Another factor accounting for online rancor may be blogs and teaching websites that promote an in-your-face attitude, says McLeod. “When people are meeting you through your website, that’s their first contact with you, and it had better represent you,” he says. Blogs and discussion forums open to the entire Internet encourage comments from total strangers, and while this often leads to cordial discussion, it also attracts people dedicated to having the last word—the know-it-alls who delight in denigrating others while touting their own dharmic understanding.

Brad Warner, a Soto Zen teacher and the author of several books, has seen this firsthand. In a recent thread on Warner’s Hardcore Zen blog, for example, a reader advised Warner to

shut the fuck up and go meditate. if you are really a buddhist monk you wouldn’t waste your time on a fucking internet forum. don’t judge others, judge yourself in meditation.

Interestingly, the reader’s tone mirrors some of Warner’s own posts. He has, for example, called the prominent Soto Zen teacher Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi “a scumbag” and “a slime ball” in critiquing Merzel’s controversial Big Mind program. Warner’s posts often draw hundreds of comments from readers, some of whom throw insults at each other—and at Warner—with abandon. Warner justifies his own outrageous rhetoric as an unconventional way of making a serious point, tracing his writing style to his roots as a 1980s punk-rock musician and journalist. “That’s the way you wrote in punk zines, and it was understood within that community that you called a friend a scumbag and everybody would laugh about it,” he says. (Warner and Genpo Roshi, it should be noted, are not friends.)

For some readers, Warner contends, these barbed public exchanges help to deflate idealized perceptions of Buddhist teachers, and that’s a good thing. If someone rejects Buddhism after stumbling across an online debate, “They’re walking away from a fantasy of Buddhism,” he says. “That’s O.K. They’re not going to find that anyway, so it sort of speeds up the process.” But it is really necessary to drive them away with a stick?

Shinge Roshi takes a dim view of the whole dharmateachers- with-attitude phenomenon. “If you see ‘Buddhist teachers’ getting caught in an angry give-and-take, they’re not teachers—or if they are, they never should have been given transmission,” she says. “How can you cast these terrible aspersions on others without bringing shame on your own lineage? That’s really what I’m struck by—that people seem to be oblivious to the karmic results of their actions and their words.

“Karmically, I think it’s quite dangerous,” Shinge Roshi continues. “It is easy to be swept away. People can get into righteous states of indignation very quickly. When there is no one looking in their eyes, when there is no face across from them seizing up with horror, it’s easy to continue.”

James Ishmael Ford is more sanguine about Buddhism’s move to the Internet, especially when taking the long view. “I think that, on balance, more good will come out of this than harm,” he says. “I think it’s bad for many of the people participating, I think a level of misinformation is ubiquitous, and I think it’s very exciting.”

Zenshin Michael Haederle is a Rinzai Zen lay monk and a widely published journalist who has taught at Syracuse University. His last article for Tricycle, “This Is Your Brain on Zen,” appeared in the Fall 2009 issue.

Image © Stephen Kroninger

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