Re: [ZenLiving] Authenticity

With palms together,


This is an interesting editorial on Antiji's website regarding this very issue:

Buddhism for the dead Ten years after Aum (Part 7)

Japanese Buddhism has turned into a service industry that offers funerals and memorial rites for money. The Buddhist organizations, including the Soto Zen school, function like big corporations with the aim to gain profits, while the temples themselves have turned into the home of the resident priest's family, who act as the local representative of the "funeral corporation". The Rinzai and Obaku school remarks during their symposium that even the parishoners who support the temple - that used to be the center of the activities of the local community until one or two hundred years ago - do not feel welcome there anymore. They say that the reason for this lies in the fact that the priests started to marry after the Meiji restauration (in 1868), and that the wife performs a central function in the temple. That means that the "temple wife", as she is called in Japanese Buddhism, is not so much the wife of the priest as an individual, but rather is married to the temple itself. On the other hand though, the temple for her represents the home for her family, and she will not be willing to open the doors for anyone - let alone spiritual seekers of truth that do not contribute to the temple's donation box and whom she or her husband has nothing to offer anyway. Anyone who is looking for the Buddha's teaching is told to stay away, and even the parishoners can visit the temple only to attend the services which they pay for. Today's temples are anything but a "soul asylum" - it's where you go to buy a grave. The rule of the wife in a Japanese home can be so strict that even her husband (the resident priest in this case) does not feel welcome anymore and kills his time in the next body building studio or game center. Whenever some customer asks for a funeral service at the temple, his wife will contact him on the cell phone, and in no time he changes into his monk's robes and is on his way to the parishoner's home. In the Buddhist world of Japan, when monks speak of their "master" they mean their father, while their "disciple" is their son. Since the Meiji restauration, it has become an exceptional case that someone from outside the temple family ordains or trains there as a monk. The monks of course do not have the feeling that their profession is holy, they do not feel that studying or propagating the teaching of the Buddha is their mission. The practice of the Dharma for the sake of the Dharma that Dogen Zenji speaks of is not an issue anymore. A Buddhist temple is a family business that you inherit from your father - for one to make easy money but also to keep up the (family) tradition. Three and a half years ago, when I became the abbot of Antaiji, I had to attend a two-day seminary at the Soto headquarters in Tokyo (which by the way also functions as "Grand Hotel Tokyo"), where they taught you all you need to know to be a full-fledged Buddhist priest. One of the lectures was about "the attitude that a resident priest should have". Hearing this lecture, first I was surprised to learn that a resident priest gains an income from living in the temple. As both the priest and his whole family live for free in the temple precincts, I wouldn't be so surprised to hear that he is paying to live in the temple - but why should he be paid? As far as I know, none of the abbots at Antaiji ever received an income for being the abbots of Antaiji. The lecturer proceded to proclaim that he received "only 350.000 Yen" (about 3000 dollars) of income from the temple each month, but as he had no children and also worked part time at Komazawa University, spending the rest of his time growing vegetables at his temple, he "gets along all right". What the hell is he using 350.000 Yen per month for when he is just a hobby farmer that works as a college professor part time? And what "attitude of the resident priest" did he try to communicate to us? I did not fully understand. But when you think about it, it is just a matter of course that the resident priests receive an income for representing the local affiliates of the funeral corporation. But then they should pay the corporation also a rent for living in their buildings. And in a place like Antaiji, where everyone eats the food that the tenzo cooks in the temple kitchen, we would have to pay a certain price for each meal, or the monthly board. In return, we would get paid for the work we do in the fields, and maybe should even receive a fixed amount of money for each period of zazen we sit? After all, we are keeping the practice at Antaiji going by doing zazen. Of course this is only a joke, but this is actually what the Soto school is expecting from the priests: They are supposed to seperate their private lifes from their function as a priest, i.e. they work as priests for the temple for a certain part of the day, and for the rest of the time they are "off-duty". The priest gets paid for his services, the costumers (the parish) pay for it. This has nothing to do with the life we aim at at Antaiji, where all the 24 hours of our daily life should be practice. Practice is our life - we don't pay for it, and we don't get paid for it. I realized just how great the gap between our life here and the situation of the Soto school in general is when I looked at the questionaire that the headquarters sent us the other day. It started with the question concerning the members of the sangha (the community of practioners). The Chinese (and Japanese) term for the Sanskrit "sangha" consists of two characters meaning "thicket" and "forest". The meaning is that the members of the sangha join together just like the many different kinds of trees and bushes growing in a wild forest. There are small ones and big ones, there are straight ones and crooked ones - all united for the sole purpose of practicing the buddha way. The Soto headquarter's questionaire on the other hand asked if the desciples of the abbot were "1) his real (i.e. not adopted) children 2) adopted children 3) a spouse of one of his children 4) the children of other members of the family, or 5) others". That someone from outside the family becomes a student of the resident priest is today considered an exceptional rarity. Blood-relationships used to play no role in the Buddhist sangha, they used to be the exception - today they are the rule. Your career as a Zen priest depends solely on your family background. You are born into the Soto school, otherwise you will forever be an outsider. The questionaire goes on to ask questions like: "Do you think that the souls of the ancestors can curse us?" or "Is it OK to perform a funeral on a tomobiki day (a day which is reserved for the performance of marriages and other events, as any event performed on that day is supposed to 'pull/affect a friend (Jap. tomobiki)'?" The Soto schools questioning has obviously come quite a long way after the quest of figures like Shakyamuni, Bodhidharma or Dogen Zenji. At the end of the questionaire, there was some space for people to feel in their opinions freely. I wrote: "How will Soto Zen develope from now on? Will we continue to aim at making more and more money through funerals in order to protect the temple buildings? Or will we take a step back and reflect on what our ancestors aimed at with their practice? Or will the Soto school just disappear, as a redundant relict of old times? It might also happen that the school devides into two different organizations, one that sees it as its task to provide funerals and other service for money to anyone who asks for them. The other aimed at preserving the teaching handed down from Shakyamuni Buddha to Dogen Zenji to us. One day it might happen that the temple where I am abbot - Antaiji - will break free from the dead frame of the Soto school and walk its own way. We need some fresh air, not the smell of dead rituals and dirty money." But before continuing to examine the historical background of the decline of Japanese Buddhism (and the question if it is really a decline in the first place), I want to take a look on how the Soto officials dealt with the Aum incident ten years ago, and also explain briefly what I personally think that Buddhism is all about.