RE: I wouldn’t be a Christian
November 3, 2018 at 4:14 am
(This post was last modified: November 3, 2018 at 4:15 am by Belacqua.)
I've noticed an odd thing, having lived 30 years in Japan now.
A lot of Americans dislike the religion they were raised with, but are happy to accept certain of its practices or tenets if the come back in a more exoticized form. For example, when I was in art school in America we were all into Alan Watts and John Cage and that US-style Buddhism. When I got to Japan, though, I spent a while at a Zen retreat outside Fukuyama. Meditation half the day, and work in the vegetable patches the rest. It was a wonderful healthy lifestyle, but in the end I realized I couldn't accept the metaphysics behind it, so I left.
One thing I learned there is that Japanese Zen people find US Zen pretty much unrecognizable. US Zen is an American system of thinking. It is mostly cobbled together from concepts which already existed in the Western tradition. If you read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, for example, you find he has described a well-established current in American spirituality which matches almost exactly what, decades later, came to be called Zen.
The practice of mindfulness, for example, is attributed to Zen by Alan Watts and Kabat-Zinn, among others. But Japanese Zen people don't recognize it. Recently it has entered Japan as a psychological therapy, and they call it mainfurunesu. That's "mindfulness" in katakana. They need to give it a Western name because it is unfamiliar.
What Americans think of as Zen wisdom is mostly deracinated concepts from the Christian tradition. Mindfulness as spiritual practice (not just therapy) is a watered-down version of what William Blake (a Christian) and Simone Weil wrote about. They called it opening the doors of perception, and attention, respectively.
I get it that people might have bad impressions of Christianity from their childhoods and maybe want to find different ways to take from it what they want. But we should be accurate in our historical knowledge.
A lot of Americans dislike the religion they were raised with, but are happy to accept certain of its practices or tenets if the come back in a more exoticized form. For example, when I was in art school in America we were all into Alan Watts and John Cage and that US-style Buddhism. When I got to Japan, though, I spent a while at a Zen retreat outside Fukuyama. Meditation half the day, and work in the vegetable patches the rest. It was a wonderful healthy lifestyle, but in the end I realized I couldn't accept the metaphysics behind it, so I left.
One thing I learned there is that Japanese Zen people find US Zen pretty much unrecognizable. US Zen is an American system of thinking. It is mostly cobbled together from concepts which already existed in the Western tradition. If you read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, for example, you find he has described a well-established current in American spirituality which matches almost exactly what, decades later, came to be called Zen.
The practice of mindfulness, for example, is attributed to Zen by Alan Watts and Kabat-Zinn, among others. But Japanese Zen people don't recognize it. Recently it has entered Japan as a psychological therapy, and they call it mainfurunesu. That's "mindfulness" in katakana. They need to give it a Western name because it is unfamiliar.
What Americans think of as Zen wisdom is mostly deracinated concepts from the Christian tradition. Mindfulness as spiritual practice (not just therapy) is a watered-down version of what William Blake (a Christian) and Simone Weil wrote about. They called it opening the doors of perception, and attention, respectively.
I get it that people might have bad impressions of Christianity from their childhoods and maybe want to find different ways to take from it what they want. But we should be accurate in our historical knowledge.
