In Our Time - Zen

Episode Date: December 4, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Zen. It's often thought of as a form of Buddhism that emphasises the practice of meditation over any particular set of beliefs. In fact Zen belongs to a particular intellectual tradition within Buddhism that took root in China in the 6th century AD. It spread to Japan in the early Middle Ages, where Zen practitioners set up religious institutions like temples, monasteries and universities that remain important today.GUESTSTim Barrett, Emeritus Professor in the Department of the Study of Religions at SOAS, University of LondonLucia Dolce, Numata Reader in Japanese Buddhism at SOAS, University of LondonEric Greene, Lecturer in East Asian Religions at the University of BristolProducer: Luke Mulhall.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Quote, if you meet the Buddha on the road to enlightenment, kill him. Unquote. So said Linji, a teacher active in China in the 9th century AD. Despite the somewhat contrary attitude expressed in this statement, Linji was himself a Buddhist, an exponent of a branch of the religion widely known in the West, as Zen. Zen is a Japanese translation of Chan, the Chinese word for meditation. It developed in China in the 6th century AD, coming from 6th century BC, India. It emphasizes a monastic way of life,

the practice of meditation, and the use of paradoxical riddles to help follow us sidestep, rational thought, and achieve a state of sudden enlightenment. It came to Japan in the Middle Ages, and its strong impact eventually spilled into the West, especially in America in the 20th century. The religion developed under particular historical circumstances and it's played a significant role in East Asian cultures and beyond. With me to discuss Zen are Tim Barrett, emeritus professor in the Department of the Study of Religions at Soas, University of London. Ruchir Dolce, Numata reader in Japanese Buddhism, also at Soas, University of London,

and Eric Green lecturer in East Asian religions at the University of Bristol. Tim Barrett, Zane emerged in China in the 6th century AD. Can you tell us how Buddhism can, came to China and how it had existed up until that point. Yes, we don't know exactly how Buddhism came to China, but certainly by the middle of the second century AD, a lot of Buddhist scriptures were already being translated. And over the course of the next few centuries,

more and more of these Buddhist sources were translated. The result was then that by the... Sixth century. Buddhism was quite well established in certain ways. They had a vast amount of data from India. They had also established monasteries, which were a novelty in Chinese society and very successful, certainly economically successful, in that the faithful would donate money to them. but this, of course, in itself generated problems, both these things. First of all, to study these translated scriptures and other documents took a vast amount of time and effort intellectually, that it has tended to slant the practice of Buddhism towards what we might call the academic.

And secondly, the monasteries being very rich. tended to isolate them from the rest of Chinese society and also make them vulnerable. There were persecutions. How aware were they of the origins of Buddhism in India in the 5th or 6th or 6th century BC? Well, certainly they knew about the life of the Buddha. They had some notion by that point of a Buddhist history

and how Buddhism had reached them The problem was, however, the vulnerability of Buddhism and also the sense that the Buddha had lived a long time ago in another country and as he lived long ago and far away and all things must pass, the fate of Buddhism did not look good. Things could only get worse. So Chan emerged as a particular type of Buddhism about this time in China. Can you tell us briefly what Chan was?

Yes. Chan emerges in the person of an individual called Bodhidharma, who was a meditation teacher. We know he was a real historical figure because he's mentioned incidentally by someone in a secular document, more or less, of about 526. And he has looked back on as having brought to China from India what one might call, for lack of a better word, the essence of Buddhism.

He was a meditation teacher, and of course meditation is something that you can't learn from books. And so if you have a meditation teacher who traces their tradition back to the Buddha, it means that there must have been a sequence of such teachers going back all that way. and furthermore, could it be perhaps in this rather gloomy situation that to learn with a meditation teacher gave you the key access to the essence of Buddhism? And that is what Zen was thought of as being. Eric Green, one of the ideas associated with Chan is a doctrine of sudden enlightenment. Can you tell us about that?

