The Ecstasy
of Piety
by Douglas Milburn

People travel either to get away from or to go toward.

I went to China to go toward.

Explanation: A life of questing had led me finally to the roots of Zen. I had always been put off by the grumpy, quasi-militaristic, authoritarian elements of Zen as we had got it in America.

I was surprised and pleased when I discovered that American Zen is Japanese Zen, which is what the folks who would later bring us one-half of World War II came up with when they imported and applied the Nipponese mind-set to Chan Buddhism from China not long after the turn of the previous millennium.

"Chan" by the way means "sitting." It does not mean "sitting while guru shouts at or strikes you or queries you mercilessly with pretentiously inane verbal games."

The name comes from the legendary behavior of the legendary founder, Bodhidharma, who allegedly achieved enlightenment after sitting facing the wall of his cave for x years. Just sitting.

Fortunately, he left a few notes, and those who followed him left a few more notes, which together became the "scripture" on which Chan Buddhism (and the bizarre Nipponese take on it known as Zen) rests.

My own path had led me from the American transcendentalists (Thoreau, Emerson) to European mysticism (Blake, Juan de la Cruz, Eckhart, Hildegard, Teresa, et al.), thence to the Middle East (Rami, the Sufis), to India (Patanjali, the Vedas, the Bagavad Gita) and the various Buddhisms (North, South, Tibetan).

Shards of meaning, scraps of hope, fragments of guidance came from this sifting and winnowing. Only yoga came close to the unified, all-encompassing system I was seeking. But even yoga was splintered.

Everywhere I looked I found the same mess that had sent me running from the Bible: old, old records, memorized and re-memorized, copied and re-copied, whose truths which maybe once were more plainly visible had been obscured across time by either editors with their own political agendas, or by copyists just worn to a careless frazzle by their thankless task, or by the memory lapses of aging sages suffering from undiagnosed Alzheimer's.

Page 2: Off to China > >

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