Inviting the Esoteric into the Exoteric: Contemporary Challenges in American Zen Buddhism

Abstract

As Zen Buddhism continues into its second century in the United States, the practices and philosophies transmitted have gone through major, though necessary transformations. At present, the vast majority of Zen temples and centers are “convert” communities that have over time adjusted language, ritual, and tradition to suit pastoral and theological needs. This article lays out a blueprint for a Zen public “theology” by discussing the transformation of the exoteric, physical practice of Zen to an esoteric practice that governs inner conduct and community cohesion. For this piece, esoteric is used less in a mystical capacity, but more in terms of referring to a closed community of practitioners and initiates. The transformation from a historically exoteric practice in Japan to a generally esoteric practice in the United States reconfigured the priorities for longstanding Zen communities, who were (and still tend to be) diffuse and dependent on lineage bearing. The esoteric character of Zen practice in the U.S. is a response to several challenges in a “western” market economy- informed society. Challenges from the mindfulness industry, its minority status in a broadly Abrahamic society, and the struggle to understand the notion of tradition while in dialog with the main Soto Zen tradition in Japan present unique hermeneutical categories for Zen in America, prompting a reckoning with the fundamental principles of Mahayana Buddhism and the tenuous pluralism operative in American society.

1. Introduction

The notion of a public theology presents a challenge when one considers the rationale behind a seated meditation tradition like Soto Zen Buddhism. While there are different interpretations and emphases among different sanghas and temples, the central focus is the practice of zazen (seated focused attention). As a sitting tradition, its public offering is fundamentally non-productive in the sense that there is no object of worship, no theos to profess, nor static doctrine to adhere to. Instead, zazen as a focus function is a practice rather than a statement. To this end, Zen Buddhism is a counter gesture to the articulation of a theology. Nonetheless, what it does not say provides an opportunity to move theological discourse beyond the rational or strictly systematic articulations that drive the profession of faith claims.

It is important to note the attempt by Buddhist intellectuals to theologize on the basis of the Dharma—or as some have called it, Buddhist Theology. This essay is an exercise in faith-driven reflection on the Dharma from a speculative or “insider” point of view (Gross 2013). The term Buddhist theology refers to the methods of critical reflection from within a faith’s tradition, though such methodologies are characteristic in theologies of Abrahamic faiths. Specifically, I apply hermeneutical and critical methods typically taught in Christian theology cultivated from the broader western philosophical tradition to reflect upon the Soto school of Zen Buddhism in the United States. The hermeneutical and critical application is a response to the already present discussions on activist-oriented and socially engaged Buddhism, which already provide a public dimension for Buddhist practice and inter-sangha collaboration.

For decades, Buddhist sanghas, specifically Zen-descended organizations, have taken on public causes, from climate change to race relations, gender equality, poverty, social inequity, and wasanti-war—the list goes on. The Soto Zen community’s transformation to a “convert” community in the mid-20th century carries a long legacy of social engagement that, while important, I will only briefly discuss for this article. Of central importance for this piece is the polity transformations connected with Soto Zen’s public engagement in the U.S. This polity (the inner operations, decisions, and self-imagining of a community), far different from the norms or common practices in Japan, has invariable consequences for how we interpret and act upon the Dharma. As a broadly convert community, we face questions about the complex histories that practitioners and teachers bring to the Dharma as well as the application of the Dharma within the complex milieu of American urban life (where most sanghas were founded and from which rural monasteries and satellite communities descend).

This essay will proceed by first addressing Soto Zen community’s intersections with polity and public theology, which will address some of the complexities of the transformations of the Dharma in the United States. This section points out the significance of the growth of Zen from the first notable emissaries in the mid-20th century and their Dharma heirs and the varied ways in which communities interpreted the tradition and, at times, innovated through attempts to make Buddhism intelligible in the American religious scene. Then, the essay will turn to specific Zen concepts central to the tradition. These concepts are not regarded as doctrine, but expressions of the Zen experience that guide and orient an individual practitioner. While not doctrine, these concepts have a relative and relational quality that provides points of interpretation of the tradition that are critically relevant to individual practitioners and Zen-descended sanghas. The final section and conclusion addresses Zen hermeneutics, which help in constructing a Buddhist (of the Soto Zen variety) theology. These last sections address the esoteric/exoteric divide by way of reflecting on the way central Zen concepts are adapted through the polity of Zen sanghas in the States.

