THE Avatamsaka (or A wonderful flower arrangement) SutraThe Buddha says that “all sentient beings are fully endowed with the wisdom and virtues of the Buddhas,” but “due to delusions and attachments, they do not realize this.” Tenshin Reb Anderson – Shunryu Suzuki’s student, abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, then co-abbot from 1986 to 1995, and currently the leading dharma teacher there – opens his latest book, Nothing to Achieve: Zen Stories of Faith and Understanding, with this teaching forming the core of the book (and arguably of Anderson’s Zen teachings more broadly). The teaching, Anderson writes, is both that “we have nothing to achieve and we must engage in the great work of shedding misconceptions and attachments.”
To illustrate this, Anderson presents a translation/adaptation of the parable of the destitute child, the fourth chapter the Lotus Silk (the title of which “Faith and Understanding” is the subtitle of this book). In this parable, a boy wanders away from home and remains lost for fifty years. When he returns, the father recognizes the boy, but the boy, afraid of the riches and not recognizing his father, tries to escape. He eventually returns to take a job shoveling manure, and over time receives more and more honors from his father, whom he still doesn’t recognize, until the father finally reveals their relationship and names his son as his heir. The treasures “came to the son of himself,” writes Anderson at the end of the parable, without the son “intending to acquire them.”
For Anderson, the parable allegorizes spiritual practice: we have an “original home from which we have wandered” to which we can return through “purposeful practices” and finally a “transition to the true selfless practice of the Buddhas, which is our family business.” The rest of the book presents the parable through excerpts from other Zen scriptures, as well as anecdotes from Anderson’s life (including many reminiscences by Shunryu Suzuki), following the same path as the parable of the wandering son, the original home, wandering, shoveling manure, and the implications of the family business metaphor in spiritual practice.
Bar There is nothing to achieve Including the endnotes, it is a good introduction to the teachings and history of Zen in just under two hundred pages. Readers will meet the ancestors of Zen from early Chinese history, including the legendary first ancestor Bodhidharma, and Mazu, Yangshan, Guishan, and Dongshan, who lived and taught in the 8th.th and 9th century, during the Chinese Tang Dynasty, through Dogen and Hakuin. Anderson generally uses Chinese, rather than Japanese, names for these early figures, which, depending on the reader’s Zen background, may make it difficult at first to recognize some of the figures some may know from koan study, such as Juzhi (Gutei), Zhaozhou (Joshu), and Xuefeng (Seppo). Many of these stories are Anderson’s translations, or occasionally adaptations, from earlier English translations such as those by Thomas Cleary. Serenity’s book. As a translator/adapter, Anderson seems to belong to the school that values accessibility over exact fidelity to the original; It is this approach that makes the book as interesting to newer practitioners as it is to those already experienced in reading more rigorous translations of Zen’s basic texts.
The stories Anderson tells about his own life progression are more or less chronological, giving a general outline of his life. Anderson spent his early years in Minnesota, where he first encountered Zen in the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Paul Reps, 1957) while studying psychology at the University of Minnesota. After an early inkling of “the intimate connection between the quality of our posture and the quality of our mind” and sensing that the studies he wanted were beyond the purview of the university, he decided to leave graduate school for the San Francisco Zen Center (which he had visited before) after seeing his graduate advisor bow to a McDonald’s question at McDonald’s. Anderson practiced there in San Francisco under Shunryu Suzuki (whose importance in bringing Zen to America would be hard to overestimate) and received the name Tenshin dharma, which itself has some history, including Suzuki’s initial explanation of its meaning: “Reb a Reb.” Even five and a half decades after Suzuki’s death in 1971, Anderson’s respect for his teacher is evident; that There is nothing to achieve offers more stories about Suzuki, for which we are truly grateful.
Not all significant events in Anderson’s life are mentioned in the San Francisco Zen Center There is nothing to achieve. There were shortcomings, and how one feels about them can be decisive in how one feels about Anderson as a person and as a teacher of the dharma.
In 1987, shortly after being appointed to succeed Dainin Katagiri as abbot of the Zen Center, Anderson was arrested for brandishing a firearm. Anderson claimed that after he was robbed, he went home to get an unloaded gun, then chased the robber and threatened him with the unloaded gun. He took a six-month voluntary leave of absence from his post as abbot, and when he returned in 1988, he served as co-abbot with Sojun Mel Weitsman until 1995.
However, the gun incident began four years earlier, shortly after Anderson received dharma transmission from Zentatsu Richard Baker (although Baker denied that Anderson had completed the process) and around the time Baker resigned as abbot amid allegations of an affair. In his 2001 book Straighten Up: Zen Meditation and the Precepts of the BodhisattvaAnderson claims that while jogging in Golden Gate Park, he found the gun along with the body of a man who appeared to have committed suicide and sat in zazen with the body with the intention of “going back and sitting on (his) body and eventually calling the police.” Anderson claims that after his third visit to sit zazen with the dead man, he told a police officer, and on the fourth visit he took the gun home. Even if we accept Anderson’s account, there is enough “arrogance and inflation” (as he calls it Standing up) to raise doubts about his integrity; Given the implausibility of much of the story, and the fact that no one can back it up except for the brandishing that got him arrested, one might wonder what really happened.
Arguably, the obscurity surrounding Anderson’s dharma transmission (and the fact that the transmission comes through Baker, himself a controversial figure) and the armed failure disqualify Anderson from being a Zen teacher. Probably opposed to this is the opinion that Anderson has done penance sufficiently and that the respect of other Zen teachers (several of whom have spoken There is nothing to achieve) indicates that he is a respected teacher and his writings are worth paying attention to. Zen teaches that existence is paradoxical, that everyone possesses an innate Buddha-nature but is also fallible and subject to error, that, as Anderson puts it, “all beings live together in a sea of suffering,” and so perhaps the best approach is to acknowledge Anderson’s shortcomings and that he nonetheless has valuable teachings.
Ultimately, however, Zen consists of exercises in body and mind, not study alone. To such an extent There is nothing to achieve points you back to the principles of Zen, introduces newcomers to some ancestors, or gives new insights to the more experienced, this is a good book and well worth reading. However, what is important to remember is what Anderson writes in the last paragraph of the book, that “nothing can be achieved and everything must be accomplished.”
