Rev. Danny Fisher

Today’s quote is from our friend and past interviewee the Venerable Kobutsu Malone, an American Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest, co-founder of the Engaged Zen Foundation, and author of Prison Chaplaincy Guidelines for Zen Buddhism: A Source Book for Prison Chaplains, Administrators, and Security Personnel.  This is it:

In the beginning we may feel that we “have” something called a “personal practice” that involves sitting alone in formal posture every day or multiple times daily. But what’s “personal” about it?

The posed question seems to differentiate between “personal” and “engaged” by implication. The notion that “engaged Buddhism” involves sacrifice begs examination.

Engaged Buddhism is not a “flavor” of Buddhism that we can choose as if we are at a “Buddhist” ice cream counter. “I’ll have a scoop of engaged and a scoop of personal… with sprinkles please!” Engaged practice is not about “choosing” to be “engaged” or not, more likely engaged practice chooses us. It does so often despite our preferences, despite the path we may have planned out in our own heads for our spiritual journey. We might bear this in mind; that our ambitions and projections onto our “path” are most likely hindrances that will eventually have to be burned through in a long painful process.

In the beginning we may have some idea that we somehow “want” to be engaged Buddhists. If we are smart, we will view such ambition with a high degree of suspicion. It is very much a part of the miasma, part of the entangling briars of ego that we have to work through. Examination and questioning is never ending on this way, complacency is a stone in the road that crops up over and over again. Unless we learn to be observant, unless we pay close attention we will find ourselves wandering into states of arrogance, deluded thinking and becoming invested in maintaining some status quo.

Engaged practice is perhaps something that develops out of what has been called “personal practice” it is about practice for the benefit of others and the benefit of society as a whole regardless our own personal benefit. It requires a familiarity with the traps and pitfalls we encounter in contemplative practice and cannot be properly manifest without having gone through the preliminary process of gaining familiarity with our own “personal” neurosis. This is why it is important to view the practice of contemplative training as an effort in becoming familiar with and making friends with all of the elements of mind that prevent us from seeing things clearly and precisely as they are. Neurosis can be quite aptly defined as the refusal to see things clearly and precisely as they are.