen and Japanese culture in the early twentieth century, is still in print, and is widely read today.

Zen in America Before the Columbian Exposition

To better understand why Zen was introduced and presented as dual discourse by the Japanese, it is necessary to go back to the 1880s. As might be expected, early interest in Zen at this time came from the religious community of ministers and educators brought in by the Meiji government to help modernize Japan. They most often saw Zen as a curious and problematic spiritual practice especially in regard to Christianity.¹ Their commentary ranges from the objective, interested, and informational to the more subjective and judgmental, the latter view of Zen predominating. Zen's practices are often disparaged and seen as contradictory and flawed in comparison with Christianity, especially in relation to Zen's claim for transmission without words or the aid of scriptures. Additionally, some commentators use the somewhat esoteric Zen as a form of cultural capital and a way to prove their ability to speak about and for Japanese culture and religion. Hence, their information about Zen is often presented without acknowledging Japanese informants by name.

Typical of a somewhat negative presentation of Zen is M. L. Gordon's article of 1886 published in the The Andover Review, a periodical with a strong theological purpose. Although Gordon's treatment appears to be straightforward, he has a hidden agenda directed toward missionary types who need information about Buddhism in order to gain an advantage in proselytizing. As he puts it, a better understanding of Japanese Buddhism will give us less of a “disadvantage” (310). Gordon emphasizes the authenticity of his information while downplaying his source and his own interest in Buddhism, characterizing his nameless informant as a “disciple of the sect employed recently to teach the essentials of their belief” to “an unpromising pupil,” implying Gordon himself. Zen is described as the “Dhyana” or a contemplative school introduced into China from India by Bodhidharma, characterized by its claims to be “sutra-less.” Gordon contrasts this with Zen's inconsistencies in its use of certain sutras as aids to “contemplation.” He also points out incongruities in Zen's use of images in its temples for which his informant has only a “shrug of the shoulders in reply,” thereby indicating Gordon's skepticism (305). However, Gordon is not much more understanding toward other sects he describes, his point being to demonstrate the varieties of Japanese Buddhism as contradictory, with implicit comparison to a supposedly noncontradictory Christianity.

Around the time of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions, the number of articles on Japanese Buddhism and Zen increased, as might be expected.² One of these, “Developments of Japanese Buddhism” by Rev. A. Lloyd, provides more factual details about Zen while continuing to allude negatively to its contemplative practice. Like Gordon, Lloyd describes Zen's practice of “abstract contemplation,” transmitted heart to heart without words, and includes the story of wall-gazing Bodhidharma as bringing this “silent understanding” to China. Although Lloyd's treatment of Zen sometimes seems appreciative, he ends by branding it as an “utterly impractical method of arriving at Truth,” and characterizes Zen's meditating practitioner negatively: “to think unthinking, i.e., he is to sit in a kind of mesmeric condition, with an entire absence of all formulated thought” (430, 437).

Zen as Dual Discourse and the Columbian Exposition of 1893

In contrast to such written descriptions, Zen became a physical presence in the United States for the first time at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the World's Fair to commemorate the quadricentennial of Columbus' discovery of America.⁴ Zen's religious aspect was personified by Shaku Soen, a Zen priest of the Rinzai sect who came as one of the members of the Japanese Buddhist delegation to the World's Parliament of Religions, one of the congresses held in conjunction with the Exposition. Unconventionally prepared by his teacher, Kosen, with a university education and travels abroad to India and Sri Lanka, Shaku Soen looked to establish Zen in the West. However, as has been demonstrated, Zen's appearance in the person of a Zen master was less an originary moment than a shift in a conversation that had already begun in the decade before the Parliament, the consequences of which will inform Shaku Soen's presentation of Zen.⁵ The aesthetic aspect of Zen was represented by Japan's exhibition at the Exposition, the Ho-o-den, a replica of a Buddhist temple whose decoration and catalogue were masterminded by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese art historian, director of the Tokyo Art Academy, curator of the Imperial Museum, and former pupil, translator, and assistant to American Japanophile, Ernest Fenollossa.⁶ As of 1884, he had become an authority in his own right and espoused the cause of traditional art in Meiji Japan. In comparison with Zen's presentation from the American clerical point of view that saw Zen as puzzling, contradictory, and lacking in comparison to Christianity, both men present Zen to the American public at the Exposition in a positive light, by associating it with modern ideas and nonreligious aspects of Western philosophy and culture.

