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Robert E. Buswell Jr. Biography

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“Much of this picture of Zen derives from portrayals found in such normative texts of the tradition as the lamp anthologies (Ch. teng-lu), huge collections of the hagiographies and basic instructions of hundreds of masters in the various lineages of Zen. But such texts were never intended to serve as guides to religious practice or as records of daily practice; they were instead mythology and hagiography, which offered the student an idealized paradigm of the Zen spiritual experience. Many scholars of Zen have mistakenly taken these lamp anthologies at face value as historical documents and presumed that they provide an accurate account of how Zen monks of the premodern era pursued their religious vocations. They do not.”

Zen
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“Modern Zen training offers a matrix within which to evaluate the way one tradition of Zen understands—and puts into practice—the doctrines and teachings of its religion. While Zen training in Korea will differ in certain respects from that followed by the patriarchs and ancient masters of classical Ch'an in China or by Zen monks in Japan, it is an authentic model of how the monks of one national tradition of Zen have tackled "the practical matter of how to live with [their] belief.”

ZenKorea
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“Korean Zen—known as Son—is also a tradition worthy of far more attention than it has gleaned to date in Western scholarship. Indeed, given the pervasive emphasis on Japanese forms of Zen found in Western literature on the tradition (as indicated by our common English usage of the Japanese pronunciation "Zen" to represent all the national branches of the school), we may forget that there are other, equally compelling and authentic approaches to Zen thought and practice found elsewhere in Asia.”

ZenKorea
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“Zen is not coextensive with any one school, whether that be Korean Sŏn or Japanese Rinzai Zen. There have actually been many independent strands of what has come to be called Zen, the sorting out of which has occupied scholars of Buddhism for the last few decades. These sectarian divisions are further complicated by the fact that there are Zen traditions in all four East Asian countries—China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam—each of which has its own independent history, doctrine, and mode of practice. While each of these traditions has developed independently, all have been heavily influenced by the Chinese schools of Ch'an (Kor. Sŏn; Jpn. Zen; Viet. Thiên). We are therefore left with an intricate picture of several independent national traditions of Zen, but traditions that do have considerable synergy between them. To ignore these national differences would be to oversimplify the complicated sectarian scene that is East Asian Zen; but to overemphasize them would be to ignore the multiple layers of symbiosis between Zen's various national branches. These continuities and transformations between the different strands must both be kept in mind in order to understand the character of the "Zen tradition.”

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“In all monasteries, there can be found examples of monks who have ordained for the two reasons that the average Korean presumes most common: failure in love or laziness. Any organization as large as the Buddhist church will be certain to attract its share of seeming undesirables. But one point that monks often made to me is that regardless of the initial motivation that prompts a man to assume a religious vocation, continued involvement in the monastic life may remold that motivation into an entirely exemplary one. Indeed, there is no way of predicting from a monk's background his ultimate success in the religious life. I knew several monks from devoted Buddhist families who ordained out of strong personal faith but were unable to adjust to the difficult lifestyle of the monastery and ended up disrobing. Finally, as monks reiterate time and again, it is not why a man initially wants to become a monk that determines the quality of his vocation, but how well he leads the life once he has ordained.”

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