I’ve not been to MAPLE, but have met Soryu several times and have spoken to many people who have been.
In addition to everything you mention, I think outsiders to Zen and Buddhism in general may not appreciate how weird it is that Soryu is not a lineage holder.
Zen, like many religions, claims its teachers have authority because they have been trained in an unbroken chain of transmission traced back to the founder, in this case the Buddha. The first millennium of dharma transmission claims are arguably based in fact but the specific record is mythical, but they’re probably accurate after the 8th century. This is somewhat similar to the situation in Catholicism, where the first 200 years or so of apostolic transmission claims are suspect, but get more reliably after, apparently firmed up to defeat the Gnostic heresy.
Traditionally, it’s pretty common that anyone leading anything in Zen has dharma transmission. In Japan, even the lowliest temple priest has received transmission, though not permission to teach. Soryu, to the best of my knowledge, is in the opposite situation: he received some limited permission to teach (though the bounds of that permission are unclear to me), but did not receive transmission, so he cannot be said to be fully initiated into the lineage in which he trained and thus can’t pass it on.
What this effectively means is that he teaches based on charismatic authority. This is not unheard of in religions, though it is unusual within Zen. A great many religions rely on charismatic authority in some form, though the strongest version of it I’m familiar with is in Evangelical Christianity. Some forms of Buddhism even rely heavily on charismatic authority, although it is usually made verified by other teachers granting assent that someone has, say, uncovered a dharma treasure that was transmitted directly to their mind.
I bring all this up just to make it clear that Soryu is a very non-traditional “Zen” teacher, though as noted, MAPLE is careful to avoid making any untrue claims about their lineage (though I expect outsiders to get confused!). I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that he doesn’t have transmission. For me, it put me off personal interest in getting too involved with MAPLE because it made it harder for me to trust that he knew what he was doing. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t, just that I can’t fall back on transmission as evidence that he should be trusted even when things seem like they are going sideways (not that teachers with transmission have never done anything wrong, but it means he doesn’t get to start from a place of trust granted to him by another teacher).
Could you clarify, please—what exactly is “transmission”? Transmission of what? (Or is this a case where the word “transmission” means something other than what it usually means?)
Likewise, this:
What this effectively means is that he teaches based on charismatic authority.
What is this to be contrasted with? If he had “received transmission”, then he would be teaching based on …? (And what is the practical difference between these two states of affairs?)
Could you clarify, please—what exactly is “transmission”? Transmission of what?
Enlightenment as recognized by someone who was themselves enlightened, with a base case of the Buddha.
In the Christian tradition, ordination (transforming someone from a layperson to a clergymember) typically requires laying on hands. A priest was touched by someone who was touched by someone who—all the way back to Jesus. (And, like, not just “they shook hands”, but “they were acknowledged as clergy by the existing clergy.” Jesus acknowledged his apostles, who then acknowledged others, and so on.)
The more decentralized traditions forego this; everyone can read the Bible, after all, and so anyone can teach the Bible to others. Charismatic authority is the concept that ‘you lead because others are willing to follow you’. With a Catholic priest, you don’t just have “people are still deciding to come to his church” as evidence, you also have “the bishop decided this guy was worthy of being a priest” as well. It’s social proof.
In Buddhism, dharma transmission is similar ‘social acknowledgement’ but the subject matter is different. The Buddha gave a lesson, one of his disciples looked like they got it, and the Buddha says “that guy gets it”, and he became the first ‘Buddhist patriarch’. Later some of his disciples got it, and he recognized them as getting it, and so on down the line. (As Gordon says, the early parts of this were probably mythical / backfilled to make sense, but eventually this became rigorous.)
That is, if I told you my ideas about Buddhism or enlightenment, I’m just some guy, and maybe my ideas are correct and maybe they aren’t, and probably you should ask the Buddhists what Buddhism is. If someone has dharma transmission, they count as one of the Buddhists (though they don’t all agree with each other, as you might imagine).
This page about Soryu says “As a teenager, he entered a Rinzai monastery, where he was ordained under the renowned Zen Master Shodo Harada Roshi.” Is this a straightforward lie, or is there some nuance of meaning here that makes it a technical truth but misleading, or…?
In this case neither misleading nor a lie. Ordination in Zen is generally a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal from Dharma Transmission, and just requires a commitment to the tradition, not some demonstrated understanding.
