WIE: I agree with you about the kind of influence Buddhism can have on a relative level, but you made some pretty provocative statements in your Afterword to Zen in America. You made very clear the distinction between effecting change on a relative level—raising the standard of ethics or morality, for example—and interpreting one's experience from an enlightened point of view or having one's actions be an expression of a truly enlightened perspective. You said that replacing the goal of enlightenment with a goal of ethical behavior uninformed by an awakened mind "both feeds on and fuels the human resistance to the unknown and the unknowable, which lies at the heart of all religious pursuit."

HT: That's right. But it all has to go on at the same time, because the effect of any one person's enlightenment is only going to be as far-reaching as the rest of the society is prepared to go.

WIE: Can you explain what you mean?

HT: Well, you can have a great saint in your midst, but how fertile is the ground to receive what they have to offer? Very few people want to get enlightened. Maybe that's something that happens in the evolutionary process of humanity—I have no idea. I don't know whether people these days want to be more or less enlightened than they did two thousand years ago. But it's absolutely true that we want to know about things. And we don't want to know about not knowing. Very few people want to know about that.

WIE: Do you think that Buddhist practitioners nowadays know that they don't want that?

HT: No, I don't—I don't.

WIE: Do you think they're deluded? Do they think they want enlightenment?

HT: Of course they're deluded! Of course. Who among us is not deluded?

WIE: I mean in terms of one's basic understanding of one's own relationship to the path. One could know, for instance, that one wants to be a good samaritan, wants to be generous, wants to be compassionate—but doesn't want to be enlightened.

HT: Yes, and I think that one of the things that's happening now is that people have grown up and found out that maybe they don't want what they thought they wanted. You're on the path for twenty years and you've taken all these vows of renunciation and then you find out that you don't want to renounce anything. I described a conversation in the Afterword I'd had with a Buddhist teacher, who said, "I don't give a shit about enlightenment." Now that's a very silly attitude for any Buddhist to take, be it a Zen Buddhist or anybody else.

But what we're seeing is that now we have a group of people who are disappointed with their practice. You could sit for twenty years and not get enlightened. So you say, "Hey, what happened? To hell with this tradition. I didn't get enlightened, so screw it." You get disappointed and then you start changing your view about it. This change in view is going to secularize the teachings. The secularization is coming from people who have had a big falling out with their teacher. They discover that they don't like their teacher or that their teacher is not who they thought he or she was. Then their views change through anger, through bitterness and through disappointment—it doesn't really matter why. Still, the secularization of these teachings is inevitable. There are very few people who want to go the distance with living a truly mature, authentic, nondualistic or autonomous life.

WIE: Right, that's true.

HT: But that doesn't mean you can dismiss the rest of it, because the rest of it has tremendous—

WIE: Relative value.

HT: Yes.

WIE: But what will help to keep the enlightenment tradition alive?

HT: I think monasteries represent that, and it's important to have that representation. It doesn't mean they are enlightenment factories, but they are beacons of that possibility. It's very hard to create beacons of that possibility without it. I don't know that you can't do it; it's just difficult.

In the Jewish tradition you don't have a history of monasticism, and you don't have a strong living enlightenment tradition outside of the Hassidim [an orthodox branch of Judaism]. But if you look at Hassidic culture, it's about as monastic as you can get. It has sex and babies but it basically takes all the men and women and children and brings them together into a pressure cooker situation in which the Rebbe is like a Zen master. He has all these ecstatic experiences and incredible enlightenment visions, and whatever he says goes.

WIE: He was involved in every aspect of community life.

HT: Absolutely. The Rebbe is like a monastic in the sense that he spends his entire day engaged in the tradition and reading the traditional texts. So from an anthropological point of view, a great deal of what would define the "enlightenment factory" elements of a monastery would apply to the structure of the Hassidim.

WIE: So do you think it's important for the teachers of the dharma in the West to have some kind of realization?

HT: Yes, of course. I would love to see all the teachers become fully realized, but the sad truth is that they're not. We see more and more teachers who are teaching who don't have a clue about it. That's inevitable. That's just the way it's going to work out.

WIE: But how do you feel about it, besides recognizing that it's inevitable?

HT: Well, there are a lot of teachers who are teaching Zen who are Zen senseis [teachers] or Zen roshis [masters] or whatever, and in a perfect world, in the Zen tradition they would have at least some experience of—

WIE: The nondual?

HT: Well, I'm sure they do have some experience of that. But they would be accomplished in their understanding. And that's clearly not the case right now. When you look at the teachers who taught the previous generation and you look at the American heirs of those teachers, there's a big difference. That's true across the board, whether you're talking about Tibetan Buddhism or Zen or Theravada. And the people who are the most aware of it are the American teachers—the teachers who studied with real teachers. They know the difference; they're not stupid.

It's hard to express to people who have come to the Buddhist community recently—the second and third generation of practitioners—how unbelievably lucky we were in the sixties and the seventies to have the teachers who came here. These were not ordinary Buddhist teachers; we got the cream of the crop as far as I could tell. Even before His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to the West, we had Dudjom Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche, the Karmapa and Trungpa Rinpoche. There was an extraordinary level of dharma coming in.

WIE: You're describing people who emanated a certain kind of realization.

