Zen Skin, Zen Marrow Quotes

“For those who care deeply about Zen and its place in Japan and the world, the challenge is to help define Zen's role creatively lest the tradition get buried under the avalanche of criticism.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“Reformers can learn from monks, who spend countless hours cooking or cleaning the grounds or raking the garden, and can view each and every task, no matter how menial or seemingly trivial, not simply as a means to an end, which is frustrating if the final goal seems remote or unattainable. Rather, the tasks are seen as ends in themselves to be celebrated as eminently worthwhile, which paradoxically enhances their possible benefit for the future.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“Zen is eminently practical in seeing nature as a model for human behavior to learn and practice the way of the dharma. For example, the pine trees weathering the harsh winter storms teach a lesson in the value of dedication and determination in pursing the path to enlightenment; bamboo branches that sway but are not broken by the breeze teach flexibility and the need to overcome stubborn one-sided or partial views; and evaporating dew, which accepts its brevity and inevitable demise, shows the demise, significance of adjusting and abandoning resistance to the impermanence of reality. These natural images, which are used extensively in the Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions, frequently enter into various styles of Zen verse and prose, not just as rhetorical flourishes but as indicators of inner spiritual transformation.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“While not inherently "green" in the current sense of ecology, Zen evidences quite a number of core qualities and values that can be considered ecofriendly and help it serve as a model for new theories that address problems of conservation and pollution control. Traditional Japanese society is characterized by an approach based on healthy, efficient, and convenient living derived from a mental outlook that makes the most of minimal natural resources. Zen particularly endorses the values of simplicity, in that monks enter the Samgha Hall only with robes, bowls, and a few other meager possessions; thrift, by making a commitment to waste nothing; and communal manual labor, such that through a rotation of chores everyone contributes to the upkeep of the temple. The image of dedicated monks sweeping the wood floors of the hallways by rushing along on their hands in a semi-prostrate position is inspiring. Furthermore, the monastic system's use of human and material resources, including natural space, is limited and spare in terms of temple layout, the handling of administrative duties and chores, and the use of stock items. The sparse, spartan, vegetarian Zen cook, who prepares just enough rice gruel for his fellow monks but not a grain too much or too little, demonstrates an inherent—if not necessarily deliberate—conservationist approach. The minimalist aesthetic of rock gardens highlights the less-is-more Zen outlook that influenced the "Buddhist economics" evoked by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“While Eisai's Rinzai sect became known as
"shogun Zen" because it gained support from the militaristic Hojo government that established power in the thirteenth century, Dōgen's Sōtō Zen sect, sometimes referred to as "farmer's Zen," used a broad range of evangelical and public works projects to spread into the countryside, especially in the northern provinces. These included mass precept ceremonies and summer retreats for laypersons, as well as large-scale bridge building and irrigation installations. Through these methods, Sōtō Zen was especially successful in trying "to reach the social classes that had been unable to participate in the formal Buddhist funerals and memorial services of the older sects—Shingon, Tendai, and the Gozan Zen schools." Therefore, in many ways, Zen in medieval Japan exercised a commitment to social reform through the overcoming of discrimination and injustice and by increasing the base of those who benefited from the spread of the dharma.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“TZN acknowledges that during its peak institutional period, Zen had close affiliations and received significant support from the elite classes in both China (among scholar/officials and literati during the Sung dynasty) and Japan (among samurai and those affiliated with the newly dominant Hōjō and Ashikaga warrior clans during the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, respectively). Even Dogen, known for his integrity and commitment to reclusion, could not have established Eiheiji temple without the benefaction of his chief patron, the one-eyed samurai retainer Hatano Yoshishige. The positive side of maintaining these connections is that Zen learned a mastery of organizational structure and techniques for community relations and outreach. Furthermore, the historical development of Zen in medieval Japanese society was somewhat different than in China, as Zen monks also formed strong affinities with outcasts and the downtrodden.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“When acknowledged, problems regarding Zen rights are seen by TZN as skin, flesh, and bones relative to a record of outstanding accomplishment in addressing the greater needs of humankind and the potential that Zen has at its core, or marrow, to achieve much more in the social realm than other less philosophically consistent spiritual outlooks or less disciplined forms of religious training. To put it crudely, according to TZN, Zen and only Zen, which functions seamlessly in both the ideal and real realms, is capable of embarking on a worldwide mission to save modern civilization from its own undoing. But according to HCC, the Zen approach, in which there festers an irresolvable gap between realms, has already shown its failure to address some basic matters of inequity within the narrow context of Japanese society and should not be let off the hook.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“Because Zen overturns good versus evil on the ideal level, it loses sight of the significance of problems involving good versus evil in the real realm, which are not adequately addressed due to a shirking of responsibility and lack of remorse for transgressions.