Sure. Yeah, I think perhaps the easiest way to say. say it would be that sudden enlightenment is an approach to the Buddhist path to liberation, the sequence of practices that the Buddhist path to liberation. Things one has to do to achieve, well, what we sometimes call enlightenment, but is more accurately thought of as liberation or awakening. It's an approach to that which assumes that in some profound way this achievement is already innate within people, within those who are seeking it and that therefore to conceive of this path and to practice it in a way, to conceive of it

as a sort of gradual transformation from one state to another or a gradual path of progress from one place to another, that this is somehow fundamentally misguided. And that because the state of liberation is already innate within people, to achieve it is more like a sudden realization that one already has this thing and therefore it must be sudden in that sense. I should just also say if I can that this is a sort of description of the idea of sudden enlightenment. Within the context of the rise of Zen, it also has a certain polemical value as a slogan. So when Zen speaks of sudden enlightenment, they're not just saying, well, this is how we approach liberation, but that other groups of Buddhists approach it in a gradual fashion, and that's not as good. So it has both

a sort of descriptive value, but then also this kind of ideological value, which is extremely important within the Zen tradition. And it's connected to the idea among a certain sector, Buddhism, that this cannot be put into words. Yes, and this is connected. The doctrine can't be put into words. Right, and that would be connected to this idea that precisely because the state of liberation is something that is already inherent in you, any attempt to explicate how one arrives at it is already a fundamentally misguided notion.

So any spoken or really just consciously articulated sequence of steps, sequence of practices that one must do. This is already the wrong thing. In fact, not just the wrong thing, but it's positively an obstacle. And so that the path to liberation now becomes conceived of not as learning to do something, but in somehow refraining from trying to do anything. So you wait for that to happen, which will happen if you wait for it to happen? Yeah, there's, I think, a valid perspective from which it doesn't quite work in the end as a totally unified system in that if you tell people, someone comes to and says, well, how do I reach enlightenment? And you say, don't try to reach enlightenment. You know, you could say, well, that doesn't really work. I mean, you're not going to sell a lot of, you know, Buddhism if that's the only thing you have to say. So there's a context, an institutional religious context within which this teaching was promulgated.

And you have to keep that in mind. Otherwise, it doesn't actually make any sense at the end of the day. I mean, that's one. This is a small digression. I wanted to be a small digression, but I'm sure you've thought this through. I was listening to Chomsky the other night, and he was saying, talking about thought,

preceding language and conceptual, that Homer Sappians had a conceptual mind before he discovered or it came about that there was language. It could just be that this is reaching back to that, isn't it? It could be, and I think that sounds quite in line with the way that the this Zen emphasis on the non-linguistic nature of truth or whatever

in the modern world people do often I think interpret it quite in line with what you're saying on the other hand there is a more specifically Buddhist intellectual context about the nature of enlightenment being inherent about the non-duality of enlightenment it not being a conceptual thing and so whether they're talking with the same thing or not I don't know but

from my perspective anyway to just gloss over the specific intellectual Buddhist context and say, oh, this is just what Chomsky is talking about, that would be at least an incomplete conclusion. But you say it's incomplete anyway. Did you? I mean, I'm just quoting what you said about three or four minutes ago. My perspective, of course, is for the moment, is the external one of an academic trying to describe the religion of Zen in a historical intellectual context. If I were preaching Zen to you, I would take a rather different approach. And we leave that for another time, if you don't mind.

Dolce, can you tell us how and when Chan moved over to Japan? Yes. Forms of Zen were already known in Japan as part of the practices of one of the largest schools of Buddhism called Thendai. And by the end of the 12th century, some Thendai monks had tried to establish the practice of Zen as an independent practice. But traditionally the introduction of Chan to Japan is associated with the activities of two Thendai monks, went to China and learned the Tsung Dynasty style of Zen with lots of focus on monastic discipline. And these two figures called the Aesai and Dogen are considered to be the founders of the two main lineages of Zen in Japan, and the Rinzai and Soto Zen. What period in history we're talking about the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th century.

