http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/zen-social-action.html

The Zen of Social Action

Ken H Jones

1. The Privatisation of the Dharma

Buddhism comes to Westerners as a monkish other worldly religion of meditation embedded in a culture of monasticism. It brings with it all the assumptions of a traditional hierarchical culture where society and nature were perceived as an unchanging back drop to the human condition. Public virtues enjoined upon ‘householders’ (and even rulers), charitable action, right livelihood and just rule, were about personal behaviour confined within the the established order. Monastics were honoured by lay support precisely because they were ‘purer’, not engaged in the pursuit of wealth and fame like everyone else. Monastics generally supported the existing social order. For Zen, this meant, successively, the aristocracy, samurai dictators, imperial militarists, and latterly, the corporate business establishment(1). Westerners who approach Buddhism swim in a very different culture, an intensely individualistic culture with a social milieu utterly different from that in which the teachings originated. These circumstances present the lay practitioner with two unique kinds of work, the first ‘inner’ and the second ‘outer’.
Personhood for the traditional oriental, as for the medieval Western individual, tended to be made meaningful through social context, whether it be occupation, hierarchical grade, caste, corporate membership or geographical community. In 1486, in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico della Mirandolla proclaimed the arrival of the free, self-defining individual thus starting the trend to individual rather than collective sensibility. Three hundred years later the Rights of Man were proclaimed,sounding the death knell of the ancient culture of communally rooted responsibilities. The collective virtues of acceptance, humility and restraint rapidly disappeared from view. After another two hundred more years of this high egoic era (as Ken Wilber calls it), this free and demanding individualism - of an affluent minority - has accumulated enough wealth, developed enough technology, and dissolved sufficient constraining norms and institutions to be able to enjoy the utmost ‘personalised convenience’. It might be the ready convenience of switching on television or switching to another partner when the first - and the kids - become too tiresome. Just about everything can be individually fixed except mortality.
The progress of this individualism is associated with the widening split between the public and the private. The public is the outer, rational ‘masculine’ world of the economy, politics, war and peace. The private is the world of the psyche, the emotions, spirituality, the arts, the ‘feminine’ - all subordinate and suspect. Encouraged by the demise of the great value-sustaining secular myths of our time, socialism and communism, and likewise of the Welfare State, privatisation of the public has become intense. Associated with the decline of civic pride and enterprise and indeed of civil society itself, the public realm has been crushed between the upper and nether millstones of State and Market, the latter becoming increasingly narcissistic and turned in upon itself.
Individualism is associated also with the sense of a loss of social relevance, a personal alienation, which has increasingly marked the past hundred years of Western culture. In the search for ever greater individual freedom Westerners have dissolved all those personal, social and ecological restraints, reciprocities and responsibilities which were the sources of collective support and security. Eco-social crisis and the widespread crisis of personal identity and meaning are ultimately one and the same. Alienated individuals seek an intensely individualistic spirituality with a functional sensibility, ‘fast food’ expectations and an obsession with achievement which reifies enlightenment. This stubborn and rootless individualism makes community (or even playing at community) difficult for many Westerners. The high pressure inner/outer crisis may lead to ‘spirituality’ as a last hope for finding meaning and security. Yet at every point there is antithesis to the assumptions of oriental monasticism. Perhaps a hundred years from now we shall better appreciate what a bizarre Western creature it was that began to take an interest in Buddhist spirituality - of all things! Our deeply conditioned assumptions could hardly be more different from those of the world of Shakyamuni Buddha, or of Zen Master Dogen.
I conclude that the practitioner of lay Zen or any other kind of Western spirituality has a special and urgent need to become fully aware of these Western assumptions in order no longer to be unconsciously governed by them. This is a process which, in my experience, can occur quite naturally in the course of traditional practice, but the more readily if both student and teacher are socially knowledgeable (this being one of the advantages of an aware Western teacher). This is a dimension of the Westerner’s ‘inner work’ which has received little discussion. Moreover, the monastic tradition has, understandably, virtually nothing to say about it. For example, as a European reading in American Buddhist journals of attempts to respond to problems arising along the Western/Oriental, lay/monastic interface, I have often been struck by a seeming unawareness of how culture-specific, how American, such responses can themselves be. This or that characteristic American response may or may not be the most appropriate, but how can we know as long as we are inside its American-ness?
The second historic task for the lay Western practitioner follows from the first. This is the ‘outer work’ of shaping a new social culture which is informed by spiritual insight and manifests it in its social norms and institutions. Although this is a radical conservative perspective which retains and transforms all the supportive and compatible achievements of, yes, the high egoic era, I none the less see monasticism as a perennial stabilising force, whatever outward changes it may undergo.

