Why Buddha Touched the Earth

A revised draft of the chapter "Zen Paganism"

Zen Paganism

It was some time in 1986 or 87 that my good friend, fellow karate student, and general co-conspirator Mike Gurklis and I were sitting around talking about our readings about Zen. We had been inspired by some references to it in a book by our karate school's founder, to seek out more information about this philosophy and its relationship to the traditional martial arts.

One thing we discovered was that Zen, while arising from Buddhism, wasn't limited to it.

So you could be a Zen Christian, one of us said. Or a Zen Jew.

Or a Zen Pagan.

I don't remember which of us said it. But it struck a chord with me. A few years later when I trundled off to my freshman year of college and decided to personalize my knapsack with some magic-marker graffiti, in among "Make love not war" and "Stop Planetary Suicide" was the logo "Zen Pagan".

At the time, it was just something that sounded cool. I didn't have any great idea what Zen or Paganism was, was still shaking off the lingering remnants of my childhood Catholicism. Sometimes, though, the title finds us before the piece, the work of whatever art, does.

In the summer of 1990, Mike and I were both students at the University of Maryland, College Park. Having both quickly tired of the dorms and attempting the commute from Baltimore, we decided to share an apartment. We'd get a better deal with a third person splitting a three-bedroom, so we put up fliers around campus.

The fellow who answered our call would turn out to be much more than a roommate. Joe Galitsky became a brother.

A few months after he moved in, Joe said to me, "If you're free tonight I have some friends coming over. You ought to hang out, we do this sort of `roll your own' religion thing, I think you'd like it."

Now by this time, though I was interested in ideas from Zen and Taoism (had I known the word then, I might have said I was moving toward pantheism), I pretty firmly identified as an atheist. But I knew Joe well enough to rule out him being a religious wacko. And I've always had an over-sized curiosity bump.

So I hung out. And he was right - I liked it.

There's not an exciting story of a black robed initiation rite here, just a bunch of laid-back artistically inclined people in a suburban living room.

We started off with some improv spoken word welcoming the "spirits" of the different directions - "spirit" being left conveniently undefined, so you could regard it as of the same order as "spirit of the law" or as something more ghostly and supernatural, according to your own taste. This was referred to as "opening the Circle".

A number of occurrences blend in my memory, and now I can't recall exactly what rituals we did that first night. Perhaps somebody read a poem or story from Celtic myth or from Native American culture; maybe one of us led the rest through a guided meditation. Possibly there was a symbolic ritual, like writing on slips of paper things we wished to be free of, and then burning the papers. Then we closed the circle, saying farewell to the spirits we'd invited at the beginning. Then, we shared a potluck meal, the only unusual thing being that a small portion of food was symbolically left outdoors for the "spirits". (I'm sure the squirrels got it.)

It was fun, and I didn't detect any cultish or evangelistic streak in anyone. So I went to the next few "Circles", as we called them.

I think it was at my third or fourth one when someone asked, "So, what got you interested in Paganism?"

Oh, is that what this was?

The group was totally non-hierarchical; we all participated, took turns leading rituals, brought in whatever prayers and meditations and ideas we liked. So, I led Zen-style meditations; shared Taoist and Zen stories; and learned bits of Wiccan and Celtic and Hindu and Native American practice and lore.

The group eventually drifted apart, as people's lives changed with new jobs and new homes. But I became connected with the larger local Pagan community, eventually becoming somewhat active in the Free Spirit Alliance.

After many years of investigating many different spiritual disciplines, "Zen Paganism" still seems a excellent name for the practice I've fallen into.

It was at the 2001 Free Spirit Gathering - FSA's summer solstice festival, one of the largest Pagan gatherings on the East Coast - that I first gave a public talk on some of these "Zen Pagan" ideas. Despite their embryonic nature, they were well received, and I've given talks on Zen Paganism several times now, at FSG and at the larger Starwood festival.

I've found several other people using the same label. Shortly before his untimely death, John Lennon identified his beliefs as "Zen Christian, Zen Marxist, Zen Pagan, whatever." I was contacted by Keith Veeder, who had been using the term in his own teaching and writings for several years (we agreed that he would be the "Rhinoceros School" of Zen Paganism and I would be the "Earth-touching school", to help avoid confusion).

On the internet I found a talk from the Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer, who mentions Zen Paganism in passing. [http://www.everydayzen.org/teachings/talk_bluecliff1.asp] And I once saw a ZENPAGN vanity license plate on the highway in Maryland.

Apparently is isn't just my own delusion that these ideas are compatible.

So what is the relationship between Zen and Paganism?

To answer that question, some definitions are in order.

Zen is easily defined. (At this point, the more knowledgeable reader may feel free to laugh out loud.) It is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Ch'an, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word dhyana, and simply means meditation. Zen Buddhism is a form of Buddhism focusing on meditation practice.

However, in Japan Zen snuck out of the temple to permeate fields ranging from flower-arranging to swordsmanship to making and serving a good cup of tea. And in so doing, it left behind the Buddha statues and the sutras, becoming something much more vague and diffuse. Which (and now I hope laughing readers will forgive me) of course makes a lie of the claim that Zen can be easily defined. Like the cliche about jazz, if you have to ask, you're never going to know.

