interview

WIE: You've been watching the American Buddhist landscape for twenty-five years both as a practitioner and in your role as the editor of Tricycle magazine.

Helen Tworkov: Yes, it's my favorite soap opera.

WIE: Can you say a little bit about how you've seen that landscape change?

HT: There have been big changes. These days people seem to know about Buddhism, and they seem to be very interested in it. At this moment, it doesn't seem to be adversarial to the society in any way—for better and for worse. In the sixties there was a tremendous rejection of the society and a quest for personal and social transformation, and there is no way to separate the Buddhist boom in America that was initiated at that time from the Vietnam War and from drugs. They are really inseparable. There was real despair about what was going on in Asia—the religions that we had grown up with in our Judeo-Christian culture had simply failed to provide any spiritual or moral fiber—so there was extreme disappointment in our country. Many of us who started practicing then were motivated by a very genuine combination of interest in both personal and social transformation. It was all about change—we wanted change. We wanted to change ourselves, we wanted to change our society and we wanted to change the world. And I think that this desire came from a very genuine place.

WIE: Has that changed over the years?

HT: Yes. Right now we see a whole new generation of people coming to Buddhism, but if there is a collective motive among them in the way there was for us, I'm not sure what it is. We were a big wave. We had our music, we had our books, we had our heroes and we had our choices at that moment. Now I see much more subtle currents motivating the people in their twenties who are coming into Buddhism, and I don't know if they even know what they are. I don't know if they've come together in a way that's allowed them even to formulate or articulate a collective motive. There's such a tremendous sense of alienation in our culture. I think they would like to feel themselves to be a part of something. There's so little cohesion and so much disintegration that in a way it's made these young people more available for the dharma [Buddhist teaching], more ripe for the possibility of discovering a new sense of identity that is not steeped in a cultural identity.

WIE: Historically, Buddhism has had to adapt each time it has entered a new culture, as, for example, when Buddhism went from India to Tibet, China and Japan. In the Afterword to the second edition of your book Zen in America—

HT: That Afterword got me into a lot of trouble! [Laughs.]

WIE: Well, you made some fascinating observations. In it you seem to suggest that Buddhism's adaptation to American culture is qualitatively different from any adaptation it has previously had to make. Because in attempting to take root in America, Buddhism has encountered and has had to adapt itself to a society that, as you say, "fails to recognize or validate the enlightenment experience." Could you explain what you mean by that and what you've observed?

HT: Do you want to talk about it specifically in terms of enlightenment?

WIE: Yes.

HT: Well, when we started off practicing, we didn't know what enlightenment was, and we still don't—we have no idea. But the way we think about it has shifted. If you go back to before the sixties, you find that Zen practice was the first, most extensive kind of Buddhism that was picked up by the new Buddhists in this country. D.T. Suzuki had a tremendous amount to do with developing and creating a climate for Zen practice in America, and he had a great deal to say about enlightenment. He talked about satori and kensho [enlightenment experiences]. What happened in this country is that we developed all these ideas about enlightenment, about emptiness and about what Zen practice was all about. And then we got tremendously disappointed in our teachers. That happened after about twenty years of practice in the Zen centers. In that time, we also went from being in our twenties to being in our forties. We became middle-aged, many people had children, and then there was a need to figure out how we were going to live in this society of ours with our conventional needs. One of the biggest differences we've seen in America is that there's been no great interest in monasticism.

WIE: You're describing what has happened in the Zen community in America, but would you say the same kinds of things have occurred in the other Buddhist schools in America as well?

HT: Yes. Except that the Zen tradition has always been more affiliated with monasticism.

WIE: You've made some interesting observations about American culture and how what you call "secular materialism" in America is influencing the way the Buddhist community is interpreting ideas like enlightenment and what it means to live an enlightened life. Today, for example, in the most popular schools of contemporary Western Buddhism, teachers and practitioners speak about bringing enlightenment into everyday life. The term "everyday Zen" perhaps best epitomizes this school of thought, even though this concept is not limited to Zen. Some popular Vipassana schools similarly refer to "mindful awareness in everyday life"—mindful awareness while you're getting into a relationship, child-rearing and making money. My question is: Is America reshaping Buddhism according to its own secular and materialistic agenda? Are practitioners in the American Buddhist community trying to add enlightenment to their lives just as they are without changing anything?

HT: Yes, I think they are. Of course, that's the danger that any dharma tradition is going to have here. We want the dharma to accommodate itself to us; we don't want to accommodate ourselves to the dharma. That's the American way.

There were lifestyles that evolved in Buddhist countries that required you to accommodate yourself to it, whatever that "it" was. There was value in just having to say, "I have to take off this set of clothes and wear that set of clothes. I have to get up at 4:45 a.m. whether I want to or I don't want to." But in this country, our daily life is made up of endless decisions that are all totally inconsequential. Do you want to buy a Chevrolet or a Ford? All day long we're being asked to say, "What do I want?" Sure, you can unhook your own ego and your own personal little selfish self in the midst of this everyday life. But you have to be a spiritual genius because you're being assaulted all day long with a decision-making process that reinforces and reifies the small self. So yes, you can do it, but—

WIE: The culture doesn't support it.

HT: No, not in the least, no.

WIE: In your Afterword you also wrote, "The most compelling question today is whether the Americanization of Zen now underway is a necessary process of cultural adaptation, or if what we have confidently called 'Americanization' has become a justification for the co-optation of Zen by secular materialists."