2. The Outer Project: Social Activism Encounters Buddhism

Over the past five hundred years Western society has become increasingly complex, dynamic and fluid. Its development can be and has been substantially affected by government policies and social and political movements which are a part of the process. There is a general assumption that it is possible to remedy and even abolish poverty, exploitation and the injustices of gender, class, and race. In spite of this often unthinking optimism, acquisitive industrial growth has now begun to undermine the planetary ecosystem itself. We face an ecological crisis which arguably can only be resolved by radical social changes on a global scale. In looking at the Western interest in Buddhism I am struck by the gap between the great secular, humanistic movements of our time and an ancient monastic Sangha specialising in wisdom and insight. What are the implications then, for a lay spirituality founded on such a monasticism?
In the West, and particularly in the United States, ‘engaged Buddhism’ has become widely acceptable, though it is still not well understood (2). It questions both the quietism of Eastern monasticism and the privatised Buddhism of the West, and is undoubtedly the most noteworthy achievement to date of modern lay Buddhism, and particularly of the American Zen communities. It is significant that the communiqué from a four day meeting in March 1993 between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and twenty-two Western Buddhist teachers, declared that ‘Our first responsibility as Buddhists is to work towards creating a better world for all forms of life. The promotion of Buddhism is a secondary concern.’
Understandably it is in the Buddhist countries of the East that the potential of engaged Buddhism is most fully demonstrated, in a variety of lay Buddhist movements. Sarvodaya is an extensive grass-roots self-help movement in Sri Lanka. Out of the struggle of Vietnam’s Unified Buddhist Church for peace, social justice, and religious freedom, Thich Nhat Hanh and his Tiep Hien Order have developed as an influential international movement. The opposition to the brutal military dictatorship in Burma is essentially both a lay and a monastic Buddhist movement. Thailand is the centre of a variety of engaged Buddhist initiatives inspired by Sulak Sivaraksa, most notably the remarkable International Network of Engaged Buddhists. A wide variety of (mostly lay) New Buddhist Movements concerned with world peace and social welfare flourish in Japan and exercise a significant influence in national life. In Japan there have been a number of Zen writers and teachers who stood out against the endorsement of Japanese imperial militarism by mainstream Zen monasticism. One of the heroes of this dissident tradition was Ichikawa Gudo, a Soto monk executed in 1911 for his opposition to the demands of the imperial regime. In the post-war period Ichikawa Hakugen, a Zen priest and university professor condemned Zen’s collusion in Japanese aggression in books like The War Responsibility of Buddhists (1970)(1). For the purposes of our present enquiry the most significant proponent of an engaged Zen is Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (1889-1980). Hisamatsu was a Zen practitioner and university professor who founded a lay Zen organisation and devoted himself to a critique of monastic Zen: as has been the case with Zen, activity starts and ends only with the so-calledpractice of compassion involved in helping others to awaken, such activity will remain unrelated to the formation of the world or the creation of history, isolated from the world and history, and in the end turn Zen into a forest Buddhism, temple Buddhism, at best a Zen-monastery Buddhism. Ultimately this becomes “Zen within a ghostly cave"’ (3).
Hisamatsu rejected monastic Zen as outmoded, advocated a ‘Zen for all people’, and did not regard a direct relationship with a master as absolutely necessary. In these respects he differs from most lay advocates of engaged Buddhism in both East and West. Engaged Buddhism also tackles the current questions and controversies in our society with regard to gender, race and class. It is troubled by the spectacle of a Sangha so exclusively able-bodied, white, and middle class, practising within a patriarchal tradition. The (American) Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s journal Turning Wheel has devoted whole issues to such questions. Yet I cannot recall reading any similar discussion on English social class. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that there are working class would-be Buddhists who are alienated by the middle class tone of many British Buddhist organisations and centres (the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order is one notable exception). My informants found the insulated ‘niceness’ and the ‘smug intellectualism’ offensive and, more seriously, the teaching coming from an outlook and lifestyle remote from those of working class people. Since similar class barriers have been seen as a problem in other walks of life it would be unwise to dismiss them here. Raising awareness of our own previously unconscious social identities, and the message they send to others, could undoubtedly be a ‘skilful means’ (upaya).

3. The Scriptural Approach to Engaged Buddhism

The eco-socially engaged Buddhism of activism and service can be approached in terms of scripture, intellect and insight. The scriptural approach involves selecting and interpreting relevant scripture, including the moral precepts. Now that all the world’s religions are being required to present their green credentials(4), it has been most recently employed to demonstrate the ecological relevance of Buddhism. Although the scriptural approach provides a useful introduction, it has serious very different from our own, and in any case the amount of traditional socially engaged scripture is quite small, for reasons noted earlier. Secondly, Buddhism is not a religion of the Book; its scriptures are at best a verbalising of insight aimed at guiding and inspiring those who are seeking insight. They have an indicative authority, but it is intended that you should find out the truth for yourself.
My third reservation is that, in the absence of the other two approaches (below), it is only too easy to read our own cultural values into scripture, as also into monastic practice. The Buddha becomes an early human rights champion, the monastic Sangha a model of propertyless democracy, and Ashoka validates the Welfare State. Instead of Dharma changing contemporary perceptions and aspirations it is simply appropriated in order to reinforce them. Such unconscious secularisation is a typical hazard to be found in the laity’s inherent concern to ‘update’ the monastic Dharma and make it more ‘relevant’. An opposite example, where it is Dharma which informs our contemporary situation, is to be found in the precepts of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Tiep Hien Order. Thus, ‘Right Livelihood’ is interpreted as ‘Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies which deprive others of their chance of life. Select a vocation which helps to realise your idea of compassion’(5).

