Cogito ergo non sum. These warnings are for myself as much as for students - I find many Buddhist ideas intellectually compelling, and get a kind of thrill presenting them forcefully (as I also do Marx, Barth, Merleau-Ponty and Pentecostalism - go figure), but on this sort of thing the talk without the walk isn't just incomplete but probably counterproductive, like crying wolf to yourself. Now it's my turn trying to walk the walk, or at least to take some baby steps. Not that much one can get in ten days, but it'll be something, a start.This isn't my very first attempt. A few years ago when passing through Fukui (Japan) I followed signs for something called ザ禅体験 Za Zen Taiken - a pun on sitting meditation (座禅, zazen) and "the (za, the English word transliterated) Zen experience (taiken)." Near Fukui is the great Zen monastery Eiheiji, whose ads had caught my eye in the Tokyo subway: 永平寺へゆき、私をぬぐ (go to Eiheiji, shed the self). But this was just some entrepreneurial local temple, and the priest was too pleased to be able to chat with a foreigner to let me rake his gravel. Instead he showed me the perks of a life as a Buddhist priest in Japan - pictures of his kids, a fancy home entertainment system and a swanky car - and I left disillusioned. The reality of Buddhism in Japan (it's been a family business like any other since a shogun decided that priests should marry and pass the temple on to their sons, and its main business is funerals) is pretty uninspiring. Back to the monasteries!
The Insight Meditation retreat is going to be a chance for me to face more than just the walk-the-walk issue, since it's American Buddhism. Just look at it (the picture above is from their website): it doesn't look Asian or even like a monastery - because it's neither. But these folks mean business. While rooted in the Theravada Buddhist traditions of South and Southeast Asia, IMS is essentially a lay (in any case a non-monastic) movement, and an American one. The teachers have names like McDonald, Bradshaw and Feldman - not a Vimalakirti, Rimpoche or Suzuki among them - and most are women. So this will be for me an experience not just of concentrated Buddhist attention, but opening to the reality and significance of western lay-centered egalitarian Buddhism, something to which I pay lip service when I teach (only in America could Buddhism have become democratic, I intone, and mean it) but focus on little, my main emphasis being on the symbiosis of monastics and laity. I won't pretend not to have prejudices here: user-friendly American Buddhism is about achieving detachment about possessions, not detachment from possessions; boutique Buddhism is of a piece with self-help and New Age fluffiness; it's orientalist escapism; it's a non-invasive balm for middle class anomie.
I look forward to revising these prejudices! For starters, this looks like a more demanding regimen than my comfortable priest in Fukui had: sitting, walking, sitting, walking, all in silence, from 5am to 10pm! (I didn't read these details until after signing up. Can't turn back now, just because it's the real deal!) And putting myself in circumstances in which I am not obviously the outsider (like, um, Japan) may help me get over my orientalist escapist fascination with monasteries in remotest Asia and face my own middle class anomie! I may never be the same. Not that anyone ever is... but that's just talking the talk again!
I should be back blogging by the 16th.