Was it really significant? Is there what's significant about that date apart from like they arrived at? Was there some movement? Well, obviously there's movement. What caused it, do you think? Well, that's a moment in which several forms of Buddhist practice emerge as independent practices. The context, the religious context is that of a mainstream, form of Buddhism based on tantric Buddhism, esoteric Buddhism, that is what is called in Japan, within schools such as the Tendai school that embraces different practices. And what we find around this period is that movement focus on one specific practice and embrace that as the best way to achieve enlightenment or liberation to progress. to progress into the path towards liberation.

So what was a particular practice that the Japanese Zen picked on, and how did it differ from the Chinese Chan? Well, that's, again, the development of Zen took different forms, according to lineage. In the case of maybe what we can say, one specificity with, for instance, the Soto School, is the emphasis on sitting meditation. Zazan, that's what is called.

Zazan was already a practice within the Tendai forms of meditation, one of the four types. Tendai being one of the Chinese forms. Tendai is a Sino-Japanese school of Buddhism that embraces different practices. And one of those, there were four different types of meditation, and one of those was constant sitting. And so Zazan is just,

sitting, meditate through sitting. And maybe we can say that perhaps in the interpretation of the founder of Soto Zen, dogan, the meaning of the Zen became sort of absolute. You just sit and that practice

equals the achievement of enlightenment. Basically the practice equals the goal of Buddhist endeavor. So we're getting two streams here we get in Japanese Zen. Would you like to take that on and develop that a bit, Tim Barrett?

Yes, well, in a sense the two streams are already there in China. As Lucia said, the differences between those who believe that in meditation, in sitting in meditation, you're going to

achieve all there is to be achieved. And the others you mentioned in your introduction, Linji and the Japanese would say Rinsai. In this tradition, there is much more emphasis on the master using various techniques to try and prompt, if that's perhaps the fair word, prompt the enlightenment in the student. And certainly there's much more of an interaction between master,

and student in the process of seeking enlightenment. Dogen, the founder of the Soto tradition, would say, you know, just sit. You know, none of this. And indeed, one can see that he's picking up on controversies that were already quite vigorous in China between advocates of one approach and the other approach. But there's just sit, and then there's these passages coming from the ancient masters of Zern. Is it Coan is the word?

Versus and so on. So are these in parallel? Are they bleeding into each other? Are they distinctive groups? Are they fighting each other? I think that. That's an interesting question. And I think that to differentiate, say, a Rinseye from Soto

and suggest that these are entirely different groups would be misleading because I think both groups except the importance of meditation, both groups see some role at least for the koan, these challenges to the intellect, as having a function in Zen training. Can you tell us more about the koan, I agree? Sure.

Have you got one of two examples of your lip tips? Well, the quote you gave in the introduction, if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. This is, I think it must be an actual colon somewhere. But in terms of what they are as literary documents, because this is what they actually are, is they're basically excerpts from what are called collected sayings of the past Zen masters.

So one of the past masters. Past masters of the Zen tradition. So one of the distinctive doctrinal emphasis of Zen is this idea that these scriptural teachings are somehow not superiors. They're not really what people need to study. You need to just realize your innate Buddha nature. But in practice, what ends up happening with in the Zen tradition is that in place of the

traditional scriptures from Indian Buddhism, what come to be valued almost as scriptures in their own accord are the recorded sermons or sayings of the Zen masters themselves. Being recipients of this lineage of enlightenment, Zen masters themselves are treated like Buddhas. And therefore their words have that same value. What do we know about these Zen masters, Eric? Some of them we know a lot about. Over which period of time, and there are a few centuries these great masters are there? Yes, the ones whose words become kind of collected into these documents,

which then are treated basically like the scriptures of the Zen School, these figures lived roughly between the early 8th century and then all the way into the 13th or 14th or later century. That's the sort of period when the collection of these documents is most intense. koans are technically sort of small excerpts from these sayings, little snippets that a Zen master spoke, and because the Zen master is basically the Buddha or has the same enlightenment as the Buddha, his words have the same power to enlighten people who hear them as the words of the Buddha do.