4. The Intellectual Approach

The intellectual (Buddhological) approach seeks to develop a theory of socially engaged Buddhism by amplifying the Buddhist diagnosis and remedy for the human condition in terms of our understanding of contemporary society.
Like other world religions, Buddhism has traditionally been limited by very simplistic social theory and assumptions. Only comparatively recently has society become sufficiently dynamic and complex to stimulate the development of adequate explanatory social theory. From the time of our birth we each respond not only in a personal sense to the precariousness of our human condition, but also as inheritors of delusive social institutions and shared meanings about the world. The ideologies of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of good and evil, which bestride our world tend to be experienced as reality itself rather than as the alienating projections of the insecure and fearful beings that we are. ‘The world grasps after systems’, observed the Buddha, ‘and is imprisoned by dogmas’ (6). Particular beliefs, feelings and behaviours tend to become ingrained as dispositional tendencies (samskaras) which shape our character and our future for better or worse. There is, however, nothing retributive, judgmental or fatalistic about this karmic momentum and we do have the capacity to modify it or even break free from it. A striking example which is both personal and social is the consumermentality (green or otherwise) which drives millions of people beyond all reasonable need and ultimately towards ecological breakdown. To paraphrase Marx, we do make our own history, but not of our own accord or under self-chosen conditions, but under given and transmitted conditions. The situation of a society at any given point in its history, is the amplified resultant of the interacting karma of all its past and present members. Thus the great institutions which embody the aggressiveness, acquisitiveness and divisiveness of Buddha’s ‘Three Fires’ appear to take on a life of their own, entrapping in ‘the system’ even those reluctant to meet its demands. In the Over-Developed World millions of kindly people accept ‘ordinary’ lifestyles and an economic system which are both unnecessary and hugely destructive both ecologically and in relation to Third World peoples. We are entrained in a headlong global karma which repeatedly overwhelms such good intentions as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.
A further example of social karma is the way in which violence breeds violence. The acquisitiveness of the powerful is expressed through social institutions and public policies which create conditions of ‘structural violence’ against the dignity of the disempowered and their freedom to shape tolerable lives for themselves (unemployment, homelessness, chronic ill-health, erosion of welfare support and so on). Structural violence provokes criminal violence, culminating in a climate of violence which eventually entrains even children as rapists and murderers while creating a deprived underclass.
The well-informed bodhisattva has a much more difficult and radical undertaking demanded of him or her than limiting herself to giving everyone a big smile, using bio-friendly washing-up liquid and radiating good vibes to distant prisoners of conscience.
Without reservation she strives to respond to the three great moral imperatives of our time - to heal the violated planet, and to enable both the underclass at home (one in five of the population) and the wretched of the earth to win dignity and freedom. To the traditional Buddhist task of calming the mind is added that of employing it to transform and dismantle social systems and processes which supercharge the suffering of humanity as well as encompassing the ruin of the planet and its creatures. Without the inner work we become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, as the history of communism has so tragically demonstrated and as the history of capitalism is on headlong course to demonstrate in an infinitely greater tragedy. As Mahatma Gandhi observed, the belief (whether of Lenin or Adam Smith) that we can devise a social system so perfect that no one will need to be good, is one of the great delusions of our time. But without the outer work the inner work cannot be socially manifested on the scale that is now required.
The good society which enables its citizens to nourish themselves spiritually as well as socially and materially needs continually to be created in the present, step by step. Ecotopias are at best no more than skilful means, and carry the constant danger of ideological petrification. Two perspectives are on offer, the one monastic and hierarchical, the other lay and democratic.
On the one hand the tradition of the Dhamma Rajah, the spiritually enlightened absolute ruler, has inspired the ‘Dhammic socialism’ propounded by the famous Thai monastic teacher Ajahn Buddhadassa (with overtones of Plato’s Republic) (7). William Ophuls, an American Buddhist political ecologist, takes a similar though more reluctant view, but from a Hobbesian standpoint(8). At the other extreme are those, like the compilers of the 1984 Green Buddhist Declaration, who propose a libertarian socialist vision of a confederal, non-violent, mutualistic, grass roots polity founded on E F Schumacher’s ‘Buddhist economics’(9). I share the view that the power of the increasingly centralised State, and the greed of the free market sustained by it, are incompatible with the stable steady state economy which ecological harmony requires, and with the degree of social justice and egalitarianism necessary to sustain such an economy. The Buddhist, Christian and Humanist metta (‘loving kindness’) required to cement a Green commonwealth will need to be nurtured by individual and group ‘inner work’ as a lifestyle norm. It will also require a civil society of communities wherein social, ecological and spiritual responsibilities figure as prominently as rights. In such a society the monastic tradition could once more exert a stabilising influence. Though few in numbers, Buddhists are peculiarly well placed to play a valuable part in realising such a scenario.
A contemporary paradox concerns the monastic-style discipline and absolute authority of traditional spiritual teachers in contrast to modern lay people who value their democratic and egalitarian secular culture. Americans in recent years have been moved to invoke that culture in order to safeguard against the abuses of power which have shaken many Buddhist centre teachers’ sexual misconduct with their students, abuse of alcohol and drugs, misappropriation of funds and abuse of power. Lay pressure has modified the traditional monastic absolutism with codes of practice, complaints procedures, arbitration and lay management boards. Here as elsewhere the balance is shifting from lay subordination to lay partnership. (See article by Stuart Lachs in the last issue of New Ch’an Forum.)
The social diagnosis outlined in this section needs to be experienced as profound awareness, and then there will be no hesitation in acting out the prescription from the ground of our being. Hisamatsu emphasised ‘the unity of academic study and religious practice’. ‘It is not the objective and impartial study of ethical, philosophical or religious phenomena, but gaining knowledge of how to 'live' morality, philosophy and religion that must be the essential concern’(10). Seng-ts’an, the Third Zen Patriarch (c.AD600) reminds us that:
‘The more you talk about it, the more you think about it, the further from it you go. Put an end to wordiness and intellection and there is nothing you will not understand’(11).

