Jun Po Roshi: Reworking Zen for a Culture That Isn't Japanese
The traditional path of Zen runs through a familiar set of right conduct: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right effort, right livelihood, right concentration, and on into meditation and Samadhi. It arrives wrapped in a particular culture. Part of the work is Koan study, and there are roughly 1,400 of the classical ones. That whole process is supposed to culminate in some settled way of being, some transformed behavior. But how do you actually grasp that? Are you watching it from the outside, still separate from it?
Think about what it means to take someone who hasn't woken up, who clings hard to a fixed idea of who they are, and try to rearrange their behavior from the outside. It breeds confusion. So I once made a crude joke. I said the trouble with both psychotherapy and Zen is that neither one works. I don't mean that literally. I said it to grab attention. What I mean is that the foundation underneath both is still muddled.
If you take yourself to be a self, a solid thing, instead of a passing process, you end up wrestling with yourself as some fixed entity. Your egocentric process is temporary. It runs inside the larger vehicle of consciousness. You are that consciousness. What you do with it depends entirely on how you interpret and answer what comes at you. So the real question is what counts as correct understanding.
People say, fine, throw out the bathwater and keep the baby. But who is this baby? And what does the baby have to do with anything Japanese? That brings it back to the basic question: what has to shift in the way you understand things?
So I took my classical training and compressed it. I folded in what I had learned from my own psychological awakening and the transformation that came with it, and I carried all of that into the Koan work, into a process of dialectic dialogue. It's a way to bring the old tradition into the present, to respect it and then weave it into the society we actually live in. We keep evolving. My master used to tell me there's no Zen outside Japanese culture. I told him there has to be. Nobody is going to turn Japanese to practice. The question is how you clean up the teaching, get down to what's fundamental, and offer it for liberation and transformation.
What I tell people is that your angst can become the thing that frees you. Fear is excitement and opening. Anger is sharp clarity and presence, not some violent lashing out. All of this happens through a dialectic dialogue you carry on inside yourself, where you take a stance. That redraws the map, you could call it a kind of neurolinguistic rewiring.
The ego can only respond with the memory structures it has stacked up across a lifetime. It reaches into the database and reacts. Reaches in again and reacts again. Over and over. Against that we use something we call Noknow. Spelled N-O-K-N-O-W. Noknow, and I take my seat.