2. Polity and Public Theology

Soto Zen’s missionary history and cultural backdrop bring about challenges due to the variability of different sanghas and the interpretations they employ from their originating teachers from Japan, as well as the controversies specific communities have experienced in their history (financial scandals, sexual abuse, and malfeasance, etc.) (Ford 2006, p. 76). Zen sects are traditionally hierarchical because of their cultural inheritance from the organized Japanese monastic ethos. Groups in America generally tend to mimic the structure of day-to-day practice for parishioners/practitioners as well as full-time dedicated monastic communities. While the (theo)logical basis of Zen practice that is transmitted changes very little, communities have experimented with how to organize and communicate the Dharma. This experimentation is key to interpreting the inner organization and outer communication of Zen communities. It is important to note the hierarchical organization of Zen communities because the longstanding tradition of transmission from teacher to student continues in many ways. However, there is wide experimentation in the application of Zen practice that ranges from traditional revivalist (retrieving the “original” Japanese ethos) to abandoning hierarchy altogether. Still regarded as Zen Buddhist, many communities do not fully regard Japanese Soto-Shu authorities as the arbiter of Zen teaching or authoritative claims to the Dharma.

One main feature of Zen communities in the United States is their dependence on lineage as an identifying marker of the pedigree or distinctiveness of practice (Ford 2006, p. 81).1 This is because the main propagators of Zen were missionaries from Japan or were affiliated with older Japanese American temples established for the (Japanese) heritage community (Ford 2006, p. 122).2 It was not until the post-World War II era and mid-twentieth century that Zen groups began to grow under the tutelage of Zen missionaries from Japan. The growth of Zen coincided with changes in middle-class American religious and social values and was coterminous with the Beat generation and other popular countercultural movements of the time (Gleig 2019). Followers from that period were influenced by popularizers of Zen (e.g., Alan Watts) and the novelty in its experimentation with non-authoritarian and nonsectarian religion. Furthermore, the exoticism of Japanese culture and esthetics solidified Zen’s hold on the American youth of the mid-twentieth century.

The initial countercultural growth paired with the exoticism of the Japanese esthetic gave rise to experimentation with meditational practice. Zen practitioners faced the issue of cultural integration, philosophical application, and facility capacity. The earliest Zen monasteries (Tasajara and Green Gulch) grew out of a need to reinterpret the monastic tradition from Japan in the States (Ford 2006, p. 126). Originally an urban non-residential practice, the monastic communities mimicked the same polity as in Japanese monasteries, becoming religious diplomatic conduits for the Soto-Shu (Soto School in Japan) to facilitate ritual competency in Zen. With the imprimatur of the leaders in Japan, American groups worked to acquire property in urban centers and rural areas to cultivate Zen practice on American soil. After more than half a century of continued missionary and cultural exchange efforts, Soto Zen continues to experiment with what it means to be an established religion in the United States. The struggles and shortcomings are the situations from which lessons in public theology can emerge because “American” Zen faces the same problems as most mainstream theistic American religions.

3. Esotericism of Polity

The specific challenge Soto Zen (as with many other Americanized Buddhist organizations) is its own inner vision of itself. Unlike Zen’s long history and woven-in cultural sensibilities established in Asia, the Americas’ soil for tilling has conflicting substrata involving race, colonialism, and deeply ingrained categorical structures that remain continually complex and ever-changing. These complexities contribute to an esotericism encoded with the signifiers and histories woven into American religious culture and society. How do the principles of the Dharma, specifically reckoning with suffering and self-abandonment, set into the bodies and psyches of practitioners who inhabit a land and traverse a politico-economic reality that remains hesitant to reckon with itself? Where does the possibility of transcendence abide when taking on the Dharma as a primary source of inspiration in a country that insists on contradictory norms of secularity and ethno-religious nationalism? The nature of esotericism and exotericism center around these questions and concern polity and hermeneutical decision-making among Zen communities with respect to their geographical and social location (Gleig 2019, p. 40).