But over the centuries the masters in the temples and dojos have found ways to make the question unnecessary, have blazed paths to lead seekers to the answer rather than attempt to speak it. It is this aspect of direct experience, of a "direct transmission outside the scriptures", that has most captured the Western mind, and is most relevant to us.

Enough for the moment of Zen. What of Paganism?

By one account, originally the word pagan meant "country-dweller", dating back to the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The temples of the Greco-Roman pantheon were torn down, and their worship could only be accomplished out in the sticks, in the forests and the groves - city gods go to the country to hide out from the intolerance of state-supported monotheism.

While some strands of family traditions may have come down from this time, the Pagan revival is largely a reconstruction, not a survival - mythologized histories of various sects notwithstanding. The first hints of this revival date to the late eigteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when several tributaries including the Romantic literary movement, Freemasonry, a classical revival, and a growing exposure to Eastern thought came together in England.

By the 1960s, "Pagan" came to be a general term for a diversity of spiritual paths - Druidism, Wicca, Aseratu, Discordianism, and eclectic self-defined paths of polytheism, pantheism, or animism. Kerry Thornley, Discordian Society co-founder, paranoid schizophrenic, and possible pawn in CIA mind control experiments that may (or may not) have been involved with the Kennedy assassination, is credited by many with giving the term its current meaning. [See "The Prankster and the Conspiracy" for the story of this fascinating central figure of American counterculture.]

It is sometimes useful to make a distinction between this "neo-Paganism" revival and the "paleo-" or "meso-" paganism of other cultures; but we are dealing strictly with neo-Paganism, and will use the term "Pagan" in this common sense.

What binds these diverse paths together, puts them all under the rubric of Paganism? Ask five self-identified Pagans and you're likely to get five different answers. (Quite possibly more.) But I believe that the following two propositions would be accepted by at least 80% of those who label themselves Pagan:

1) Humanity has lost sight of its connection to the natural world. It has not lost the connection - we are of this world, part of it, and the connection cannot be broken. But we have neglected and ignored it, forgotten that this connection exists, and this is harming both us and the natural world.

2) Our ordinary experience of consciousness is not the only mode possible. Through the use of ritual and magick - "the art and science of changing consciousness at will" - we can explore our consciousness to positive ends, finding other ways of thinking that can be helpful. As Jeff Rosenbaum of the Association for Consciousness Exploration put it, "Everything is explored by altering it. The way you explore temperature is by seeing how different temperatures affect something. The way you explore pressure is by changing the pressure to see how that affects different things. The way you study consciousness is by changing your consciousness." [http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050829/krassner]

We can pick out a few other features likely to be identified as Pagan: a focus on experience rather than dogma; a spiritual egalitarianism, holding that every person has equal access to the divine and that any "priests" or "priestesses" act as facilitators, not as special chosen representatives of deities; and a respect for the feminine, where Goddess imagery is as important (or more important) as the Gods.

So then. What is the relevance of Zen to Paganism?

The Pagan revival and the interest of Western thinkers in Eastern philosophies both stem from a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, are both rooted in the need to build a sort of "industrial strength shamanism", to build a spirituality capable of deals with the radical changes in human civilization we are undergoing.

Furthermore, if we look at the historical roots of the Pagan revival, at the works of Crowley and Gardner, we find a strong influence by Eastern thought, Hinduism and Taoism and Buddhism. Some in the Pagan community who still hold to the notion that ancient European practices have been handed down with little change may find this claim remarkable, but the history is well-established. A look at Zen gives Pagans an opportunity to connect with these roots, in what is (to my mind) a remarkably clear expression of the best ideas of Buddhism and Taoism.

Paganism is still quite new, only beginning to organize itself. To prevent future bouts of dogmasclerosis, it would do well to look to Zen's model of "direct transmission." And for all of its emphasis on, and expertise in, bringing about transformative ritual experience, Pagan paths have less to offer the practitioner in terms of integrating the experience into day to day living - Paganism can learn from Zen how to escape the Circle or the Grove, how to penetrate everyday life.

In it's relative youth, Paganism lacks a strong foundation of ethical teaching; the non-dogmatic compassionate teachings of Zen Buddhism could be a rich example, much more specific than the Wiccan Rede, for example, while still avoiding moralistic preaching.

Finally, if magick is understood as a means of changing consciousness, then we ought to take a serious look at the experiments and observations that Buddhists have been involved with for 2,500 years.

And what of the relevance of Paganism to Zen? In these pages we're going to look at the nature religion hidden in Zen Buddhism, from Buddha sitting under the Bo tree and touching the Earth, to the influences of Taoism and Shinto on Zen, to the Beat poets writing in the mountains. The world needs a strong nature religion now - the only way we'll likely stop destroying the planet and ourselves is to see the planet as sacred.

Also, as Zen seeks to spread in the West, the practices of Paganism - tied to familiar Western mythos - might offer "skillful means" to Zen teachers, ways to illustrate concepts and even on occasion to trick students into learning.

And we're going the see if Paganism can get formal Zen to let its hair down and party a little bit (in a non-attached fashion, of course). Zen has always had a streak of the rapscallion running through it, from stories of drunken Zen masters to the "Red Thread" Zen tradition of teachers like Ikkyu. These Zen rascals and the joyously fornicating, Dionysus-worshiping Pagans might well be able to teach each other a few things.