Adapting and arguing

There is always a clash between the traditionalist and the modernist. Does that sound simple enough? Of course it is just a flashy generalisation but it's fine for a start.

As I've been involved in the Zen part of Buddhism it's become clear that those who actually study Zen can hardly agree with what goes on in the name of the so called patriarchs. A huge percent of Zen - an I'm not talking about gadgets and furnitures - is just crap. There are teachers and groups who are supposedly the real thing, the representatives of authentic transmission, but actually talk and practice something they've just made up, or their teachers did. It doesn't really matter. So if I criticise modern Zen in this way I'm either a scholar or a traditionalist, or perhaps someone who actually knows what Zen is which means that I'm a Zen follower myself believing in his own truth. Of course, if I didn't believe it I'd be a scholar and not a Buddhist.

Now, the interesting thing about this difference in approaches is that it exists in all forms of Buddhism, from Theravada to Dzogchen. And that is a good thing. It keeps the Dharma alive. People on either side may think that the others are sorely mistaken - obviously they are - but then this conversation between the two requires constant adaptation and arguing. Adaptation is good because it makes it necessary for the standpoints to try to get closer to an imaginary middle ground, which they will never reach, but in the process both sides integrate elements from each other making their own approach accessible to a larger group. Arguing is good too because it motivates everyone to clarify and explain points to a greater detail making it better understood even by those who defend it.

To appreciate the situation we should think about the great masters of whichever sect and see how they were in their times the "radical reformists". But what was once an idea of a minority of marginal thinkers can develop into orthodoxy - and this is natural selection within religion. Through adaptation and arguments a new school is built and integrated into the larger Buddhism. One or two of today's extremist teachers might end up centuries later as patron saints of a by then influential tradition. But of course that future tradition won't be much like what today they say, because it has evolved - argued and adapted.

This view of "religious evolution" can actually help us appreciate our opponents in whatever sect we follow. Also, it should server as a motivation to look at our own tradition not as something perennial but rather as a result of centuries, or even millennia of development that involved innumerable factors from geographical position to socio-political events. And at the same time, just because we're not trying to cultivate pure philosophy here, there is always the transmission from mind to mind, something that one can experience only for himself. This is what was once defined by the Buddha as essential for the teaching to stay alive, the attainment of the different levels of insight into the true nature of reality. And that insight, just like the noble path itself, is eternal.