In this conference on Buddhism, doors leading to questioning and trying it out for yourself were categorically slammed shut, bolted. We all understand that this is a "religion" and a way of life for grown-ups, that it is a system of thought--a path to train our confused minds so that the difficult questions which life throws at us could be examined thoroughly. So, why is it that now, after having stumbled upon this Path, we insist on avoiding it so vehemently? Barring it with slogans and buzz words arising from our own ignorance and fear?

Walking away from the two day conference on Buddhism in America I felt a feeling of discomfort. Boston is a very nice city, historical, the seat of the most illustrious universities in this country; the hotel was elegant to say the least, so why the discomfort? Maybe because of the weather? There was a very cold northerly wind blowing. It chilled our Californian bones whenever we ventured outside. But, there was no need to step outside, unless you were a vegetarian. Then one might get the urge to search for a Chinatown's Golden Buddha or a restaurant run by a Vietnamese former monk. This is what Heng Chih, Heng Liang, Heng Gwei and I did on the first and the coldest day of that long weekend.

Then the conference began. There must have been about six hundred people attending it. The most colorful and prominent among them were the Tibetans, as usual, designing their sand Healing Mandala while the conference progressed, and putting on a show in the evening for the benefit of Tibetan refugees. The conference was, however, decidedly American and Western. Let me tell you why I thought so.

One of the loudest slogans to be heard spilling out of the various conference rooms was: "Sanding Down the Rough Edges of Buddhism". Now, if anyone were to engage in the sanding down of Buddhism privately and carefully asking for "feedback" along the road, with an open invitation for comments and critique, I do not think that I would have too many objections. Afterall the Buddha himself said that we should not believe blindly even in Buddhism and invited us to question, to try out his teachings. However, in this conference on Buddhism, doors leading to questioning and trying it out for yourself were categorically slammed shut, bolted.

Before going any further let me make one thing as clear as I can. The bolts that were used to slam shut the doors of Buddhism are the very same bolts that are used to slam behind us our own Western traditions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is a curious phenomenon of our world.

As people of the twentieth century, educated and enlightened to modem civilization, we have rebelled against the misuse of religions, or against that what is commonly peddled as religion. Then some of us turned Eastward hoping to find answers which our own cultures did not provide any longer. Some turned Westward. All of us looking for answers that our religions, which are weighted down with cultural and superstitious luggage, did not provide. Thus it became possible for both Easterners and Westerners to confront each other in the hope to see beyond themselves and their weighted down religions.

Buddhism is that what could bond The East and West in a quest, only if we are willing to let go of the excess baggage while approaching our various Middle Paths. Afterall, Buddhism arose somewhere between the East and the West, in the middle, foreign to both Europe and to the Far East. We all understand that this is a "religion" and a way of life for grown-ups, that it is a system of thought - a path to train our confused minds so that the difficult questions which life throws at us could be examined thoroughly.

So, why is it that now, after having stumbled upon this Path, do we insist on avoiding it so vehemently? Barring it with slogans and buzz words arising from our own ignorance and fear?

After the conference it seems imperative that all religions in good faith get together, with compassion and with awareness in order to examine where the faultlines lie, and how they could be avoided. Finding blame with any religion is out of the question, as the Indian saint of the last century, Sri Ramakrishna, once said: a religion is as good as the individuals who practice it.

The first day of the Conference we heard how psychologists use Buddhism in their practice. They call it stress reduction and relaxation in order to "mainstream" its tenets. That is very good, I heartily support the effort, only one comment: should not the patients at some point be told the name of the medicine, what it is that is curing them. Should they not be told that what seems to be helping is only a tiny little piece, a little piece taken out of context from a much larger "system"? Then carefully, encourage the patients on the way to be healed to go beyond these preliminaries, instead of tricking them into believing that they have already reached the End of the Road, and setting them up for more confusion down the road? Can we really heal ourselves quickly and magically by tasting only the sugar coating and throwing away the rest of the medicine which may or may not be so pleasant to swallow?

I could not help thinking that the offerings from many of the speakers were only crumbs. They seemed to admonish us to stop further investigation since there lies nothing ahead anyway. Most of the speakers implied that. However, difficult issues are those which are often at the root of most of our problems, issues which engage our conscience and challenge it on a deeper level. They are the sand which should be used not to sand down the 'rough edges' of Buddhism itself, in order to make it more palatable, but our own confusion. There is no awakening without some measure of 'dis-ease'. This applies to both the senses and the mind as part of the senses.

It is afterall an issue of ethics. Surely most of us heard the clear message that Buddhism blasts out: have the courage to confront all that you encounter and deal with it, make conscious decisions and conscious efforts, and take your mind (and your senses) seriously! The beauty of Buddhism is that it shows us how to go about it, and reach our conscience, how to discover it and how to cultivate it to its maximum capacity.

But, to return to our conference and the approach to Buddhism as a form of relaxation. This was the topic of the first keynote speaker, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. He started by quoting H. G. Wells who once said that Buddhism did more for the world than the whole of mankind, then he quoted other famous Western thinkers, philosophers and scientists who benefitted from Buddhism said some wonderful things about it. Dr. Kabat-Zinn ended this string of quotes with Einstein who once said that Buddhism is the cosmic religion of the future. Very encouraging.