Shaku Soen and other Japanese delegates made a positive impression on their American audience.⁷ Shaku is presented as an important religious figure in the published proceedings of the Parliament. His bibliographical note at the end of the second volume report of the Parliament proceedings identifies him as “Shaku Most Reverend Soyen … head of the Engakuji division of the Rinzai Zen sect; a scholar in the sacred books and doctrines of Buddhist sects …” (Barrows 1589). Here his title, given in Eastern and Western terms, designates his elevated religious position, while enabling his reception as a type of religious figure familiar to Americans with an air of the exotic.

Using interpreters, he spoke twice at the Parliament, once on the eighth day and once on the sixteenth. The theme of the eighth day was ecumenicism and the need for religious sympathy and the unity of all religions to counteract the rise of science and skepticism. However, although Shaku Soen personified Zen for his Western audience, his message in this first speech did not specifically describe or allude to Zen tenets.⁸ Entitled “The Law of Cause and Effect as Taught by Buddhism,” it presents Buddhism in a way that shows it to be both in keeping with Western morality and a religion (unlike Christianity) well able to encompass new developments in Western science such as Darwin's theory of evolution. Shaku begins by describing the natural world and asks why the universe is “in a constant flux,” responding with Buddhism's “one explanation, namely, the law of cause and effect,” a natural law by which our deeds of the past create our present existence today. His speech develops these ideas effectively while simultaneously inserting comments that subtly question and challenge Christian tenets: “God did not provide you with a hell, but you yourself,” for example (829, 830–31).

His rhetorical strategy here is a reverse orientalism, using Western stereotypes of Buddhism to his advantage. In this way, he turns a popular Western critique of Buddhism, lack of a personal God, to his advantage by demonstrating how Buddhist philosophy can respond to the pressures of both Western scientific ideas and modern life.⁹ This pattern will be evident in Shaku Soen's subsequent presentations of Zen to a Western audience, as he speaks and writes about Mahayana Buddhism in general, emphasizing its compatibility with Western modernity in comparison to Christianity. His strategy thus uses the pragmatic Buddhist concept of upaya or skillful means, the idea that bodhisattvas or Buddhist teachers may use all means at their disposal to guide beings to enlightenment.

Although the Parliament and Shaku Soen represented the religious aspect of Zen, the Exposition itself made connections between Zen and Japanese material culture. American world's fairs were important venues for the introduction of Japanese and other foreign cultures into the United States in the nineteenth century, and the Columbian Exposition was no exception. One aspect of these fairs was that Japanese culture was presented as collectible commodity to the American public. This emphasis on Japan and the aesthetic also dovetails with the American collecting mania for Japanese art objects and enthusiasm toward Japan in the nineteenth century, a fad known as the Japan Craze.¹⁰ An aspect of this craze was that Japan epitomized the aesthetic for Americans who also saw in Japanese culture a panacea for modernity. Collecting and appreciating Japanese art was a way for American Japanophiles to renew and recover a connection with the handmade and artisanal. Art historian William Hosley describes American interests in Japanese culture as both a “diagnosis and a cure for the Victorian's growing cultural malaise” in which the “throbbing pulse of industrialization had taken its toll” (29).¹¹

Japan's exhibition, the Ho-o-den or Phoenix Palace, a replica of the Buddhist Phoenix Temple of Uji, was given one of the choice locations of the fair, the Wooded Isle. Joe Earle in his study of Meiji Era art suggests a reason for this almost favored status in that Japan's monetary contribution for the centennial or the amount that its government committed to spend was the largest of any other participant (32).¹² The building was constructed on site by workers sent from Japan and contained displays of Japanese material culture. In a statement for the North American Review on Japan's participation in the Exposition, Japanese Minister Gozo Tateno describes this building as an example of historical Japanese architecture, “unique in design and construction,” illustrating three different epochs of Japanese cultural history with the left wing in the style of the Ashikaga Period, the right wing in the style of Fujiwara, and the main hall in the style of Tokugawa (39). Its interior was decorated by members of the Tokyo Art Academy under the direction of Okakura Kakuzo.¹³