Yeah, see, that still seems misleading to me. I mean, I read @Vaniver’s explanation, it made sense to me, and if you asked me to summarize it, I would’ve said “dharma transmission is basically ordination”. So when I read on that page that Soryu was “ordained”, that matched up perfectly with the aforementioned understanding, and I assumed that the description was referring to this “dharma transmission” stuff. I would never have even suspected that the truth was that “ordination” is “a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal” relative to “dharma transmission”!
No mostly that was Vaniver having been confusing in context. Like, if you just leave out the Catholic part of the explanation it’s just “(mythologized) transmission of authority from the Buddha”, which Soryu doesn’t have and isn’t being misleading about. Even within Catholicism, monastic ordination != priestly ordination, IIRC you can’t have both, but in Orthodoxy you can, but they’re still orthogonal etc.
While I have no reason to think Soryu intends to mislead anyone, I do think he’s at times represented his credentials in a way that would be confusing for people outside Zen.
A lot of the problem is that in English we use fewer words than in Japanese to describe distinct concepts. So it may help to walk you all through how it works, at least in the Soto tradition (my understanding is that it’s approximately the same in Rinzai, which is Soryu’s tradition, but with some differences because of different teaching styles and a notably different step at the end).
The first step is jukai. This is when one avows the 16 Boddhisattva precepts and receives robes (in the form of a rakusu) and an outer dharma name (the new name one takes when “leaving home” to join the sangha).
If one trains to become a priest, the next step is tokudo, or “crossing over (to the other shore)”. At this point one may receives an inner dharma name (that replaces one’s personal name, just as the outer dharma name traditionally replaces one’s family name) and an okesa (a more traditional robe that is worn in addition to the rakusu). It’s also at this point that one receives “transmission” of a kind because priests are lineage holders. They are not permitted to pass on the lineage to others, though. They generally have permission to teach zen in addition to permission to perform general religious ceremonies, but cannot perform jukai or any other acts of ordination.
A priest may later receive denkai, which is a kind of formal permission to teach because it allows the priest to give jukai and thereby transmit the precepts. This does not give them the power to offer tokudo, though, and generally just means that they can either give the precepts to send novices to a monastery or, in more recent times, give jukai to lay people (generally considered a type of lay ordination). In the West, some lay practitioners have also gone through denkai and are a type of lay teacher who you might think of as roughly equivalent to a pastor.
When someone says that have received “dharma transmission” or “full transmission” this generally refers to shiho, which literally means the person has inherited the dharma. This is what traditional teachers who run monasteries have. In the West, most teachers also have this kind of transmission, including lay teachers who did not ordain as priests (thus at shiho they receive an inner dharma name, an okesa, and enter the lineage at the same time they receive their kotsu (a short wooden stick that signifies their authority in ceremonies, although they may use any of several other implements in place of the kotsu for special occasions) and denkai). Shiho gives the teacher the additional authority to give shiho to another. A lay teacher who was not ordained as a priest would only have permission to pass on a lay lineage, though, as they obviously cannot offer priest training, though could in theory give shiho to a student who was ordained as a priest by another teacher.
Now to be clear, the story on shiho is complicated. In Japan, it serves two purposes. One is to pass down abbotships from father to son, where both may have little actual realization and may not have practiced much, since shiho is required to be the abbot of some temples, which are often run like a family business. The other purpose is the one it serves in the West: to transmit authority to those who are deemed qualified to teach. So just be aware that dharma transmission can mean something different in Japan compared to in the West.
Okay, so the last type of transmission I’ll mention is inka shomei, which is the certification or “seal of approval” Rinzai teachers receive when they complete the koan curriculum. The Rinzai school is a bit more complicated than Soto because lots of stuff is tied to passing koans, and in Japan, Rinzai teachers receive inka shomei in place of shiho, while in the West it’s more muddled and depends on the lineage. I’m more removed from Rinzai, so I can’t speak to much detail on the specifics (though note I practice in a lineage where the root teacher, Maezumi, received Soto shiho and later Rinzai inka shomei from a different teacher, causing a lot of confusion for everyone by mixing the two schools and mixing in Western elements).
So, with all this context, what’s up with Soryu? I don’t know. He’s definitely received jukai, which is why he’s named “Soryu”. I’m unclear if when he says “ordained” he means he was ordained as a priest. It sounds like he’s received some kind of teaching permission from one or more teachers, which maybe counts as denkai, but it could have been a less formal teaching permission (e.g. I have a degree informal teaching authority: I have permission to teach zazen and basic zen concepts, but have not gone through any formal ceremonies for this after jukai, and I’m expected to be fairly conservative in my approach because my limited permission exists under the supervision of my teacher and could be revoked at any time if I’m not teaching well).
