The Zen Monastic Experience Quotes

“In all monasteries, there can be found examples of monks who have ordained for the two reasons that the average Korean presumes most common: failure in love or laziness. Any organization as large as the Buddhist church will be certain to attract its share of seeming undesirables. But one point that monks often made to me is that regardless of the initial motivation that prompts a man to assume a religious vocation, continued involvement in the monastic life may remold that motivation into an entirely exemplary one. Indeed, there is no way of predicting from a monk's background his ultimate success in the religious life. I knew several monks from devoted Buddhist families who ordained out of strong personal faith but were unable to adjust to the difficult lifestyle of the monastery and ended up disrobing. Finally, as monks reiterate time and again, it is not why a man initially wants to become a monk that determines the quality of his vocation, but how well he leads the life once he has ordained.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“The rapport that prevails among the monks, and the close filial bonds that tie all members of the monastic family to one another, can give new postulants the reassurance and sense of place that they knew before in their home villages or in the military. Rather as in a fraternity, once they are initiated into the monastery, their place in the organization is assured, bringing some permanent meaning to their lives.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“It is three in the morning and another day has begun at the Korean Buddhist monastery of Songwang-sa.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Foreign pressures on the late Chosŏn court brought the first real break in this state of affairs. Japanese suzerainty over Korea began in 1905 with the appointment of a Japanese adviser to the Chosŏn dynasty throne and was formalized in 1910 with the official annexation of Korea. Ironically, perhaps, the Japanese colonial presence was initially of some advantage to Buddhism. Japan was itself a Buddhist country and its envoys empathized with the pitiable plight of Korean monks under the Chosŏn administration. It was Japanese lobbying at the turn of the century, for example, that forced the Kojong (r. 1864-1907) government to remove restrictions on Buddhist activities in the capital and allowed Buddhist monks to enter the cities for the first time in some three hundred years.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“The foundation of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392- 1910), with its pronounced Neo-Confucian sympathies, brought an end to Buddhism's hegemony in Korean religion and upset this ideological status quo. Buddhism's close affiliation with the vanquished Koryŏ rulers led to centuries of persecution during this Confucian dynasty. While controls over monastic vocations and conduct had already been instituted during the Koryŏ period, these pale next to the severe restrictions promulgated during the Chosŏn dynasty. The number of monks was severely restricted—and at times a complete ban on ordination instituted—and monks were prohibited from entering the metropolitan areas. Hundreds of monasteries were disestablished (the number of temples dropping to 242 during the reign of T'aejong [r. 1401-1418]), and new construction was forbidden in the cities and villages of Korea. Monastic land holdings and temple slaves were confiscated by the government in 1406, undermining the economic viability of many monasteries. The vast power that Buddhists had wielded during the Silla and Koryŏ dynasties was now exerted by Confucians. Buddhism was kept virtually quarantined in the countryside, isolated from the intellectual debates of the times. Its lay adherents were more commonly the illiterate peasants of the countryside and women, rather than the educated male elite of the cities, as had been the case in ages past. Buddhism had become insular, and ineffective in generating creative responses to this Confucian challenge.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Buddhism first came to Korea during the fourth century a.d. Virtually from its inception on the peninsula, the religion was a principal force behind social and technological change in Korea. Along with their religion, Buddhist missionaries introduced to Korea a wide cross-section of Sinitic culture and thought, including the Chinese writing system, calendrics, and architecture. Buddhist spiritual technologies were also considered to offer powers far superior to those of the indigenous religion of Shamanism. For all these reasons, Buddhism became an integral part of the religio-political nexus of Korea during the Unified Silla (668-935) and Koryŏ (937-1392) dynasties. Buddhism therefore provided the foundation for Korean national ideology for over a millennium.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“While Korean Buddhism did not begin as an exclusively Sŏn tradition, Sŏn was introduced into Korea perhaps as early as the late seventh century during Ch'an's incipiency on the Chinese mainland. By the thirteenth century, Sŏn came to dominate Buddhist doctrine and praxis, virtually eclipsing all other branches of Korean Buddhism after the fifteenth century.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Zen is not coextensive with any one school, whether that be Korean Sŏn or Japanese Rinzai Zen. There have actually been many independent strands of what has come to be called Zen, the sorting out of which has occupied scholars of Buddhism for the last few decades. These sectarian divisions are further complicated by the fact that there are Zen traditions in all four East Asian countries—China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam—each of which has its own independent history, doctrine, and mode of practice. While each of these traditions has developed independently, all have been heavily influenced by the Chinese schools of Ch'an (Kor. Sŏn; Jpn. Zen; Viet. Thiên). We are therefore left with an intricate picture of several independent national traditions of Zen, but traditions that do have considerable synergy between them. To ignore these national differences would be to oversimplify the complicated sectarian scene that is East Asian Zen; but to overemphasize them would be to ignore the multiple layers of symbiosis between Zen's various national branches. These continuities and transformations between the different strands must both be kept in mind in order to understand the character of the "Zen tradition.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“The monastery, like any large social organization, attracts a whole range of individuals, with varying interests and skills, all of whom have to be put to use in the service of the religion. The Buddhist monastic life must be wide enough in scope to be able to accommodate these various types and make them productive members of a religious community.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Monks are, in short, perfectly ordinary people. If they are extraordinary at all, it is only because of the way of life they have chosen to pursue.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Monasticism provides a valid means of avoiding the sensual attachments that can be a very real distraction to meditation. Monks are acutely aware that family ties are an intensely emotional attachment—and therefore distraction—and intentionally limit, if not cut off completely, their contacts with their families.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Korean Zen—known as Son—is also a tradition worthy of far more attention than it has gleaned to date in Western scholarship. Indeed, given the pervasive emphasis on Japanese forms of Zen found in Western literature on the tradition (as indicated by our common English usage of the Japanese pronunciation "Zen" to represent all the national branches of the school), we may forget that there are other, equally compelling and authentic approaches to Zen thought and practice found elsewhere in Asia.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Modern Zen training offers a matrix within which to evaluate the way one tradition of Zen understands—and puts into practice—the doctrines and teachings of its religion. While Zen training in Korea will differ in certain respects from that followed by the patriarchs and ancient masters of classical Ch'an in China or by Zen monks in Japan, it is an authentic model of how the monks of one national tradition of Zen have tackled "the practical matter of how to live with [their] belief.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Much of this picture of Zen derives from portrayals found in such normative texts of the tradition as the lamp anthologies (Ch. teng-lu), huge collections of the hagiographies and basic instructions of hundreds of masters in the various lineages of Zen. But such texts were never intended to serve as guides to religious practice or as records of daily practice; they were instead mythology and hagiography, which offered the student an idealized paradigm of the Zen spiritual experience. Many scholars of Zen have mistakenly taken these lamp anthologies at face value as historical documents and presumed that they provide an accurate account of how Zen monks of the premodern era pursued their religious vocations. They do not.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Whatever one's reaction, it is hard to remain neutral toward a religious tradition that purportedly depicts its most revered of teachers as torching their sacred religious icons, bullying their students into enlightenment, rejecting the value of all the scriptures of Buddhism, even denying the worth of Zen itself.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience