English version of "Sanka suru bukkyô ni mukete: Amerika ni okeru Dôgen zen," in Nara and Azuma, ed., Dôgen no nijûisseiki [Dôgen's Twenty-first Century], pp. 211-232. Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 2001.

In October, 1999, the Sôtô school held a celebration at Stanford of the 800th anniversary of Dôgen's birth. On that occasion, I gave a talk entitled "Living With Dôgen: Thoughts on the Relevance of His Thought". The talk concerned issues in Dôgen's religious thought that I felt will need to be addressed if we are to formulate a contemporary version of Dôgen's Zen. My purpose there was simply to lay out certain historical characteristics of Dôgen's approach to Zen; I dealt only in passing with the contemporary scene and did not try to imagine the shape of a contemporary Buddhism. Nevertheless, at the end of my talk, I did suggest one general feature of Dôgen's approach to Zen that I thought might be especially relevant to a modern rethinking of Zen religious life. I called that feature "participatory Buddhism". Here, I would like to pursue this notion a bit and see if I can relate it to issues facing the contemporary Buddhist community.

Let me begin with several caveats. First, I am by training an historian of Buddhism, not a theologian and not a sociologist of contemporary religion. Thus, I have no particular expertise in my subject matter here. I am speaking only as a Buddhist layman interested in the future of his religion, and I hope that specialists in my subject matter here will sharpen my ideas and correct my mistakes. Second, I am speaking only as an American Buddhist layman about issues in the American community; I leave it to others better qualified to decide whether and how what I say here is relevant to Buddhism in Japan. Third, in speaking of "the American community", I have in mind only the Buddhism found among American converts to the religion, not the religion of the nikkei and other ethnic communities, which have their own distinctive characteristics. Finally, I should warn the reader at the start that my thoughts here are those of a religious and political liberal, who has doubts about much both in the traditional and the current interpretations of Buddhism.

American Buddhism

If Dôgen's Zen is to flourish in America, it will have to come into conversation with American Buddhism. I see at least five trends that tend to distinguish this Buddhism from traditional forms in Asia -- trends that, in one form or another, have been noted by others as well in recent studies of the American Buddhist scene. I shall call them "secularism", "individualism", "eclecticism", "egalitarianism", and "activism".

By "secularism", I mean a tendency, often identified as a peculiar feature of modernity, to view the "sacred" realm of religion as a product of human culture, rather than to view the worlds of nature and culture as the expression of a sacred realm. American Buddhists do not typically see their country as a mandala; they do not read their history as stages of the dharma leading to the coming of Maitreya; they do not see their own lives here as preparation for birth in Sukhâvatî. They do not treat the ideas and practices of Buddhism as manifestations of the dharma-kâya. Rather, Buddhism is but one human option in a world of many options; it must compete in the marketplace to prove its value, both to the individual and the society. Like any product on the market, Buddhism can manipulate the tastes of its consumers through skillful advertising, but it must also cater to their tastes through skillful packaging.

By "individualism", I mean a tendency to treat Buddhism as a vehicle for personal experience, rather than as a religious institution or social community or cultural tradition. Americans today often make a sharp distinction between "religion" and "spirituality" -- the former having to do with institution, ritual, and dogma; the latter concerned with the individual's inner life. In this distinction, religion is seen as somehow suspect, as shallow and "inauthentic"; spirituality is seen as pure and beautiful. Although the language of spirituality often puts great value on a common humanity and a harmony between the human and natural worlds, it is typically concerned first of all with private experience: how I feel about myself and humanity and the world -- or what has been called "I-dolatry". For many American Buddhists, then, membership in a Buddhist organization is of secondary concern, and acceptance of the norms of a particular Buddhist community is as much a compromise as it is a commitment.