Polity and hermeneutical decision-making—that is, the way in which a community perceives itself and the way it sees and acts in the world—are important theological locales because they reflect the priorities and values of a community while showing where and how communities conceal or reveal their reckoning with reality. To this end, the esoteric/exoteric contrast is demonstrative of the hidden (or concealed) properties of a community that go beyond the sources or proprietary knowledge gained by a student. The contrast, instead, has to do with the extent to which the Dharma penetrates and draws insight from the immanent reality presented by an American community dedicated to Dharmic practice. As noted above, many Zen sanghas depend on their lineage pedigree and the diffusion of the Dharma throughout the country with minimal formal contact with the Japanese counterpart. Culturally, historically, and politically, Japanese Zen authorities have very little influence (except for those who are formally trained, credentialed, and espoused to Soto-Shu) over proclaimed American Zen masters or Roshis. Thus, appealing to the authority of tradition can only go so far and the cultural signifiers of power enter into a distinct (and new) dialog with the principles of Zen and American “reality.”3

In some respects, the esoteric/exoteric difference presents an uncomfortable proposition for communities. The practice of reckoning with “reality” is a radical one that both convert and heritage communities must navigate publicly as religious organizations and internally as organizations of initiates and devotees dedicated to the Zen interpretation of the Dharma. The inner and the outer are particularly acute for American sanghas because what is “inner” and “outer” indicates the differences in the depths of reckoning with the present reality of American experience and the posture with which teachers and practitioners engage with the practice.

In “Buddhist Hermeneutics”, Robert Thurman addresses the long evolution of hermeneutical methods in Buddhism and the forms they take. In the case of Zen/Chan, he notes that the tradition is a “scriptureless school”, relying on wisdom practice as the verification of knowledge and enlightenment, rather than from a textual practice (Thurman 1978, p. 35). Furthermore, the notion of mysticism does not represent the process of interpretation and discernment characteristic of Zen. Instead, Thurman states that the tradition is properly understood “as rationalistic, non-authoritarian, and empirically pragmatic…” (Thurman 1978, p. 36). Put in other language, Zen practice and the wisdom acquired are apophatic in nature—that is, a negation-based tradition that does not rely on any specific or defined postulates that have a definitive form regarding the nature of faith or concrete reality. The apophatic nature of Zen is hermeneutically important and often overlooked when one speculates about a Zen theological perspective. Nonetheless, apophasis is central to rethinking the esoteric/exoteric as they play out in America sanghas.

Ann Gleig in American Dharma brings to light many of these polity questions still faced by Buddhist communities. In a specifically pointed discussion on the uniquely American cultural and demographic challenges that sanghas face, Gleig discusses the chauvinism of white privilege widespread in sanghas. What remains problematic is the “recovery” and rearticulation of the purity of lineages through mainly white, middle-class purveyors of Zen (Gleig 2019, pp. 45–47).4 Linked with established centers and lineages, Gleig points out the challenge that established communities face as they adapt to forms and philosophies of Buddhist teaching in the states—specifically, the dependence on eccentric and countercultural teachings and ritual forms as a distraction from deeper historical issues and experiences specific to the history of conquest in the Americas.

Orienting hermeneutical premises based on praxis (polity and the hermeneutics behind Dharma-oriented decision-making) occasions a shift in consciousness regarding our notion of public and private. Generally, in the West, privacy has a connection to ownership and the domain of the conscience/private judgment. Such a connection operates through a metaphysics of individualism and consumption. Specifically, the social imaginary deeply ingrained in our consciousness—the private property system—permeates the North American consciousness in a way that sets individuals apart from and as competing with one another. Though this is a simple assessment, the evidence of this social fragmentation takes on metaphysical proportions through social, cultural, and political norms. Additionally, the religious realities that participate in the American cultural landscape must adjust to the means of and needs for survival and relevance. Since Zen is not native to the land and is not based on the related Abrahamic cosmologies prevalent in the States, promotion and relevance has been an acute concern for many sanghas. A praxis-oriented view encoded with the Zen interpretation of the Dharma falls into conflict with the encoded notions of consumerism, efficiency, and competition.

