The Case for A Lumberjack Flannel Rakusu
Last Updated: 2025-06-12 00:00:00 -0500
There’s a genre of mastodon post that I occasionally enjoy recapitulating, and I call it my “tin cup sermon”. It’s never quite the same twice, but it usually goes as a lament that socially, our conception of what I’m going to call the “ease of zen” is exoticised. That is, when we picture zen surroundings or zen architecture or zen people, we picture the photos we have all seen of places like Antaiji or Sogenji. There is a temptation to best approve of Zen in what we perceive as its purest forms - the way it is practiced and the way that that practice looks at the great Japanese monasteries to which most North American teachers can still trace their dharma lineage today. I used to lean firmly in that direction, and it’s only been the more often I practice - the more experiences I have of finding zen at the bottom of a beat up tin camping cup - that I’ve come to change my mind about it.
The Case for Syncretism
For census purposes, I’ve put Buddhist in the box more often than anything else, but if we’re being honest, I don’t know that I would say I cleave especially strongly to that label, in part because I’ve learned through long and lived experience that there ain’t no zealot like a fresh convert, and the new penny shine is easy to put off after spending some time with a faith. A better description of my approach to things in general can be found in the concept of syncretism. There’s a twenty dollar word with fifty bucks worth of backstory to it, what I fundamentally mean by it is that I take a stewpot’s approach to life. New ideas come and go like the contents of a grocery bag. The ones that work for me go into the stew. I don’t have much use for observances I don’t find significant, but I have even less use for orthodoxy. Whatever confluence of forces conspired to give the human species sentience, sapience, and gnosis didn’t do it so we could all learn to paint by numbers.
This approach is really easy to justify for trivial things. The idea of fusion cuisine sounds bananas until you tire of clarifying your own butter and just start buying ghee, or decide to stop whining about the “authenticity” of “Canadian-style” Chinese food and just accept that food be food. Every engineer knows that spending time in diverse teams with a variety of disciplines and backgrounds leads to better problem-solving outcomes.
But when you take that approach to how you spend your Sundays, conversations get weirdly charged and heated. And to some extent, I get that. If you have built your worldview in such a way that leaves room for the sacred, and you encounter another worldview that profanes your sacred, well hell, even the most action-permissive of mastodon leftists get mad about “yucking someone’s yum”.
So here’s my pitch to you: If you like making a maple-curry cream sauce for your chicken penne, that’s valid. If you think that God Omnipotent might just be more complicated than early-writing humans could explain by couching in anthropocentric terms, that’s valid. The best ideas aren’t just amulets to be worn as trophies, but become practices that enrich. So keep what works and toss what doesn’t: life is short, and you’ve only so much RAM to work with.
Meet the Buddha, Kill the Buddha
Lin Chi (better known, if I follow things correctly, as Rinzai), was a zen patriarch who later went on to form what has since become known as the Rinzai School, which is sort of the other major school apart from Soto in Zen Buddhism, to massively oversimplify a complex topic. As a Patriarch, he has many sayings attributed to him, but what that has stuck with me for a long time is “If you should meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Like all koan problems, this one is difficult to succinctly render into a straightforward “this means X” analysis. All the old Patriarchs were frustratingly Christlike in their fondness for parables.
I’ve always felt that the Meet the Buddha, Kill the Buddha truism has a simple enough surface meaning. While deeper meanings point in the direction of “why are you looking outside yourself for Buddha-Nature”, a great surface reading is a rejection of sacredness. This is not to say that Buddhist temples aren’t places where sacred objects exist, but that there’s a clear distinction in Buddhist conceptions of sacredness and what I’ve seen of Christian ones, and Meet the Buddha points it out very clearly.
Zen Buddhism has a lot of tools - as in physical objects - which are important to zen practice in the sense of “practice in community”. A monastery has its butsuden which is venerated and gates which can only be passed in certain conditions and no shortage of ritual pomp and splendor. But then there is an important distinction between “things and theories that enable practice” and “practice”. The sundries of zen monastic tradition are of a suchness to support the creation of an environment in which to do zazen. Respect should be shown to a space and the things in those space, but a zafu is not a sacred object just because it facilitates your practice. The loss of a book of sutras is a material inconvenience, not a sacrilege.
