The phrase "spiritual bypass", which I'm sure you know (it is even a cliché by now) is often used to describe this phenomenon. I recently learned that it was coined in the early 80s by the psychotherapist and Buddhist practitioner John Welwood, who had a lot of experience with this phenomenon in spiritual communities. There's a great interview with Welwood from 2011 about this. I have a pdf somewhere, but all I can find online at the moment is this excerpt: https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/on-spiritual-by....
The relationship between spirituality and therapy is endlessly fascinating to me. (Edit: it's no coincidence that the OP eventually ends up talking about IFS.)
Most valuable to me is his for lack of a better term non-violence. I've never read or heard him say negative things about other schools or teachings. He simply puts out his approach to things and lets you free to take, pick, choose, whatever. For example he gives _criteria_ for a practice, a teaching, a community.
The other extremely valuable aspect is his explicit approach to trauma, to overcoming deep rooted early onset trauma, little by little.
He fluently moves between traditions, if he is teaching a Christian audience then he'll use Christinesian lingo, if he is in a neutral settings (like training therapists) he'll "translate" concepts, like "contemplative church" or "sangha" or Ashram"; or "blind" and "see" vs "unknowing" and "awakened". Like a stream enterer would know that rituals are valuable (to some or many) but interchangeable or not useful to some. Which leads me to the third valuable thing: I'm rooted in a very liberal Catholicism and it's rituals, noises, smell and lingo feel "home" to me while the Zen noises, smells and lingo confused me, while not being _substantially_ different.
so in summary I was happy to find someone in the intersection of being trauma sensitive (healing even), being open minded and seeing Jesus-as-Zen-teacher-not-mage.
:-)
on the cac.org site they host some podcast, teaching series, really, with nice transcripts even:
https://cac.org/podcasts/instructions-for-the-practice/
https://cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/TTTM_Transcript_I...
Seems like the Zen school wouldn't be such a threat if they just sat inside all day working on their posture.
anyway, to cite "zen mind beginners mind" regarding just sitting around all the time:
> Zen is not something to get excited about. Some people start to practice Zen just out of curiosity, and they only make themselves busier. If your practice makes you worse, it is ridiculous. I think that if you try to do zazen once a week, that will make you busy enough. Do not be too interested in Zen. When young people get excited about Zen they often give up schooling and go to some mountain or forest in order to sit. That kind of interest is not true interest. Just continue in your calm, ordinary practice and your character will be built up. If your mind is always busy, there will be no time to build, and you will not be successful, particularly if you work too hard on it. Building character is like making bread—you have to mix it little by little, step by step, and moderate temperature is needed. You know yourself quite well, and you know how much temperature you need. You know exactly what you need. But if you get too excited, you will forget how much temperature is good for you, and you will lose your own way. This is very dangerous.
Do I understand it correctly that you’re saying that such people only try to practice samādhi instead of sīla, samādhi, and paññā? So that they neglect most of the noble eightfold path?
The Thai forest tradition has been very meditation-focused (as was, in my reading, the Pali canon) but they emphasize the importance of the rest of the eightfold path too. The Pacific Hermitage had good discussions uploaded to YouTube for example.[1] And the UK and Australia branches seem to have had a similar sutta-centric and practical focus.
His very first attempt to transmit the Dhamma ended up in failure (the guy before the first five) - and that made him to question, worked on and fixed the way it was delivered.
I am not sure whether I'd agree with everything you said, but simply because I only tangentially got exposed to "western" zen and buddhism, through some zen monasteries in California. But you put certain things/concepts in words that I didn't manage to express clearly by myself, so thanks for that.
In a study where no-self is an objective, it is no mystery why problems with a particular ego are not always addressed.
Insight meditation is not supposed to solve your petty life problems, heck it might even exacerbate them if you do it badly. Stick to practicing sila if you feel like you aren't ready for the more challenging practices.
While Stoicism comes from a different tradition it's actually a great introduction to a good frame of mind for sila and even for the more rational-adjacent kinds of meditation practice like Zen, and one that will be especially familiar to a Western audience. Of course it's also true that many people resort to therapy in order to address these same challenges, and there's nothing wrong with that if it's your preference.
I can recommend Jack Kornfield's modern classic, A Path With Heart.
Just as you say, he spent years practicing with the much-loved Ajahn Chah and the formidable Mahasi Sayadaw - and then came back home to find his old patterns still there. Of course, the insights and experiences he'd had helped him, but the patterns still had to be worked through.
There is a lot to be said for lay practice. Instead of running off to a monastery, do a couple retreats a year and maintain a daily practice. There is plenty of dukkha to encounter in a normal life.
This is really hard to remember if you've had some dramatic meditation experiences or you're really eager to make progress, which is one reason the Soto folks are always emphasizing patience.
CBT is both.
Not so! The problem is that disengaging is much more difficult outside of a sheltered monastic community, not that it is impossible. It becomes a balance engaging and disengaging; you spend as much time as necessary engaging so you can set up your environment to allow as much time for disengaging as possible, and find relationships which will be able to support you in this. Stopping the process of disengaging to deal with something like dealing with a difficult social interaction or rearranging your finances can be very painful and frustrating. But in the end, dealing with these interruptions is a part of the process of awakening.