By "eclecticism", I mean the tendency to "shop around" in the religious marketplace for what is attractive and to put together a personal version of spirituality that may be drawn from a variety of sources, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. The American Buddhist scene is now filled with a great variety of options, both imported forms of the religion from virtually all the countries of Asia and new domestic forms that mix traditional Buddhist teachings with elements drawn from psychology, "new age" spirituality, ecology, and other current enthusiasms. In such a marketplace, it is hardly surprising that Americans, suspicious as they are of church dogma, tend to show little "brand loyalty" for a particular tradition. Sectarian identity is a fairly fluid matter, and a mix of Buddhist sources -- from Dôgen to the Dalai Lama -- fairly common. The various traditions of Asian Buddhism are like imported "natural resources", to be fashioned into finished products by an American spiritual industry.

By "egalitarianism", I mean the tendency to imagine each individual as an equal player in the spiritual life. To be sure, in its formative period, American Buddhism has seen its share of what is sometimes called "guru worship"; but there is a deeper cultural habit of resistance of authority and resentment of hierarchy. The spiritual superiority of the Buddhist clergy is suspect; the wisdom of the elders needs to be demonstrated. The authority granted Asian teachers is continually undercut by a sense of American superiority; deference for those deeply steeped in Buddhist tradition is weakened by a "youth culture" that values what is new and original. Leadership in the community is by consensus, to be arrived at democratically. Men cannot speak for women; women speak for themselves and demand a Buddhism that speaks to them as women.

Finally, by "activism", I mean a tendency to think of Buddhism as a practice, rather than as a belief system. There are of course many Americans who simply appreciate Buddhism as a world view, or way of thinking about things, many who describe their beliefs and themselves as "Buddhist" but do nothing about it. Yet Americans seem drawn to Buddhism especially as something to do, as a set of therapeutic spiritual exercises to be engaged in. They may have little fondness for church dogma and ritual, but they have faith in the goal of enlightenment and the practices supposed to bring it about. Hence, American laymen are not content to leave meditation to the monks; they want to be involved in spiritual training. American Buddhists are not content to think of their religion as a refuge from problems; they expect the religion to solve problems - not only their own personal problems but the problems of the world: war, social injustice, environmental degradation, and the like. They want to use the religion to make spiritual (and sometimes even material) progress, and they measure the value of the religion by its results.

Dôgen's Buddhism.

There is obviously a sharp contrast between these tendencies of contemporary American Buddhists and the Japanese Buddhism of Dôgen's day. Some historians since the Meiji period have tried to see the "new Buddhism" of the Kamakura-period as peculiarly "modern" in its questioning of traditional institutional authority and its emphasis on individual salvation; but however close even Americans may sometimes feel to the spiritual insights of figures like Dôgen, Shinran, and Nichiren, we must recognize that these men operated within a very different religious world. They operated in a Buddhist world, where the religion was not merely a private spiritual choice but was woven into the very fabric of the public sphere -- of politics, society, and culture -- and indeed into the fabric of existence itself -- of time, space, and the ultimate nature of things. In such a world, it would be difficult even to imagine the sort of secular individualism and psychological spirituality that Americans now take for granted.

Some of Dôgen's spiritual insights may be timeless, but his Buddhism was also a product of his time. In my lecture to the Stanford symposium, I pointed out some of the features of his Buddhism that seem dated and may present problems for us. For Dôgen, like many other Buddhist thinkers of his day, the chief issue was not how to give the religion a meaningful voice in a secular world but how to choose among the many voices of the Buddhist religious world. His consequent exclusive focus on the Zen of his teacher, Ju-ching, and dismissal of other forms of the religion -- including other forms of Zen -- presents an awkwardly sectarian starting point for an American Zen that must be in conversation not only with other Buddhists but with other religions and other, non-religious points of view.

