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Some comments on the structure of Zen institutions in the United States and how they shape Zen practice and the possibilities of Zen monasticism & priesthood/leadership. These are based on my observations. I'm interested to hear from differently situated people.
These are Soto Zen particular b/c those are the institutions I know best. I imagine there's crossover with other Zen schools as well as other Buddhist schools in the United States.
1) The major residential centers (eg SFZC and ZMM and affiliates) are largely coastal and established at a time when the crushing income inequality of our era did not exist. The conditions then allowed for institutional development, mostly by and for white people..
...that our time doesn't, even for most white people. (What was the average student debt of college grads relative to average starting income in 1970 versus 2020? What was the average rent relative to income?)
2) Likewise, the generation of teachers who trained in the early years at those centers were young and mostly white at a time when it wasn't financially/professionally/familially disastrous for that class to dedicate 1, 5, 10 years of life to monastic training/residential life.
3) These conditions allied with standards from Japan of what rigorous Zen training should entail: one should spend at least a couple practice periods, if not a couple or more years, at a residential center. The result is that Zen institutions and Zen practitioners in the US...
... carry forward both an internalized sense of what "good zen training" looks like and some institutional training standards, all of which are based on standards set at times when conditions were very different than they are now.
4) How are conditions now? 1st is what I've already indicated: today a young person either has enough family wealth that they can imagine being at least partially supported by it through much of their life, or they are anxious and scrambling to put together work for themselves.
This is not conducive to feeling like you can take "time off" for monastic training. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence of people who wanted to do more residential training and really couldn't swing it...
... as well as people who did do some and were largely supported by parents in doing so, and also missed out on years of developing themselves to establish a job that would allow them to support themselves.
5) 2nd: Zen monastic life in the US has *never* promised security of livelihood, something I became acutely aware of when I lived at SFZC and heard conversations about how that institution was caring for/accommodating/failing to accommodate senior members who had been ...
... affiliated teachers for a long time. Zen teachers in the US have *always* needed to put together their own livelihood, to some degree or another.
But again, back to point one, my sense, backed up by all the data about income, security nets, etc., is that that was easier for someone who was young 40 years ago than someone young today.
6) 3rd: geographically, it has always been harder for someone whose life is centered outside of the coasts to access residential training opportunities. Where I was raised and now live (the rust belt midwest, though I lived for 5 years in NYC & 1 year in SF) there were largely...
...no residential centers established at that key time (say 1965-1985). This means that practitioners here usually attend a small center, often led by a single teacher, oriented around lay practice. I think people on the coasts really underestimate what it takes to...
...go 1500 miles away for a stint of time: jobs, family life, just the fact of being 1500 miles away make it really hard to do. And again, it's even harder for younger generations to do this than it was in the past, for all the reasons outlined above.
7) And yet, US Soto Zen largely still fosters both an internalized and institutionally reinforced sense of what counts as rigorous training. From my vantage point, there continues to be a sense that if you have not done that kind of training, you are not *really* trained up.
8) Here then is a central contradiction: we have a concept of "good Zen training" paired with conditions that make it very hard for someone who is not independently wealthy to both meet those standards and develop a profession that allows themselves to support themselves...
... so that they can also be a Zen priest and community leader in the future.
9) I have swung it because my own teacher has been flexible wrt life circumstances of all her students & I was interested in and pursued a career that had flexibility built in, so I could do a residential practice period (at SFZC) and a 3 week training (SPOT with Grace Schireson)
10) But two things about this: 1) my path is my own and should not be a model for how we organize institutions. I feel that I am just very lucky rather than that I planned anything well.
2) My time at SFZC and at SPOT are my major "credentials' whenever I meet a Zen person out and about. These are, from what I can tell, what make me qualified/legible in many others' eyes. I have a problem with this because though I highly valued and learned from and am ...
immensely grateful for both experiences, to make them my central credentials discounts what has been the heart of my practice:
my many years of participation in Udumbara Zen Center of Evanston, IL and my many years of weekly dokusan with my own teacher there, interaction with my fellow students there (not to mention my PhD in Buddhist studies).
11) So when we ask ourselves, why does American Zen continue to be largely white? Why does it continue to be largely middle and upper class? Why are so many Zen teachers therapists, writers, freelancers and college professors?
There are many answers to these questions, and some of those answers are about the conditions we have created for training and the internalized sense we carry with us about what good training looks like. If these conditions and this sense are incompatible with the actual lives...
...of non-white people, or people from the working class or poor people, then we are reproducing a system that makes it hard or impossible for those people to actually take up a Zen path.
12) I also want to address the question of "good zen training." When I write what I have written here, I am not suggesting that there is no such thing as "good zen training."
There is: it will always involve Buddha, dharma, and sangha; there will always be a teacher; and it will always insist on direct experience of thusness.
13) But I believe that none of those things have an obvious or necessary institutional form. I value monastic and residential life immensely, and I am thankful we have some of it available.
But as an institutional form, its limited given our current social and economic realities. How can we create inst. forms that allow for different people's life circumstances, so that Buddha, dharma, sangha, teachers, and direct experience of thusness are available to more people?
14) I conclude the way I started, by pointing out that this is based on my own experience and observations, combined with my understanding of the difference in the on the ground realities between the past when many of these institutions were founded and now.
I welcome (am eager for) perspectives from people w/ diff. experiences. I value my dharma training and lineage so highly, I want to be a transmitter of it to the future, and I want to help create the best possible conditions that will allow anyone who wants to pursue the path.
Something I didn't really know how to work in here: family life. Lots to say here, but one observation: I know of a well-known zen teacher who requires that his students training for transmission be either already in relationship or not participating in dating for 5 years.
This is so gendered! Don't have a married priesthood situation and then tell a 30 year old woman who would like kids just not to date between the ages of 30 and 35.
The structure of authority in Zen, very much based on individual teachers, has ups and downs (to say the least). But this is a real down: a teacher should not, in my view, have the leeway to ask this kind of thing, a basic inequity, of their students.
@agleig You are the anthropologist of American Buddhism. Care to weigh in here?
