American Zen Retold

Ah, academia. Who would have thought, back in 1994, when we were howling in laughter at David Chadwick’s Thank You and OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan, that it would wind up in a PhD dissertation, and that the scholar would take Chadwick’s characterization of himself seriously in a chapter entitled “Failure.”

But talk about academic sleight of hand. Imagine a guy who read all the books we read for inspiration and instruction and then persuaded his PhD advisor that they were a worthy dissertation subject.

That is exactly what Ben Van Overmeire, assistant professor of Religious Studies at Duke University’s Kunshan campus in China, has done. In American Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature, Overmeire looks at American Zen through the lens of the koan.

He points out that, essentially, koans are brief narratives about a wise, knowing person and a novice, and makes the ingenious observation that all of the narratives he’s included are like koans: The author, through his experience, “knows” something that his reader doesn’t, and the book enlightens the reader. The book imitates the effects of a koan, with the reader as the novice student.

The interesting thing is that in doing this project—I don’t know that this was his intention—Van Overmeire has sketched a history of American Buddhism, everyone from D. T. Suzuki to Ruth Ozeki. To know a period of history, a teacher once told me, one should read the best biographies and memoirs. That’s what Van Overmeire has done.

Van Overmeire begins, as everyone does, with the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. It was then that D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) first came to the United States and commenced his voluminous work, which—for better or worse—set the tone for American Zen, with its long, convoluted sentences, its focus on Rinzai Zen, its obsession with koans and sudden experiences of enlightenment, and his neglect of sitting meditation, which he hardly mentions at all, perhaps thinking Westerners couldn’t do it. When I first read him, Suzuki gave me the impression that Zen involved a series of mental puzzles and that learning Zen was learning to think in a new way.

After Suzuki, Van Overmeire looks at a writer with a similar influence, Philip Kapleau (1912–2004), whose book The Three Pillars of Zen inspired a whole generation to practice. Kapleau did include sitting instruction but also eight stories of sudden and dramatic enlightenment, including that of “Mr. P.K., an American Ex-Businessman,” which told Kapleau’s own story. More than the short, enigmatic koans, these narratives had an electrifying effect on readers; the people in them seemed to be discovering the secrets of the universe—if not all, at least the most important ones. The stories stood in stark contrast to most Westerners’ experience of religion (the Presbyterian church, in my case). Van Overmeire lapses into colloquialism when he speaks about his own reaction to hearing about enlightenment: “I wanted it, bad.”

American Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature
By Ben Van Overmeire
University of Virginia Press, 2024, 252 pp., $35.00, paper

That attitude is a one-way ticket to failure, which is the subject of Van Overmeire’s second chapter, beginning with what Janwillem van de Wetering (1931–2008) experienced when he traveled to Japan to study Zen. Not only was he startled by various statements from his teacher (“What? Satori? Please? Where did you dig that up? Throw that out.”), but he found his first experience of zazen excruciating. “My thighs began to tremble like violin strings. The soles of my feet became burning pieces of wood. My back, kept straight with difficulty, seemed to creak and shake involuntarily. Time passed inconceivably slowly.” (Sounds about right.) Most Japanese men training around him were looking for jobs and weren’t interested in Buddhist teachings. He left after a year without solving his koan.

David Chadwick had a more mature perspective, undoubtedly because he had trained with Shunryu Suzuki before he went to Japan. He saw Zen training as “not like the traditional stories with one or more of us realizing the true light, attaining a perfect understanding, and the rest just plodding along. I think we’re all just plodding along—and that is the true light. . . . All our endless failures are adding up to a magnificent success. It’s just not what we had in mind.  It’s real.”

Chadwick, who has since written a definitive biography of Suzuki Roshi and who maintains a massive website about all things related to Suzuki and the San Francisco Zen Center, has been a particular inspiration for me and wrote some words that I copied into the top margin of my journal, and that inspire me every time I look at them: “[Suzuki Roshi] told us that enlightenment was not a state of mind, was not contained in any experience, and he guided us away from trying to recreate past profound experiences and toward accepting ourselves as we were. He taught a disciplined life of zazen meditation, attention to the details of life, not wanting too much (especially not another state of mind), and not getting too worked up.”