So the koans then become collections of particularly potent, so it's thought, excerpts from these words, which are then collected into volumes with lots of different sayings from different different Zen masters over hundreds of years and studied by a, followers of Zen, kind of like scriptures. There's a certain irony here. People have commented that the Zen school begins by saying that Zen transmits a teaching outside of words, and then the literary output of the Zen School in China

is actually greater than any other school of Buddhism, precisely in these collections of the sayings of the Zen masters. Lucia, can we go back to something you mentioned in your first contribution, back to Zazan, Soto, Zazan, and can you just point out the differences? say similarities you've gone, but the differences, so the listener can understand the differences from what Eric's been saying? With the koan.

Yeah. The difference is from the koan. The difference is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zazan is, so koan and Zazana, as both them and Eric have said, have been identified as the two main practices. Can we go into Zazen a bit now?

That's sitting around, isn't it? Yes, that's just sitting, just sitting meditation, as I mentioned before is one type of meditation. But what do you do when you're told to meditate? It's a bit difficult in this area, isn't it? Because you're told to meditate but not to meditate. So it gets a bit complicated to be simple, isn't it? Yes, perhaps.

What I think is interesting in the way in which this type of meditation is articulated by the early Japanese thinkers is that what is important is the posture of the body and the correct sort of sitting. So by sitting leg crossed, which is the ideal shape of the Buddha, of the form that the Buddha takes also in the iconography, you have a model to imitate.

By just sitting in the correct posture, the practitioner becomes the Buddha. By doing nothing else but that. So the focus is not so much on the mental process of meditating that is often thought to be fundamental in Western perceptions but is in the more ritualized way of sitting. And breathing, I presume, breathing exercises are there. And breathing to a certain extent.

Well, you've got to be breathe, but I mean there's special ways to breathe. But that's not, yeah, I don't think that in Zen is the most. I'm sorry to be so pedantically empirical and English and all the rest of it, but you're sitting meditating and I'm using that word deliberately. I'm not diminishing the enterprise because one of the great precepts is just sit. That is a quote, isn't it? Just sit. So you're just sitting, you're in the right posture, you're breathing correctly, then what?

And just that equals to the achievement of enlightenment, of liberation, at least in the words of, well, dogan, for instance. In practice, meditation was just one of the activities that would be performed in a Zen monastery. There were meditation sessions, that were integral part of the daily life, but meditation was not the exclusive activity of the monks, of Zen monks. there was as much time spent in reading sutras and sort of praying if we want to say so.

It's curious, isn't it, Tim Barrett, that I'm struggling, obviously, to articulate what the people involved are deliberately not articulating. So don't you find that when you're studying this, that people are saying, no, we're just sitting? And now you find out about it for yourself? Yes, but I can really. assure you that as one Zen Master said, it's great doubt that leads to great enlightenment. I don't think it's a process we can get through in the next few minutes, but

I think that... Hold on, just a second. Why does nobody's mentioned doubt until now? What's the doubt? The doubt is to what am I doing, trying to find enlightenment, what is enlightenment? Am I getting nowhere studying the words of the master?

Am I getting nowhere by just sitting? Am I getting nowhere living in a monastery. Is this what they mean when they talk about being in Buddha mind, these doubts? Yes and no, because a Buddha mind, which is the state of mind of a Buddha, has some masters in going back as early as the 9th century, at least, if not the 8th, insist. It's just like everyday mind. which means that enlightenment is not some experience that is above and beyond ordinary human life. As I said, the problem had been with Buddhism in China

that it was not integrated into society particularly well. But the Zen masters insist that it is something that it can be part of an ordinary life. Indeed, not simply for monks, but for lay people as well. So enlightenment doesn't have to be, oh, I see the word. as it really is. Enlightenment can be cleaning your porridge bowl. It could be, but you would be cleaning it in an enlightened way. You remember George Herbert, a servant with this clause, makes drudgery divine.

