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Stand On Your Own Two Feet: Can a Post-Modern Approach Save Zen?

Stand On Your Own Two Feet: Can a Post-Modern Approach Save Zen?

Last updated on: February 24, 2011 at 4:20 pm by Dosho Port

Stand On Your Own Two Feet: Can a Post-Modern Approach Save Zen? 2011-02-24T16:20:00-06:00 Dosho Port

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The few times that I brought a personal issue to Katagiri Roshi – hoping to lean on him – he would say, “Stand on your own two feet.”

I bring this up now because I’ve been reflecting again on power in dharma communities, a reflection that I’ve been revisiting for over 3o years.

We may be in a critical phase in the transmission of the buddhadharma to the global culture. How we deal with power is one of the most vital issues.

First off, I don’t agree with those who see power as evil, as something we should avoid. Power is always being exercised in our personal lives and in community so it is better to embrace power and openly reflect on it together.

However, I do understand the reaction to flee when the complexity and difficulty of power becomes salient. I sometimes still yearn for a little cabin in the woods, less often now but … ah, waking up to the deep quiet, sipping coffee on the veranda in the dark, hours of zazen, a swim in a clear mountain lake … ah, but there I go again….

Back to the issue of power, I agree with those who suggest that scandals and such are symptoms of an underlying issue, specifically, where can we optimally locate power such that the buddhadharma might fully bloom? Should power be located in the teacher, the community, or the individual?

The traditional place to locate power was in the teacher. Here’s an example of a description of a retreat where power is located in one key person:

If you’ve ever wanted to “hang out” with Genpo Roshi in a private, one-on-one setting—knowing that your life would be transformed in the process—this is your opportunity.

What’s different in this blurb (I am not making this up) from other systems with traditional power is how undisguised and unabashed the teacher-centered approach is. The power to change your life seems to lie in spending $15,000 for four days in Maui, hanging out with somebody really special.

Come on. Such a retreat would seriously transform my credit card debt but apart from that, probably not so much.

That these events fill up shows how people are desperately hungry and how that hunger can be exploited.

Remember, “Stand on your own two feet.”

Disillusioned by hanging out and anticipating transformation (with or without scandal, with or without spending $15,000), what we often try next is to locate power in the community.

Here’s one clear expression of community-based power that I stumbled across recently in an online forum (used with permission):

What we can do is to locate power in community, one that authorizes teachers and people in other leadership roles by calling for mutual accountability, ethical action, and an openness to speaking and listening to truth.

Clearly, there are advantages to community power, important and healthy stuff.

Unfortunately, what also comes when power is located in the community is group-thinking which is inherently uncreative and attached to fleeting, contemporary norms as if they were universal truths. In addition, in order to project community- based power, lots of meetings are required and the group’s focus can move from practicing awakening to attending committee meetings.

Sound familiar? If so, your community might be practicing community-located power.

There’s another danger that is expressed by the Japanese saying, “The nail that stands up gets hammered down.”

Power located in the community encourages a system of normalizing judgment that is exercised in the evaluation of our own and others’ lives. This can control against abuses but also limits innovation – a vitally important ingredient in establishing the dharma here and now.

Finally, the community can elevate itself such that compliance with the community’s normative judgments becomes the goal of the practice. The communal “we” becomes more important than the individual. Rather than an ego we develop what Pilar Jennings calls a “we-go.” In community-located power, the we-go is idealized and awakening to true nature is equated with compliance to group norms. Dangerous.

A third option is the post-modern approach. Here’s an really Buddhist-sounding excerpt from Wikipedia:

[Post-modernism] involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications…. Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests consist in.

In the post-modern approach, power is located in unfolding dyadic relationships and the ongoing insights actualized in face-to-face meeting.

While traditional power motivates by the promise of granting worth from on-high, and community-based power motivates by offering belonging to those who conform, post-modern power instills in people the aspiration to realize their own and others’ inherent worth.

While traditional power functions by oppressing, imposing and coercing, and community-based power functions by recruiting people into surveillance and policing others, most-modern power functions in person-to-person meeting and trains us to broaden our capacity for open-ended possibilities, also known as, “don’t know mind.”

Post-modern power is edgy and requires sustained willingness to meet the person standing before us now. It is my commitment to practice post-modern power in our wild fox den here in Minnesota, and with others that I meet as I roam around in Zen dens here and there.

“I am willing,” wrote Chogyam Trungpa, “to share my experience with the whole environment of life with my fellow pilgrims, my fellow searchers, those who walk with me. But I am not willing to lean on them in order to gain support…. If a group of people leans upon the other, then if one falls down, everyone falls down. So we should not lean on anyone else. We just walk with each other, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, working with each other, going with each other.”

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