Okakura also wrote the illustrated catalogue for the Ho-o-den, which presents not only Japanese culture to an American audience, but a culture influenced by Zen Buddhism. Describing the Ho-o-den as a replica of the Phoenix Hall adapted for “secular use,” he cites Buddhism as influential in bringing Chinese art to Japan, the Ashikaga period representing a style that “began a new art-life under the influence of Zen Buddhism” (an “ ‘orthodox’ sect of the Northern, Mahayana, School of Buddhists”) and the teachings of Chinese philosophers of the Sung dynasty. The Ho-o-den also featured a tea room, described by Okakura as an aspect of Ashikaga culture in which all “appliances” are “noted for simplicity of taste” (13, 20, 23).¹⁴ He described the wing's study as a place its master used to practice Buddhism.

Okakura's catalogue was not the only publication where average fairgoers could read about Zen influences on Japanese art and material culture, however. History of The World's Fair, a souvenir book, devotes a chapter to the Wooded Isle, in which the “Hoodo” or “Japanese building” is named as one of the “gems” of the fair with its three pavilions each representing three epochs in Japanese art history. Describing the Ashikaga period as one when Japan, “emerging from the war of the two dynasties, started into a new art-life under the influence of Zen-Buddhism and Lung [Sung] philosophy” with “purity and simplicity” as the motto, the author seems to paraphrase Okakura's catalogue without acknowledgment (Truman 431). Both documents are significant in demonstrating that Zen associations with the artistic culture of Japan were presented to the American public at this time in a popular context, complementing the spiritual presentation of Zen embodied in Shaku Soen's appearance at the Parliament.

The continuing American fascination with Japanese culture and the increasing presence of Japan on the world stage as the Asian power to be reckoned with due to Japan's military victories at the turn of the century kept both men before the public eye. They would feed interest in Japanese religion and culture with articles and books for an English-speaking audience from the 1890s into the twentieth century. Additionally, both men were physically present in the United States in the new century. Shaku Soen toured the United States giving lectures in 1905–1906, and Okakura Kakuzo made Boston his American base, as advisor, then curator, at the Museum of Fine Arts from 1904 until his death in 1913.

Zen Discourse after the Fair: Shaku Soen

After the Parliament, Shaku Soen's contribution to Zen transmission was not only to embody Zen as honored dignitary in the Buddhist religious hierarchy, but also to take on new roles of poet and calligrapher. In keeping with his pattern at the Parliament, Shaku Soen would continue to allude only sparingly to Zen and its unique practices and qualities, perhaps because as previously noted, Zen tenets were seen as too “curious” by Americans.¹⁵ It is ultimately the fact of his appearance, the aura of authenticity, along with artistic, scholarly, and elitist associations that will be most significant in his transmission of Zen at the turn of the century in person and in print.¹⁶

Shaku's articles and talks emphasize both his persona as Zen poet and that of polemicist for Buddhism, the aesthetic discourse becoming almost as strong as the spiritual. For example, in January 1894, The Monist printed one of his poems, “The Universality of Truth,” written in Chinese characters with literal translation as well as extensive footnotes. The editor adds the comment that “it takes a scholar to write such poetry,” implying both that Shaku is a poet and scholar and that Zen priests write poetry. The four-line poem describes the world's races as one in righteousness and equality under a moon that shines down on all. His vision is of a world of racial harmony in contrast to the actual discrimination and racism of the West, especially in relation to the yellow races, his point made not through sermonizing but through poetic imagery (“Universality” 161).

Shaku is again presented as both poet and calligrapher in an article of February 1899, in The Open Court, in an essay entitled “Japanese Calligraphy.” Here he acknowledges Buddhism's similarities to Christianity in a positive w...