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Western Zen lineages

Over the last fifty years mainstream forms of Zen, led by teachers who trained in East Asia and their successors, have begun to take root in the West.



Derived from Japan




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In North America, the Zen lineages derived from the Japanese Soto school are the most numerous. Among these are the lineages of the San Francisco Zen Center, established by Shunryu Suzuki and the White Plum Asanga, founded by Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi. Suzuki's San Francisco Zen Center established the first Zen Monastery in America in 1967, called Tassajara in the mountains near Big Sur. Maezumi's successors have created schools including Great Plains Zen Center, founded by Susan Myoyu Andersen, Zen Mountain Monastery, founded by John Daido Loori, Great Vow Zen Monastery founded by Chozen Bays, the Zen Peacemaker Order, founded by Bernard Tetsugen Glassman, Heart Circle Sangha founded by Nicolee Jikyo McMahon and Joan Hogetsu Hoeberichts, and the Ordinary Mind school, founded by Charlotte Joko Beck. The Katagiri lineage, founded by Dainin Katagiri, has a significant presence in the Midwest. Note that both Taizan Maezumi and Dainin Katagiri served as priests at Zenshuji Soto Mission in the 1960s.

Taisen Deshimaru, a student of Kodo Sawaki, was a Soto Zen priest from Japan who taught in France. The International Zen Association, which he founded, remains influential. The American Zen Association, headquartered at the New Orleans Zen Temple, is one of the North American organizations practicing in the Deshimaru tradition.

Soyu Matsuoka served as superintendent and abbot of the Long Beach Zen Buddhist Temple and Zen Center. The Temple was headquarters to Zen Centers in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Everett, Washington. He established the Temple at Long Beach in 1971 where he resided until his passing in 1998. Matsuoka created several dharma heirs, three of whom are still alive and leading Zen Teachers within the lineage. These are: Hogaku ShoZen McGuire, Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston Sensei, and Kaiten JohnDennis Govert. Hogaku established Daibutsuji Zen Temple in Cloudcroft and the Zen Center of Las Cruces, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. So Gozen is now the Abbot of Daibutsuji and the Zen Center of Las Cruces.[43] So Daiho Hilbert left Daibutsuji to establish the Order of Clear Mind Zen, a socially engaged sangha in New Mexico.[44] Taiun Elliston Sensei established the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and is working to establish an order honoring Matsuoka.

The Sanbo Kyodan is a Japan-based reformist Zen group, founded in 1954 by Yasutani Hakuun, which has had a significant influence on Zen in the West. Sanbo Kyodan Zen is based primarily on the Soto tradition, but also incorporates Rinzai-style koan practice. Yasutani's approach to Zen first became prominent in the English-speaking world through Philip Kapleau's book The Three Pillars of Zen (1965), which was one of the first books to introduce Western audiences to Zen as a practice rather than simply a philosophy. Among the Zen groups in North America, Hawaii, Europe, and New Zealand which derive from Sanbo Kyodan are those associated with Kapleau, Robert Aitken, and John Tarrant.

In the UK, Throssel Hole Abbey was founded as a sister monastery to Shasta Abbey in California by Master Reverend Jiyu Kennett Roshi and has a number of dispersed Priories and centres.[citation needed] Jiyu Kennett, an English woman, was ordained as a priest and Zen master in Shoji-ji, one of the two main Soto Zen temples in Japan (her book The Wild White Goose describes her experiences in Japan). The Order is called the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives.[citation needed] The lineage of Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi is represented by the White Plum Sangha UK, while Taisen Deshimaru Roshi's lineage is known in the UK as IZAUK (Intl Zen Assoc. UK).[citation needed] The Zen Centre in London is connected to the Buddhist Society. The Western Chan Fellowship is an association of lay Chán practitioners based in the UK.[citation needed] They are registered as a charity in England and Wales, but also have contacts in Europe, principally in Norway, Poland, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland and the USA.