4. Praxis as (Theo)logy

Since Zen Buddhism is a non-theistic tradition, its basis for expressing faith claims (refuges) involve an action-oriented relationship with the world. Its telos, anthropology, and ontology stem from the varying texts of the Buddha’s sayings and a vast history of commentators. The practice of zazen (seated concentration) is regarded as the source of inspiration and action. The concepts that describe the inner experience of zazen provide working terms for discerning a Zen theology. In the place of a prophetic or theistically oriented religion, Zen is a practice wherein philosophy arises, not the other way around. The shift in consciousness brought about by practice and the subsequent insights are an important part of inspiration for the pastoral activity for many sanghas. Since there is no central authority in the U.S., many sanghas decide their public work for themselves, thus interpreting the Dharma according to the needs of the time and locale.

Underneath the pastoral and public work, the centrality of zazen functions as the primary expression of the transcendent/immanent relationship in reality. While there is no ambiguity in the expression, there is no dependence on authoritative doctrine or assertions of certainty. Zazen as a physical practice engages the body and mind as a unified whole, addressing the physical altering of the body and developing the nervous system. At the phenomenological level, zazen, a seated practice, requires the full engagement of the body and senses to maintain stability and concentration (samadhi) (Thurman 1978, p. 35).5 The task, always challenging, is also very dynamic because it endeavors to enliven the body rather than to halt it. In this sense, it is not asceticism or meant to be a self-annihilating practice. Instead, the practice of zazen functions as a dialectical relationship that brings physicality into tension with imagination. Does this make zazen or “master” practitioners authoritative? The answer to this question involves recognizing that the practitioner’s body/bodily practice has an analogous relationship with the vastness of the cosmos, which also means that one’s suffering and the conflicts of the world are interconnected and operate within the vastness of the cosmos.

As a sect of Mahayana Buddhism, Soto Zen espouses the basic tenets of Buddhism—the four noble truths, the bodhisattva ideal—and regards the “unbroken” transmission of the precepts from the Buddha to the present. However, Soto Zen appropriates these tenets in a radical way by elevating the meditative practice of zazen, or more specifically, Shikantaza (just/only sitting). The centrality of Shikantaza, for the purposes of this essay, is key for understanding the body/mind wholeness, the practitioner, and the inner/outer dialectical relationship between the human and the world.

Zazen is a seated meditational practice that should be primarily understood as a practice. That is, zazen as meditation is a sustained engagement with the body in a way that accesses inner capacities and remains still as sensations (emotions, perceptions, and memories, etc.) arise. Attention to posture, breathing, and the tenuous harmony between the two bring rigor and intensity to the bodily experience (Winfield 2013, p. 58).6 In a literal sense, the practice is “just/only sitting”, or shikantaza. Ehei Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto Zen Sect, places great emphasis on “just sitting” because it is an action of non-action. The external act of sitting still in a sustained and intense fashion is coupled with a similar internal orientation of mind, hishiryo (thinking–not thinking).

From a hermeneutical perspective, body/mind unity subtly articulates a metaphysical claim, while at the same time striking down dependence on an ontology. Metaphysically, body/mind unity (shin jin ichi nyo—“mind body not two”) connotes that there is no difference between the internal and external experience of an individual’s orientation to reality. In a stronger way, there is no inner or outer life for an individual, but rather, the total presentation and manifestation of being here and now (Winfield 2013, p. 59). 7 This is why the simplicity of just sitting and the intensity of thinking–not thinking operate as points of praxis rather than juxtaposition. To this end, hermeneutics becomes situated in praxis rather than discourse, uncoupling a strict binary view of reality and the ontological claims based on oppositional otherness. The individual is not defined by its other; rather, situatedness in the present occasions an unconditional experience of reality as a totality. In other words, implied in the body/mind unity is a displacement of the experience of being an isolate in a reality of isolates. Praxis as the driver of interpretation presents new premises for meaning making and relational identification. The ongoing relationship between the body and the imagination is meant to integrate into a dynamic whole rather than to distinguish the psychic from the somatic. Rather, psychic and somatic unity do not collapse into each other but reorient the senses for the purposes of reorienting one’s perception of the world. This dialectic is the site from which theological reflection springs because it operates as proof of the concept/verification of the verbal and written teachings of the religion. In other words, the experience and ongoing commitment to practicing zazen is the basis for reflection, not the other way around. To this extent, the body/mind become the allegory for the cosmos and the generator of spontaneous wisdom.