This seems like something we could just ask him about to clarify. Unless I’ve misunderstood, folks at MAPLE generally receive the precepts and go through jukai or something like it, receiving robes and a dharma name, though interestingly not a rakusu.
And as Herschel says, maybe this just doesn’t matter. There are plenty of good teachers who have only charismatic authority. I personally think it matters a lot because Zen students put a lot of trust in their teachers to guide them through the difficult process of awakening, and I think it’s safer to have a teacher who is fully and legibly trusted by their teacher to be their teacher’s peer. But that’s a reflection of my risk appetite from knowing how harrowing the process was for me and how much harm I’ve seen happen to some people who get too far along the path without adequate guidance. Other people should feel free to take the risks they are willing to take, even if I would not take them.
FWIW there’s a large number of lay Buddhist teachers in the West, many of them formerly ordained, without lineage transmission. The thing that’s weird in Soryu’s case is that he’s teaching outside of his lineage, without having disrobed. My understanding is that his permission to teach was through Shinzen Young, and I’m not aware of that having been revoked. I expect rats don’t really care about lineage, but eg. Shinzen also gave permission to teach to Michael Taft, who teaches meditation in the Bay, and no one seems to be bothered by.
This is very in the weeds but I think the transmission thing mostly hardly matters, if you’re not already pilled on the tradition in its own (again, mythologized) framework here, then mostly each teacher has to independently demonstrate their reliability and authority, etc.
Speaking only for myself, I consider it a minor red flag, in the sense of “not only is this guy in my outgroup, but even the outgroup thinks that he is weird”.
I am aware that this kinda goes against the conservation of expected evidence, in that if my outgroup said “this guy is perfectly legit”, it probably wouldn’t make a good impression on me. So why should it make a bad impression if they question whether he is legit?
I guess the answer is that even if I deeply disagree with the outgroup, there is still some positive correlation in our values; after all, we are all humans, we care about generally human things. I don’t care about the spiritual consequences of “teaching outside a lineage”, but I care about a more generalized version of “this guy draws his authority from being associated with X, but X say that from their perspective he is associated incorrectly”. I don’t care about X per se, but I care about using some kinds of status moves.
Thank you for posting this!
I’ve not been to MAPLE, but have met Soryu several times and have spoken to many people who have been.
In addition to everything you mention, I think outsiders to Zen and Buddhism in general may not appreciate how weird it is that Soryu is not a lineage holder.
Zen, like many religions, claims its teachers have authority because they have been trained in an unbroken chain of transmission traced back to the founder, in this case the Buddha. The first millennium of dharma transmission claims are arguably based in fact but the specific record is mythical, but they’re probably accurate after the 8th century. This is somewhat similar to the situation in Catholicism, where the first 200 years or so of apostolic transmission claims are suspect, but get more reliably after, apparently firmed up to defeat the Gnostic heresy.
Traditionally, it’s pretty common that anyone leading anything in Zen has dharma transmission. In Japan, even the lowliest temple priest has received transmission, though not permission to teach. Soryu, to the best of my knowledge, is in the opposite situation: he received some limited permission to teach (though the bounds of that permission are unclear to me), but did not receive transmission, so he cannot be said to be fully initiated into the lineage in which he trained and thus can’t pass it on.
What this effectively means is that he teaches based on charismatic authority. This is not unheard of in religions, though it is unusual within Zen. A great many religions rely on charismatic authority in some form, though the strongest version of it I’m familiar with is in Evangelical Christianity. Some forms of Buddhism even rely heavily on charismatic authority, although it is usually made verified by other teachers granting assent that someone has, say, uncovered a dharma treasure that was transmitted directly to their mind.
I bring all this up just to make it clear that Soryu is a very non-traditional “Zen” teacher, though as noted, MAPLE is careful to avoid making any untrue claims about their lineage (though I expect outsiders to get confused!). I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that he doesn’t have transmission. For me, it put me off personal interest in getting too involved with MAPLE because it made it harder for me to trust that he knew what he was doing. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t, just that I can’t fall back on transmission as evidence that he should be trusted even when things seem like they are going sideways (not that teachers with transmission have never done anything wrong, but it means he doesn’t get to start from a place of trust granted to him by another teacher).
Could you clarify, please—what exactly is “transmission”? Transmission of what? (Or is this a case where the word “transmission” means something other than what it usually means?)
Likewise, this:
What is this to be contrasted with? If he had “received transmission”, then he would be teaching based on …? (And what is the practical difference between these two states of affairs?)
Enlightenment as recognized by someone who was themselves enlightened, with a base case of the Buddha.