HT: Yes, and the same thing in Zen—you look at Soen Roshi, Yasutani Roshi, even Nyogen Senzaki—you're not talking about your average Zen abbots. These guys who came were really very extraordinary! So of course at some point, Buddhism is either going to stay in this kind of little, elitist situation or it's going to spread. The secularization of the teachings is inevitable. There's no point in bemoaning it; it has to happen. Buddhism, like any tradition that's been around 2,500 years, is enormously flexible, otherwise it would have never gotten past India.

WIE: You said earlier that you felt that many of the teachers teaching today don't have the same kind of transmission of awakened mind that their teachers did—

HT: Yes, but I have to deal with my own preconceptions. I was trained and influenced by teachers who were extremely strict on issues of dharma transmission. Some of these same teachers are now giving dharma transmission to every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along. They changed. So maybe I have to look at where I'm stuck.

WIE: Perhaps, but earlier you referred to striving for that which you call "the unknowable" and "the unthinkable." You seemed to be suggesting that if a teacher is teaching scholastic dharma, without communicating the essence of the spiritual path and goal, then something essential is being lost.

HT: We don't know yet. Maybe there is. At least with all of these teachers in the Zen tradition, their students are sitting regularly. Maybe the best anybody can do is to show people the meditation cushion.

WIE: Is that what you think?

HT: Of course I would rather that everybody was studying with wildly enlightened masters. Show me one. Of course! Wouldn't it be great if the world was populated with fully awakened, enlightened people? Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? It doesn't seem to be that way.

WIE: You're saying, "Wouldn't it be great if they were enlightened?" Someone else might say, "Well, I don't mind. I don't mind if someone just shows me the cushion." So you obviously feel that there's a big difference between having an enlightened teacher and having an unenlightened teacher.

HT: No, actually, I'm not sure that there is. How many people can use an enlightened teacher? You're trying to box me into a place of yes or no, but we just don't know. For example, I think Tricycle is enormously valuable. But it's not an enlightened magazine. All it's doing is introducing people to the dharma. People have to find their own way and they have to be inspired by their own perceptions.

As a Buddhist and as a practitioner, I'm always going to be interested in Buddhism. I'm always going to be interested in Zen. I love the tradition. But as an editor, what preoccupies me is, "What does Buddhism have to offer this country that's not already here?" If all you're doing is doubling up what's already here through the Christian and Jewish traditions, then it seems to me to be a complete waste of time. Take "engaged Buddhism" as an example. There's certainly no problem with any individual Buddhist who wants to work in a prison or an AIDS hospice, or whatever it is they want to do. It's wonderful work. Yet personally I've never known what makes any of those programs Buddhist. And I've also never known what makes them "engaged Buddhists" rather than just Buddhists. I've read a lot about "engaged Buddhism"; it sounds a lot like Buddhism. I've never gotten the distinction. I also haven't seen that that kind of activity is different than a lot of Christian charity work. The true sense of Christian charity is wonderful. And it's not that it's not wonderful to do AIDS work or hospice work or whatever kind of charity work it is. But I'm more interested in seeing what Buddhism has to offer that we don't already have here. We already have a sense of social action that's deeply part of our culture.

WIE: So what do you feel Buddhism has to offer?

HT: I think that what Buddhism has to offer that's not in this culture are teachings on the nature of mind. Understanding that your own mind has the capacity to create a tremendous amount of suffering for yourself and others, and also that it has the capacity to dissolve a great deal of suffering for yourself and for others. You don't have to be a mystical genius to use those teachings to help your life a great deal. We're talking in a very profound and subtle way about the nature of mind, and when you take on the possibility of a nondualistic reality, even the sense of compassion becomes different.

WIE: When you speak about understanding the nature of mind, are you speaking in any sense about a realization of the Absolute or some sense of the nondual? Do you think that the difference between what you refer to as Christian ethics and what Buddhism has to offer as an ethical perspective comes from an awakened mind, comes from some understanding of the nondual?

HT: Yes, but again, there's probably about a half-dozen people who genuinely, truly can tolerate the heat of living in a completely nondualistic reality.

WIE: But thank God we have those examples so we know that there is something higher to strive for, because without them or the writings about them—

HT: Sure, and it would be great to have those teachings of Buddhism manifested by a mind that is so empty that you get a taste of that capacity yourself. You have to have some experience of the possibility of emptying your mind out or it just becomes theoretical. But even in theory it's pretty powerful.

The teachings of mind are the enlightenment tradition. Those teachings are very alien to this culture but they can be brought into this culture in a widespread and beneficial way. They can have enormous effects on society and on the sense of responsibility that people have for themselves and for others around them. That is the enlightenment tradition.

WIE: I have one last question for you: Imagine you leave your apartment in Chelsea and you walk downtown to the Tricycle offices. As you get to Vandam, you look down the street and to your surprise you see a throng of ten or twenty thousand monks and nuns crowding the entire block. You make your way through the mass of monks and nuns to your building. When you get to the entrance, you look up and see someone standing before the door—it is none other than the Buddha himself. As you look at him, you have absolutely no doubt that it is, indeed, the Buddha. If this were to happen, and if he looked at you and said, "Okay, Helen, your time has come. Leave everything and come join my order of monks and nuns,"—would you do it?

HT: I have no idea! It's so hypothetical, I can't even imagine it! It's not even a fantasy I can imagine. I feel like I'm disappointing you, but I can't even think about it. It's too hypothetical for me. I'm just trying to get to the place where I walk out the door and down the street, do you know what I'm saying? I'm still dealing with walking down the street!