Dogen’s foundational reliance on zazen practice to cast off mind and body (shin jin datsuraku) demonstrates the psychological effect of practice in a way that suggests neither retreat from the world nor surrendering to illusion. Instead, in a non-dual way, casting off mind and body re-signifies the markers that demarcate everyday life, as it reconfigures the consciousness in its perception of life (Winfield 2013, p. 59).8 “Suchness”, or wisdom, is the cultivated capacity to non-dually embrace the contradictions inherent in karmic existence in a non-reactive way. Pamela Winfield, the author of Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment, addresses Dogen’s central insight through analyzing the overlapping hermeneutics of seeing involved in Japanese art from the esoteric traditions represented by Kukai (Kobo Daishi) and Dogen (Koso Joyo Daishi). She explains that Dogen’s spatio-temporal orientation has a stronger emphasis on temporality as the frame for material reality. In this framing, temporality encompasses the infinity of possibilities of matter (substance). Winfield explains that Dogen’s temporality imagines material existence as a dynamic potentiality that never remains in stasis and “manifests” its “true”/primal emptiness without egoistic or individuated exertion (Winfield 2013, pp. 26–27).9 She adds that “in the Zen tradition, it is a process, not a place, that bestows enlightened knowledge… marked by the assertion, negation and final reaffirmation of self and other in and through time.” (Winfield 2013, p. 27). The state of nonreaction and stillness is where we can begin to understand the ethical sensibility of Soto Zen. The shattered obstructions of measurement, power, otherness, and the self remain in a constant state of change due to their inevitable coalescing from navigating the day-to-day experiences of suffering in everyday life (Dogen 2012).10 Nonetheless, shattering as a practice, precisely shinjin datsuraku, also reconfigures one’s reliance on motivational structures to compete or “measure up” in worlds and existences determined by “objects of mind” (ideological structures of governance and institutional establishments). This reconfiguration does not set one apart from these objects of mind. Instead, the body/mind practice occasions an awakening to the futility of “objects of mind” and the investment in them as constitutive qualities that determine life. This awakening facilitates a shift in orientation from artifices that require (demands) subjugation to artificial structures born of suffering to a perspective that regards life as self-subsisting, though still encumbered by suffering. In a word, non-attachment (Jp. mushotoku—no profit no gain) 11

The term mushotoku refers to the Japanese translation of the Maha Prajna Hrdaya Sutra (the Heart Sutra). At the center of the sutra, the reader arrives at mushotoku, “[seek] no profit and [expect] no gain”. Non-attachment, in contrast to indifference, is the result of the removal of barriers between the self and other, power and subservience, and transcendent and immanent. Instead of separation from the world, zazen practices a deeper attunement and sensitivity to the effects of suffering in reality. Nonetheless, such sensitivity does not relieve the practitioner from the vicissitudes of life, but adds an enhanced attunement to beings and suffering. The notions of seeking and expectation are widely accepted as intrinsic features of human experience, especially as it relates to reactivity to the rules of cause and effect (karma). They are at once connected to attachment and desire (the sources of suffering) as they are to the way of cessation of suffering. David Loy rightly points this out when discussing the link between Buddhism and Western psychology:

This [meditative] process implies that what we fear as nothing is not really nothingness, for that is the perspective of a sense-of-self losing its grip on itself. According to Buddhism, letting-go of myself and merging with that no-thing-ness leads to something else: when consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become no-thing, and discover that I am everything—or more precisely, that I can be anything.

(Loy 2013)

The realization and practice of mushotoku results in what Pamela Winfield says is Dogen’s pattern of “assertion, negation, and the reaffirmation”—the breakdown of dependence on static moral structures or a textual basis for interpreting the subject or relationships (Winfield 2013, p. 27). Furthermore, the distinction between public and private, self and other, and form (phenomena) and emptiness (noumena) dissolve along with the dependence on a personal deity or projection of the ideal “self”.

