Buddhism, activism, and Unknowing: a day with Bernie Glassman

·期刊原文

Buddhism, activism, and Unknowing: a day with Bernie Glassman
(interview with Zen Peacemaker Order founder)

by Christopher Queen, Tikkun

Vol.13 No.1 , Jan-Feb 1998 , Pp.64-66

Copyright @ Institute for Labor and Mental Health

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A Day with Bernie Glassman
Since the 1980s, Roshi Bernard Glassman has become a familiar figure
to readers of Buddhist journals like Tricycle and Shambhala Sun. But
now the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Time magazine
can scarcely report on the explosion of interest in American
Buddhism without mentioning "street retreats" - penniless week-long
excursions into lower Manhattan led by Roshi Bernie - and the
Greyston Foundation, a mandala of for-profit and not-for-profit
businesses that serve the poor in Glassman's adopted neighborhood of
Yonkers, NY. Indeed, the vision of urban renewal and human
reclamation only dimly imagined by Sixties radicals is vividly
embodied in the work Glassman and his community have done in this
often forgotten corner of affluent Westchester County.

The Peacemakers
The Zen Peacemaker Order was founded in the summer of 1996 by Roshi
Bernie Glassman and his wife, Sensei Jishu Holmes. The order is
based on three principles: plunging into the unknown, bearing
witness to the pain and joy of the world, and a commitment to heal
oneself and the world. As a university lecturer on Buddhism, I have
followed what Glassman and others have written about the rise of
socially engaged Buddhism in the West. His is a particularly good
story: a Jewish boy from Brighton Beach becomes head priest and
teacher of a major branch of Japanese Soto Zen, then contributes to
a worldwide shift in the practice of Buddhism - from a religion of
contemplative retreat and devotion to one that plunges into direct
engagement with society's discarded people, places, and problems.
Glassman started his work with those on the fringes in the 1980s,
with the Greyston Mandala. Then, the Greyston network of companies
and agencies committed to community development were fragile
startups. Today, the thriving organizations include the Greyston
Family Inn, with fifty units of permanent housing and a handsome
street-level daycare center serving fifty children; the Greyston
Bakery, a million-dollar gourmet confectioner providing job training
and employment to homeless and formerly homeless men and women;
Greyston Builders, specializing in the renovation of affordable
housing; Maitri Center and Issan House, a housing center and walk-in
clinic for people with AIDS and HIV; and Pamsula, a handicrafts
company that recycles used and discarded clothing, providing
employment for low-income women. Still growing without Bernie's
direct involvement, the Greyston Mandala is now renovating two
abandoned apartment buildings.

When I arrive in Yonkers, the Peacemaker community, which today
includes Zen teacher and hospice movement leader, Joan Halifax, is
sitting down to a picnic dinner. Some order members speak of their
plans to return to Oswiecim, Poland, for another Thanksgiving
retreat at Auschwitz and Birkenau. This, they say, is the experience
of bearing witness. Bernie is chatting affably with tablemates and
working on a plate of salad, beans, and rice. He's beginning to let
his hair and beard grow out in preparation for an upcoming street
retreat. He welcomes the newcomer warmly without being effusive. A
complete stranger, walking in, would see that Bernie was at the
center of everything, and then wonder how he does it.

Gazing around the room at the thirty order members, candidates,
students, and visitors, I am reminded of a time when small
gatherings of spiritual seekers and social misfits sat on the floors
of city brownstones, sharing visions of a new America and a world at
peace. In those days, the politics and religion were inchoate and
raw, like the drunken ravings of Jack Kerouac's Ray Smith and Japhy
Ryder and the angry memoirs of Malcolm X. Today's group is
infinitely more evolved - Buddhists with a sense of history
stretching back 2,500 years and deep feelings for the mystery of
life in its most extreme manifestations.

Later, in the Peacemaker Order's offices, I leaf through voluminous
notebooks outlining its scope: mission and vision statements,
business plans, and endless committee and board minutes and reports.
I read about a growing network of Peacemaker Villages, local groups
engaged in service and activism affiliated with the Peacemaker Order
through publications, funding arrangements, training, and planning.
Some include Upaya, a foundation headed by Joan Halifax devoted to
death and dying hospice work and environmental activism; the Latino
Pastoral Action Center devoted to inner city community development;
and the Prison Peacemaker Village, which has created a hospice
network in prisons.

I learn of plans for a Peacemaker Institute, which will offer
practical training in peace activism, mediation, community
development; academic study of peacemaking traditions; conferences
and internships for practitioners; a peace library, web site, and
publications; and a Children's Peace School.

Then, I make my way to the Glassman-Holmes home where a
space-age-chiropractic-massage-and-vibrating-lounger-chair with
NASA-style controls rests in a corner. An electrically heated,
liquid-filled toilet seat graces the bathroom. I tease the Roshi of
the Streets about these Sharper Image catalogue items. "Jishu gave
me the toilet seat for my birthday," he shamelessly replies. We
settle down on couches to talk.

The Interview
QUEEN: What is engaged Buddhism, anyway? Some people say your street
retreats are just consciousness-raising for the rich - you don't
hand out blankets or food - in fact you soak up some of the limited
good will that still exists on the streets of lower Manhattan.
GLASSMAN: The same question could be raised about the Buddha. How
did he benefit mankind by sitting in meditation? This is a problem
with the term "engaged Buddhism" in a broad sense. Anything anyone
is doing to make themselves whole in their own life, or realizing
the Way, or becoming enlightened - whatever term you would use -
these are all involved in service, because if we realize the oneness
of life, then each person is serving every other person and is
reducing suffering.

