Metcalf, Franz

H-Buddhism Metcalf, Franz Page published by A. Charles Muller on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 HOW I ENDED UP HERE AND, UM, WHERE AM I, ANYWAY? Franz Metcalf In casting about for content or structure or any way at all to begin this contribution, I looked to my website. That’s where we have our true existence now, right? I did find a brief biography and I reckoned that was a good foundation for this document of my career. Here’s the web version: Franz’s background and varied professional achievements combine the spiritual and the scholarly, religious feeling and critical thinking. He began his graduate studies almost 30 years ago (yes, he’s getting a bit long in the tooth), at the Graduate Theological Union, earning his Master’s degree through comparing Buddhist and Catholic spiritual retreats. He earned a doctoral fellowship to the University of Chicago and pursued his abiding personal interest in Zen by writing his dissertation on the question, “Why do Americans practice Zen Buddhism?” He was awarded distinction on both his doctoral exams and his dissertation, receiving his PhD in 1997. In the ivory tower, Franz is Past President of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region, and has participated in numerous scholarly meetings in addition to organizing one (which is way harder). He has published various articles and chapters on contemporary Buddhism and Buddhism and the family, and is founding book review editor of the Journal of Global Buddhism. Franz has taught religious studies at California State University, Los Angeles, for longer than he cares to reflect on. Down from the tower, Franz is a founding member and current director of the Forge Institute for Spirituality and Social Change. He is also author of five books, including What Would Buddha Do?, a best seller published in over a dozen languages. His latest is Being Buddha at Work. He continues to inquire into Buddhism and psychology, both academically and personally. His most beloved project (though he’s losing control over it) is his daughter, Pearl Miroku, who’s named after either an old car or the coming Buddha. Oh, and he’s working on a historical-spiritual-detective novel, set in and around the sangha during the life of the Buddha. Prayers might be in order. In providing some detail to flesh all that out, we are going to have to start with that Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism rather self-congratulatory first sentence.Let’s separate background from achievements, as background is something dear to my heart as a person intimately concerned with developmental psychology. My father was a child psychiatrist and clinical professor of psychiatry, my mother a pioneer in the field of educational therapy. It was perhaps inevitable that my approach to Buddhist studies would focus more on lived experience than on written texts. From my first year in graduate school, I was focused on spiritual experience, including my own (modest as it was and continues to be). My religious background is practically nil. My parents were both Sunday school teachers in their teens but had long given up religious affiliation by the time I was born. My sister and I were baptized Presbyterian to please our great-grandmother, but, as far as I know, we did not attend church even one more time during our childhoods. My father was an unabashed atheist and, though my mother may have continued to harbor transcendental suspicions, she had no involvement with any organized religion or spiritual practice until I taught her some simple meditation practices. My father being a child psychiatrist, most of our family friends were Jewish, but almost none were observant. Further, Christianity in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s was largely effaced by the counter-culture which certainly had a greater influence on me. Buddhism, on the other hand, was cool, was embraced by the counter-culture, and was present in both traditional and modernist forms in my hometown. Chinatown was my favorite place to go wandering as a child, partly because it offered the spectacle of traditional forms of Buddhism. And I remember how much I loved the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park and the way its windows looked out into the Japanese Tea Garden. That garden’s esthetic has never lost its hold on me. Meanwhile, Shunyru Suzuki Roshi was a participant in at least one Be-In nearby in the park. So Buddhism in Mahayana forms was a part of my childhood: not a practiced path, but also not foreign to my experience of Americanness. In high school, my best friend and my first serious girlfriend were Chinese American. They were hardly more Buddhist than I was, but the simple presence of Chinese and Japanese contributions to my San Franciscan life made Buddhism part of my normal life. I wrote in the introduction to my dissertation, “I find it impossible to say when I first became interested in Zen Buddhism. I have no recollection of my first learning of it, or when I first decided I liked it; I only recall that by college I was already remembering liking Zen.” While attending Berkeley, I began to explore Zen ideas through the then-popular gateway drugs of Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen, and the like. I was also strongly attracted to and influenced by Chang Chung-yuan’s Creativity and Taoism. It’s interesting that I did Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism not seriously contemplate joining Berkeley Zen Center (which was just blocks from my various apartments). Indeed, I hardly knew it was there. This speaks to the idealized and thoroughly imaginary nature of the Zen so alluring to me (and so many others) at the time. But the allure did not fade over time. As I wrote in my dissertation, After years of interest in this Zen tradition, I began to consider (but never actually succeeded in) taking up Zen practice (although I did end up meditating regularly in a martial arts class). In 1984 I went to Asia for eight months, spending three of them in Japan (I spoke some Japanese at that time). I went to see the holy places, to meditate, to find my spiritual center, to eat a lot of sushi. It was, consciously, a sort of pilgrimage. I now believe it was unconsciously more a test or a kind of shock therapy for a wayward youth. I did consider myself a “Buddhist” at the time, though I had no particular teaching to follow, no temple to attend, no priest to guide me. I observed the precepts (not to harm, steal, lie, or abuse drugs or sex), and I took them seriously: I would neither eat meat nor wear leather, I was ruthlessly honest with myself and others, etc. Of course I was bound to land from this flight. By the time I came home (lighter in weight, heavier in thought), I had decided I was an American, after all, and wanted to investigate more “American” sources of spirituality. During my time in Asia, particularly India, it became increasingly clear to me no form of Asian Buddhism was right for me. (By now it seems that no form of American Buddhism is right for me, either, but that’s getting ahead of myself.) Nevertheless, I was confident that I wanted to explore religion in general and Buddhism in particular, more carefully. Returning to Berkeley, it occurred to me that the Graduate Theological Union offered me a nearly ideal place to do this. I figured I could push my way through a two year Master of Arts in religion, even if I didn’t find it enthralling. Of course I did find it enthralling. I had no background in religious studies, having focused on acting as an undergraduate and having chosen a “field major in the humanities” as it was the nearest thing at Cal to no major at all. But, as it turns out, a critical mind and a good GPA are the only real requirements for admission to an MA program in religion. The GTU required all students to affiliate with one of its eight schools; I chose the Jesuit School of Theology because of their excellent course offerings, not because I had any particularly Catholic leanings. The Institute of Buddhist Studies was not an option as a host school for the MA, but I did take multiple courses there, getting the rudiments of an education in Mahayana (from Ken Tanaka, Alfred Bloom, and guest teachers including Abe Masao) and in Theravada (from Bhante Seelawimala). I Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism wrote an extensive paper on Zen practice, based on a series of interviews and participant-observations at Berkeley Zen Center, and became confident I wanted to write my thesis on conversion and Zen practice. Someone at IBS recommended I contact Carl Bielefeldt at Stanford, as he was the nearest Zen scholar to the GTU at that time.

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