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March 24, 2005 |
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By Norman Fischer | 3/24/2005 @ 9:32 am
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March 1, 2005
Muir Beach
(From Zen Abbot's Journal 47)
I was much affected by Richard Jaffe's book "Neither Monk Nor Layman," (Princeton, 2002), a tremendous scholarly labor about the Japanese legalization of marriage for the Buddhist clergy during the Meiji Period (late 19th Century). I'd been meaning to read this book since it came out, and was reminded of it when I saw Richard at the conference on Buddhism and the media at Cal last month. I knew already the general drift: that the Meiji government wanted to better control the Buddhist sangha by integrating it more into society; and that it was a scandal for centuries how frequently monks violated the precept of celibacy quite openly, with households, concubines, children, all off the record, and therefore with no social standing. The government wanted to end this deception, which so weakened the nation. I'd known all this- but there is also much more to it, and much more still that occurred to me in the margins of Richard's argument.
The issue of clergy marriage was powerfully controversial and was debated both within the government and the sangha for many years. (And is still not completely settled: many Japanese priests I have met over the years were ambivalent about it, viewing marriage as a chore or a weakness rather than a commitment they'd made happily.) It occurs to me that it is possible Japan is the only Asian country to so thoroughly debate the question (which is what the marriage debate ended up amounting to): should Buddhism change to accommodate the modern era, and if so, how? To be sure, this wasn't an enlightened debate, purely motivated. Nor was it straightforward. Both the government and the Buddhist establishment were concerned, above all, with competition from the West, and, particularly, with the spread of Christianity, which appeared more forward-looking and modern than Buddhism. Since Japan had been now forcibly opened to the West, and could no longer outlaw Christianity as it once had, the government saw Christianity as a serious threat from within. There was a need to circle the wagons in an effort to protect the national ethos: bringing Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto together to extol the emperor and form a national front against the Western (Christian) ideology. And so the Japanese went about using Buddhism as a tool in the remaking of the state along modern, though Japanese, lines, as a way of resisting and ultimately defeating the West at its own game. The fruit of this self-conscious modern version of Japanese nationalism was the militarism of the 1930's and the Pacific War that followed, which marked the end of this phase, and the beginning of a new one, the Japan of today.
Before Meiji the Buddhist sangha was a world unto itself. Though it made alliances with temporal powers and was governed by them (through a separate set of laws), it remained a world distinctly apart. The Meiji government recognized that the essence of the modern- as opposed to the feudal- state was that it was a monolithic state, not a group of independent powers constantly engaged in shifting alliances, and so the Meiji commissioned a national census, and for the first time included Buddhist monastics as members of Japanese society. Marriage legalization was another way to bring the monks into the society, and to account for the many non-citizens (their wives and children — no one knows how many of them there were, since no one counted) their poor keeping of the celibacy precept had engendered. It also helped to blunt the attacks of the Christians who were fond of pointing out how corrupt the Buddhist monastics were.
It is true that Japanese Buddhism has always been, in comparison to other Buddhist countries, morally lax, probably due to a combination of Buddhism's (relatively) forgiving attitude toward moral transgression, as well as the Japanese penchant for desire, beauty, the aesthetic, and the ease the Japanese seem to find in saying one thing while doing another. (In no other Buddhist country but Japan could a monk like Ikkyu, with his famous pornographic poems, be a hero rather than a scourge). Indeed, Richard, in his conclusion to the book, argues that while on the surface- and from a Western point of view- it may seem quite negative to say one thing and do something else, as in, for instance, the taking of precepts one has no intention of actually following, in fact it may not be as negative as it seems. Why not hold to high aspirations, and good intentions you believe in and aim toward, even though you know you won't be able to achieve them? Isn't this preferable to being "realistic" and only aspiring to what you can actually manage to do? I myself have made this argument many times and it seems a good one. In fact, as far as I know, "monks" in Japan still take the precept against sexual activity of any sort, even though almost all of them marry. In Western Zen the precept from the first was simply translated as "not committing sexual misconduct," without anyone particularly noticing the change.
