“Hi Leo,

I’ve been reading some of your blog articles and I’ve picked out a few gem ideas that I’ve been trying to apply to my own life, so thank you so much for that. However, as someone with both an academic and personal interest in Zen, I do feel the urge to put in my “two cents worth” and offer my perspective on the whole “Zen” name debate.

First of all, as a scholar I do find it very frustrating to enter the term “Zen” into a search engine (both academic and non-academic) only to be rewarded with a surplus of articles and websites have very little to do with actual Zen (some not at all) and have to waste my time sorting through them to find what I’m looking for. I must admit that I felt somewhat the same way about your site. While your articles offer some very good advice and tips on leading a healthy, organized and productive lifestyle (something I myself need much improvement on!), this really has little to do with the spiritual aims of Zen Buddhist practice. As one of the previous posters pointed out, associating Zen with simplicity somewhat obfuscates the underlying complexity and richness of the tradition. This is in part due to the sources of our understanding of Zen in the West. People like D.T. Suzuki, while making a very important contribution to the dissemination of Zen to the West, simplified and repackaged Zen in a manner to make it more appealing to Westerners. Modern Zen scholars have been challenging the received popular viewed of Zen that we have in West and have been forming a more nuanced and complete picture of the tradition as a whole, including its historical development, which was largely ignored by writers like Suzuki. This means of course going back to the development of Chan/Zen in China, the real birthplace of Zen.

Some posters here might be surprised to find that the Chan masters throughout history were lively debaters and often rigorous scholars who did not scorn the use of words or shy away from expressing their often strong opinions. Being enlightened does not mean not having an opinion or to disengage oneself from the linguistically contrived world of conflict and contradiction. To suggest such is simply to shut down the possibility of argument and debate and rob the other of their right to a voice. Zen is not some hippy-dippy tradition about feeling groovy and being disengaged from the world. As my teacher puts it, it is the experience of the nonduality of duality and nonduality. Both the enlightened and us nonenlightened folks live in this world of duality and to live only in the world of nonduality would make enlightened activity and even existence an impossibility.

Sorry for the long post, but I just wanted to offer my own opinion to the fray (long live debate!) and some points to consider in our collective understanding of Zen as a culture and perhaps a better understanding why some of us get so peeved at the casual use and misuse of term “Zen” (which no doubt has contributed to the Western fetishization of Zen and Asian culture). But sometimes all we can do is laugh and continue to deepen our own understanding. Here is a website that offers some comic relief to that effect:

http://theworsthorse.com/

And here is a wonderful website offering many thought-provoking articles dealing with some of the issues I touched on above:

http://www.thezensite.com/

Cheers!”