INTERVIEW

1. How is living a Zen life counter cultural?
2. What lead you to this lifestyle?

Louis—I’ll take the second of you questions first. I would ask what led me to zen practice since zen and all of Buddhism is a practice. Lifestyle makes it seem like the lifestyle advertising that is so predominant out there. Indeed, that is exactly how zen is marketed these days as a lifestyle—serene, peaceful, minimalist, lots of green tea, maybe some shakuhachi flute in the background over $100 sushi. But very little actual sitting. Buddhism is a practice—it very practical and pragmatic. I came to practice from 2 angles

1) art and aesthetics—I was blown away by Japanese haiku and scroll painting. Later—Chinese poetry as well. The attention to daily life drew me in and seemed to connect with the works of WCW whom I was reading voraciously at the time. So because I was figuring what it meant to be a poet and what poetry was etc. the Japanese conception of art as a “Way” led me naturally to zen. Basho after all was a practitioner—I recall Robert Aitken Roshi’s book A Haiku Wave being instrumental in making this connection for me and clarifying how writing could be a form of practice—an extension of (but never a substitute for) formal meditation.
2) Suffering—my life was a mess and I wanted to find a way to sort it out. My traditional Christian upbringing offered little in the way of guidance besides kumbiyah around the youth group campfire, so I looked elsewhere. My religion prof at McGill—Victor Sogen Hori—was a zen monk as well. That helped a lot. I checked out the local zendos and started sitting daily when I was 19 or so.

In terms of how zen is countercultural, I would as instead IF zen is countercultural, and that clearly depends on what you mean by culture. In terms of Shambhala Enlightened Society, practice is anything but countercultural—it is the vehicle to creating a kinder, more awake, compassionate society that eases of suffering of the greatest number of people. But sure, in one sense, practice goes against the grain of our current speedy, consumerist culture. I’m wary tho of the “world-denying” implications of countercultural. The biggest misnomer about zen is that it means dropping out of society and going to live in a monastery—a kind of fuck it all approach that in the end amounts to a lack of courage to face and deal with one’s life just as it is, warts and all. Real practice isn’t about dropping out of society, it’s about entering more deeply into it and helping others. I also don’t think that we need a counterculture right now—I think the current system of liberal bourgeois capitalism through welfare state democracy is the best idea of how to structure our lives we’ve come up with so far. The problems (more equitable distribution of wealth, global warming, species extinction, AIDS, genocide) are matters of refinement, not fatal flaws in the system. I don’t think the whole thing needs to be scrapped—the situation as we Buddhists say is workable. A lot of the counterculture focuses on how bad America is and how hopeless the system is—I think that’s a poisonous attitude to take. Don’t play the America Sucks Sweepstakes.

From my point of view enlightenment is a moment of clarity where
everything becomes obvious. Can you explain if this statement is true or
false?
4. Why is enlightenment so important for Zen Buddhists?
5. Have you ever reached enlightenment?
6. If yes, how was it like.

I don’t have much use for the question of enlightenment. Too often people take this idea of getting enlightened and turn it into a goal to pursue. The problem with that is twofold—one you already are what you are pursuing, and two it’s an aggressive, acquisitive approach to spiritual practice. Enlightenment becomes just another commodity on the spiritual marketplace—what Trungpa Rinpoche termed spiritual materialism. And people who practice in this way frequently become arrogant and prideful assholes who think that they’ve got something the rest of use mere mortals don’t. This is especially true of Rinzai zen koan practice. Having done that practice for a while and “passed” koans, I can tell you that so-called enlightenment experiences aren’t much different from bad gas or a blood sugar low. They are impermanent states of mind that, if clung to, become just another source of suffering. Better I’d say to cool off and not worry too much about enlightenment. I prefer the “no gain” approach to practice which assumes that we are all already Buddha—intrinsically enlightened—and our job is to pay attention to all the subtle ways we talk ourselves out of acting that way. Slowly, we learn to stay with and taste fully all aspects of our experience, including the parts we don’t like. It’s a hell of a lot harder to sit still when you’re pissed off or bored silly than to concentrate on a koan and get enlightened. The latter runs the risk as well of turning meditation into a mechanism for repressing emotions—I’ve met TONS of people who have passed lots of koans and had enlightenment experiences who still don’t demonstrate even the slightest amount of emotional honesty.

So—I’d question that enlightenment is important to zen Buddhists. Certainly in the two main schools Soto and Rinzai you have divergent opinions. Soto is more oriented towards the no gain approach where Rinzai stresses the importance of satori. Unfortunately for the Beats, the only real scholarship at the time centered around DT Suzuki who stressed satori and enlightenment like nobody’s business. This one-sided perspective on practice set American zen back 50 years I’d say—it’s negative effects can still be felt to this day.