Buddhism is different than becoming a good person
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Jakusho Kwong-roshi |
Buddhism or the Buddhadharma is different than becoming a good person. Because when you want to become a good person, when you want to do good, you become a purpose, you have a purpose of being good, of what you think is good. So we even have to transcend that.
Studying Zen is not becoming a good person, but becoming a human being. When you become a human being then you are naturally ... you realize your basic goodness. Even ourselves are basic goodness. Then you realize the basic goodness of others. That's goodness.
So, It's not doing good things for people. Becoming the selflessness in serving people is one of the greatest rewards.
-- Jakusho Kwong-roshi
The above is taken from a interview clip that appears in a video set called "Religions of the World." The fifty-minute film on Buddhism is wholly unimpressive -- lots of film scans of murals and small statues spinning in front of a black screen. But interview clips of Kwong-roshi, the founder, with his wife, and Zen Teacher at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center in Santa Rosa, California; Prof. Lewis Lancaster, PhD, UC Berkeley; and Dr. Rina Sircar of CIIS are very worthwhile.
I love what Kwong-roshi says about goodness in the quote above that I snatched from the film, and not because [or solely because] it justifies me being a jerk from time to time. I think that many people who are new to Buddhism [and even some who have been at it for a long time] approach our religion with the idea that by being gooder than good and holier than thou they win in the competition of being Best Buddhist.
But that's not so -- at least from a Zen approach. The way I look at it, Zen is fundamentally a search for authenticity.
And, by the way, Kwong-roshi is curiously the most ordinary yet appealing individual you are likely to ever encounter. Much like the Dalai Lama, you are given to immediately believe anything this gentle man says.
4 comments:
If "Zen is fundamentally a search for authenticity," I wonder what constitutes authenticity. Is one being any more "authentic" when he spontaneously acts like a "jerk" than when he purposefully acts like a saint? Like you, Tom, I find the ideal of authenticity to be enormously appealing, but I'm not sure what it means to be authentic, much less how to achieve the ideal.
Nagarjuna,
Good point. If there is no self, how can it be dressed in anything?
But I think Kwong-roshi's point is that you strive NOT to dress the self; that being a naked human being is how you realize your basic goodness.
But that does call into question that when I "allow" myself to be the jerk that I think I 'comfortably' am, from time to time, am I moving in the direction of being more authentic or less authentic? I don't know.
I guess Kwong-roshi is saying that zazen, mindfulness, purposelessness and other factors of zen practice are meant to move us away from being attached to outcomes, status, being right, winning and other ego-guided desires such that we are naked and can see that others, too, are naked. And with that comes the realization that this nakedness is good.
In an other part of the film, Kwong-roshi talks a little about how our society colludes against spirit and fights our "effort" to ease into the comfort of being naked and realized.
An influential recent discussion of the concept of authenticity is Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity. Here's a review.
And here's a bit of what it says:
"According to Taylor, the rise of individualism grew out of an ideal of authenticity which can be traced back to Rousseau and Herder and which originally embodied the ideal of a higher life, premised on the possibility of a distinction between what we actually desire and what we ought to desire.
But over time, argues Taylor, this evaluative element disappeared and the ideal of authenticity was corrupted: the notion of an external standard which we should strive to live up to was replaced by the self-confirming, vacuous idea of choice as a good in itself. "
Hi, Alan. Thanks.
I read the review and am eager to get my mitts on the book. In what sense the meaning I am giving to "authenticity" meshes with the meanings Taylor finds, I'm uncertain.
I suppose I am unconcerned with the idea of meaninglessness. That is, I find no meaning in it. And I guess the external standard is married to the idea being life affirming and doing the greater good. But it's not based on reason; it comes from knowing. Choice is a good unto itself because it is the training for knowing. Anyway, that, in hogwashese is where I'm at, spewed on the fly.
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