In the Christian tradition, ordination (transforming someone from a layperson to a clergymember) typically requires laying on hands. A priest was touched by someone who was touched by someone who—all the way back to Jesus. (And, like, not just “they shook hands”, but “they were acknowledged as clergy by the existing clergy.” Jesus acknowledged his apostles, who then acknowledged others, and so on.)
The more decentralized traditions forego this; everyone can read the Bible, after all, and so anyone can teach the Bible to others. Charismatic authority is the concept that ‘you lead because others are willing to follow you’. With a Catholic priest, you don’t just have “people are still deciding to come to his church” as evidence, you also have “the bishop decided this guy was worthy of being a priest” as well. It’s social proof.
In Buddhism, dharma transmission is similar ‘social acknowledgement’ but the subject matter is different. The Buddha gave a lesson, one of his disciples looked like they got it, and the Buddha says “that guy gets it”, and he became the first ‘Buddhist patriarch’. Later some of his disciples got it, and he recognized them as getting it, and so on down the line. (As Gordon says, the early parts of this were probably mythical / backfilled to make sense, but eventually this became rigorous.)
That is, if I told you my ideas about Buddhism or enlightenment, I’m just some guy, and maybe my ideas are correct and maybe they aren’t, and probably you should ask the Buddhists what Buddhism is. If someone has dharma transmission, they count as one of the Buddhists (though they don’t all agree with each other, as you might imagine).
I see, thanks.
This page about Soryu says “As a teenager, he entered a Rinzai monastery, where he was ordained under the renowned Zen Master Shodo Harada Roshi.” Is this a straightforward lie, or is there some nuance of meaning here that makes it a technical truth but misleading, or…?
In this case neither misleading nor a lie. Ordination in Zen is generally a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal from Dharma Transmission, and just requires a commitment to the tradition, not some demonstrated understanding.
Yeah, see, that still seems misleading to me. I mean, I read @Vaniver’s explanation, it made sense to me, and if you asked me to summarize it, I would’ve said “dharma transmission is basically ordination”. So when I read on that page that Soryu was “ordained”, that matched up perfectly with the aforementioned understanding, and I assumed that the description was referring to this “dharma transmission” stuff. I would never have even suspected that the truth was that “ordination” is “a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal” relative to “dharma transmission”!
No mostly that was Vaniver having been confusing in context. Like, if you just leave out the Catholic part of the explanation it’s just “(mythologized) transmission of authority from the Buddha”, which Soryu doesn’t have and isn’t being misleading about. Even within Catholicism, monastic ordination != priestly ordination, IIRC you can’t have both, but in Orthodoxy you can, but they’re still orthogonal etc.
While I have no reason to think Soryu intends to mislead anyone, I do think he’s at times represented his credentials in a way that would be confusing for people outside Zen.
A lot of the problem is that in English we use fewer words than in Japanese to describe distinct concepts. So it may help to walk you all through how it works, at least in the Soto tradition (my understanding is that it’s approximately the same in Rinzai, which is Soryu’s tradition, but with some differences because of different teaching styles and a notably different step at the end).
The first step is jukai. This is when one avows the 16 Boddhisattva precepts and receives robes (in the form of a rakusu) and an outer dharma name (the new name one takes when “leaving home” to join the sangha).
If one trains to become a priest, the next step is tokudo, or “crossing over (to the other shore)”. At this point one may receives an inner dharma name (that replaces one’s personal name, just as the outer dharma name traditionally replaces one’s family name) and an okesa (a more traditional robe that is worn in addition to the rakusu). It’s also at this point that one receives “transmission” of a kind because priests are lineage holders. They are not permitted to pass on the lineage to others, though. They generally have permission to teach zen in addition to permission to perform general religious ceremonies, but cannot perform jukai or any other acts of ordination.
A priest may later receive denkai, which is a kind of formal permission to teach because it allows the priest to give jukai and thereby transmit the precepts. This does not give them the power to offer tokudo, though, and generally just means that they can either give the precepts to send novices to a monastery or, in more recent times, give jukai to lay people (generally considered a type of lay ordination). In the West, some lay practitioners have also gone through denkai and are a type of lay teacher who you might think of as roughly equivalent to a pastor.