5. The Insight Approach

Although all three approaches are needed, the cultivation of insight is the one that goes to the heart of a socially engaged Buddhism. Apart from some specialised concerns such as meditation and non-violent action, the practice is simply the classic awareness of mindfulness, moving through the three phases of awareness, ‘acceptance’ and ‘empowerment’. Through this practice we become aware of the impulses underlying our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, driven by our root rage, fear and insecurity. We become aware of how we shape a self-serving reality which creates suffering for ourselves and others and which disables appropriate action. Such awareness in itself begins to change the way we experience reality. The world begins to look a different place, and we also begin to act differently.
Awareness can be focused helpfully ‘where the shoe pinches’ - that is on some specific discomfiture which can provide some workable practice in awareness whether or not we choose to formulate it as a specific question or koan. It will not let us rest, whether it be some nagging irritant or our own mortality, or the latest bloody minded episode in some part of the world or other, or our despair at feeling unable to do anything about the ruin of our planet. We so much want things to accord with our desire. If we are in a helping role, for example, we want to feel that we are able to help (and we may enjoy feeling virtuous and maybe somehow superior to the poor wretch who needs our help).
As well as such focusing, the practice requires also an all-round ‘bare awareness’ (Krishnamurti’s term) which continually clarifies perception, both of our emotional states, (whether oceanic or volcanic), and an uninterrupted view of what is actually happening out there. Clarity is enhanced by sessions of formal meditation and retreat. Arguably, this is what meditation is really for.
As awareness deepens it may bring not only frustration but total despair as we are exposed to more truth than we can sustain, coming up against the powerlessness of the small, alienated self. This is the sharp end of Hisamatsu’s ‘fundamental koan which includes all traditional koans, and which has particular relevance for spiritual action and service: Right now, if nothing you do is of any avail, what will you do? This, for example, is the end of the line for a would-be helper who realises s/he really doesn’t have any ‘answer’ to the predicament of a suicidal person.
Sooner or later, given sufficiently sustained practice, awareness will flip over into ‘acceptance’: we give up struggling to maintain how we want it to be and how our society has conditioned us to see it. ‘Acceptance’ is here used in a special sense in two respects. First, it is not ‘I’ accepting, usually grudgingly, but rather some falling away of the self’s insistence on how it should be. Secondly, the activist is not accepting the evils against which s/he has so long struggled; s/he is accepting the undeniable reality of those evils, which are henceforward to be met without evasion and distortion. ‘Formless form’, as Hisamatsu calls it, is thus freed to respond appropriately and unreservedly to the demands of the situation, and can indeed do no other. This is experienced as a liberative release, an ‘empowerment’ which is the opposite of self-empowerment. Freed of doubt and anxiety, here all actions do ‘avail’. At this point the delusion of a privatised Dharma is exposed. The liberation of self and the liberation of others are seen as inseparable.
Engaged Buddhism is the daily actualisation of the boddhisattva vow chanted in Zen monasteries: ‘Sentient beings are innumerable, I vow to save them.’ This ‘inconceivable liberation’ is expressed by Kenneth White, our finest living European Zen poet, as follows (from his long poem Walking the Coast)

‘knowing now that the life at which I aim is a circumference continually expanding through sympathy and understanding rather than an exclusive centre of pure self-feeling the whole I seek is centre plus circumference and now the struggle at the centre is over the circumference beckons from everywhere.’(12).

This empowerment is the empowerment of compassion, of a generosity of spirit. And so, in the depths of the night, the Samaritan gives up trying to help and just hangs out with the would-be suicide in the humanity of a mutually sustaining intimacy - two small figures joking together adrift on a life raft. When a fellow monk fell down in the snow, Master Joshu lay down beside him... Similarly, the activist discovers what it means to love his adversary - to feel compassion for the person but resolutely to oppose what he stands for.
And so... right now, if nothing you do is of any avail, what will you do?

Disappearing in front, disappearing behind, the forest path unwinds me.

