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The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk

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Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

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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 Many scholars of Zen have mistakenly taken these lamp anthologies at face value as historical documents and presumed that they provide an accurate account of how Zen monks of the premodern era pursued their religious vocations.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
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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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
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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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
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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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.”

Zen
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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“In the Western imagination, "Zen" has connotations of hip and cool, liberal and progressive; it is thought to be a fashionable and easygoing spirituality with just the right touch of esoteric exoticism and none of the stuffy and constrictive baggage of dogmatic institutional religions. In Japan, by contrast, Zen is generally associated with the strict discipline of a rigorous spiritual practice and also with a traditional, ritualistic, and culturally conservative religious establishment.”

Zen
Book:Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism
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“See how the symbols stretch across all three shields? They represent a god." Hypnos frowned. "There's a God of lions and knives and wineglasses? That seems incredibly specific." "This god is Shezmu," said Enrique, rolling his eyes. "He's seldom depicted, perhaps because he's at such odds with himself. On the other hand, he's the lord of perfumes and gracious oils, often considered something of a celebration deity." "My kind of god," said Hypnos. "He is also the god of slaughter, blood and dismemberment." "I amend my original statement," said Hypnos.”

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Book:The Silvered Serpents
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“Analogously, the cultural appropriation of "Zen" in the popular culture of the West has often been as superficial as it has been enthusiastic. However, in Western universities these days the pendulum has swung in the other direction; the current academic trend is to use historical and philological scholarship to criticize the idealized spiritual and romantic image of Zen fashioned by earlier generations of writers. In erudite books with clever titles like Chan Insights and Oversights and Seeing Through Zen this this critical—and sometimes polemical—debunking is aimed not only at the ways in which authors like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts have presented Zen to Westerners; it is also aimed at the traditional self conceptions and self-presentations of the Zen tradition throughout its fifteen-hundred-year history in Asia.”

Zen
Book:Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism
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