It's a different clause, but the same sentiment in a sense. So daily life, including, and I think this was key in China, including manual labour, could... be also an enlightened life. Remember that the accusation was that the monks were parasites. So to say that, no, we're not parasites, our enlightenment is part of just part of normal life. We're not separate from society.

That was, I think, important. Why I'm digging away at this, Eric Green, and I wanted to help us here, is it became so powerful, so important in Japan, and it affected so many things, Zen, and then he spilled over into the West. that getting to the core of it is, we can spend another minute or two on that,

and the core of it seems to be meditation. And clearly not having, given that meditation, they're saying we are thinking, or are we thinking, but articulation is for others. What's your handle on it? Well, I don't know that I can give you a complete answer, but let me just say that one thing that for me makes sense of it all, is that if one tries to talk about the sort of the Zen approach,

particularly this approach in which they're reluctant to explain what the approach is, just sit, you know, just by sitting you are the Buddha, if considered in the abstract, these statements, I think, often don't seem to make much sense. But when we again remember that these are statements which are being articulated in a particular context. So when the Zen master says, don't try to attain enlightenment, right, he's presuming that he is speaking to someone

who is already committed to attaining enlightenment. in a context of people who have devoted their entire lives to do, an institution that has set up all of these rituals and practices and things precisely for this purpose. So there's a sort of disconnect between what Zen masters say and what from the outside they look like they're doing. And the point of it all, if you want to put it that way, in some ways lies precisely in that contrast.

Don't try to attain enlightenment is a way to articulate the attitude you should have while trying to attain enlightenment. Now, the Zen masters wouldn't say that because they're only going to say the part. of it of don't trying to attain enlightenment. But when they're saying this, they're surrounded by people who are in an institution devoted to the attainment of enlightenment. So when you put those two together, it makes a bit more sense.

If you try to take out just what the Zen masters say and say, oh, how does it make sense to say that you shouldn't try to attain it? Then it gets a bit mysterious. Is enlightenment anything like the notion of Greek idea of living well or the general idea of happiness? Are there any connections we can make with more familiar forms? answer comes then non I don't want to step in here first

my only hesitancy would be that and while I think that for example some of the things that Tim just said about the notion that enlightenment should be something that can manifest in everyday life and all these things we do have to be very careful and we don't always know the difference between when such things are said

as a kind of ideology versus when they reflect what people have actually done so in the case of Zen for example yes you have many statements to the effect that enlightenment should be something that can appear in every aspect of your life. But did the Zen monks leave their monasteries and stop performing their elaborate

rituals and stopped devoting 40 years of their life to doing these things? No, they kept doing that. So, you know, I would be personally reluctant to say that the Zen notion can be sort of abstracted from all that, because again, I think it takes place in that context. Although I think this is the kind of thing where people

start having debates. Can I come to Luchia then to develop that? You mentioned the idea of the Zen monasteries, and in Japan, Zen became a force. And big force, monasteries, monasteries, the letter attacked and so. So there we are. What were the monasteries giving to Zen? Why did they need monasteries? Well, first of all, because Zen, like all other forms of Buddhism, was a monastic

tradition, at least when it started. But maybe if we look at the development of Zen in Japan, we can see that there is a, well, the establishment of a new monasteries, a but on the model, the structural model of pre-existent Buddhism. So then sort of allies to the government and newly emerging classes. So we have two different types of monasteries, some which are sponsored and catered to the military government, the aristocracy and received donation from these classes,

for the performance of rituals that are rituals of protection, protection of the country, protection of individuals, and funerary rights. Which are very important. They are very, very important. They are perhaps,

besides what the rhetoric of Zen says, the most important contribution of Zen to Japanese society. The funerring out of the funerary rights, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we can say that Zen developed type of funerary rights for everyone in Japan

that are still existent, so long-lasting influence. Because the Zen monasteries already had funerary rights for the abbot and for general common monks, and

that could be applied to lay people but in a very specific Zen fashion by ordained the dead, by the posthumous ordination of a dead person. So when you died, you got a new name, you got a... Exactly. And you were sort of entered into, you became a monk.