Casting off body and mind and mushotoku ultimately express the practice (and thus doctrine) of non-attachment. Non-attachment as a doctrine is not an absolute or a guarantee after long years of practice or achievement. Rather, it functions as the marker of reckoning with the harshness of reality via a reckoning with arising sensations, espousal of the objects of mind, and the conditioned finitude of our existence (living and dying). Once again, we face a dialectical relationship between the desire-driven experience of the world (suffering) and relinquishing the drive to satisfy causal reactions to suffering. While not particularly profound or revolutionary on the surface level, the gradual and ongoing practice shapes the spiritual and physical experience of the practitioner. A further dialectical experience of non-attachment is the notion of the self and its relationship to the interconnected cosmos. Non-attachment shatters the barrier of the structure of cosmic existence and the individual’s desire to influence it. Allegorically, the body/mind experience interprets the cosmic reality, thus drawing the practitioner closer to solidarity with all beings in the cosmos of all possible existences—in a word, compassion (Loy 2013, p. 165).12

This praxis-oriented reflection is not quietist or historicist in nature, which is by design. The instruction of history and signification of orders of people and reality are considered obstacles to the cosmic/psychosomatic unity. These “objects of mind” generate from constructions meant to define hierarchies, structures of authority, and modes of opposition and competition—that is, the building blocks of a liberal society. These obstacles as “objects of mind”, while immaterial in essence, are real in presence since they function to provide external order to peoples, cultures, and resources. While there is no specific telos in Zen (not even Nirvana/Satori), going beyond or shattering through obstructions becomes the pastoral and spiritual activity generated in Zen practice. As an iconoclastic practice from the vital engagement in dialectic, Zen embraces contradiction by setting aside objects of mind and constructions of authority/hierarchy. In what Dogen Zenji terms the “casting of mind and body” (shin jin datsuraku), zazen correlates setting aside the ego (assertion of the self and privatizing the domains of the body and mind) and setting aside the “objects of mind” that configure our experience of reality. The result is a closer/clearer experience of reality “here and now” unconditioned by inner or outer prejudice.

5. Reckoning with Reality

The above section on the terminology used in Soto Zen is meant to introduce terms for “theological” reflection. The “theos” here is the elevated importance of zazen as the practice/interpreter of one’s (individual and collective) bodily experience in the world. Zazen functions as a threshold (rather than a mediator) that shatters delusion and reconfigures the body in order for practitioners to awaken to the vastness of the reality of suffering. What sounds like a via negativa is actually a liberating practice of witnessing the layers of oppression, death-dealing, structures of power, and systemic violence conducted at so many layers in society. Through the adjustments to mind and body, and subsequent “casting away” of mind and body, there opens a condition for the possibility of a deep critical consciousness that sets aside preconditioned attitudes and ideologies already operative in society. However, the condition for the possibility is also a challenge for active(ist) sanghas and sanghas who seek to retain forms and practices that mimic continuity with our Japanese counterparts.

Referring to tradition is both necessary and crucial for developing a public theology. Nonetheless, the American (western) adaptation of Zen faces a double challenge of being a minority religion and the composition of the practitioners in sanghas. As a minority religion, Soto Zen faces the struggle of taking root in a land with converts wherein the mystical (esoteric) experience long cultivated in Japan does not translate seamlessly to the States. Instead, the esoteric is as varied as the sanghas and lineages throughout the States. While the unique vocabulary of Zen experience outlined above is widely used in most sanghas, there is no consensus on its meaning or how the concepts can be utilized in a critical reflection that coalesces into a rigorous discourse that challenges the tradition and the conditions in which we find ourselves practicing the Dharma.13

From a theological/Dharma perspective, Soto Zen faces a methodological challenge that is not easily translatable to (primarily) Christian interlocutors. Generally, the locus theologicus in Christian theologies tends to refer back to Christ and the relationship between the Creator and the creature reconciled in Christ. This has public implications that connects Christian faith and the faithful with social and political institutions. The church, an institution that invests in its role as a moral authority, participates with other institutions in the complex reality. In public theology, the dialog between church and state, undergirded by faith claims and investment in the public good, is enacted by the faithful—the participants in the faith community and society. That the faithful are formed selves, decisive agents through which the dialog between faith and society occurs, the esoteric and the exoteric—that is, the spiritual/mystical and moral application of the faith—operates in tension with each other, providing the “data” for critical theological reflection.

