Diane Hamilton on Zen, Meditation, and Practice in the West
Erik opened by asking Diane what it has been like to become a recognized Zen teacher as a Westerner, someone whose practice is no longer tied to the world of Japan. Diane thanked him and started with a bit of lineage. Like every religious tradition, Buddhism carries a long memory, something like 82 or 83 generations back. The Soto school, the branch in which she holds transmission as a teacher, also reaches back many centuries in Japan.
She pointed to something that happened much more recently and much closer to home. In the late 1960s and into the '70s, there was a kind of opening in American consciousness, and a lot of artists and thinkers were drawn to Zen ideas. Alan Watts was one of them. The Beat poets were another current. Figures like these were already shaping the culture, and through them Zen entered American life more or less detached from the institution of the Soto school itself.
That detachment matters, she explained, because it changes who ends up practicing. In Japan, China, Korea, or India, a person might simply grow up Buddhist, carried into it by their parents and the temple their family already belonged to. The pattern in the West runs the other direction. Most people who took up Zen study here were not raised in Buddhist homes. You could fairly describe many of them as religious rebels, people who arrived at the practice by choice rather than inheritance.
So there is a sharp difference between becoming a Zen teacher in Japan and becoming one in the United States. The Western practitioner has to decide, deliberately and on their own terms, how they are going to practice and how closely they want to tie themselves to the Japanese institution. Because of that, teachers across America and the West sit at all sorts of distances from the Soto school. Some stay tightly linked, others much less so.
For her own part, Diane described herself as closely connected to the institution within the States, though she has not worked hard to build a formal connection to the institution back in Japan. Reaching that standard, she noted, is demanding. It asks for a practice that carries the Japanese forms with real precision and care. She apologized for the length of the answer.
The conversation then had a small practical hiccup. Erik mentioned that something was coming through unevenly, maybe a tap on the microphone or the table. Diane confirmed she had been tapping on the table. With that sorted out, Erik asked her to say a little about the overall scope of her work and what she had come to share.