QUEEN: You and Thich Nhat Hanh [a Vietnamese monk who works with
American veterans of the Vietnam War] are very non-dualistic about
this: not separating your own suffering and its relief from that of
others. But Dr. Ambedkar, the Untouchable leader in India during the
fight for independence, said no religion should romanticize poverty.
Aren't you doing that by spending a week on the street and then
coming home to a hot shower?

GLASSMAN: I think that the person who has lived with the
Untouchables can work with the Untouchables in a way that others
cannot. You can't become Untouchable in this way, of course. At the
same time I believe that those who came out of that experience have
a deeper understanding of it, and we should learn from them. I want
to figure out how to learn from those who have suffered in a certain
way, even though I can't fully enter that realm. So we go on the
streets. ! know we aren't homeless and I make that quite clear. At
the same time, those who come will experience something that is
closer to that world than those who haven't been there. This is the
meaning of "bearing witness." It's like entering a church knowing
you're not God or the priest. But you will experience something
different from someone who stays out of the church or someone who is
just hired to fix the roof.

The Magnet of Suffering
QUEEN: Why are you attracted to places of great suffering - the
inner city, Auschwitz, the notorious needle park called the Letten
in Zurich where thousands of junkies used to buy, sell, and shoot up
in broad daylight?

GLASSMAN: I don't know. The words that come to me are the desire to
learn. I don't know what it is, but it happens a lot to me when I
encounter a situation I don't understand. It generally involves
suffering. When I enter a situation that is too much for me and that
I don't understand - I have a desire to sit there, to stay a while.
QUEEN: You talk about an energy that surrounds such places.
GLASSMAN: Yeah. There's a magnet that pulls me so that I want to
stay there. I haven't figured it out, but I'm not sure it's so
unusual.

QUEEN: Is it possible to imagine a twisted individual who derives
some kind of sadistic pleasure from being near human pain and
suffering?

GLASSMAN: Sure. But the people and situations I'm talking about are
a metaphor for our whole society - all the attachments and
addictions. In the drug zone in Zurich the metaphor is so naked you
couldn't miss it unless you ran away. You had addicts shooting up
and dealers making money from their suffering. A few blocks away
were the large banks laundering the dealers' money, with the good
citizens of Zurich looking away, trusting their police to keep
everything under control. But if you stayed and looked, then the
human condition is laid more bare there than it is in a bank lobby.

Unknowing
QUEEN: Let's talk about the first precept of your order, Unknowing.
You have a Ph.D. in mathematics and have acquired expertise in
countless areas of Buddhist teaching and practice, psychology,
business management, finance, and so on. Yet you teach Unknowing. Is
this some kind of a Zen trick?

GLASSMAN: In Zen the words source and essence are the equivalent of
Unknowing, and they come up again and again. We have the absolute
and the relative perspectives about life, and Unknowing is the one
source of both of these.

QUEEN: Early Buddhism in India is very comfortable with notions of
knowledge, wisdom, and technique. Yoga, meditation, and philosophy
were all developed by experts, the virtuoso monks. But in China a
mistrust of words and concepts and intellectualism came into the
early Zen tradition from Taoism and we hear about book-burnings and
Zen masters who do wild, irrational things to break their students'
dependency on logic and learning. Is this part of Unknowing for you?

GLASSMAN: Yes, and for me it fits in with my Jewish background. In
contrast to the whole rabbinical tradition of Talmudic learning and
scholarship comes the mystical tradition of Kabbalah and Chasidism,
where all the earthly qualities and emanations come from the
infinite Ein Sof. And the Sufis have some of the same ideas. But the
important thing is that Unknowing was emphasized by my teacher
Maezumi Roshi, and it fits my temperament. It just makes so much
sense to start from Unknowing.

QUEEN: But how does this work when you are dealing with people with
no educational opportunities, who have a desperate need for
knowledge and expertise? Ambedkar was just as jealous for education
as he was for economic opportunities for the Untouchables who
converted to Buddhism in 1956.

GLASSMAN: Yeah. But the other side must be stressed. At every moment
one starts from unknowing so that all the acquired knowledge will
arise spontaneously and be used in a new, creative way.

Life in Community
That evening, the Peacemaker community participates in evening
exercises. The program was a full-dress rehearsal of the Kanromon,
"The Gate of Sweet Nectar," a traditional Zen ceremony for feeding
the hungry spirits, chanted partly in Japanese and partly in English
translation. Roshi Bernie, Sensei Jishu, and several senior order
members are in full priestly regalia, while others wear the Zen
student's bib, or rakusa. An orchestra of gongs, bells, and wood
blocks is positioned near the door to accompany the formal
procession, liturgical movements, and periodic gassho, or bowing.
Choreography is everything here, but the places, movements, and
sequences are still being worked out, as Roshi frequently stops the
whole thing to correct the person playing the wood block or the
person rounding the line of officiants slightly late.

Now, curiously, Bernard Glassman seems to be fully in his element,
teaching a motley but earnest assembly of middle-aged Americans how
to bow and play the gong, to invoke the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,
and to appropriate and internalize the tenets and precepts of
engaged Buddhism for the twenty-first century of the Common Era and
the twenty-sixth century of the Shakyamuni Buddha Era.
Attention! Attention!

Raising the Budhi Mind, the supreme meal is offered to all the
hungry spirits in the ten directions throughout space and time,
filling the smallest particle to the largest space.
All you hungry spirits in the ten directions, please gather here.
Sharing your distress, I offer you this food, hoping it will resolve
your thirsts and hungers.

Christopher Queen is Dean of Students for Continuing Education and
Lecturer on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. He is
co-editor of Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia
(SUNY Press, 1996).