Jun Po Roshi on Concentration Practice and the Future of Zen (Interview Archive)

Zen comes down to a handful of surviving schools, three in total, though only two have much presence in the United States. One is Rinzai, which is the line I belong to. We work with koan, those riddling questions that give the mind something to grip while it concentrates. The Soto school rejects that approach. They call koan work kika-onza, a kind of muddled effort, and insist instead on shikantaza, which simply means sitting and nothing added. From what I have seen in myself and in those around me, plain sitting tends to go slack. The mind wanders off wherever it wants.

Soto is the bigger of the two schools. People like to ask which method actually works better, and the honest answer is that both of them take roughly twenty years. Whether you sit or you concentrate, you will eventually and unavoidably drop into stillness. We say concentration gets you there with less waste. For my own temperament it was simply required, so I have kept at it. Concentration is the vehicle that steadies insight and steadies the mind itself.

When the mind goes completely quiet and firm, something shifts. You stop staring at the finger that points toward the moon and start receiving the moonlight directly. That light then pours through the whole egocentric structure and lights it up from inside. Ego, by the way, is not the villain here. It is a process rather than a self, a passing reflective activity that sorts and interprets circumstance. It runs on inherited machinery: survival, reproduction, the patterns bred into us, layered over with whatever came down through family and then through the wider culture.

Erik: Part of why we wanted you at this conference is that there are so many teachers in the Zen tradition we might have invited, yet you seem to carry a lot of Western material into the room. I know integral theory is something you know well, and you keep referencing genetics, primate drives, that kind of thing. So where does Zen go from here? Can that sort of awareness actually be set into this kind of map? How does it take root and spread as a modern Zen? What does modern Zen even look like?

Jun Po: Here is what happened. Once I received Inka at the monastery, which is the formal acknowledgment that mind has been transmitted, I realized I had a problem on my hands. There was a puzzle to solve, and the work of solving it fell to me. There I was in Chinese and Japanese robes, sitting in a monastery, eating sushi, the full Japanese cultural package. The Japanese are a beautiful people. They also carry racism, sexism, and imperialism, and in certain respects they remain fairly constrained by all of it.

And suddenly the task was mine: take this revolutionary, awakening dharma and bring it into America. How do you actually do that? How do you meet the particular difficulties and knots of this place? Zen as I inherited it did not come equipped for the job.