Tricycle | Awake in the World

Sensei Enkyo O’Hara is abbot of the Village Zendo, in lower Manhattan. A Zen priest, she is a dharma heir in the Maezumi-Glassman line of the White Plum Asangha of Soto Zen Buddhism. She serves as an elder in the Zen Peacemaker Order, part of an interfaith network integrating spiritual practice with peacemaking and social action. Sensei O'Hara spoke with Tricycle in November 2002.

In the current political climate, a lot of people feel compelled to take a stand in one way or another. As someone who has been engaged in political and social action, how do you as a Zen teacher view taking a stand? In Zen—and I’m not talking about Buddhism, I’m talking about Zen—a primary teaching is that there is no one way. The minute you hold to any one principle to the exclusion of others, you’ve missed the point. The freedom Zen offers is to realize that moment to moment you have to make a decision, so moment to moment you have to decide whether you’re going to march against, say, your government’s policies, or whether you’re going to support them in whatever way you can. But you can’t make a rule, lay down a principle, and say, “This is what Buddhism says about war,” “This is what Buddhism says about this issue or that,” because immediately what arises before you is the other side. This is a very difficult idea to accept: although we all want a path, a right way, we can’t have the kind of certainty we crave. There’s always the other side. And that’s also true about what you think enlightenment is and what you think a good practice-life is.

When you say that you decide from moment to moment where you stand on a particular issue, what is the standard you’re holding yourself to? That question is the heart of the matter. You just have to trust that your practice, your awareness of your oneness with all beings, and your compassion will be activated in each moment. And also know that of course you have to act, and you may not be acting appropriately. There’s always that edge that you’re walking; and the awareness of that edge is very helpful because then you’re not fixed on the notion that you’re right. It’s a hard one, and many people—certainly Zen students and teachers—have made many mistakes. That’s why we have a meditation practice; we have something that allows us to get in touch with the universal, the absolute nature of our being, that allows us to act compassionately.

What do you mean when you say that a lot of Buddhists have made mistakes? What are you thinking of? I’m thinking of the Japanese Zen teachers in my own lineage during World War II, and in particular, Yasutani Roshi. Yasutani Roshi encouraged the Japanese to go to war, and I believe that that was a mistake. There were even others before him who encouraged the invasion of China.

And yet Yasutani Roshi certainly practiced. How do we make sense of that? Again, there is nowhere to stand. I can’t make sense of it. But I can be aware that no matter how clear I think I am, there is another side that I don’t see. There is always an opportunity to look into “the other,” the “enemy,” and discover oneself. How can I explain how Yasutani Roshi got caught up in the patriotic fervor of the time and encouraged killing? Here is a man who had recently completed his formal Zen studies, which teach interrelation, the merging of self and other. And yet he became attached to an idea of self against other. Even more paradoxically, he later became a remarkable teacher.

We all want to idealize our teachers, and we want to idealize enlightenment, and ourselves. What happens is we set things up so that there is enlightenment, and there’s this teacher who’s going to give it to us, and that teacher has to be perfect and we have to be perfect. And of course, it makes it impossible for us to practice, and to have compassion for ourselves and for others. The fact is, we’re all human. And enlightenment does not bestow perfection. There’s no such thing as perfection. There are different teachers with different issues, but always there’s something there. I think of the wonderful teaching of the lotus in the mud: It grows from the muck below and blossoms as a beautiful, pristine flower above. All of us have our feet in the stinking mud, and yet there is an opportunity to offer our lives, however imperfect they are, to others. We can offer our teachings, our compassion.

I think that the most disempowering thing in spiritual traditions is to act as if enlightenment is some sort of perfection and that enlightened people are perfect—and they’re not. My teacher, Maezumi Roshi, was far from perfect, but he was a great teacher. He was intimate, and he was intimate with his own suffering, as well as that of people he worked with.

I guess we would expect to associate enlightenment with perfection, free of flaws. What does it mean then? There’s this wonderful koan that is about just this: “The buffalo passes through the window; his horns pass through, his head, his front legs pass through, his hind legs, but the tail doesn’t. Why is that?” And then the koan’s poem has the line, “So much depends on this precious tail.” [laughs] What doesn’t pass through is that which makes us human and that which allows us to teach, to really reach others. It’s complex, but that’s how I see it.