‘The Three Pillars of Zen’: An American Goes to Japan
A review of ‘The Three Pillars of Zen’, by Philip Kapleau; Beacon Press, 1965.
Philip Kapleau was the chief Allied court reporter at both the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials. It was in Japan that he got interested in Zen Buddhism. Back in the States he explored this interest, namely by attending talks given by D.T. Suzuki; but soon he got fed up with what he saw as the over-intellectual treatment of Zen, and so in 1953, he moved to Japan to get properly to grips with it.
The publishers of The Three Pillars of Zen, released in 1965, billed it as the first real look behind the curtain of Japanese Zen. More still: it promised enlightenment. Publishers do tend to over-promise; but even for them, that claim seems a little bold. In any case, we can be sure that most readers of The Three Pillars (including, alas, this one) have not attained enlightenment. But the book’s influence on American Buddhism has been profound.
Publishers tend to over-promise; but even for them, that claim seems bold.
The book is a manual, an anthology, and a travelogue of spiritual yearning. Kapleau sets out his three pillars—teaching, practice and enlightenment—with the fervour of the convert, and it is perhaps because of his breathless zeal that the book seems so uneven. It is a hybrid thing: half textbook, half scripture, marked throughout by an earnest belief that silence and suffering are the only things that matter. On a generous reading, it demystifies a tradition that has been clouded by cultural differences and orientalist fancy. On a less generous reading, it sounds – and I hate to say it – like an American trying very hard, perhaps too hard, to be an authentic Japanese practitioner of Zen.
The first third of the book is given over to formal lectures delivered by Yasutani Roshi, a Zen master with the rhetorical grace of a chartered surveyor. Kapleau translated and organised these talks to create a kind of basic training for Western hopefuls, a ‘Zen for beginners’. These lectures are a bit of a slog to get through, and the man who gives them – a fanatical supporter of Japanese imperial ambition, by the way – is much concerned with moral purity, not just the perils of ego. Zen, we learn, isn't meant to be fun.
Kapleau translated and organised these talks to create a kind of basic training for Western hopefuls, a ‘Zen for beginners’.
The second section deals with Kapleau’s experience in a Japanese monastery during sesshin—week-long spells of intensive seated meditation, broken only by bouts of sleep, sharp whacks with a stick, and awkward interviews with the master. It is the most vivid and memorable part of the book, for we read about bleeding knees, hallucinatory visions and the gradual falling-away of the ego. Each sitting has the effect of punching a hole in the dam of the ‘I’, though Kapleau’s progress is slow and not linear, so the section is repetitive.
Finally, we have our third pillar: enlightenment. Here are kōan commentaries and firsthand testimonials from students who have (supposedly) ‘broken through’. These accounts are earnestly given and at times affecting, though there is something about their simplicity that invites scepticism, and they lapse into the kind of solemnity that I am afraid seems just a bit self-involved. (Ironic, I know.) They follow the same pattern: resistance, struggle, breakthrough, humility. And in the end, they are disappointing. We find ourselves thinking that if what these people have attained is insight into the true nature of things, then all that meditation wasn’t worth the trouble.
These accounts are earnestly given and at times affecting, though they invite scepticism and lapse into the kind of solemnity that I am afraid seems just a bit self-involved.
We can only get to the point of seeing things as they are if we get rid of the lens that warps and clouds what we see. ‘The gaze must be cleansed’, as Huxley put it. This lens, or gaze, is the ego, the ‘I’. Its dissolution is the central theme of the book, and the ultimate end goal of all genuine spirituality. The method to do this, in Zen, is zazen, seated meditation. Yasutani and Kapleau describe it with a reverence: they make it clear that this, and no other, is the way – something with which I imagine Christian, Muslim and Jewish mystics, among others, might quarrel. On the road to satori there is no shortcut, no support, no accommodation for the easily bored or distracted. Zen, we learn, is a brutal teacher. We sit. We breathe. We endure. Much of our time is spent, as Pablo d’Ors tells us in his Biography of Silence, ‘in the desert’.
It is interesting, perhaps even refreshing, that Kapleau does not ‘Americanise’ or even Westernise his experience for the sake of his readers, but drags them into the depths of a foreign tradition. Japan, and specifically its monastic Zen culture, has something America lacks, Kapleau thinks: discipline, and a deep understanding that individualism is not just suspect but to be avoided. I make no comment as to the rightness or wrongness of that view; but I will note in passing that, as Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War shows, Japanese Buddhists showed an almost unquestioning support for Japanese military aggression in the years following the Meiji Restoration in 1868. No one is perfect.
Japan, and specifically its monastic Zen culture, has something America lacks: discipline, as well a deep understanding that individualism is not just suspect but to be avoided.
There are other tensions. Kapleau seems torn between wanting to preserve the mystery of Zen and to explain it. Ironically, given his distaste for the over-intellectualisation of Zen as expounded by D.T. Suzuki, he offers charts, diagrams, footnotes. He almost tries to quantify enlightenment, listing common ‘symptoms’ and transcribing dokusan, private interviews with Zen masters about whether enlightenment has occurred. I don’t know about you, reader, but I think there is something silly about all this, and I say that (in case you care) as someone with quite a lot of time for Zen.
I have touched on Kapleau’s gushing and uncritical celebration of Zen as something like a near-perfect spiritual tradition, as well as his suggestion that our cousins across the Pond are morally bankrupt, or lazy, or complacent. But the Westerner who goes East, takes a new name, decks himself out in traditional clothes, and attacks his country of origin is a toe-curling cliché. And though there is of course something to be said for standing outside of our culture in order to see it afresh (contrast clarifies, as Os Guinness says somewhere) Kapleau’s ‘critique' is a sweeping generalisation. Besides, I like Americans.
The Westerner who goes East, takes a new name, decks himself out in traditional clothes, and slags off his country of origin is a cliché.
But The Three Pillars of Zen has its charms and I would not want to suggest otherwise. It gives us a glimpse at Japanese monastic life from the point of view not of an academic but a participant. Its descriptions of sesshin are among the most richly textured as I have ever read. And for those already on the path, Kapleau’s prose, for all its faults, might just carry the ring of truth.
I wonder what the Buddha, who liked to use humour to point out the absurdities of Indian society, would have made of all this formality. The book is relentlessly, drearily serious. Where Biography of Silence is serious in its treatment of meditation, it leans towards the poetic and, as the essay unfolds, takes on an aspect of lightness and humility. Kapleau takes himself, his experience and his adopted culture with an exhausting seriousness that undermines his claims to have abolished his own ego. To mistake gravity for depth or austerity for truth is surely to make a common and basic mistake about the spiritual or religious life which, after all, is at least meant to lead to joy.
