Why Zen History Matters

History is the study of past events. History is also a story. In fact it’s a lot of stories that weave together to make bigger stories. 

The study of history is supposed to provide insight into how we stumbled into current situations. But the stories that we call history serve a deeper purpose, which is to tell us who we are. 

This is a delicate subject to bring up with Zen students, who are earnestly studying the self to forget the self. But let’s look at this more deeply.

Humans tend to perceive and understand themselves and the world through narratives. We all carry around a story about our lives in our heads, and if we’re being honest we might notice this story is not always entirely true and is subject to revision and editing. Stories also determine how organizations and nations understand themselves. It’s important for us to pay attention to this. 

The Buddha taught people how to break the connection to the narratives in our heads through mindfulness.  By paying moment-to-moment attention just to what is, without judgments or intellectual filters or placing experience in any other context, we can begin to realize the stories we tell ourselves are just an interface to reality, not reality itself. 

However, I think it also must be said that none of us can ever stop crafting a personal story. It’s something we humans are wired to do. We just need to make sure our story is honest and that it provides a healthy psychological foundation for practice and for being a functional human being. 

A few years ago Norman Fischer published a book called Sailing Home that is about exploring our personal stories. He wrote that when we stop getting lost in our own plotlines, with their tensions and expectations, we begin to see the feedback loops and old tapes that keep us stuck in suffering. But, he said, stories also can help us navigate difficult times, if we use them skillfully. 

Right now the history of the United States is the subject of raging controversy, from the display of monuments to how that history is taught in schools. You may have noticed that the real subject of the controversy is not so much “what really happened,” although that’s important, as it is “who are we?” What sort of people are we? Who gets included into “we”? I think it’s very important “we” get this right, because we’re stuck in a lot of old and unhealthy feedback loops. When the national narratives are not supporting an honest and healthy vision of current reality, it can cause a lot of bad decisions and great suffering. 

How does this apply to Zen? Zen has a lot of history, and don’t assume that history wasn’t all left behind in Asia and doesn’t affect us in the West. It’s embedded in the teachings and liturgy and everything else. As soon as you walk into a Zen center you enter into that history, of a Buddha who twirled a flower, of a monk who cut off his arm to get a teacher’s attention, of mysterious but enlightened tea ladies, and so on. 

A few of these stories may have really happened in some sense, although many are fiction. They are presented to us because they teach something. But Zen’s stories also have created Zen’s identity as a tradition. The tradition that is Zen came together in China in part by adopting a shared narrative of a lineage of teachers, of Bodhidharma sitting in a cave, and of Huineng winning a poetry contest to become the Sixth Patriarch. And all Zen teachers today trace their lineage back to Huineng. 

We know about Huineng because of what is written in the Platform Sutra. I regret to inform you that the biographical bits in the Platform Sutra are probably more fan fiction than history. And the lineage charts only go back so far before they dissolve into myth and conjecture. But the tradition of lineage and the narrative of the Platform and other shared stories really did help hold the several Zen “houses” together through the crumbling of the Tang Dynasty and the fragmented period that followed. I’m not sure Zen would have survived without that shared narrative. The Zen that survived into the Song Dynasty was transmitted to Japan by Dogen and many others. Other transmissions took it to Korea and Vietnam. And now it’s here. 

The way Zen’s story has traditionally been told does have some flaws, such as leaving out women. There is also a tendency to remember the old masters as pure and virtuous people who “got enlightened” remarkably easily and probably were better than us, somehow. That’s a shame, because one teaching repeated many times by many teachers, from Mazu Daoyi in the 8th century to this day, is that even Shakyamuni didn’t have anything we don’t have. Never think you don’t have what it takes, because you certainly do.

Shining, romantic visions of the past aren’t always that helpful. When we’re going through a rough patch it’s good to remember that even Dogen was confused and discouraged now and then.

It’s also the case that Zen’s history has some dark sides, such as the support of Zen teachers and institutions for Japanese military aggression in the early 20th century. It’s important to remember this, and to study this period to understand how it could have happened. Ignoring history doesn’t make it go away. Ignoring it also doesn’t guarantee that it won’t happen again.

There are wonderful stories too, of course. We’re still telling the Tang Dynasty stories about Layman Pang and his family. We tell the story of Hakuin’s “Is that so?” and the one about Ryokan, the thief, and the moon in the window.  These stories have teaching points, but they are also just good stories. And they are our stories now. They are telling us who we are.

We are at the very beginning of Zen’s taking root in the West. We’re also at the very beginning of a narrative about Zen in the West. I propose that we build that narrative on an honest and factual understanding of Zen history, to create a healthy understanding of Zen that will sustain it, and us, through whatever comes. It’s important that we get this right.

By Barbara O’Brien

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