He then explained that in the eyes of Americans meditation was perceived as non-doing, which implies laziness and is therefore fundamentally un-American. That then becomes the reason for him not to mention the word Buddhism or meditation to American audiences. Dr. Kabat-Zinn calls his "own" method: Mindfulness Based Stress-reduction and does not specify where he got his ideas from, in order not to needlessly irritate a conservative New England clientele in need of psychotherapy.

Then the lights were dimmed and a slide appeared on the screen. It was the slide of a spider's web, more or less, underneath it were the words "Indra's Net = interconnectedness," illustrating the point that there really is no center to ourselves. Then for our own edification, I guess (since he never mentions Buddhism to his patients), Dr. Kabat-Zinn explained that statues of the Buddha are representations of our states of mind and that you can never be where you actually are.

Then he told us how he helps his patients practice noninterfering and non-doing in order to "affect the quality of the day" - a statement uttered by the famous American writer and nature lover who in his day was interested in Buddhism, Thoreau. He also explained how in his SS & RP (stress reduction and relaxation program) he teaches his patients to "hold the present moment" as a complement to medical treatment, not a substitute. And that we could all benefit by it since in order to live in this crazy world we can never be crazy enough. This sort of approach is also known as Mind Body Medicine these days.

Thus relaxed by the first key-note speech to what I presumed to be an almost exclusively white, middle class, audience of psychotherapists capable of paying at least $350 for attending, I went on to the next event: a brilliant discussion by Roshi Bernard Tetsugen Glassman.

Roshi Tetsugen is from New York and practices Zen. He is very well known and he gave an inspiring demonstration of the spontaneity of Zen while also promoting his new book on the subject. First he collected fifteen questions and then wove his talk around them using the metaphor of cooking with the ingredients at hand, and producing the best meal you can muster under the circumstances. The obvious moral of the talk being: do not wish for what you do not have. Excellent advice, very folkloric. It made me remember advice from the German teacher in my high school days: Streck dich nach deiner Decke! - Stretch yourself according to the length of your eiderdown! Or the English saying: You are too big for your britches! - Hmm, not quite the same, but folksy anyway.

It is a solid piece of advice and a solid piece of Buddhism, Japanese Zen gives it an extra dimension, but this can hardly be equated with the teachings of the Buddha and all of the magnitude, methodology, discipline and wealth of the Buddhist sutras and shastras. It is a good aspect, something most religions have in common, and something which these days is not very popular due to its preachy character.

But preachiness is something that Buddhism is not guilty of in my mind. Buddhism invites to us to figure it out on our own, warning us that the answers are not going to be easy simple or quick. Roshi Tetsugen's presentation may help with the cultivation of mindfulness while cooking, but what about our dis-comforts, those that go beyond cooking and beyond the lack of cooking ingredients? For that we had a series of other presentations to chose. Here I cannot comment any longer in my facetious manner since we were busy with our own ingredients that were to be thrown into this Conference of Buddhism in America.

We, the participants from the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (CTTB) Heng Sure, Heng Chih, Heng Liang, Heng Gwei, Doug Powers and I-sat all together, the lay persons at the two ends, the Sangha in the middle, faced the audience and let Heng Sure introduce us, our work and the CTTB, the practices there and some of our points of view, and last but not least the work of the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua. The importance being placed on the exchange between East and West, how both can benefit from each other if the approach be authentic and sincere.

In the afternoon, after our short introduction, I went to listen to Stephen Batchelor, a well-known English Buddhist and scholar who now has a Buddhist Institute in England, doing what we are trying to achieve in Berkeley. As a Buddhist and scholar, Stephen Batchelor explained what Buddhism holds as its important tenets, how these fit, or do not fit with the Western concept of agnosticism. This term was coined by his great uncle C.H. Huxley, a well known scientist from a well known family.

He first explained what his great uncle really meant by agnosticism: a nonprivileged knowledge but nevertheless demanding, a method and not a creed. It is training in the cultivation of rational investigation of the power of ideas and reason. Stephen Batchelor quoted from the Pali Canon and its Nikayas, the Manukiputta Sutta, and thus for the first time in this whole Conference I heard the Sutras mentioned. Batchelor then stated that Buddhism is a pragmatic tradition, its primary focus being on the actual practice.

He also discussed the problem of identifying Buddhism with religion as understood in the West today, since it obscures the Dharma into a secular culture, robbing it of the inner dimension. All of this prompted him to resuscitate the term agnosticism, although agnosticism today has lost its "potency". It has become a dismissive denial implying a degradation into cynicism and skepticism. Not at all what his great uncle meant.

Finally a serious explanation of the difficulties in explaining Buddhism! Religion, Batchelor said, in the modem world means nothing more than a series of metaphors for consolation and psychological security, and neither Buddhism nor agnosticism can be restricted to only that function. Since both are not consolatory but confrontative.

He then went on to describe dukkha. In his description of dukkha Batchelor mentioned another thing which the two have in common, they are not mere humanist in their outlook but 'sentientbeingnist'. He continued by describing very eloquently something that could be summarized as the concept of prajna. Some of the notes which I jotted down are:

There is no blueprint due to the unrepeatability of phenomena. Emptiness is only a mid point where we discover the origin of imagination, something that a human being is reluctant to do. I happily started thinking how people were finally given something worthwhile, a slice instead of a crumb, only to hear someone comment that Stephen Batchelor's lecture, as wonderful as it was and presented as well as it may be, is but only a small and unimportant aspect of Buddhism, implying that cooking and relaxation were the cake and prajna the crumb. I guess to each his own, the good thing about Buddhism is that there are many Dharma doors, I guess.  

 ~ To be continued