California 'Zen': Buddhist Spirituality Made in America

California ‘Zen’: Buddhist Spirituality Made in America Inken Prohl ABSTRACT Focusing on the United States as a contact zone for transcultural flows, this article examines how Zen Buddhism was imported into the United States; remade and remarketed there; and then re-imported back into Japan. Beginning with the impact of D. T. Suzuki, the article pres- ents important cultural brokers, institutions, and popular discourses that spread the narratives and practices of both Zen Buddhism and ‘Zen.’ The examination illustrates the importance of the United States as a religious marketplace in itself and as a productive and creative refinery of and for ideas, lifestyles, and products—in this case, Zen Buddhism. The United States as a Contact Zone for Transcultural Flows This essay examines how Zen Buddhism, one of the sets of ideas and practices lumped under the umbrella term ‘Spirituality,’ is in many respects an exemplary product of translocative flows. In what follows, I employ Thomas Tweed’s frame- work of the translocative, which he has designed to account for the importance of transnational exchange and flows and the dynamics of religious practice in an era of global exchange and mobility (“Theory and Method”). As this analysis of the transformation of Zen Buddhism in the United States in general, and Calfornia in particular, shows, the United States plays a crucial role as a catalyst of religious change and a contact zone for interactions among agents, ideas, and material cul- ture, turning Zen Buddhism into a new religious brand: California ‘Zen.’ Transforming Zen Buddhism The strange career of Zen Buddhism in the United States illustrates the way America functions as a transcultural contact zone. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, one could describe Japanese Zen Buddhism as a small, rather conservative Japanese religion. Zen monks played important adminis- trative roles in the wake of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, but apart from that, their duties consisted chiefly of conducting traditional funeral rites and per- forming rituals dedicated to the emperor’s safety and welfare, as well as that of the country as a whole—rituals that helped legitimate the emperor (Wil- liams). With the opening of Japan to the West following the Convention of Kanagawa (1854), however, Zen Buddhism began to be captured by the same global translocative flows that led to new forms of Buddhism elsewhere. These new forms of Buddhism are highly dynamic conglomerations of Buddhist ideas 194 Inken Prohl and practices merged with concepts of democracy, capitalism, the modern individual self, and Protestant notions of interiorized religion. These new forms of Buddhism are what David McMahan refers to as “Buddhist Modernism.” Bud- dhist Modernism—those forms that “emerged out of an engagement with the dominant cultural and intellectual forces of modernity” (McMahan 6)—cen- ters on meditation, individual experience, and the compatibility of Buddhism with science, democracy, and classical humanistic ideals. Numerous encounters between Asian Buddhists and Western audiences led to transcultural hybrid- ization, which transformed understandings of Buddhism for Westerners and Asian Buddhists alike and led to ongoing processes of exchange and concep- tual synthesis among Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world, including the United States. The Zen Buddhism that emerged from these manifold transfor- mations was the epitome of a highly experiential, mystical religious tradition with a strong focus on meditation practices (Sharf, “Zen”). The emergence of Modern Buddhism created a continuum between more traditional forms of Zen Buddhism and the modern variants, with a diverse field of meaning, practices, and aesthetics between these two poles developing over the course of the twentieth century. This is the field that is referred to in the contemporary discourse simply as ‘Zen.’1 ‘Zen’ typically refers to an ‘exotic’ means of optimizing and reforming the self. ‘Zen’ combines different allegedly Zen Buddhist ideas and practices into schemas for attaining a bal- anced, successful life. Books, lectures, and workshops promise ‘Zen’ as the op- timal tool for fashioning a new life via the improvement and realization of the self. Gary R. McClain and Eve Adamson’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Zen Living is but one example of the ‘Zen’ lifestyle’s influence on postmodern mar- ketplaces around the world. For the American market, Inez Stein’s The Magic of Zen is an example of self-optimization through the refinement of personal skills, as are the nearly innumerable books dedicated to ‘Zen and the Art of X,’ a range that includes such famous topics as “Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Happiness” and workshops focusing on “Zen and the Art of Self-Transforma- tion through Mindfulness.”2 These commercially successful manifestations of ‘Zen’ have been supple- mented by the expansion of ‘Zen’ into the world of wellness. A huge array of products, diets, techniques, and practices for catering to one’s lifestyle and needs are sold under the label of ‘Zen.’ With these end results in mind, I will now focus on the way a traditional, conservative, local Japanese religion—Zen Buddhism— transformed into a global, consumer-oriented religious brand: ‘Zen.’ What fac- tors and mechanisms led to this fundamental transformation, breathtaking in its scope and speed? Answering this question requires an examination of the role the United States played in this transformation as a dynamic marketplace and a refinery of ideas, products, and agents, particularly in the field of religion. 1 As I show in this essay, ‘Zen’ is a highly flexible and adaptable signifier, thus I typographi- cally distinguish ‘Zen’ from Zen Buddhism. 2 See Pirsig; Prentiss; Stein; and Hutter. California ‘Zen’ 195 Importing and Refining The metaphor of the refinery explains this transformation, in that refining a product requires both the raw product as well as technology for the refining. In the case of the transformation of Zen in America, the raw materials were imported from Japan, partly through early American converts and aficionados such as William Sturgis Bigelow (1850-1926) and Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), but chiefly through D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966). 3 The refinement, meanwhile, came via the translation of the product for a new audience and their consumption tastes, principally in northern California and New York, and particularly in the postwar decades as the ‘Zen’ brand continued to expand. D. T. Suzuki, one of the most famous and beloved Buddhist intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, arrived in the United States in 1897. He worked with the German Paul Carus (1852-1919), a philosopher, publisher, and advocate of world religion. In 1893, when Carus was at work translating several Buddhist texts, he met Sōen Shaku (1860-1919), Suzuki’s teacher, at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Shaku later sent Suzuki to the United States, put- ting the latter in position to serve as Zen Buddhism’s principal mediator and rep- resentative in the American West. Suzuki’s form of Zen Buddhism was a highly individualist and interiorized form of Zen Buddhism, where the individual seeks their own path to a salvation that must be directly experienced and cannot be expressed in words; Suzuki called this experience satori. Satori is the revelation of a new world to the practitioner. It is a radical transformation of self, in which the practitioner undergoes a total epistemological readjustment as a result of the revelation. Scholars have shown that Suzuki’s form of Zen Buddhism had little in common with contemporary Japanese Zen Buddhism.4 Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism, which he described in a number of commercially successful books and lectures, was the product of a number of translocative flows—his readings in a variety of Western traditions and personal encounters with the Western intellectuals he met during his time in Illinois, New York, and California. In addition to his work with Carus, who was a believer in the essential unity of all religions, Suzuki also translated the writings of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and met with a number of different American intellectuals, including Transcendentalists, literary figures, and members of the Theosophical Society.5 These encounters influenced Suzuki’s conception of Zen Buddhism, which he saw as a pure, unmediated, non-dualistic, highly individual religious experience. Suzuki thus echoed and creatively incor- porated a religious paradigm that was and remains influential in the American religious marketplace, that of religion as predominantely individual-driven. Al- though European and American intellectuals such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, 3 See Rosenstone; and Tweed, “American Occultism and Japanese Buddhism.” 4 On Suzuki’s Japanese context, see Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights; Ketelaar; and Snodgrass. 5 On Suzuki’s numerous encounters with Western intellectuals, see Fields; Offermans; Jaffe; Sharf, “Experience”; Sharf, “Uses and Abuses”; Suzuki, Swedenborg; and Tweed, “Unit- ed States.” 196 Inken Prohl Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Rudolf Otto had contributed to the idea of religion as an individual endeavor, practice, or state of mind, the religious marketplace in the United States was a major force in developing and exporting the idea of religion as an individual path to salvation (Sharf, “Experience”). As Robert Sharf notes, Suzuki’s form of Zen Buddhism, with its highly experiential personal access to truth, adapts this integral component of American religious history and identity. Suzuki thus helped create the paradigm of modern spirituality and paved the way for the later export of other forms of American-grown religiosity, including New Age (Sharf, “Uses and Abuses”). The Market for Zazen Suzuki’s ‘Modern Zen’ emerged out of the ‘Buddhist Modernism’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Jaffe). For his American customers, however, only Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism offered the Zen experience; they either did not appreciate the broader context within which Suzuki’s form was developing or, more likely, were unaware of it.

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