home go back to Zen Essays: Critical Zen thezensite The Zen Master in America: Dressing the Donkey with Bells and Scarves by Stuart Lachs (send comments about this essay to
[email protected].) Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Washington D.C., Nov. 18, 2006 and the The International Association of Buddhist Studies Congress, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, June 24, 2008. “It is almost always instructive to look at the actual evidence for what are taken to be ‘established facts’….” [1] Modern day Zen masters/roshi,[2] while enjoying the decided advantage of being part of a tradition that imputes to them quasi-divine qualities, suffer the disadvantage of living in an age of widespread information. Thus, while the image of the Zen masters of the past bask in the unquestioned glow of hagiography, modern day Zen masters risk widespread exposure of their private and public behavior, particularly when that behavior is less than exemplary.[3] The accessibility to the lives of modern masters allows us to examine them more accurately than their counterparts, the ancient masters of China, Japan and Korea.[4] Whereas in America, they have knowable lives, capable of being documented, in the ancient Far East, we know almost nothing about them, or if, in fact, they even existed. These masters in America are flesh and blood humans about whom we may discern some very specific facts: how they behave, how they use their power, how they understand their position, etc. In America, the actual person who fills the position of Zen master/roshi is frequently, if not always, substantially different from the idealized presentation.