Laypeople Quotes

“Suzuki-roshi's students in America were laypeople who practiced like monks. This seemed so innovative, so unprecedented, that scholars and theologians told the students at Zen Center that they were the vanguard of a Buddhist reformation. And Suzuki-roshi apparently believed this was true. He had asked Richard to reform Buddhism in Japan. But seen from Japan, the Zen Center model might have looked like backwards Buddhism. For almost two hundred years, the monks in Japan had been practicing as laypeople. When Suzuki-roshi arrived in America, he inverted the model by necessity; he had to begin with laypeople because there were no American monks. It was a long road from Sokoji to Tassajara. But they got there. They escaped from the world and holed up in a monastery. And then they transformed Tassajara. And it began to look a lot like Eiheiji. During services, the Americans even managed to chant in Japanese.

What was the big difference? The distinction was really a matter of degree. What distinguished the Americans from the Japanese was their determination to sustain the intensity of monastic practice after they left the monastery.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center