When someone says that have received “dharma transmission” or “full transmission” this generally refers to shiho, which literally means the person has inherited the dharma. This is what traditional teachers who run monasteries have. In the West, most teachers also have this kind of transmission, including lay teachers who did not ordain as priests (thus at shiho they receive an inner dharma name, an okesa, and enter the lineage at the same time they receive their kotsu (a short wooden stick that signifies their authority in ceremonies, although they may use any of several other implements in place of the kotsu for special occasions) and denkai). Shiho gives the teacher the additional authority to give shiho to another. A lay teacher who was not ordained as a priest would only have permission to pass on a lay lineage, though, as they obviously cannot offer priest training, though could in theory give shiho to a student who was ordained as a priest by another teacher.
Now to be clear, the story on shiho is complicated. In Japan, it serves two purposes. One is to pass down abbotships from father to son, where both may have little actual realization and may not have practiced much, since shiho is required to be the abbot of some temples, which are often run like a family business. The other purpose is the one it serves in the West: to transmit authority to those who are deemed qualified to teach. So just be aware that dharma transmission can mean something different in Japan compared to in the West.
Okay, so the last type of transmission I’ll mention is inka shomei, which is the certification or “seal of approval” Rinzai teachers receive when they complete the koan curriculum. The Rinzai school is a bit more complicated than Soto because lots of stuff is tied to passing koans, and in Japan, Rinzai teachers receive inka shomei in place of shiho, while in the West it’s more muddled and depends on the lineage. I’m more removed from Rinzai, so I can’t speak to much detail on the specifics (though note I practice in a lineage where the root teacher, Maezumi, received Soto shiho and later Rinzai inka shomei from a different teacher, causing a lot of confusion for everyone by mixing the two schools and mixing in Western elements).
So, with all this context, what’s up with Soryu? I don’t know. He’s definitely received jukai, which is why he’s named “Soryu”. I’m unclear if when he says “ordained” he means he was ordained as a priest. It sounds like he’s received some kind of teaching permission from one or more teachers, which maybe counts as denkai, but it could have been a less formal teaching permission (e.g. I have a degree informal teaching authority: I have permission to teach zazen and basic zen concepts, but have not gone through any formal ceremonies for this after jukai, and I’m expected to be fairly conservative in my approach because my limited permission exists under the supervision of my teacher and could be revoked at any time if I’m not teaching well).
This seems like something we could just ask him about to clarify. Unless I’ve misunderstood, folks at MAPLE generally receive the precepts and go through jukai or something like it, receiving robes and a dharma name, though interestingly not a rakusu.
And as Herschel says, maybe this just doesn’t matter. There are plenty of good teachers who have only charismatic authority. I personally think it matters a lot because Zen students put a lot of trust in their teachers to guide them through the difficult process of awakening, and I think it’s safer to have a teacher who is fully and legibly trusted by their teacher to be their teacher’s peer. But that’s a reflection of my risk appetite from knowing how harrowing the process was for me and how much harm I’ve seen happen to some people who get too far along the path without adequate guidance. Other people should feel free to take the risks they are willing to take, even if I would not take them.
My understanding as a guy who… watches a bunch of YouTube videos and promises he’s right:
Within Catholicism, becoming a monk is not normally described as “ordination”
Within Catholicism, you can definitely be a monk who’s ordained to the priesthood
But you’re right that there are different change-of-status ceremonies that denote different kinds of entrance into intense official religious life.
FWIW there’s a large number of lay Buddhist teachers in the West, many of them formerly ordained, without lineage transmission. The thing that’s weird in Soryu’s case is that he’s teaching outside of his lineage, without having disrobed. My understanding is that his permission to teach was through Shinzen Young, and I’m not aware of that having been revoked. I expect rats don’t really care about lineage, but eg. Shinzen also gave permission to teach to Michael Taft, who teaches meditation in the Bay, and no one seems to be bothered by.
This is very in the weeds but I think the transmission thing mostly hardly matters, if you’re not already pilled on the tradition in its own (again, mythologized) framework here, then mostly each teacher has to independently demonstrate their reliability and authority, etc.
Speaking only for myself, I consider it a minor red flag, in the sense of “not only is this guy in my outgroup, but even the outgroup thinks that he is weird”.
I am aware that this kinda goes against the conservation of expected evidence, in that if my outgroup said “this guy is perfectly legit”, it probably wouldn’t make a good impression on me. So why should it make a bad impression if they question whether he is legit?
I guess the answer is that even if I deeply disagree with the outgroup, there is still some positive correlation in our values; after all, we are all humans, we care about generally human things. I don’t care about the spiritual consequences of “teaching outside a lineage”, but I care about a more generalized version of “this guy draws his authority from being associated with X, but X say that from their perspective he is associated incorrectly”. I don’t care about X per se, but I care about using some kinds of status moves.
(Sorry, this is mostly off topic.)