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The Subtle Art of Bowing: A Dharma Discourse

The Subtle Art of Bowing: A Dharma Discourse

Last updated on: May 7, 2026 at 9:00 am by James Ford

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The Subtle Art of Bowing: A Dharma Discourse 2026-05-06T08:36:15-07:00 James Ford

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Zen priest Kosho McCall bowing.

(This presentation was first offered by my dear friend Dharma Holder Tom Wardle. He has generously aloud me to reprint it here.)

Tom Wardle is an Executive Coach, Spiritual Director, and Zen Teacher. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Hult International Business School. He is also a graduate of the Zen Peacemaker’s Seminary for Socially Engaged Buddhism. Tom is passionate about koan, lay practice, and the integration of the dharma into daily life. He currently teaches with Empty Moon Zen. You can connect with Tom here.)

***

The story of Buddhism coming to the West is a long and ongoing one, and it is important we have some perspective on it because it has greatly coloured our perceptions of what Buddhism is and how it should be practiced.

The history is long and complicated, demanding far more than a brief dharma talk to do it any justice. It has its roots in the latter 19th century, a heady, idealistic and deeply romantic period in Western history. While the Victorian age carried a veneer of conservatism, it was also highly idealistic and experimental. The industrial revolution was in full swing, regularly introducing new technologies that radically changed the lives of Western peoples. Innovations like the steam engine made large scale travel by both land and sea much faster and more accessible. The telegraph enabled communication across distances in ways that seemed almost magical. Industrialization brought about mass urban migration, a trend that continues to this day, and gave rise to corporations in a form we would recognize. Wealth inequality was severe then as now, but the promise of prosperity inspired many.

This was also a time when Western imperialism reached a crescendo, driven by greed and industry’s insatiable appetite for raw materials. While not the subject of this talk, we should all remember the great violence done across South America, Africa, Oceania, and Asia in the name of progress.

In 1854, Japan, a nation that had been almost completely cutoff from the outside world for 250 years, was forcibly opened to the west under threat of violence from the United States. The Americans were quickly followed by the British and the French, and various factions within Japan saw their moment to rise up against the samurai government and the oppressive caste system. There was a bloody war, but the samurai were ultimately defeated and the emperor Meiji restored as head of a modern parliamentary system.

To avoid the horrors inflicted on their Chinese neighbours by western imperial powers, the Japanese adopted nationalism and set about a program of rapid industrialization in order to become an imperial power themselves. In the process, however, great change was necessary, and this began with the construction of a national identity. Buddhism was a Chinese import and subject to aggressive reform and suppression throughout the Meiji period.

It is important to explain here that our Western concepts of religion largely do not apply in Japan. In fact, there was not a native word for the concept of religion as we hold it prior to the arrival of Western missionaries. In Japan, things have always been more fluid. Buddhism had comingled with native belief in kami, gods and divine nature spirits, resulting in a mixture of the two called shinbutsu-shugo, literally “syncretism of kami and buddhas”, or, less charitably “contamination of kami and buddhas”. In Japan, this fluidity between religious systems and practices continues to this day, leading to the contemporary joke that all Japanese are born Shinto, marry Chrsitian, and die Buddhist.

The Meiji government struggled to separate Buddhism from indigenous belief systems but was determined to curtail the power of the monasteries, who had been power brokers throughout history and had often kept large armies of their own. Eventually, Western curiosity about Buddhism would lead the Meiji government to use it as a tool of propaganda, but first it had to be reformed. Laws were passed that required all schools of Buddhism to distinguish themselves through explicit doctrinal differences or else be consolidated.

As applied to Zen, this lead directly to the contemporary misconception that pervades the West that Rinzai do koan and Soto doesn’t, a demonstrable falsehood, historically speaking. As evidence, I offer that not only did Dogen himself write an extensive koan collection, the Shinji Shobogenzo, he may have even held transmission in a Rinzai lineage himself. The picture is nuanced and complicated.

As well as constructing denominational distinctions, total complicity with the Meiji imperialist agenda was prerequisite for all Buddhist clergy, something that would continue through the Second World War and casts shadows across many Zen lineages, including our own. For more on that dark legacy, I refer you to Brian Victoria’s important though controversial book, Zen at War.

Throughout the late Victorian age, there was enormous interest in esoteric ideas, grand theories, and spiritualism, so the ground was ripe for the encounter with Buddhism. The landmark event would be the World Congress of Religions in Chicago in 1893 where Zen quickly became a sensation due to the charisma and fluent English of DT Suzuki, there as translator for his teacher, Soen Shaku. Headed into the conference, Shaku declared “Religion is the only force in which the Western people know that they are inferior to the nations of the East…. Let us wed Buddhism to Western thought… At Chicago next year, the fitting time will come.”

Clearly Shaku and Suzuki had their own agendas. Nonetheless, a meaningful dialogue began that would continue through the 20th century and eventually lead to the “Zen Boom” of the 1950s-1970s. Japanese Zen teachers came to the US, many to initially serve temples in Japanese ethnic enclaves, others specifically to teach Westerners. These men carried varied motivations, but most left behind complex legacies in their native lands. Some fetishized the West much as the West did the East, a case of “the grass being greener.” Others were effectively banished here. At least one was a convicted criminal.