HT: Probably one of the traditions that lends itself least to the secularization of Buddhism is Zen. You can have a completely secular Tibetan Buddhism and the same thing may be true of southeast Asian Buddhism, whereas I personally think that the best of Zen perhaps needs the monastery. I'm not sure that you can really get it in a secular society, because Zen plays with reality in a way that your PTA meeting wouldn't allow. There are many traditions in which the lines between lay and monastic, mystical and mundane, ordinary and extraordinary, or esoteric and exoteric can be very gentle paths that lead from one to the other. Zen is the one tradition where it feels to me that really too much gets lost in the process of secularization. The quirkiness of Zen—the total, complete transcendence of conventional form—can only take place in a highly secure, collective, shared sphere that allows for this. You can't just walk around the world appearing crazy. It doesn't have any value for people.

WIE: Monasticism and renunciation have traditionally occupied a central role in Buddhism. Gautama the Buddha found it essential to renounce everything, leaving his kingdom in his quest for enlightenment. Apparently, he also passionately encouraged many others to do the same. Today, this kind of renunciation is rarely spoken about within American Buddhist circles and, as you have observed, monasticism has never really taken root among Western Buddhist groups. Yet there are people like Professor Robert Thurman who feel that Buddhism can never take root in America without a living monastic tradition. What do you think about this?

HT: I agree with that.

WIE: Is it because monasticism itself is important, or because of the quality of renunciation that monasticism requires?

HT: I think that you have to have a concrete physical space that becomes a pressure cooker for practice. It's going to be very hard to go deep with the dharma without having that distilled place where we say, "This is all we're supposed to do." Today you have all these Buddhists running around and they're supposed to get enlightened, they're supposed to be very nice to everybody, they're supposed to be carrying out the precepts—and that's all possible—but meanwhile they're also raising children and furthering their careers and building houses and doing this and doing that. The role of the monk is to just do the dharma.

WIE: Is this kind of renunciation being spoken about among Western Buddhists? Or are most individuals putting their attention on "how can I do everything that I want to do and be on the path to enlightenment?" Because as you said, monasteries are a pressure cooker—and they're a pressure cooker for what? To make something happen, to move from ignorance to enlightenment. It would seem that this is something that very few modern Westerners are interested in.

HT: Yes. You asked before about the society being antagonistic to any kind of spiritual development. Well, this society, for example, is unbelievably antagonistic to silence. It finds silence extremely threatening. It's not coincidental that you have so few monasteries here and that even the Christian monasteries are practically extinct. The monastery represents silence; it represents a space in the culture that says, "Stop, slow down, be quiet." Whether it's a Christian or a Buddhist monastery, it's a physical space that says, "Just quiet down." But our society doesn't like that. It's very threatening. If you make a lot of noise, then everyone's very happy.

Of course, there is the possibility of creating temporary situations that can give people a very deep experience and a real taste of what renunciation means, which can then be brought back into society. Maybe in this country we'll develop a temporary ordination, something similar to what you have in southeast Asia and in the Far East or in Tibet. Somebody I know recently referred to periods of intense practice as "binge Buddhism"—and they referred to themselves as a "binge Buddhist."

WIE: What does that mean?

HT: They said they go on retreat for three weeks and then they don't practice again until the next time they go on retreat.

WIE: What do you think about that?

HT: It's better than not doing anything at all.

WIE: But isn't there a danger that if the "binge Buddhist" model becomes the most popular model, it could dilute genuine aspiration for radical change?

HT: Of course. But look at the history of Asia. Why is America going to do something that's radically different than India, Tibet, Japan, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia or Vietnam? Very few people are interested in getting enlightened, very few people are interested in waking themselves up, very few people are interested in truly living in a nondualistic view. So when you talk about "enlightenment," you're talking about only a handful of people. Meanwhile, you've got all the rest of humanity suffering and you try to do what you can to create an environment or an awareness that helps to alleviate that.

WIE: Is there any way, though, within the context of this pluralistic view, to insure that regardless of whether or not I personally choose to give my life to that supreme possibility, or whether or not Jane Doe or John Schwartz does, that that possibility itself isn't being diluted—that enlightenment is still being viewed as the ultimate or supreme possibility—and that one would also know if one wasn't striving for that? That, to me, is the question: What is American Buddhism doing with enlightenment?

HT: I think that's a really good point. My hope would be that a monastic situation would create that witness. But again, if you look at Asia, it's not necessarily true. In fact, it's not unlike what happened in the Roman Catholic Church. The bureaucracy of the Church eventually just ate up every shred of mystical possibility, so that it was no longer being imbued with any mystical elements. The question is—how can you maintain something within the culture so that the enlightenment tradition within a secularized Buddhism actually can function to enlighten or awaken? How can you keep some dialogue going? In the Church, the dialogue got broken, at least as far as we know. You grow up in the West never knowing that anybody in the Church ever contemplated the reality of not-knowing at all—which of course they did.

WIE: Yes, they must have.

HT: If you read the writings of the early church fathers, they sound exactly like the Zen masters, but that's not what we were taught. This was something that we, as secular people, didn't have access to. So as far as I'm concerned, the best we can do is to keep the channels of communication open within a pluralistic, diverse kind of Buddhism, because of course it's a given that you're going to have a very secular Buddhism. Whether or not it's going to be any more interesting than secular anything else, I really don't know—it might not be.

But on the other hand, I think Buddhism has an enormous amount to offer to this country and is having a tremendous effect on the consciousness of America. You don't have to have a big mystical relationship to life to understand what the value of Buddhism could be or what the need is—and you don't have to be a rocket scientist or St. John of the Cross to see it. You can see Buddhist views filtering down into the death-and-dying literature and into some of the environmental movements, with a kind of pragmatism that in my mind is not a mystical approach, it's just a realistic approach.