Exactly. You are entered into the community, the monastic community. Exactly because the funerals were meant for monks. So they were meant for an ordained person. And by moving the ritual into the sort of society and applying it to lay people, the Zen monks have reproduced the model of ordained. They shaved the head of a dead person, and they gave a posthumous name, which is called the precept name, so the name that a monk would take during ordination. And they would even include this name in a lineage chart that linked to the dead person to the patriarchs eventually to all the previous monks.

and the posthumous name is still one of the most important practices of funeral rights today in Japan. Tim Barron, Zanes associated with a lot of the arts and wider culture, particularly poetry. What's the connection now? Well, I think there's a connection, especially with poetry, because Zain is very interested in language, and poets are very interested in Buddhism in general. It brought into China a lot of ideas about, mental life.

And poets are interested in things like visualising a scene or creativity, all these things that go on in the mind. And we find an overlap between the way poets describe poetry and certainly Buddhist terminology in general. Now, Zen monks too, because poetry in any culture tends to be a very compressed form of language. So when they tried to express some of these ineffable truths, and poetry was a frequent medium for at least alluding to the ineffable truth.

And for example, a Zen master would encapsulate his or her enlightenment in a verse and perhaps at the end of their career as they knew death was approaching. they would leave a final verse to their students. However, when it comes to the introduction of Zen culture to Japan, I think it's important to see that one of the things that Eric has mentioned that a Zen master is as good as a Buddha had actually been quite important in giving East Asia, China, in the first instance, a sense that they didn't need India.

And there was a big shift in Chinese culture about a millennium ago towards a more independent culture that didn't look outside China. What this meant was that you had created a new Buddhist culture that was distinctively Chinese, that used Chinese poetry, also painting and calligraphy. And it was this package that was exported to Japan, and that was quite novel. I'm going to stay with Japan, I agree.

Can you tell us, how Zen began to play and as the Middle Ages rolled through in society and institutions particularly say the army, the samurai in Zen for instance, which is what a lot of people know about. I should turn this question over to the Chi, I suppose. Well, she can come in, right?

This is the way it goes ping pong pong and it's your turn now. Here I thought that there was some other secret order. The connection, I mean, as Lucia was saying a second ago, one of the things that accounts for Zen success in Japan is the strong connections established between the government and the Japanese Zen institutions. Why were they attracted to each other, Zen and the government? Buddhism is power.

I mean, in addition to being enlightenment and all the other things, you know, one of the things that Buddhism promises is worldly power. If you perform good Buddhist deeds, if you patronize enlightened Buddhist masters, you get a return in this life, which can help you do all sorts of things. So this is not unique to Japan by any means, and this goes back to the beginnings of Buddhism in India, really.

But in Japan, the Buddhism had really established itself as a state religion that legitimized the government. And the Zen schools, as the sort of newly arrived, the schools could legitimize the emerging ruling elites, which are the warrior elites. So the reason is not really in the kind of stern discipline that monastics, a Zen monasticism was proposing, but was in the fact that Zen monks coming from China

were bringing Chinese civilization and they were kind of new players in the acculturation of the emerging military classes. Well, let's stick to this to Japan. We know he's all come to China. We've got that. That's been drilled into us. Now, in Japan, for instance, when we see films about the samurai,

several times, we're looking at a man using Zen, to be the perfect archer. Now, can you give us the connection now? Because archery and zen has gone through it, hasn't it? Yes, yes. You'd be useful to have that. I'm afraid that that was not a connection