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“The relation of mysticism to morality is often controversial because of an implicit gap between the ideal realm of spiritual attainment (enlightenment) and the real or practical realm of ethical decision making. This gap frequently leads to charges of escapism, amorality, or antinomianism—all forms of a basic moral blindness—which haunt many spiritual traditions, including Zen. The blindness ranges from a passivity in overlooking or ignoring social problems and moral dilemmas to a more aggressive side, which actively participates in or causes examples of intolerance and militarist excess, including atrocities committed during the World War II era in Nanking or with regard to the plight of the "comfort women" (Asians forced into prostitution by the Japanese military).”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“Zen's failure to resist and renounce intolerance and militarism is ironically derivative of traditional principles when misunderstood or when applied, sometimes purposefully, in an inappropriate way.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“Can monks, even if they are free of desire, cultivate rituals designed to cater to laypersons' attachments and longings and still remain immune to corruption? Or, should questions raised about compromise in the name of a standard of incorruptible purity be set aside as the unrealistic expectations of an idealism that is not appropriate to observing Buddhism on the ground?”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“The situation in which a native spirit becomes more highly venerated than Buddhist gods by a Sōtō temple supposedly dedicated to the practice of zazen, and yet still is recognized as having a malevolent potential requiring exorcism, becomes a focal point for rethinking the function of syncretism in Zen.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“One of the legacies of the popularization campaign is that some of the most prominent Sōtō temples are associated with shamanistic and esoteric practices. They are best known to their congregations of lay followers for espousing a syncretic approach to attaining worldly benefits, such as prosperity, fertility, or safety during travels, rather than for traditional Zen practices of meditation and monastic discipline.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“It is well known that Sōtō Zen for laypersons since at least the fourteenth century has been quite different than Sōtō training designed for monks or nuns in terms of incorporating popular practices such as divination, pilgrimage, posthumous ordination, and the veneration of indigenous deities in pursuit of healing and the gaining of worldly benefits. Thus, a great number of the approximately 15,000 Sōtō institutions (this number, confirmed in recent surveys, includes a small number of monastic training centers and a very large number of local temples) are designated prayer temples.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“For TZN, nonsense in Zen is understood in the most positive of terms on a metaphysical level rising above and standing beyond the contrast and conflict between sense and senselessness. Nonsense is a tool skillfully used to help put an end to seeking a path of reason and to point to an enlightened state unbound by the polarity of logic or illogic. For the dissolution thesis, on the other hand, the endless wordplay in Zen literature represents an infantile stammering and the willful abandonment of meaning, and is a kind of verbal cunning and trickery that harbors risky ethical (i.e., antinomian) consequences. Here we find clearly the roots of the critique of Zen's failure to negotiate human rights issues, which seems to rest on a tendency toward deceptive, duplicitous rhetoric that avoids being pinned down or committed to any particular view or decision.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“Once the tremendous literary productivity of Zen masters is acknowledged, the question remains whether their profusion of words and countless instances of contradictory and absurd utterances and gestures make any sense.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“It is now clear that the kōan about Mahakasyapa's receiving the flower after Sakyamuni's wordless sermon, as well as slogans like "special transmission outside the teaching" and "no reliance on words and letters"—originally separate items that came to be linked in a famous Zen motto attributed to Bodhidharma—were created in the Sung dynasty. First making their appearance in eleventh-century transmissions of the lamp texts, including the Chingte chuan-teng lu (1004) and the T'ien-sheng kuang-teng lu (1036), these rhetorical devices were designed to support the autonomous identity of Zen in an era of competition with neo-Confucianism and are not to be regarded as accurate expressions of the period they are said to represent. A close examination of sources reveals that Tang masters with a reputation for irreverence and blasphemy were often quite conservative in their approach to doctrine by citing (rather than rejecting) Mahayana sutras in support of teachings that were not so distinct from, and were actually very much in accord with, contemporary Buddhist schools.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“Zen is perhaps best known not so much for the negation of speech, which would represent an extreme view, but for inventing a creative new style of expression that uses language in unusual and ingenious fashions to surpass a reliance on everyday words and letters.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“What happens when it comes to light that in Zen there has always been a large and fundamental role for verbal communication and that, indeed, Zen masters have produced a tremendous volume of writings that originally were based on oral teachings (while the claim for the priority of orality has itself been questioned)? Does this point to a basic contradiction or hypocrisy in Zen, or would the prevalence of literary production mean that our understanding of what constitutes Zen transmission in relation to oral and written discourse must be reconfigured?”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“On matters of transgression in the social sphere,
Zen's deficiencies cannot be blamed on an indifferent or unresponsive attitude, for in some cases it has been actively pursuing a reprehensible agenda. Perhaps part of the problem is Zen's apparent lack of a sense of good versus evil on a metaphysical level in stressing that all phenomena are interconnected and interpenetrating.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?