Cross Cultural Talking About Zen: Living Life Within the Margins

Last updated on: August 20, 2016 at 1:53 pm by James Ford

Cross Cultural Talking About Zen: Living Life Within the Margins 2016-08-20T13:53:31-07:00 James Ford

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This picture is of my ordination cohort back in 1970 with our preceptor, the Reverend Houn Jiyu Kennett. I’m the kid in the second row on the far left, the one with the ears. Looking at it set me to thinking about various things. Age, you bet. And aging. The years that have flowed in between. And, about the strange directions my life has taken, and back then, what is it now forty-six years ago, how I can guarantee you I had no idea, absolutely no idea where this was going…

Today there is a conversation ongoing about Buddhism in the West and among the various topics, our current Western concern with appropriation. Appropriation is something complicated. It can be about people within a more dominant culture taking on bits and pieces from another culture that has been on the receiving end of some nasty things, often over a very long period of time. A classic example of this might be Pat Boone’s version of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti. All pretty embarrassing for pretty much everyone. It gets a bit muddier with Elvis Presley. And from there it gets ever more complicated.

Despite the coherence one might want, and with that identity and some sense of place in the great mess, culture is in fact all about encounter, clash, and change. And within that there often is exploitation, particularly from cultures that colonized others drawing upon those others. Not either or, but both and. So, of course, there are numerous ways any particular event can be interpreted, based upon how one understands the world.

Me, my real interest, the whole of my life is about the liminal space in the great encounter between Buddhism and specifically Zen Buddhism and our Western cultures, more specifically, our North American cultures. People see this spot, this moment, this encounter in all sorts of ways. For instance I once was told to my face that my being a Zen practitioner and priest while an American of European descent, at that time for some thirty years (it is now well over a decade since that particular encounter) was cultural appropriation. Flat out. No nuance. Just exploitation.

I often wear clothing that derives from Japan, and ultimately, China. I engage in liturgical practices that are adaptations of worship in a Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition, often mashed a little with Western and Christian elements. And, I happily acknowledge all the long away my debt to the Western rational tradition, which informs every thought that arises in my heart. That said, my language is littered with allusions to the Buddhist and specifically Zen spiritual traditions. (In fact I tend to draw upon two specific sources for tropes in my writing, the seventeenth century English King James Bible and the twelfth century Chinese koan anthologies. About equally.)

And then there’s that place where we live, both figuratively and literally. Our home decorations, in addition to the somewhat larger than average library, includes a mash up of prints from my spouse’s great uncle Ralph Fletcher Seymour, a print of an Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom, a couple of Tibetan tankas, two Mayumi Oda prints, a Navajo knockoff of a Hopi kachina (an interesting point for conversation all by itself), and several Buddhist statues featuring Guanyin. Throw in the furniture largely Mission style (our “grown up” furniture, mostly purchased after I turned sixty, and realized if we were going to move beyond graduate student chic, time was running out) and various appointments from Mexico, and, well, there we are.

Life is complicated. Life is messy. And, when we’re living into it, it gets even weirder. This is why my life motto found in hard experience is an adaptation of something Eihei Dogen once said about Zen, “one continuous mistake.”

On the more intimate scale, my life has been a path of encounter, clash, and change. And, the heart of it has been informed by my upbringing as a Christian and my lifetime discipline as a Zen Buddhist – further complicated by a twenty-five year career as a Unitarian Universalist parish minister – lived here in North America. Appropriation? Dialog? Integration? A little bit of both and? Something else entirely?

Well, there’s that other Zen motto that informs everything I am. Only don’t know.

And that said, here’s what I do know, as little as it might be. For me there has been something transformative in my living here at the edges, having a liminal spirituality. I am so grateful that I was born into a time and place where my life could be informed with an unsettled and unsettling spiritual clash of cultures and religions.

And, of course, it is dangerous. So, many bows to my many teachers.

And, I know for those outside as well as inside, it can provide some interesting moments in several directions. For an example a secular Japanese peek at western Zen practitioners in Japan…

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