Yes - that's why I'd value a _true_ master (Zen terminology) regarding maturity higher as a monk. In terms of ML monks risk overfitting their trained mental strategies to a monastic context which then turn out to be unsuited for chaotic urban environments. OTOH of course it shows maturity IMHO to turn your back on modern urban environments and withdraw into a monastery. Then there is no need to steelman yourself for the next dozen disappointing Tinder dates and how they'll affect you.
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=vimalakirti%27s+advice&lg_t...
To wit, even the whole notion of "prophet" and the "original teachings of Buddha" and how Zen and more broadly Mahayana are "not the original teachings" as compared to that in the Pali canon etc. that are brought up again and again by Western practitioners are hallmarks of Christian, and more fundamentally Abrahamic, thought process.
No one in Asia cares that this is so. Period.
Alas, Indians, and most Asians too are increasingly turning into half baked Christians today (see 'Navayana'), so the above is a bit of lie. The traditions too are all dying much like their country and culture of their birth... Way to go occidental monoculture!
To your point specifically, the Pali Canon is really not philosophically sophisticated. The Nalanda school which is now preserved in Tibet after the Islamic destruction of India has very deep philosophical roots as compared to those traditions in the periphery like Zen and do make very compelling arguments against the old schools of Buddhism.
The development of Mahayana has a parallel on the Hindu side of the tradition, but of course, since us brown-skinned heathens are infinitely uglier, the Europeans have made it their goal to demonize us vis-a-vis the white-skinned E-Asian Buddhists (lol). I'm not surprised to see books claiming that Siddhartha was a Scytian, and hence Buddhism is Greek (also, lol). I wonder what they'll next claim about Nagarjuna. At some point, you just laugh and move on (instead of debating endlessly with idiots on listservs).
Sadly, Mahayana and Advaita never had much debate within themselves, so the typical view on the Hindu side (prototyped by Madhava) of Buddhism is also quite outdated.
I hope you reach that point soon lel
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Please tell me you are making a pun and you didn't just misspell canon 4 times.
I've come to the conclusion after a lot of reading, practice, and contemplation that there is NO form of buddhism that makes any sense to engage with unless you believe in rebirth. The point of buddhism is to escape rebirth, not achieve some psychological state like happiness or well-being. If you're expecting the later out of buddhism, you're probably better off putting your energy into more "worldly" endeavors. I've been much happier since I stopped meditating and started using that time to focus on friends, hobbies, career and dating.
Traditional buddhists would probably facepalm at this and say something like "no duh, rebirth is buddhism 101". But a lot of American buddhist traditions present rebirth as an optional belief which is nonessential to buddhist practice. I even watched an American zen teacher call rebirth "bullshit" publicly in a talk once.
What's sad to me is that therapists have started recommending meditation as some universal good, despite the research on it still being pretty young. It seems they've been influenced by the American buddhist/mindfulness movement and are being rather uncritical. I'm sure small amounts of meditation can help some people with stress and anxiety, but it shouldn't be viewed as something to automatically recommend to every patient like sleep and exercise.
Many of the teachers and students I knew were not rising above their neuroses. Many of them were masking their life problems with the Buddhist aesthetic as opposed to really working with them. We would cycle through the same concerns repeatedly without any progress. I started to figure out that the process was to drop the issue and disengage with it. The problem is that does not work outside of a sheltered monastic community because you need to face your problems constantly in the real world.
I agree that many modern Buddhist schools stray away from the Buddha’s original teachings (as we know it from the Pali Cannon). Many branches won’t even really teach what Buddha said; only interpretations from later traditions. We did not talk about Buddha much in Zen practice at all. Much more time was given to Dōgen, and the Chinese masters than to Buddha. In Zen everyone is a Buddha so Siddhartha Gautama (O.G. Buddha) gets marginalized. There is also a pantheon of Buddhas which dilutes things even more. Buddhism has a pretty straight forward thesis (Four Noble Truths), but it has become esoteric after centuries of appropriation and reinterpretation.
Modern Western Buddhism pushes meditation above all of the other practices. We spent more time meditating than anything else, which was different than how the early Buddhists and even how most Buddhists in Asia practice. This leads to people thinking that all they need to do is sit and not change anything about their lives and it will magically work out. In fact in Japanese Zen Dōgen essentially states that sitting with the correct posture (zazen) is enlightened practice itself. This enlightenment is transitory, so one could imagine that the longer you sit zazen the more time you get to stay in this enlightened state. You can see how this could become an obsession. This in practice leads to a lack of engagement which would have you thinking you are actually putting in the work, but you are just eschewing reality.
Buddhism has a rich tradition of debating and challenging teachers. In fact the Pali Cannon is full of these debates. However, these days if you bring up a question or objection to some teachers they don’t really engage with you. In Zen you can cover up inconsistencies with esoteric vocabulary and wave it away. Just sit and it will be okay.
Buddha in the Pali Cannon was actually more human than we give him credit for. He made mistakes and learned from them (even after nirvana). He got old and died. He scolded his monks for breaking monastic rules. The Buddha represented in the Pali Cannon can be raw at times which goes against the ideal Buddha archetype.
+1 from a long time fan of the Buddha