Why Buddha Touched the Earth

This is a rough draft of what will be an early chapter.Note: newer version here

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.

But after many years of investigating many different spiritual disciplines, this still seem a excellent name for the practice I've fallen into.

The phrase has struck others also. Shortly before his untimely death, John Lennon identified his beliefs as "Zen Christian, Zen Marxist, Zen Pagan, whatever."

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

Since then I've found several other people using the same label. 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 related.

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.

But in Japan, Zen snuck out of the temple to permeate fields ranging from flower-arranging to swordplay to making a cup of tea. Which (and now I hope the more laughing readers will forgive me) of course makes a lie of my 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, paths, to make the question unnecessary, 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.

The first hints of a Pagan revival date to mid nineteenth century, when several tributaries including the Romantic literary movement, Freemasonry, a classical revival, and a growing exposure to Eastern thought came together in England.

Both the Romantic movement and the Pagan revival can be seen as a reaction to the collapse of Enlightenment thinking after the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, and to the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. It was becoming clear that Reason was not enough; but the Enlightenment had greatly weakened traditional Christianity. So the Romantics looked back in their intellectual heritage to a point before both Christianity and Reason as we know it, to the culture of ancient Greece, for inspiration.

But even as the Romantics looked back to the mysticism of ancient Greece, they did so in a post-Enlightenment context - thus, Shelly could write a treatise on the necessity of atheism, but also could invoke the Goddess in his poetry and raise an altar to the Great God Pan.

In the U.S, generations had passed since the American Revolution. The young nation still wrestled with issues its Enlightenment-inspired founders hadn't settled: chiefly, slavery and women's rights.

With the Industrial Revolution, came also the quest by some in America for cultural freedom from the European tradition. The gods of classical Greece and Rome were associated with the tradition from which they were trying to free themselves; but Nature was more present in the New World than in deforested Europe. These new American thinkers seized on inspiration from the natural world, and also looked more to the traditions of the East rather than to those of Europe. This was the origin of the Transcendentalists.

While Shelly and the British Romantics went on to influence a little-known poet named Algernon Charles Swinburne who inspired such figures in the early history of Wicca as Crowley, Fortune, and Gardner, the Transcendentalists would go on to have a heavy influence on the Beats, who did a lot to bring Buddhist ideas to America in the mid 20th century and who laid the foundations for the counterculture from which American Paganism sprung.

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 animsm. 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.

(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 touch with 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?

First, Paganism is still quite new, only beginning to organize itself. To prevent future bouts of dogmasclerosis, it would do well to look to Zen. Second, 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.

Also, 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.

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. (Many in the Pagan community who still hold to the notion that ancient European practices have been handed down with little change, may find these claims remarkable or debatable.) A look at Zen therefore gives Pagans an opportunity to connect with these roots.

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.

And we're going the see if Paganism can get Zen to let its hair down and party a little bit (in a non-attached fashion, of course), see what the dancing, joyfully fornicating Pagans can contribute to the "Red Thread" tradition of Zen. In this post-sexual revolution world, it's time for a fresh, sacred consideration of sexuality.