Dôgen's argument for his exclusive focus on Ju-ching's Zen rests heavily on a particular vision of the shôbôgenzô, handed down in the lineage of the Zen patriarchs descended from Sâkyamuni, a vision that will be difficult to maintain among Americans familiar with a wide variety of alternative histories and educated in a modern historiography suspicious of the legends of sacred histories -- and also sensitive to a modern feminism resentful of patriarchal authority. Dôgen's conclusion that the shôbôgenzô handed down from Sâkyamuni is best embodied in the deportment of the Zen monk and the rites of the Zen monastery will not be very attractive to Americans looking for an egalitarian Buddhism outside the confines of the cloister and a personal spiritual freedom beyond the memorized rituals of institutional religion.

Nevertheless, if some elements of Dôgen's Zen seem more the artifacts of a medieval Japanese religion than resources for a modern American Buddhism, we need not be too discouraged. The situation, after all, is hardly more difficult in Dôgen's case than it is for any world view, Buddhist or otherwise, of the thirteenth century. And if Dôgen's Zen was a product of its time, there is also much in it that transcends medieval Japan and speaks directly to the Buddhism of modern America, both encouraging us here in our time and place and challenging us to transcend the limits of this time and place. In particular, there is what I am calling Dôgen's "participatory Buddhism", a model of the religious life that I think has much to say to Americans, both as an inspiration to the spiritual life they seek and as a corrective to some of the spiritual ideals they imagine.

Dôgen's interest in the rule and ritual of monastic life was not merely an expression of his faith in the sacred history of the Zen institution, not merely the blind imitation of hallowed tradition. Rather, it sprang from a deeper sense that the daily life of Zen practice was not only a means to an end but an end in itself, the expression of our natures as buddhas. Zen practice for Dôgen was not only a set of techniques for transforming humans into buddhas; it was also the forms through which buddhas expressed themselves as humans. Hence, to engage in such practice was itself to participate in the life of a buddha. Simply giving oneself over to the life of a buddha in practice was itself transforming a human into a buddha. To seek some other kind of buddhahood at the end of practice, beyond the life of a buddha, was to seek a dead buddha, to "kill the buddha".

Obviously, the key premise in this argument is the proposition that buddhahood is an activity, an act of expression, rather than a permanent state. In fact, for Dôgen, the life of a buddha had a broader significance than its expression in Zen practice: everything occurred in the life a buddha, everything that occurs was the expression of that life. Or, to put it more strongly, buddhahood in its broadest sense was simply occurrence itself -- the ongoing expression of things, the continual welling up of the world as things. It is not that there was some primal "thing" called buddhahood from which everything emerged; the occurrence of things as things was itself buddhahood. If we call this fundamental activity of coming into being as something the "practice" of buddhahood, then everything could be said to be practicing; or, to put the point from the opposite side, in an ultimate sense our own practice of Buddhism was participation in the fundamental activity of the world itself. Hence, to aim for a buddhahood beyond our practice was not only to kill the buddha but to kill the world.

The argument here is slippery and turns on an equivocation on the terms "buddhahood" and "practice", used sometimes in a metaphysical sense to mean "the activity of existing" and sometimes in an ethical sense to mean something like "authentic human activity". If we sort out this equivocation and hold strictly to the two senses, the obvious question becomes, if the activity of existing itself is the practice of buddhahood, why do we distinguish between human existence as such and authentic human activity as Buddhist practice? We do not normally distinguish a carrot from an authentic carrot. Why do we make the distinction in the case of humans? And why, among all human activity, do we choose Zen practice as peculiarly authentic?

In fact, Dôgen seems to be playing back and forth between what the Buddhist scholars would call the buddha as dharma-kâya -- i.e., the impersonal, ultimate reality of things as they are -- and the buddha as nirmâna-kâya -- i.e., the perfected person as an enlightened being. In this play, the existence of things gets "personalized" as a kind of enlightened "practice" -- as if it were a conscious spiritual effort -- and our religious practices get "impersonalized" as existence itself -- as if they were somehow ontologically grounded. As religious rhetoric, the play back and forth between these two senses of "buddha" can be powerful; but apart from the rhetoric, the crucial distinction remains: to be buddhas, humans (unlike carrots) must actively participate in the buddha's practice. Exactly what such participation entails in terms of actual human practice cannot be deduced from a metaphysical definition of buddhahood as mere existence: it must be chosen on other grounds. Dôgen made his choice in faith that the forms of Zen he saw in the monasteries of Sung-dynasty China were the practice handed down from the nirmâna-kâya buddha Sâkyamuni. If we no longer share that faith, we shall have to look elsewhere to justify our choices.

