The Six Worlds of Samsara, Cont.

People who do Animal Chan may be timid, passive and dependent, but though this suggests a certain stupidity, such an inference would be wrongly drawn. They are neither stupid nor ineducable. Those who are not already trained before they enter the monastery are encouraged to pursue an academic interest, take music lessons, or learn a craft or some other skill.

On the other hand, it does not follow that because they are socially helpless they are socially nonreactive. They notice everything, recording who does what and when in a brain that is defensively programmed to minimize good conduct of others and to exaggerate that which is not so good. Such information is their ammunition which, should they ever be found wanting in the execution of their own duties, they will use in any way they can to defend themselves. They are not above poison pen letters. They also whine a lot.

Angel Chan. This is the Chan of sophisticated neo-intellectuals who are captivated by Chan's lofty, philosophical principles, its cool, esthetic presentation and the dignity of its priesthood which they enter as though pledged and pinned to a good Greek House. These are the people the Prophet Mohammed had in mind when he said that, "A philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics, is an ass bearing a load of books."

Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, one of the great Zen masters of the modern era of Antaiji Temple, notes that in Japanese monasteries it is Americans nowadays who swell the ranks of Angel Zen. They seem to excel, he says, in "polishing the scepters" of high-ranking, spiritual persons. Exquisitely superior, they are called 'angels' because, while being less than God, they are ever so much more than mortal men.

People who do Angel Chan stroll meaningfully in temple gardens where they frequently are caught, en flagrante, in acts of sublime cogitation. Daily they have intercourse with the cosmos - encounters which leave them a little breathless and pregnant with a poem or two. Usually they come to Chan because they are fed up with the crass materialism and moral degradation of American cities. They despise the 'plastic' world and yearn for the elegant simplicity of Chan's Natural Man. But despite their convictions that Urban Man is corrupt, they are very fussy about where they get their university degrees and which symphony orchestra has recorded their favorite classics. And though Chan describes itself as 'a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words and letters' a description which somehow suggests that to whatever degree canonical works provoke disputation their study does not foster 'natural' living, people who do Angel Chan scan the voluminous tonnage of Buddhist scriptures just to be able to calumniate each other in the name of scholarly exegesis. They will argue for hours about the most abstruse or insignificant trifle, calling out chapter and verse like so many quarterbacks.

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