Nonetheless, the engagement between Westerners and Buddhism grew, and inevitably teachings and practices were tailored to the interests of a Western audience. This would lead to many distortions and shifts in emphasis, particularly around meditation, which had traditionally been the purview of monastics. Lay devotees of Zen throughout Japan have typically engaged much more in devotional practices such as prayer, chanting, sutra copying, and making offerings in order to improve their karma. Many hope that by doing so, they will be reborn a monk in future and be able to escape the cycle of suffering from there. Of course, there is also always the hope for blessings here and now.

In the West, we have tended to underprivilege these devotional practices, often looking down upon them as “magical thinking” or just plain foolishness. Perhaps you even noted within yourself a reaction when I brought them up. Good. Stay with that.

Now look, I’m not much of one for any sort of cosmology or magic. While I acknowledge that there are myriad phenomena in this world that I do not understand and may very well be beyond the ken of science and reason, I am very much a rationalist in the Western sense of the word. My father is a physicist and academic; I have a lifelong love of the sciences, and I love to know about things. And that is exactly where the problems start.

Of the three pillars of Zen that are great faith, great doubt, and great effort, I have always preferred the latter two. My dharma name even means “Great Question,” and it is very apt. Faith, however, has been a struggle for me for more reasons than I could politely enumerate here. I’ll spare you. But I do know this: I need it, and for me, faith specifically means bowing.

We are highly individualistic creatures by culture and by nature. If nothing else, I am at the center of my own senses. When you stub your toe, I feel nothing, but when I do, my entire consciousness is coopted by the experience. When you are hungry, again, I feel nothing, but when I am, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of anything else. My experiences insist upon themselves, vivid, urgent, and apparently real. Because it feels like it all comes back to me, I am inevitably the main character of my own story, just as you are of yours. If we are not incredibly careful, we are left feeling like we are the center of the universe.

Meditation can play into this self-centeredness all too easily. I know I started practicing as an exercise in self improvement. As a teenager with a predisposition toward depression, I was clear I needed some work and meditation seemed to make sense. I figured I could fix myself through the practice and become something superior. I’d work out all of my flaws and frustrations with myself, and then this new, superhero self would have a frictionless and glorious life. I figured it would take about five years. I fantasized about flying through the koan curriculum like Koan Jesus, never making a mistake and wowing my teachers with my brilliance. Thank god that isn’t what happened, not at all, and I can see now how intoxicated I was with fantasies about my own splendid specialness.

Those attitudes are the precise opposite of what Zen is about, but they are totally natural. Practiced properly, meditation is an antidote to such thinking, but all too easily it can dangerously reenforce our sense of specialness.

If you have any doubts about how dangerous meditation can be, go read Zen at War, or just look back at the legacy of abuse and hurt left by so many Zen teachers in the last half century. And here’s the really tricky part: some of those abusive, racist bastards were also gifted teachers. Its all so very messy.

Self deception and self-centeredness arise endlessly. Meditation can be a tool to become intimate with these things, to know them when they come knocking and thereby to help us manage them, or it can become another onanistic exercise in self aggrandizement. What do we need to do to tilt it toward intimacy and humility, toward an experience of oneness over selfness?

If we don’t worship something else, we end up worshiping ourselves. We have to submit to something, anything, as greater than ourselves, we have to learn to bow, and we have to keep bowing, because that vivid experience of self insists upon itself relentlessly. It creeps back in again and again, so we must remain vigilant. We can’t do it alone, but Zen provides a toolkit that goes well beyond meditation, and in those other tools, there are refuges for us.

The act of taking refuge is what makes you a Buddhist. It is the act of owning our self-centeredness, of taking responsibility for it, of atoning for the endlessly arising greed, anger, and ignorance that result from the vividness of our personal experience of the world and of this body that always wants for something. We can’t escape it, so we best get real intimate with it so we know it when we meet it. Which we will. Again and again and again.

When we take refuge, we bow to the Buddha, the awakened nature of all beings. That’s how we usually put it, but today I want to invite you to think of bowing to Buddha as acknowledging that every other being experiences things exactly the way you do, struggling with the same self-centeredness, the same craving, the same heartache. In this, we are all the same.

We take refuge in the Dharma, the teachings. The Dharma is how it really is to live this life, my self-centeredness be damned. I may think I get it, but I don’t. I really don’t get it. My views are at best incomplete if not dangerously distorted. If you go read early translations of the sutras, Dharma is often translated as The Law, capital T, capital L. I really like that. I think of it as law in the same sense that gravity is a law: It just is. You can’t fight it.

Bowing to the Dharma, to how things really are, can also reframe our practice of meditation. The Soto missionary Shohaku Okamura reminds us in his brilliant essay, “Those Who Greatly Realize Delusion Are Buddhas”, that “Zazen is not a method of correcting the distortion of our fabricated conceptual maps, but rather is the act of letting go of all maps, and sitting down on the ground of reality. Letting go is at once the complete rejection of any formation arising in our limited karmic mind, and the acceptance of all formations as mere secretions of the mind. We let thoughts come up, and we let them go away. We neither negate nor affirm anything in zazen.”

So I bow. I bow to the Dharma. Again and again.

Finally, and we should never think of the order as any kind of statement of importance or priority, we take refuge in Sangha: The only hope for us is in other beings, in learning from them, being challenged by them, coming to accept them and see them as we see ourselves. If we are to grow beyond our self-centeredness, it must be in community.

So, I invite you, make bowing central to your practice. Do it physically. Do it when you meditate. Bow when you chant, and bow to whatever you encounter in this world. Do it all the time. Just bow. We will all be the better for it.

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