Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Author:Carolyn Chen [Chen, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Killing the Buddha

When Gil Goldman, a Zen priest in Silicon Valley, noticed that attendance at his zendo (temple) was flagging, he came up with an entrepreneurial solution. Tech professionals, who are a sizeable proportion of the members of his zendo, were so busy with work that they didn’t have time to attend services, he realized. What if, instead of asking people to come to the zendo, he brought meditation practice to them at the workplace? Gil, who had been an engineer for over thirty years, was familiar with tech culture. He knew that he couldn’t bring incense, robes, and chanting into the company offices. Instead, Gil made meditation practice that is “based on Buddhism … appropriate for work.” He pitched meditation as a tool for “high performance,” “productivity,” and “resilience,” all words that, he knew, tech companies liked to hear. Instead of wearing robes to teach, he wore khakis and a button-down shirt and never mentioned that he was a Zen priest.

Helen Sommers, a middle-aged Buddhist meditation teacher, faced a different dilemma from Gil’s but reached the same solution. She’d taught meditation and yoga for years. Her passion was teaching meditation and yoga to people in prison and to kids in inner-city schools, who she felt would really benefit from it. But Helen couldn’t afford to limit her teaching to community centers, prisoners, and inner-city students now that the influx of well-paid tech workers was driving up the cost of living in the Bay Area. Helen realized that she needed to market meditation to a more affluent population to survive. Taking a tip from a fellow meditation teacher, Helen rebranded herself as a “mindfulness leadership coach” and learned all the science on meditation that she had previously dismissed. She avoided words like “consciousness,” “dharma,” and “liberation.” Teaching mindfulness to tech employees, she says, “pays the bills,” so that she can live out her true calling of bringing meditation to prisoners and students.

Gil’s and Helen’s experiences show how tech “disrupts” Buddhism. To survive in Silicon Valley, religion must conform to the logic and culture of the tech industry. This is true for religious organizations, whose members are working too hard to attend the zendo. It’s also true for individual religious and spiritual teachers, who must learn new ways to monetize their teachings or be priced out of the Bay Area. But not everyone sees Buddhism’s adaptation to tech as a means for survival. Others, such as Google engineer and best-selling author Chade-Meng Tan, are trying to spread the dharma to new “users” by linking the benefits of Buddhist practice to productivity and success.

Gil, Helen, and Meng teach Buddhist meditation in companies for different reasons, but they share the same challenge: how to sell a religious product in a professedly secular workplace. They are what I call meditation entrepreneurs. They include three groups: contractors who teach meditation for a fee, such as meditation teachers, executive coaches, and companies producing meditation products; company administrators, such as human resources professionals and executives who

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