Participatory Buddhism.

In my talk to the Stanford symposium, I identified three discursive levels at which Dôgen is asking us to participate in Zen practice: at the metaphysical level, through identification of our lives with the universal activity of buddhahood; at the historical level, through commitment to the lineage of the patriarchs who transmit the practice; and at the ethical level, through adoption of the communal life of the monastery within which the practice occurs. Above, I have suggested that Dôgen's definitions of participation on the last two levels do not follow inevitably from the first and may, in fact, be difficult to accept for those who do not share his faith in the historical tradition and ritual forms of Zen. Yet whatever the difficulties of definition, for me the crucial point lies in Dôgen's vision of a Buddhist life of total engagement with the world around us, of a Buddhist self that is a full participant in the immediate circumstances in which it finds itself.

The self finds itself in circumstances at all three of Dôgen's levels of practice: what I am calling the metaphysical, historical, and ethical. By a "participatory Buddhism", I have in mind a religious model in which the individual commits himself or herself to these circumstances, takes responsibility for them, and strives to clarify and perfect them. On this model, the traditional Buddhist goal of liberation (however else it is defined) is achieved not through escape from but through escape into the world of our conditioned existence. The self loses itself, or transcends its narrow, self-centered concerns, by giving itself over to its larger contexts: its metaphysical context as an embodiment of buddhahood, its historical context as an inheritor of tradition, its ethical context as a member of community.

Expressions such as "escape from the self", "losing the self", or "giving the self over" to its contexts seem to suggest a spiritual ideal of passivity and surrender, in which the individual is swallowed up by his surroundings. In one form or another, this is, of course, a common model in many styles of religion, from mystical visions of union with the ultimate to communal calls for submission to the will of the group. An epistemological version of this model is often celebrated in the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, in which one becomes, as they say, like a mirror, simply reflecting whatever occurs in the present moment, without passing judgment on it or trying to control it. I would like to distinguish such models from what I have in mind for a participatory Buddhism. I have in mind something more like the ancient ideal of the bodhisattva, who is at once patiently accepting of the world as it is and yet deeply committed to making it better.

Of course, to participate in something one has to begin by acknowledging that one is a part of it. But, one must also "take part" in it and take responsibility for it as an individual player. Hence, participation involves a delicate balance between context and individual, a subtle negotiation between acceptance and resistance. The balance will shift, the negotiation will become more difficult, as one moves through the various contexts in which the self finds itself. In general we can say that the balance shifts from a more passive acceptance toward a more active responsibility as we move from our participation in the metaphysical context of buddhahood to the ethical context of our lives as Buddhist practitioners.

In the metaphysical -- or we might say the "existential" -- context, our participation rests heavily on our acknowledgment of ourselves as embedded in buddhahood, a sense of our existence as a part of what is really going on -- what Dôgen might call the "kôan of realization". To be sure, we may not know what is really going on. The key to our participation is not knowledge of ultimate reality but simply the sense that something mysterious and valuable is really happening here and the commitment to live by that sense. Here, traditional contemplative practices like mindfulness, or Dôgen's meditation of "just sitting", may help to give us that sense, but I do not want to limit participatory Buddhism to those who practice zazen: anyone willing to stop now and then and look around can find herself in the midst of the mystery of what is really going can.