Natalie Goldberg, in The Great Failure, experienced a different kind of failure, the failure of her teacher to uphold his vows (a fact that she discovered only after his death), also her failure to see him as he was; her portrait of Katagiri Roshi in the earlier Long Quiet Highway is much different from the man she portrays in The Great Failure. But she sees failure as “the very means of attaining insight. If human beings are always caught between the highs and lows, failure is a reset button that allows us to ‘drop through to a more authentic self.’  ”

In the chapter “The Two Truths,” Van Overmeire examines the work of three women: Gesshin Claire Greenwood, Grace Schireson, and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. Greenwood went to Japan without a starry-eyed view of practice (she thought enlightenment was essentially a male fantasy) and practiced in a women’s monastery, where she faced enormous hardship. “ ‘It was about thirty-five degrees Celsius every day in the kitchen, which I believe in Fahrenheit is really fucking hot.’ She works like this every day, five months per year, three years in a row. The women she works with constantly scream at her for not doing things right.” She made the decision that freedom in this situation was to not fight the system but to abandon her personal preferences and completely give in to the situation, as suggested by her title, Bow First, Ask Questions Later.

Grace Schireson went to Japan as an older woman, with years of practice behind her. She practiced in a male monastery, where she experienced the hazing we’ve read about. At one point, the head monk slapped her, a detail that shocked me. She decided to honor her physical limitations and not give in to the pressure toward uniformity. An older monk had told her not to bow if it’s too physically challenging, and she followed his advice.

The book imitates the effects of a koan, with the reader as the novice student.

In The Way of Tenderness, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, as a “queer Black disabled Buddhist priest” who practiced in other religious lineages before coming to Soto Zen, does not so much synthesize these two views as go beyond them, in a formulation that I found quite moving and that expresses mature spiritual wisdom.

“If I were to define the way of tenderness, I would say that it is acknowledgment—acknowledging and honoring all life and all that is in the world fully, with heart and body. This acknowledgment is wordless and is expressed in a deeply felt nod to everything and everyone—an inner bow to life, so to speak.”

But for a view of Buddhism from a larger perspective, Van Overmeire’s chapter on detachment turns back to, of all people, Janwillem van de Wetering, who did not abandon Zen after his initial failure but continued to practice in the United States, writing two more memoirs, A Glimpse of Nothingness and Afterzen. Van de Wetering, who in the meantime had become a best-selling mystery novelist, makes fun of the whole process in the latter book, giving teachers nicknames like Holy Monk YesYouPay and Master Dipshit. But he also, having experienced various people who seemed fraudulent and a few who did not, made three suggestions about spiritual teachers, all of which sound sensible to me.

The good teachers van de Wetering encountered “(1) have a healthy relationship with their sexuality (they are not celibate, nor do they pretend to be so); (2) have a sound financial sense (if they are not wealthy, they know how to provide for themselves and their community); and (3) are detached from their mask as master (this is just a role, not to be taken too seriously).”  Sex, money, and power: He nails the three problem areas. That third quality, detachment from the role, seems especially important.

Van Overmeire discusses interdependence—and its flip side, emptiness—in his chapter on Ruth Ozeki, the longest one on a single author. I consider A Tale for the Time Being a great novel; I’ve read it three times and would happily read it again. But I’m afraid that, in this chapter, Van Overmeire got into the kind of elaborate and inventive textual analysis I associate with the academy. Up to that time, he had mainly avoided it, though he also went over the top in discussing Shozan Jack Haubner’s Single White Monk, one of my favorite Zen memoirs. I’m not saying Van Overmeire is wrong in what he says; he may be entirely right. I just thought he beat the subject to death. Jacques Derrida comes up—always a red flag for me—and Van Overmeire misunderstands Eckhart Tolle in discussing the present moment. Too much thinking! as Master Seung Sahn used to say. I believe great works of literature speak for themselves and don’t need to be analyzed.

But the best thing I can say about Van Overmeire’s book—and for me, this is high praise—is that it will send me back to read these books again, or in a few cases, for the first time. His insightful survey gives them a fresh feel and paints a vivid portrait of Zen practice today.