Word: zens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...body language says a lot that maybe he doesn’t mean to be saying.” Another student present at a core meeting told a reporter, “At one point, he closed his eyes completely in what seemed to be some sort of Zen napping trance.” As a graduating senior, I have nothing but sympathy for fatigue, but the bottom line is that Summers fails to provide the basic body language students are used to seeing in those who are paying attention to them...
...sure," the poet Gary Snyder remarked, "the Japanese are mind-boggled by the historical accident that American bohemians became the caretakers of Zen in the West." In the sections of his book where he celebrates this mind-boggling aspect of the story, Downing shows that the things that went right at Zen Center are in the end much more important than all that went so sadly, and so predictably, wrong...
...wise and lovable as he might have been, certainly suffered from his own distinctive set of follies and foibles. Evangelizing America, it turns out, was only part of the master's plan. He also nurtured the somewhat grandiose dream of using his new American followers to help him revitalize Zen in Japan itself, where empty formalism and corruption were increasingly becoming the norm. By almost all accounts, Suzuki's choice to leave Baker as his only legitimate American dharma heir was a disaster, and Suzuki himself even seemed to be aware of this fact beforehand. Why, then, did he insist...
...That Zen got off to such a rocky start in America isn't really such bad news as Downing and his subjects sometimes intimate it is. If the insights made available by a spiritual institution are separate?and bigger?than the imperfect individuals who achieve and transmit them, that means they're still valid even after those individuals lose the thread and mess up. American Zen, that peculiar hybrid of Japanese and American sensibilities that was planted on California's shores in the '60s by Suzuki, Baker and others, may have been damaged by the scandals and embarrassments that Downing...
...Francisco Zen Center is part of a story that is still very much in its infancy. As one member put it of Zen Center's early days: "We knew what we were doing, but we really didn't know what we were doing." Whatever eventually becomes of Buddhism in America, the fact that such a disparate group of ragged, countercultural anybodies could?through naivet?, prescience or some combination of the two?manage to engineer Zen's establishment as a living practice as well and as swiftly as they did remains something of a miracle...