This level of what we might call "participation as awe" is the starting point for the practice of buddhahood, but it is not its end. Insofar as we are a part of what is really going on, we are naturally participants in buddhahood and need not trouble ourselves with the quest for anything more; it is enough to notice this fact and take it seriously. Yet insofar as we notice the world taking shape around us, we cannot help but be interested in what shape it takes; and insofar as we take the world seriously, we have no choice but to be engaged in what is going on and do something about it. To do something about it, we have to express ourselves in the world, at what I am calling the historical and ethical levels of participation. Here things become more difficult. The truth is we do not know what is really going on; if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that nothing in particular follows naturally from our natural buddhahood: all our definitions of the buddha, all our images of what it would mean actually to live as a buddha, are Buddhist inventions, drawn from dreams of human perfection.

Dôgen dreamed of Sâkyamuni seated under the bodhi tree, of Bodhidharma transmitting the lineage of the patriarchs, of Chinese Zen masters following the sacred rule of Pai-chang. For a monk, these are powerful dreams: they provide a history in which to locate yourself, a tradition with which to identify yourself; they give you good reasons for doing what you do and tell you what to do when you wake up each morning. But for those of us who wake up each morning in a world where Sâkyamuni's enlightenment is but one remembered dream among many, a world where our children want their breakfast, and the newspaper is filled with stories of other people's children who have no breakfast again today, we will probably need a broader range of choices.

When we wake up in a world that is no longer a Buddhist world, where there are so many different and conflicting dreams to choose from, we will need to make our choices self-consciously, always recognizing that how we decide to shape our lives as buddhas is arbitrary and voluntary. Such recognition of the arbitrariness of our own religious commitments is a key ingredient in what I would call an "honest" Buddhism in our time -- i.e., a Buddhism without ontological excuses for its choices. This is true not only of Buddhism in our time: every religion in the twenty-first century must now find a new balance between faith and doubt, between commitment to one's own tradition and acceptance of the validity other traditions. If we lose our balance, we fall -- either into a narrow sectarian absolutism or into an easy ethical relativism. If we lose our balance, we will not be full participants in the world around us -- either because we surrender our autonomy to the norms of the community or because we withhold our allegiance to any community.

In such a delicately balanced situation, participation in our historical context will probably require a fairly broad sense of our tradition and a fairly strong sense of ourselves as the shapers of that tradition. It may not be enough simply to cloak ourselves in the robe of Bodhidharma and prostrate ourselves before Dôgen and the lineage of the ancient patriarchs. We may need a broader sense of what it means to be a Buddhist than membership in the Zen school or the Sôtô school; we may need a richer language for expressing our Buddhist commitments than is to be found in the Chinese Zen texts or Dôgen's Shôbôgenzô. We may have to open our sense of ancestry to include a wide variety of Buddhist traditions, from many Buddhist cultures that never knew of Dôgen (and would not agree with him if they had); we may have to build into the worship of our ancestors a critical sense of their historical limitations and our historical obligation to criticize them.

We must keep our balance here. Once we relax the restraints of tradition and acknowledge its historical limitations, we will probably tend to lean to the "left", so to speak. With our relative indifference to the ancestors and our relatively weak sense of respect for tradition, American Zen can easily begin to privilege individual autonomy and innovation; with our arrogant sense of cultural superiority and our youthful impatience with old ideas, we can easily begin to see Zen tradition as a set of old Asian ideas to be fixed and set about fixing it to our own liking. This is not what I mean by participation. It is nonsense to speak of participation in a tradition if we do not respect its historical expressions and commit ourselves to transmit them; it is nonsense to say that we are practicing Dôgen's Zen if we imagine that we can simply replace Dôgen's teachings with some other ideas we like more. If we have an historical obligation to criticize our tradition, we must also recognize that the more we fix the tradition to our liking, the less power it may have to challenge us to fix ourselves.

