Our Jewish Zen Ingredients

Three of Maezumi Roshi’s first successors were Jewish, including my teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman. Accident or karma? I’m thinking now that it was karmic. I’m thinking about the importance of planting Buddhist seeds in Taoist China. Without the Taoist soil, there would have been no Zen. Maybe the American Jewish soil is important to the emergence of American Zen.

Maezumi Roshi brought to America the Zen that he’d imbibed growing up in a family of Japanese Soto Sect priests. He brought the monastic ethos of the Sect’s founder, Dogen Zenji, as it had transmuted over the centuries in Japan from monastic practice to an almost hereditary class of householder priests. Maezumi knew that he could not create American Zen. That would be up to his American successors. Here’s an example of that process.

Bernie taught me that in our lineage there were two tracks, a priest track and a teacher track. Priests are empowered to perform a variety of ceremonies – most importantly, weddings, funerals, and Jukai, the giving of the Buddhist precepts – while the teachers transmit the Dharma to the next generation of teachers. According to Bernie, one could pursue both tracks or only one. For many Zennies, at least at that time, this was apostasy. For them only Zen priests could become teachers, but among Bernie’s dharma successors were a rabbi, a Jesuit priest, and a Sufi sheik.

Bernie had ordained – it was an important step in Maezumi Roshi’s world, and then Bernie disrobed because, he told me, people were coming to him for answers which they could find only within themselves. Bernie was a teacher, not a mediator between his students and the divine, or as he would say – non-theistically – the universe. Was Bernie following a path marked out in Jewish history from the priestly class of ancient Judaism to non-priest teachers, rabbis? He never told me that was what he was doing. Was it only a half-remembered or forgotten ancestral trace? Either way, I think Bernie was on the right track, that the Zen teachers of the American future may well look a lot more like rabbis than priests.