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By Root 723 0

Traditionally it’s supposed to take place after midnight. But Nishijima doesn’t like to stay up that late, so the fun began at 8:30 in the evening. I pretty much got every single step in the ceremony completely wrong. My kesa kept sliding off my shoulder, I kept putting the little mat-thingy you’re supposed to kneel down on the wrong way around, I nearly klonked heads with Nishijima when we were bowing to each other—pure comedy.

But I got through it and Nishijima gave me my certificate back with all the necessary seals on it—and, badda bing, badda boom, I’m a certified Zen master.

LET ME TELL YOU THIS THOUGH: No one masters Zen. Ever. It’s a lifelong, never-ending continuously unfolding process. Zen master is a horribly misleading term.

Could we dispense with Zen masters? Certainly. Could we dispense with the Dharma Transmission ceremony altogether? Sure. And we could dispense with the word Buddhism too. Personally, I’d like to get rid of all of them. Ultimately, none of it has anything to do with what matters.

Gautama Buddha was able to see through the façade of religious organizations and must certainly have realized that his simple method of meditation ran a serious risk of being turned into something cheap and shoddy by association with such nonsense. In fact he predicted his own order’s eventual demise. Yet he went ahead and established an order of monks, and one of nuns, anyhow. He knew it was the best way to transmit what he had found to future generations. It worked, too—for all the cheap gaudiness that surrounds much of what passes for “Buddhism” today, Buddhism works. Real Buddhism still makes it through the institutional Buddhist muck, like a flower blooming out of a cow-pie.

No matter how many dumb-asses there are running around with shaved heads and robes who wouldn’t know enlightenment from a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, there are some people within Buddhism who know exactly what it was Gautama Buddha was trying to teach. And these people, these real Buddhist teachers, also know better than to believe in the institutional façade referred to as “Buddhism.” And they know this precisely because of the social organization known as Buddhism. Neat, eh?

Any good Zen Buddhist teacher will tell you right up front that the whole Zen Buddhist shebang, from robes to enlightenment to Dharma Transmission, is really a sham, ultimately not important in the least. And that’s what makes Zen Buddhism different from every other religion. As Johnny Rotten said in MOJO magazine, “It isn’t a rip-off if you tell everybody it’s a rip-off.” Authority is easily abused. But authority can do good. It takes power to make the real changes needed in the world. A good person who is good at dealing with power can make the world a better place for everyone.

Buddhism, though, should go beyond that. Buddhism is about letting people know they do not need to follow any authority. If you think you need an authority figure, go somewhere else.

The tendency to look at Buddhist teachers as Authorities is tough to avoid. I noticed my teachers were different from me in some vague way I couldn’t really understand, and so I gave them Authority. But, God bless ‘em, they always tossed it right back to me. That’s what any good Buddhist teacher does. That’s the easiest way to tell the real teachers from the phonies: a phony will take your authority and a real teacher will give it back.

There are times I’ve felt I could do certain people some good if only I could get them to see me as some kind of authority—but that kind of attitude isn’t right. A faith-healer makes people believe he has a special power to cure their sickness and if they believe that strongly enough, they may be able to transcend their own inability to see that they themselves have the power to affect their own cure. The problem is that they then attribute their miraculous healing to the faith-healer instead of to themselves thereby depriving themselves of the power that was already theirs to begin with.

Ultimately it’s always better to make people see how they can heal themselves.