The balance between individual autonomy and surrender to circumstance will become even more difficult to maintain as we try to participate in what I am calling our ethical context. A participatory Buddhism defines the individual as a member of community, but it does not necessarily define what that community is. Once we break the link in Dôgen's Zen between the tradition of the patriarchs and the life of a monk, the monastic community loses its privileged place, and the actual practice of Dôgen's Zen is thrown into settings beyond the fixed forms of monastic ritual and routine. The submission of the self to these fixed forms was a key element in the traditional practice, and the loss of these forms will force us to find not only new definitions of community but new understandings of what we mean by our "practice".

It is tempting here to imagine a parallel between the forms of the monastery and the practices of daily life. Thus we can imagine that, insofar as we simply give ourselves over to the obligations of our daily lives and perform with care and attention whatever we are called upon to do, we are engaged in the same mindful practice as the monk in his cloister. As the Zen masters sometimes like to say, when it is time to work, just work; when it is time to stop, just stop. There is no doubt much to be said for such a practice as a psychological technique for overcoming our resistance to what must be done and losing ourselves in our work. But this is not what I mean by participation in community. This is not, in the end, an ethical practice because it ignores the question of what in fact must be done and what would be best for our community.

The cloistered monk has made a choice to limit his participation to a single, narrowly defined community with a single set of norms. Outside the cloister, we are members of many communities -- from our family, neighborhood, and work, to our country, humanity, and all living beings. The norms of these communities often conflict, and the conflicts force us into difficult ethical judgments about where our obligations lie. Outside the cloister, then, we cannot simply lose ourselves in attention to what we are doing; we must continually look up from what we are doing and ask why we are doing it and whether in fact it is worth doing. Thus, our commitment to the norms of any community will always be tempered by a sense of individual responsibility, and our participation in community will involve an obligation to judge, criticize and try to reform its norms. Depending upon the community we happen to find ourselves in, a participatory Buddhism may be almost as much a matter of resistance as it is a matter of acceptance.

Opening Dôgen's Buddhism in America.

In closing, I would like to come back down from these abstract thoughts about a participatory style of Buddhism to the more concrete situation of the contemporary American scene. If Dôgen's Zen is to flourish in America in the twenty-first century, it will need to open itself to its new circumstances. It will need to be in dialogue with American secular culture and with the other forms of Buddhism around it: it cannot continue simply to repeat its technical jargon and dogmatic claims; it must begin to explain itself in rational terms accepted by outsiders. It will need to experiment with new forms of practice that encourage participation in a variety of settings: it cannot continue simply to mutter its mantras and warm its cushions in the zendô; it must look outside the zendô at what is going on and take its practice into the world of ordinary life. Openness to new circumstances suggests the possibility of new institutional structures. Here, I would like to mention four institutional experiments that offer interesting possibilities for Dôgen's Buddhism in America. Some of these are already being developed; others have not yet been seriously tested.

The most common and fully developed form of Zen institution in America today is what is typically called the "Zen center": an organization principally of laymen, usually led by an ordained teacher, dedicated to the practice of zazen. In the history of Dôgen's Zen, this is an unusual institution, without real precedent in the monastery or local temple of the Sôtô school; it is perhaps closer to the model of early Shinshû and Nichiren groups of the Kamakura period or some of the "new religions" of the Edo and Meiji. Of course, the sociological character of these American Zen centers will differ depending on the style of the teachers and the values of the members -- a few tending toward authoritarian guru cults but most looking more like the egalitarian communities familiar in some liberal forms of American Protestantism. Leadership often tends to emerge from group consensus, not from clerical office; women often play at least as central a role as men.

The American Zen centers offer to laymen an opportunity to participate in practices traditionally left to monks -- especially daily zazen but also meditation retreats, personal interviews, ritual services, sutra and kôan study, temple work, and so on. Thus, the centers appeal to an American demand for spiritual practice and experience; they provide a powerful new model for individual participation in the spiritual life. But they cannot by themselves provide a complete basis for a participatory Buddhism. As they mature, the challenge for these centers will be how to relate what they offer to larger contexts -- how to relate the individual centers to other Buddhist organizations, both in America and Japan, how to relate the teachings and practices of the centers to the broader Buddhist tradition, how to relate the spiritual life in the centers to family, social, and political life in the secular world.