that was made historically. Martial arts had their own kind of development, and in fact, you can say that they were as much linked to Zen as to tantric Buddhism. All the swords that, for instance are used by with assaultments

are not all but many of them are inscribed with esoteric deities, with tantric deities rather than with Zen sayings. But the connection between Zen and martial arts is I think a much more modern

connection that started really at the end of the 19th century and was part of a broader movement of modernizing Zen and associating it to all sort of well art and non-religious elements, spiritual element and it's connected to the emphasis on Bushido as one of the

kind of characteristic that identifies Japan. So we are not talking really of medieval positions here, but of very complex ideological reasons at the end of the 19th with the formation of the Japanese state. Well, I agree. How did it find its way into Japanese society, say from the 13th to 16th, 17th, 17th century? Was it, the samurai, the archery thing,

doesn't turn up until much later. So what does turn up sooner? Yeah, much later. The famous Zen, if I just get this in, since it's a good fact for everyone to know, the Zen in the Art of Archery book, which is out there. This German philosopher studied with an archery master in Japan.

That archery master actually was on record in Japanese expressing his distaste for Zen, how he hated it. So a lot of the connection between some of these things is not just late 19th century, as Lucia said, but even later, and particularly in the interaction between Western thinkers who were sort of trying to figure out this whole Japanese thing and were putting pieces together,

which on the Japanese side didn't necessarily go together. So we told them on what really happened, which you're not getting much out of that, really, but what people decided to happen a few hundred years later and imposed on what had happened or what they thought had happened. We know exactly where we are, I'm going to. Okay, let's turn to D.T. Suzuki,

and his particular interpretation of Zen and why it's significant. People are pointing at you, Tim, so there you go. Well, Lucia and Eric have led into this very well. He's part of this whole late 19th century, early 20th century, reconsideration of the Zen tradition and the manufacture of bits of it that weren't there before. Suzuki was certainly taught by someone

who was a leader in the movement to take Zen out to the world as representative of the essence of Japanese culture, which indeed because they had received a cultural package from China of arts and so forth, that was good.

Furthermore, this very essence thing, it's a word I've mentioned before and felt very bad about, because it presupposes there is a thing there that you're looking for, which might be misleading. But even so, it was easy to sell to Westerners, especially because Suzuki, having spent 10 years in America,

was very aware of what the current preoccupations were of people like William James talking about religious experience. So he talked up, and it was not entirely a false representation of the tradition. He talked up immediacy, you know, how Zen took you straight into an experience of enlightenment. Tim, I'm sorry, Eric, we're talking about not sort of enlightened. We're talking about Zen playing a part in the nationalist ideology that prevailed in Japan before the Second World War. How did he get aligned with that? Well, it wasn't just Zen. It was basically all Japanese bosom. Yeah, we're talking about Zen at the moment. Well, but in a sense, if one talked about Zen by itself, one would then say, well, what was particular about Zen, which made them do it.

All the Japanese Buddhist institutions did. They did because the Meiji government, which had come to power, was basically interested in suppressing Buddhism and elevating Shinto. That's the kind of state religion. So all Japanese Buddhist groups, in order to survive, in order to make themselves relevant, came up with ways to contribute to the modernization, nationalization, and then eventually military effort of Japan. So I'm not sure there was anything distinctly Zen about that.

That's just what was going on in Japanese Buddhism. On the other hand, it is also true, and some books written about this, the particular language of Zen, in particular this reluctance to talk about prerequisites to enlightenment, such as moral prerequisites. This is not to say that Zen Buddhists traditionally have actually ignored moral prerequisites, but there's no place within official Zen ideology to really talk about how, say, following moral precepts contributes to enlightenment. that has perhaps at times made it easy to align certain Zen ways of speaking with less savoury elements of history. Again, this is not to say that historically there's any connection between that,

but on an ideological and rhetorical level, it's possible that that has helped, or helped is not the right word. Can you tell us how it moved, when he began to move emphatically to America, didn't it? We've had Suzuki. Can you just briskly tell us where it hit America? Sorry, we're running out of time. Sorry about this briskly, but we spent an awful lot of time in China.

