The Matter of Zen by Paul Wienpahl

Author:Paul Wienpahl [Wienpahl, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317215363
Google: RdYeDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-05T06:02:30+00:00

16

Some history

ACCORDING to Heinrich Dumoulin, a historian of Zen Buddhism, the first Western contact with Zen came in the sixteenth century, when Christian missionaries visited Japan. There they encountered the doctrine of nothingness, had conversations with roshis, were impressed with the tea ceremony, and, according to their reports, made conversions even among the roshis. They probably did not know that a Zen Buddhist would agree to conversion simply to facilitate relations with the foreigners. On the other hand, they may have found out, for they came to regard the Zen sect as the most satanic of the Buddhist sects.

Since then there has not been much contact between the West and Zen Buddhism. Certainly there has not been contact with Zen Buddhism in Japan until recently, for the doors of Japan were closed to the West for two hundred and fifty years before 1854. When the West did become interested in Buddhism, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it was not Zen Buddhism with which it became acquainted. Rather it was the Buddhism in India. A knowledge of Sino-Japanese Buddhism is in fact quite recent, and its accuracy has been impaired by the prior and longer knowledge of Indian Buddhism, which is a horse of another though not entirely different color.

The story of the recent coming of Zen Buddhism to the West is largely that of the coming of Japanese Zen Buddhism.1 Some awareness of it is important, for the story, even when briefly told, makes it clear that the coming of Zen to the West is in the main a literary phenomenon in which zazen has been neglected.

Although there are now a number of Westerners engaged in zen study in Japan, the transmission of Zen to the West has so far been the work of surprisingly few individuals. Apart from the very few Westerners, such as Eugen Herrigel,2 who were zen students in Japan and then wrote of the study, or the somewhat larger number of people who heard of Zen in the West and began writing about it, Zen was brought to the West by a small band of Japanese Zen Buddhists who trace their teaching to Engaku Temple in Kamakura. Of these only one is well known, D. T. Suzuki.

After the 1850’s, when Japan was opened to the West, the roshi at Engaku-ji was Kosen. He became a famous teacher during the Meiji Era, in part because he took an equally keen interest in the promulgation of Zen among laymen and in the lay education of Zen Buddhist monks. He was aware, too, that Zen Buddhism was in danger of dying out in the rapidly modernizing Japan of his day, and he cherished the idea of its transmission to the West, where it might flourish again. For some reason Kosen was under the impression that, of all the Western countries, the United States would provide the best soil for the Zen seeds that would be carried from Japan.

This interest in the transmission of Zen to the West was not a missionary interest.

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