There are also a number of Rinzai Zen centers in the West. In North America, some of the more prominent include Rinzai-ji founded by Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi in California, Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji established by Eido Shimano Roshi and Soen Nakagawa Roshi in New York, Chozen-ji founded by Omori Sogen Roshi in Hawaii, Daiyuzenji founded by Dogen Hosokawa Roshi (a student of Omori Sogen Roshi) in Chicago, Illinois, and Chobo-Ji founded by Genki Takabayshi Roshi in Seattle, Washington. In Europe there is Egely Monastery established by a Dharma Heir of Eido Shimano, Denko Mortensen.



Derived from China


Covering over 480 acres of land and located in Talmage, California, the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas was founded by Hsuan Hua.

The first Chinese master to teach Westerners in North America was Hsuan Hua, who taught Chán and other traditions of Chinese Buddhism in San Francisco during the early 1960s. He went on to found the City Of Ten Thousand Buddhas, a monastery and retreat center located on a 237 acre (959,000 m²) property near Ukiah, California. Another Chinese Chán teacher with a Western following is Sheng-yen, a master trained in both the Caodong and Linji schools. He first visited the United States in 1978 under the sponsorship of the Buddhist Association of the United States, and, in 1980, founded the Chán Meditation Center in Queens, New York.[45]



Derived from Korea

A prominent Korean Zen teacher in the West was Seung Sahn. Seung Sahn founded the Providence Zen Center in Providence, Rhode Island; this was to become the headquarters of the Kwan Um School of Zen, a large international network of affiliated Zen centers.

In the early 20th century, Master Kyong Ho (1849–1912), renergized Korean Seon. At the end of World War II, his disciple, Master Mann Gong (1871–1946), proclaimed that lineage Dharma should be transmitted worldwide to encourage peace through enlightenment. Consequently, one of his his Dharma successors, Hye Am [46] (1884–1985) brought lineage Dharma to the United States. Hye Am's Dharma successor, Myo Vong [47] founded the Western Son Academy (1976), and his Korean disciple, Pohwa Sunim, founded World Zen Fellowship (1994) which includes various Zen centers in the United States, such as the Potomac Zen Sangha, the Patriarchal Zen Society and the Baltimore Zen Center.[48]

Derived from Vietnam

Two notable Vietnamese Zen teachers have been influential in Western countries: Thich Thien-An and Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Thien-An came to America in 1966 as a visiting professor at UCLA and taught traditional Thien meditation. Thich Nhat Hanh was a monk in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, during which he was a peace activist. In response to these activities, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1966, he left Vietnam in exile and now resides at Plum Village, a monastery in France. He has written more than one hundred books about Buddhism, which have made him one of the very few most prominent Buddhist authors among the general readership in the West. In his books and talks, Thich Nhat Hanh emphasizes mindfulness (sati) as the most important practice in daily life.



Pan-lineage organizations

In the United States, two pan-lineage organizations have formed in the last few years. The oldest is the American Zen Teachers Association which sponsors an annual conference. North American Soto teachers in North America, led by several of the heirs of Taizan Maezumi and Shunryu Suzuki, have also formed the Soto Zen Buddhist Association.



Freedom and liberty in Zen philosophy

The term that Zen uses to express the idea of “freedom” is “jiyū” and it consists of two characters; “ji” meaning “self on its own,” while “yū” means “out of”, and the phrase as a whole designates an action arising “out of self on its own”. This action then carries a sense of spontaneity, much like the spontaneous creative act of living nature. This idea of differs from Western intellectual tradition, where freedom is associated with liberty. British empiricists like John Locke, for whom freedom (liberty) is defined as a lack or absence of external constraint. According to this model, freedom is to express an “ego desire”, except in cases in which the will expressed by the desire exists in an individual who finds themselves in a case of the “state of nature” where an external constraint is placed. By contrast, Zen's free action is not delimited by ego-desire, because it arises out of nothing; where the self in Zen is a groundless ground that is nothing so it arises out of the self on its own. It purifies all the “defilements” interlaced with the activity of the ego-consciousness, as well as the personal and collective unconscious. For this reason, there is no issue involved in the Zen person's action that addresses the will of ego-consciousness. Persons practicing Japanese Zen Buddhist philosophy therefore claim not to be subject to the “bad faith” in “self deception”, since they do not explain a motivation for action as a rationalist would; a rationalist must rationalize an irrational desire that is actually rooted in the body and the unconscious as if it were not.[49]

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