Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The truth is that the well-known “orthodox” Zen monks of the Tokugawa period were paradoxically marginal, in the sense that their rhetoric of orthodoxy and orthopraxy had surprisingly little to do with the actual practices of most Soto Zen temples. In fact… the vast majority of ordinary Soto Zen monks and laypeople never practiced Zen meditation, never engaged in iconoclastic acts of the Ch’an/Zen masters (as described in hagiographical literature), never solved köans, never raked Zen gardens, never sought mystical meditative states, and never read Dogen’s writings. While some Tokugawa-period monks and some modern scholars may have construed such activities as true Zen, this study asks not what Soto Zen ideally ought to have been, but what Soto Zen actually was, as lived by ordinary priests and laypeople.’ (The Other Side of Zen)

A salutory reminder from this book, which I borrowed from the Tassajara library when I was there recently.