The Meiji Buddhist clergy had almost universal resistance to changing the celibacy rule. They considered it a degenerate thing to do, a move that would surely destroy Buddhism. They recognized of course how poorly the rule had been kept, decried the corruption of the time, but called for movements to purify monastic comportment rather than to legalize sin. To most Buddhist clergy the idea of a priest or monk explicitly being allowed to marry was anathema. Keeping the rule and tolerating violations was much preferable, and the most influential clergy fought hard for the government to keep strict enforcement of the rule. (None of the Buddhist lineages had powerful enough central authority to enforce religious law themselves. Pre-Meiji, the various temples and groups could do more or less as they saw fit. Organizing, rationalizing, standardizing, is crucial for progress in the modern world; we take it for granted, but the world was not always like this). The struggle went on for a while. Even clergy who favored the new marriage laws had no affection for marriage as such. They simply felt it was better to admit the degeneracy of the sangha in these dark times than to go on with the pretense of purity. Virtually not a single important Zen cleric supported the new law. It was up to members of the Nichirin sect (whose founder had left the monastery and openly married) to argue that marriage might have a favorable consequence for Buddhist clergy: it might bring them closer to parishioners, and, even, possibly, be a fruitful training ground for compassion. This is the argument I would make now, for American Buddhist clergy. Also, the news ideas about sexuality that were current in the West were also beginning to be felt in Japan, and some forward looking Japanese clergy argued that sexuality was natural, and cutting off sexuality was harmful.
While celibacy makes sense for fully committed religious people, and can be a beautiful and a positive thing, even if it is temporary (better to see yourself as a noble short term religious celibate than a poor sap who is too undesirable to be attractive to anyone), it is clearly difficult and can certainly lead to all sorts of abuses and perversions if it is not wholesomely and voluntarily chosen, and if it is not supported with practices and counsel. Witness the Roman Catholic experience in the Twentieth Century. To limit religious profession in our time to celibates would be a big mistake. To set up the ancient Vinaya as the best or purest standard for Buddhist practice in the post-modern world is counter-indicated, I would say. Experiments to bring Buddhism into modernity, while sometimes flakey, are also healthy. We need both. Anyway, religions are always changing, even if we think they aren't, and every age is a degenerate age. Real purity only exists in the texts. In the secular modern world the best time is always tomorrow. In the religious world the best time is always yesterday.
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February 26, 2005 |
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By Norman Fischer | 3/08/2005 @ 5:51 am
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February 26, 2005
Muir Beach
(From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 47)
Holland was a quick trip, and mostly a blur. The airplane ride was so long, the jet lag so pervasive, that I was reeling every day with some new manifestation of it, and so had a hard time arriving quite where I was.