We did India, China and Japan is not bad, and we've got to get to America before we end. Right. Well, I think what, Diti Suzuki had a role. He arrived in America as the translator of a Zen monk, the monk that Tim was talking about, who wanted to liberalize Zen. And so that was 1893,

the Chicago Parliament of Religion, the first time that the West heard a Zen monk speaking about Zen. And then I think a second wave of interest in Zen is in the beat generation, the post-war big generation and the identification of Zen as a spiritual experience that is sort of religious but not really religious using the words that Diti Suzuki himself used. So the association of Zen with a certain type of immediacy, of experience, the arts, again,

and a certain autonomic behaviour as well. What about the claiming of Zen by the Beats, by Kerouac and Ginsburg, and by Zen and the out of motorcycle maintenance and so on? Can you tell us about that? What about it? Yeah. I mean, do you think they've got, well, they're using it for their own purposes or?

Well, sure, but everyone uses everything for their own purposes, right? It was definitely, it was definitely a case where they... Were they on the ball? Were they getting something that was seriously there from Tim's trek from India to China to Japan? I think they were getting something that was seriously there, but they were, of course, also extracting it from its historical institutional religious context. But on your hand, that's what Buddhists have always done.

When the Chinese got Buddhism from India, They also extracted it from their context and made something new. So from that point of view, it's all well and good. But from a historical point of view, it's a bit novel. Thank you very much, Eric Green, Richard, Dahlcher and Tim Barrett. Next week we'll be talking about behavioral ecology. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. We didn't talk about lineage enough and the importance of that within... No, no. Part of what's happening is that stress... a connection back to the Buddha that this legitimates the authority of the Zen master

you know, it's in a society like China. They're not called patriarchs for nothing, as it were. That this is a way of stressing their authority. And more than even the sort of ideological or doctrinal or even practical elements,

that's the one thread that holds it all together. What links all the people we call Zen or Chan into one thing is precisely this strong identity with this lineage that the claim to be a representative of the tradition from Bodhi Dharma to people who say who could say and even in modern China for example and we didn't talk about this but Zen kind of as a lineage

lives on in China people today Chinese Buddhist masters claim to be in the Zen lineage even though they don't say anything that resembles what we would call Zen anymore sort of ideologically and doctrinally they've changed but in terms of their lineal identity they still hold to that so that is we should emphasize that. In a sense also we were seduced by

the India-China-Japan thing which is a wonderful narrative China. It was entirely your fault. Indeed, but we're missing out on the Vietnamese and the Korean. But of course the Koreans would insist that

their Zen is as good as anybody else's Zen. And in a sense, in terms of modern Zen or contemporary Zen, the Vietnamese and Korean experience are extremely important. They've been some of the prime exporters of certain Zen traditions. It's true, I think... But in Vietnam, it's possible that you have a case that's more like contemporary or sort of more modern China

in that it remains as a notion of lineage. Extremely important, but it's not the kind of particular Zen discourse that we were discussing sudden. I mean, those things no longer... I don't know enough about the Vietnamese case. None of us to know. But I think that's also just... As another thing, we sort of missed the Zen meditation thing.

We didn't quite unpack that enough in the sense that, you know, Zen as meditation is something that all East Asian Buddhists are interested in. So the use of Zen to describe themselves is itself a kind of claim that we really have the essence of. What I say about that is that it's like Baptists. All Christians tend to accept the right of baptism. But Baptists are called that because it's... They give it a certain... Just like all Christians are.

are Catholic. Yeah. Indeed. Absolutely. And not to mention the Orthodox, Christians who are not the Orthodox. Yes, who are Orthodox. So Zen calling themselves Zen is a lot like those terms, actually.

That should be pointed out to it. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com. Slash Radio 4.