6. The Interdependence of Activism and Monasticism

In Western Zen, monasticism commonly amounts to (a) a teacher or teachers, based on (b) a centre, sometimes with resident senior students who may be veritable monastics, with (c) retreat programmes and facilities, used by (d) more or less committed lay people. By monastics I mean specialists who are sufficiently preoccupied with spiritual practice and maybe the teaching of it as to be more or less excluded from a lay life style.
This illustrates the interdependence of monasticism and activism which I have touched on at several points in this paper. Testimony as to this interdependence can be found in different religious traditions, whether it be that of the famous Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa in respect of Ajahn Buddhadasa, or of the American peace workers who looked to Thomas Merton ‘to help us keep ourbalance and sense of reality’ (13).
When Hisamatsu rejected monastic Zen he had in mind highly insightful but totally cloistered monastics devoid of any social ethic or else unthinkingly supporting the established order. He therefore maintained that (in Christopher Ives’ words) ‘true practitioners must study such areas as politics, economics, history and the natural sciences in order to understand more fully the issues facing humanity and towork out skilful means (upaya) of responding to them. In short, practice without such study is blind’(14). Similarly for the eminent Zen Master Joshu Sasaki, ‘Zen is a preparation for life in the world, not the goal of life in the world, and in its highest stages involves the study of sociology, politics, economics, etc.’(15). Widely experienced and knowledgeable lay people in this partnership surely have a role to play in helping keep the spiritual specialists well informed. This is necessary both to counter, in teaching, the privatisation of spirituality in our contemporary culture and also to ground themselves in their students’ daily concerns, whether the traumas of neighbourhood crime or the tragedies of the recession, the grief for a dying planet or the effects of childhood sexual abuse on later life. I recall how moved I was, as a peace campaigner, to be asked by Ajahn Anando, the then abbot of Chithurst forest monastery, ‘How can we monastics help?’ And I recall the walks together in the woods, where each offered the other whatever might be most helpful - some periodical articles from me; a fortnight in one of the monastery’s meditation huts from him!(16). It has been suggested that disillusionment with many American Zen masters’ ethical behaviour has been paralleled by disappointment with the elusiveness of Enlightenment. Correspondingly the monastic tradition associated with both has been downgraded in value. One American Zen teacher observed to me that the tenacity of his European students stood in marked contrast to a high turnover among his fellow countrymen and women. The yearning for perfection seems in America to be shifting elsewhere. Riskfree exemplars emphasising a less problematic ethic than many of those tricky masters and lamas of old, are preferred as teachers to insightful discomforters (17).
But having got rid of THIS may there not be a danger of getting stuck with THAT? Both teacher abuse and the characteristic outcry about it are perhaps superficial and sensational facets of a deeper malaise of a Western Buddhism still to come of age (18). Is it perhaps not a question of politically, ethically, correct lay zen against questionable monastic traditions. Rather, we need a new approach centred on a monasticism with an integrity strong enough to enable lay practitioners to withstand and transform a social culture which is on course to secularise a Dharma of inconceivable liberation. If we are to live up to our social and ecological responsibilities, this is essential. Without it a trivialised Buddhism will melt into a socially reflexive New Age preoccupation leaving an unremarked minority of adepts to their yogic enlightenments in mountain fastnesses.
The importance of anchoring social action and service in a strong and mature monastic tradition cannot, I believe, be over-emphasised. Engaged Buddhism is a ‘radical conservatism’ in several senses, not least in that the more radical and potentially disturbing the action, the stronger and more conservative does the monastic support need to be.
The following Vow of Humankind, formulated by Hisamatsu and his students, provides a summary of socially engaged lay Zen:

Keeping calm and composed, let us awaken to our True Self, become truly compassionate humans, make full use of our gifts according to our respective missions in life, discern the agony both individual and social and its source, recognise the right direction in which history should proceed, and join hands as brothers and sisters without distinctions of race, nation or class. Let us, with compassion, vow to bring to realisation humankind’s deep desire for Self-emancipation and construct a world in which everyone can truly and fully live’(16).

References

1. Daizen Victoria, ‘Japanese corporate Zen’. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 12(1) 1980, pp61-68.
2. Ken Jones, The Social Face of Buddhism, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1989.
3. Quoted in Christopher Ives, Zen Awakening and Society, London: Macmillan, 1992.
4. See, for example, Martine Batchelor and Kerry Brown, eds. Buddhism and Ecology, London: Cassell, 1992.
5. For the Tiep Hien precepts, see ref. (2), above, pp165-168.
6. Samyutta Nikaya, xii, 15. For an extended Buddhist treatment of political ideology, see Ken Jones, Beyond Optimism: a Buddhist Political Ecology, Oxford: Jon Carpenter, 1993.
7. Ajahn Buddhadasa, Dhammic Socialism, Bangkok: Thai InterReligious Commission for Development, 1986.
8. William Ophuls, ‘Political Values for an Age of Scarcity’ American Theosophist, 69(5) May 1981. For fuller treatment see his classic Ecology and the politics of scarcity, San Francisco: W.H.Freeman, 1977.
9. E.F.Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, London: Abacus, 1974.
10. See ref. (3), above, p71.
11. Seng-ts’an, ‘On Trust in the Heart‘ (‘Hsin-Hsin-Ming’) in Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959.
12. Quoted, with grateful acknowledgement to the author, from Kenneth White, Walking the Coast’ The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems, London: Penguin: 1990, p58.
13. See ref. (2), above, p190.
14. See ref. (3), above, p71.
15. Quoted in Christmas Humphreys, A Western Approach to Zen, London: Allen & Unwin, 1971, p192.
16. See ref. (3), above, p82.
17. Those who are uneasy about the new “politically correct” Buddhism will be cheered by John Stevens, Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex. Boston and London: Shambala.1990.
18. Helen Twerkov gives a useful overview of the debate in the US around these issues in the ‘Afterword’ of her updated Zen in America (Kodansha International 1994). See further in depth discussion in Tricycle, Spring and Summer 1994 numbers. See also Stuart Lachs, A Slice of Zen in America. New Ch’an Forum No 10 pp 12-20 Bristol Ch’an Group.