Second day in the Hague, still jet-lagged but with at least a night's sleep under our belts, we ventured out to Mauritshuis, an important museum, where you can see some Rembrandts, some Vermeers, some Jan Steens, and other stuff. I love the smaller towns of Europe like the Hague, and the smaller museums. You don't have to be so much assaulted by the sheer immensity of things, the spaces and objects, room on room of them, that scream their significance at you. I suppose a museum, an impressive piece of public architecture, is the latter day equivalent of the King's palace — a place designed to impress you with the prestige and power of the realm. It was once the person of the King and His Royal House that you were supposed to be impressed by. Now it's the culture, the nation. Something exaggerated about this in either case, yet it remains somehow more or less convincing, and these days each country's cultural display becomes a Disneyland Tourist Extravaganza, mighty generator of the all important tourist dollar. The Hague is a bit more modest, and I'd rather be able to see — as we did in Mauritshuis — two or three really great paintings, in a smaller crowd, than a thousand masterpieces in the midst of a mob. Vermeer impresses with the quiet and serenity of his pictures. "View of Delft" is here, one of his few outdoor scenes. Noah pointed out how at the left of the picture the city wall flattens out almost to abstraction. The light in the painting is dark and modest. As it is in fact is here in Holland, so often the sky's cloudy, roiling with moving clouds, over the flat watery land, or over the sea. In general my favorite paintings were skyscapes (Mesdag has a few good ones — not the panorama, but a seascape/skyscape at the panorama's downstairs small museum, and another we saw at the Teylor Science Museum in Haarlem). "Woman with the Pearl Earring" is also here, and it's a wonderful picture, but unusual for Vermeer in that it features a face only, against a receding indefinite background — doesn't show a partial face within the context of a small and detailed domestic scene, as do his other famous pictures. The face of the woman, whose head is turning away, as if caught for just a moment, not posing, but busy in the midst of activity, is soft, almost blurred, and the earring appears as just a stabbing shaft of light. The Dutch came of age culturally in the 17th Century, mercifully past the time when the passionate abstractions of Catholic Europe held sway, so when you come to Holland to look at the great paintings you see Vermeer's quiet depictions of domestic life, or Rembrandt's pictures of character-laden human beings, rather than the soaring heaven-inspired pictures you see in Italy or France. A big relief. The quality of the light and landscape here seems to fit this. Van Gogh (none of whose pictures we saw here) had to go to the south of France to see that light, before he could break out. Light like here in California (though the skyscape here today, as I write this, is mauve, as in Holland. Mauve was in fact a Dutch painter. Is it possible the color was named for him?)
In Amsterdam, next day, we went to the Rijksmuseum, the important one, to see more pictures. Vermeers and Rembrandts. The small Rembrandts — of Jeremiah musing to the picture's right, as Jerusalem burns, tiny in a corner to the left - of Ana, an old woman, reading her bible, the pinpoint light illuminating her wrinkled hand on the page — were very moving, as were the Vermeer domestic scenes, one of a woman reading a letter, illuminated by light from the nearby window, one fold of the letter blazing white. The woman though, and all else in the depicted room, very still, smudged, gorgeous in her vagueness. This was all the more noticeable next to another Vermeer, a famous one of a maid pouring water from a pitcher next to a window (always that Vermeer window: another world outside this one that bathes this world in a holy light?) In this second picture the figure and the surroundings much more etched and definite. A third Vermeer on this same wall of a street scene, a few very carefully rendered houses with small figures in the doorways. I tried to take some photos of people in the museum looking at these pictures on the wall — using a very slow shutter speed, maybe two seconds. We'll see what they look like.
Dinner that evening (this was Kathy's birthday- also Adine's, also Anders', Noah's Danish roommate) at an Amsterdam restaurant with Nico and Joke; Nico is Adine's Dutch Zen teacher, a disciple of Gempo's, Joke his wife a musician. Nico is a very nice man, jovial and humble, who entered a Catholic monastery as a young boy, spent thirty years there, and left to do Zen; Joke is quite funny and charming. Nico has regular Zen groups he visits in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam, traveling on the train from city to city, and does this as his full time work. Just like me more or less, we realized, as we indulged in some shop talk. He too is happy to remain unencumbered by property (his groups rent space), and takes delight in the delight his sangha members take in the practice — like me also.
Walking back, we went through the red light district, which is quite close to the immense and immensely ornate Central Train Station. Girls half dressed in the windows, storefronts actually, right on the narrow crowded streets. Many of them wearing day-glo panties or pasties bright in the lurid special-effects lighting. Displaying themselves in the decor of their rooms, pacing up and down like cats, rubbing up against the windows, or striking other naughty poses. Their beds, sheets invitingly turned back, also part of the decor- the beds very close to the windows, which are very close to the crowded streets- I wonder how anyone could have sex in there in a relaxed state.
Earlier in the day we'd taken a canal boat tour of the City, old houses lining the waterways. The houses all have outdoor winches at the top to haul up furniture to be pulled in through windows, since none of the interior staircases are large enough to accommodate this. Amsterdam looks pretty much as it did three hundred years ago.
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