Houston Zen Center Mountain Seat Ceremony

4/8/12

Yesterday Flint and I attended the installation of an abbot, Gaelyn Godwin, at the Houston Zen Center. Many dignitaries were present, from Hoitsu Suzuki Roshi, the son of Shunryu Suzuki, five abbots and former abbots from the San Francisco Zen Center, Daigaku Rumme representing Soto Zen International, and many well-known teachers. I described the program in some detail in my Sunday dharma talk. 

This two-hour formal Soto ceremony called the Mountain Seat Ceremony was a perfect expression of classical Japanese Zen. The Japanese Zen tradition goes back nearly 1,000 years, and the Japanese have had a long time to evolve and perfect the forms and ceremonies that reflect and express Zen practice and teachings in their own culture. Still, they did not originate Zen, they adopted Zen from Chinese Zen teachers and texts and made it their own. The Chinese, in turn, developed Ch’an and the Chinese forms from Indian teachings, as an expression of the cultivation of “home-grown Buddhas” suitable for their own culture.

Zen is in its infancy in America. We are just beginning to understand how we must cultivate our own home-grown Buddhas, our own ceremonies, even while preserving the heart of practice and the teachings that have been generously handed down to us. We have few "native" formal ceremonies at the moment, and that may change over the next 1,000 years, but what will not change is the commitment to the path of liberation, the practice of sitting meditation, and the warm hand to warm hand method of its transmission.