The World as Just So Part 12: The Japanese Zen Monastery
Having discussed basic principles of what Zen is about, I'm passing on to the more practical side of it. A Zen monastery is not a monastery in the Christian sense. It's more like a theological seminary, except that it practices more than it teaches. A typical institution consists of a campus, and on the campus there are many buildings. First of all, around the edges, you will invariably find independent temples that were founded in times past by noble families, because one of the things that Buddhists did when they came to the Far East was they exploited ancestor worship.

This was very clever of them: this being the great religion of China, the Buddhist priests performed services like [?] masses for the repose of the souls, or for good incarnation—reincarnations—for one's ancestors, and they made quite a thing out of that. And so they have memorial services for the departed, and that's one of the principal functions of temples in Japan. People don't go to temple in the same way as Westerners go to church. They make pilgrimages to temples and—say, at a great temple like Eihei-ji—you will find, on a Sunday morning—or practically any morning—a swarm of about 500 people attending the 4 a.m. service of chanting. Chanting the Buddhist scriptures. But they are, kind of, in and out of their temples. They have special services, they have memorial services, weddings, funerals, or everything like that, but they don't have a parish kind of church community as we find it in the West.

Although, when Buddhism—through the Japanese immigrants—exports itself to the United States, they immediately copy the Protestant church institution and sing, Buddha loves me, this I know, for the sūtra tells me so. It's terrible. And all the young men—nisei, who have never been in Japan—the one thing they can't stand is sūtra chanting, because they don't know what it means, and the priests don't know what it means a lot of the time. And so—but it's beautiful to listen to, and they haven't got an educated Western ear yet to appreciate that kind of oriental music.

Well, now, aside from these many temples, each of which is in charge of a priest with his family—and some of them are having a hard time making a go of it these days, so they become restaurants for very elegant food, or museums, and all sorts of things.

Now, the central—the guts of the Zen temple is what's called the sōdō. Sō, in Japanse, is the saṅgha, the order of followers of the Buddha; dō simply means ‘hall.’ So the ‘saṅgha hall,’ or sōdō, is the center. And this consists of a number of rooms, but the main one—the actual sōdō itself—is a large, long, spacious room, with platforms on either side and a wide passage down the center. The platforms are six feet wide and each contains a number of tatami mats, which are measured six by three, and every monk is assigned to a mat. And on a shelf behind the mat, against the wall, he has all his posessions, which are very simple. And so the mat is his sleeping place and his meditation place. There is an image of the bodhisattva Manjushri in the hall, more or less in the center of the passage between the platforms. Manjushri is a bodhisattva—called a monju in Japan—who holds in his hand a sword, and this sword is the sword of wisdom, or prajñā, which cuts asunder all illusions. That is the dwelling place and the meditation place of the monks, and then they have, of course, kitchens, and a library, and they have special temples that the monks use for various services.

Then, aside from that, there are the quarters of the kansho, who is the abbot, or administrative head, of the temple, and then the quarters of the rōshi, who is the spiritual teacher. There isn't, in the Zen—not in the Rinzai Zen School, at any rate—exactly a hierarchy. Every temple is independent. There's no Pope, no Archbishop, but there is a fraternal relationship between all the temples of the Rinzai sect. The Sōtō sect have a little bit of a hierarchy, but still, on the whole, the kansho—or administrative head of the temple—is the big boss. The rōshi is the respected boss, the man everybody's terrified of—at least on the outside, at any rate.

Now, if you want to get into one of these institutions and study, they make it difficult. It's so different from the welcome attitude you get when you go into a Christian church. Here, they repel you. Westerners, of course, are treated with a certain amount of courtesy that is not ordinarily accorded to Japanese—but even then it's made difficult, because they realize that a Westerner who's taken the trouble to learn Japanese, and to get himself over the oceans, and to live under unfamiliar conditions is certainly pretty serious about it. And there are a number of Western Zen monks. So funny—there's one at Taihei-ji, who comes from San Francisco, and he's tremendously tall, and to see him with all the others is quite amusing.

Anyway, the formal approach is that you arrive in your traveling gear at the gate, and the Zen monk's traveling gear is most picturesque: he wears a great mushroom on his head; enormous straw hat, about so wide, and then he has a black robe—shorter than a kimono—and he has long white tabi socks underneath, and geta, which are the wooden sandals with bridges on them to keep you high up a bit. Or he may wear just plain waraji, which are straw sandals. Then he carries, on the front, his little box in which are his eating bowls, his razor, his toothbrush, and such necessities of life.

When he arrives he's told that the monastery is very poor and they can't afford to take on any more students, and that the teacher is getting old and it might tax his strength, and things like that. So he has to sit on the steps, and he puts his traveling box in front of him, he takes off his big hat, and he lays his head on the box—his forehead—and waits there all day. But he is invited in for meals to a special little guest house, because no traveling monk can be refused hospitality. And he is admitted at night into this special place, but he's expected not to sleep, but to spend all night in meditation. In olden times this went on for at least a week or ten days to test this fellow out. Then, finally, the assistant to the rōshi comes and tells him that the rōshi maybe will have a talk with him