Because the Zen center is a new type of institution that blurs many of the traditional distinctions between monk and layman, it presents new sorts of institutional problems. On the one hand, its focus on lay participation in meditation and other monastic-style practices tends to exclude those laymen who, like most Buddhist laymen in Asia, do not want to or cannot engage in such practices. On the other hand, its mix of lay and clerical communities tends to encourage accommodation to secular life-styles and thus to inhibit the development of traditional monastic training. If Dôgen's Zen is to flourish in America, it will probably have to move beyond the model of the Zen center to develop other sorts of institutions that offer a broader range of options to its members, both laymen and monks.

The American tendency toward activism has already led to the beginnings of organizations that seek to reach out beyond the zendô and the Zen center into broader social contexts -- organizations like the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, run by Rev. Alan Senauki, dedicated to the promotion of non-violence; the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, working with the terminally ill; or Rev. Tetsugen Glassman's Zen Peacemaker Order, engaged in a broad range of social action, both national and international. Such groups not only bring the principles of Dôgen's Zen into intimate conversation with the secular world but provide concrete opportunities for the practice of a participatory Buddhism by those more drawn to an active, rather than to a ritual or contemplative, style of religious life. Given all the work that needs to be done in the world, there would seem to be a great opportunity for the growth of such organizations in the twenty-first century.

In a quite different direction, some Zen centers have already developed institutions more closely resembling the traditional monastery -- i.e., residential communities, often isolated from the surrounding populace, that provide more formal training to full-time practitioners. To date, like the Zen centers themselves, these institutions have almost always been open to both laymen and clerics, and to both men and women. It may be time, however, for American Zen to begin considering the possibility of developing at least some institutions limited solely to a celebate monastic order and established separately for monks and nuns, in order to offer Americans an opportunity to experience the more traditional life-style and to practice the more traditional forms of Dôgen's Zen. At the same time, it might also be interesting to open such institutions to monks and nuns from other Buddhist traditions, in order to bring Dôgen's Zen out of its sectarian isolation into participation in the broader tradition of Buddhist monasticism.

The monastery can provide training in the traditional forms and spirit of Dôgen's Zen, but it cannot adequately provide education in the history and texts of Dôgen's Zen, let alone of the broader Buddhist tradition. American Zen Buddhists tend to be highly educated people, almost all with college degrees; but they also tend to be sadly uneducated in Buddhism. Even among the clergy, there are few who have made a serious study of Buddhist history and thought, and almost none who can read Buddhist texts in their original languages. Indeed, one often finds an anti-intellectual ethos in the Zen centers, as if everything worth knowing could be known through the practice of zazen. This ethos makes it difficult for American practitioners to understand even the teachings of their own tradition, let alone how their tradition is related to other forms of Buddhism past and present.

Some Zen centers have tried to develop classes, lectures, and study groups to teach their members, but much more still needs to be done to ensure an educated leadership. The Sôtôshû Shûmuchô has recently undertaken a project to make available authoritative English translations of liturgical, ritual, and doctrinal texts like the Shôgôgenzô; and has established an Education Center in San Francisco; but these efforts will only be successful if American Zen Buddhists begin to take it for granted that their practice should include an intellectual understanding of their religion. It may be time, therefore, to consider the development of an American Zen educational institution -- perhaps beginning at least with an annual summer school -- that offers a curriculum in Buddhist languages, texts, history and thought. Such an institution could serve not only to train the clergy in what Zen has been in the past but to encourage the development of constructive thought about what Zen ought to be in the future -- to encourage, in other words, the development of American Zen "theologies" of a higher quality that the one I have tried to propose here.