How does theological reflection work when the locus is not a theos or a tradition that denies the notion of a wholly defined solidified self, but rather encourages the displacement of the self (casting off body and mind)? The implications of this question involve a displacement of how one considers the individual a decisive moral agent, the moral authority of institutions, and disrupts the polarity between the universal and the particular. As noted above, the notions shin jin datsu raku and mushotoku emphasize non-attachment and shattering the binarism of the universal and particular (the cosmos and the practitioner). Such shattering may not be strictly literal, though it is significant in critical ways. Specifically, the displacement of the self calls into question the centrality of personhood and identity as a source of meaning and purpose in life. The notion of the body, individual and collective, and its core life as an entity hypostatized and endowed with meaning from an external source (God/theos) holds the tension of the “is and is-not”. The “is”, or being, oriented toward distinction and differentiation, accumulates attachments meant to identify one’s uniqueness and specificity. We see this in many Christian theologies that depend on the Trinitarian formulation as a justification for human personhood and human dominion over the Earth. However, displacing the centrality of the human, desire, and uniqueness disrupts the justification of an intrinsic hierarchy in nature as well as the consequent degrees of differentiation encoded in discourses based on earthly dominion (colonial, classist, racial, nationalist origin narratives, and exceptionalism).

Dropping off body and mind creates a condition for the possibility of deep uncertainty of the source of meaning and value while resituating the gaze from the solidity of objects of mind to suspicion. The uncertainty and suspicion are not nihilist or self-erasing, but rather an exposure of the pervasive pursuit of desire that we have historically encoded into bodies, institutions, material, space, and time. Exposing desire through “dropping off” means exposing suffering and the base state of karmic (reactive) existence. To this extent, shin jin datsu raku exposes us to reality, the persistence of suffering, and reaction in existence (the first noble truth). On the other hand, mushotoku (non-attachment) operates as a hermeneutical axiom that emphasizes critical engagement with the causes of suffering through witnessing (not indifference).

A significant aspect of this engagement and reckoning involves Zen as praxis more than religiosity or individuated consumption of articulated so-called “Buddhist” experiences. Soto (and Rinzai) Zen Buddhism is normally interpreted as a practice or philosophy wherein its “orientalism” is interpolated into an esthetic and ritual alternative to normative American religious experience. The symbolism and exoticism expressed in religious institutions (even younger ritual and thought movements) contrast with the increased rationalist and consumerist ethos in the West. Nonetheless, this contrast is not an opposition or dispossession of the values of consumerism, but rather an absorption meant to render religious experience as differentiated on the presentation of rhetoric, images, and desirability. As a religious tradition, Zen in the States faces a religious milieu where the internal and external (esoteric and exoteric), rather than mystical, are subject to a desire-driven economics and culture focused on individualized experience and sovereignty. An example of this is the extractive practices in the multibillion-dollar enterprises in the mindfulness industry. Religious communities and transmitted traditions that bind practitioners and initiates together fluctuate between the commercialization of meditation techniques, robes, and the fragmentation of authoritative structures by pay as you go ventures that remain agnostic to the inner experience or awakening to the Dharma. Entrepreneurialism has always been an aspect of American culture that has required religious organizations to adjust their times. However, Zen’s entrance into the west, once considered countercultural, abides as fragmentary images and concepts within the cultural landscape of the mindfulness industry and religio-activist sanghas that provide the externalized performance of Buddhist practice and esthetics.

The esoteric operative in Zen takes on different proportions in its establishment in the States. Specifically, the esoteric involves a stronger materialist encounter with self, others, and sociality in religious contexts. Instead of the “church” experience or the dominant pastoral models of ministry, Zen’s public articulation is an alternative to congregational and ecclesial models of religious practice. Underneath the performance of religious ritual and meditative rigor is a deep, confrontational theology that challenges core perceptions of converts’ religious assumptions and culture. As described above, the physio/spiritual hermeneutics that constitute the experience of zazen and the expression of enlightenment presented by Dogen and his followers (casting/dropping off mind and body) shatter notions of how we situate the mind, body, self, space, and time. What arises is a different type of esotericism that continuously recalibrates the body and consciousness in subtle and radical ways toward a deep critique of reality and the structures that maintain suffering. Zen sanghas, communities with practitioners and initiates, involve navigating the stark encounters with “reality” through a received tradition, where new interpretations of the given vocabulary witness suffering and the radical ways it permeates life and narrows possibilities for the awakened living in the world. This form of “deep wisdom” and radical non-attachment is not for everyone, though it welcomes all. Nonetheless, the perspective of zazen generates possibilities for new articulations of how we consider the individual and collective experience of internal and external awakening to the material veracity of relationships alongside the constructs we use to value them.