And a lot of this seems to get lost in communication. I’ve practiced around a few different lineages of Soto Zen in North America at this point, and an unhealthy amount of time in online communities. Online spaces in religious contexts seem to err on the side of ultra-orthodoxy, to a fault and to the point of heresy. I think in particular of one space I spent a lot of time on when I was in my “adult convert to Catholicism” phase where I can now, years wiser and miles distant, see clearly that the baseline viewpoint was borderline heretical - Vatican II was wrongly decided, etc etc. It’s the same in Zen communities. There is a desire to see the most “authentic” form of practice possible. Japanese instructors are preferred over Westerners, and where Westerners are acknowledged, please let them go only by the Japanese games given to them in jukai. Heaven forbid someone should practice as Master Billy Bob Simpson. The monastery in Montana or wherever should be constructed as an exact replica of Antaiji or it doesn’t count as a monastery. God help he who presents western-style food from the office of the tenzo!
I cannot stress this point enough - most of what you think Zen is, isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I like Japanese food, and the zen-monastic aesthetic. I have no problem learning the Japanese terms for various ceremonial or monastic positions and concepts. I say “zazen” because it’s a more precise term than the usual english translation (seated meditation, which can mean damn near anything). But your enlightenment, such as it is (or isn’t) isn’t preconditioned on you taking jukai, being able to recite the full Heart of Perfect Wisdom sutra in the “original” “Japanese” (being, naturally, originally in neither). It’s perfectly valid for your refreshment at ossesshin between sessions of zazen to be a bit of red rose tea in a chipped camp mug. Bodhidharma won’t chop your arm off if you do your samu in proper Dickies work-wear.
Form is Emptiness
Localization is a funny business. I think a non-zero number of “American” Buddhists I know landed on Zen specifically out of a pre-existing fascination with Japanese culture more broadly. Not necessarily that they’re investigating a religious persuasion out of being on their “weeb shit”, but just that one sort of naturally follows the other. I started taking Zen seriously after investigating how it interacts with Japanese fine dining and food culture. That’s okay.
But I worry that the “format purists” are missing the point. Buddha never traveled north of the Himalayas, much less crossing the Sea of Japan. Bodhidharma is widely considered to be the founding Patriarch and he never made it much further than South China. Zen is, after all, a descendant discipline to Chan Buddhism in China, itself yet another development in the great Mahayana school of Buddhist teaching. And much as each took on elements of the local culture as they formalized practice, it seems strange not to expect the same thing to happen here.
Rohatsu Osseshin takes place in the dead of winter, and even the wildest models of runaway climate self-harm don’t seem to bring any relief to the idea that Canadian winter is there to try and kill you. It makes a degree of sense to adjust the practice of Ossesshin around that, if you have a Canadian temple. Probably need to make some architectural changes, and I personally wouldn’t recommend spending any time trying to do your zazen in an un-or-under-heated zendo in December.
Zen, eh, is going to be culturally distinct from Zen just as Zen is culturally distinct from Chan. The foods served by the tenzo, the terms of practice, the language of liturgy, will all have to evolve to suit those who are practicing them, and to be honest, there is no problem with any of this. You are not any closer (or further) from the Buddha because your practice clothes are flannel and thick enough for the weather. If there needs to be a samu position that shovels out a clear area for walking meditation between the rounds of zazen during sesshin, that’s just good practice. If the Tenzo provides you with kraft dinner and steamed broccoli for the evening meal, that’s just tasty.
You can express your Buddha nature eating burnt marshmallows off a doug fir fire with a roll-up-the-rim cup in your left hand. Baoche’s Fan can be you splitting kindling.
And yet you still live in society, curious.
All this being said, I want to be abundantly clear that I don’t think you need an all-or-nothing approach here. Zen isn’t really a discipline of all-or-nothing approaches in the first place. For one thing, the cultural entwinement is part of the point. It’s hard to separate some Japanese cultural ideas from Zen ideals and I don’t think you should try. Your “tenzo” can probably be your “cook” instead, and you can probably “reverend” your “roshi”, but I’m going to challenge you to find a better way to say precisely what is meant by “zazen” than “zazen”.
This isn’t really a rant about ideological purity. It’s more of a rant about rants about ideological purity. When discussing faith communities, especially communities of practice, getting mired in the politics of whether or not to wear martial arts gi as surrogate robes in the zendo for formal weekly practice is missing the point of needing to arrange a conducive environment for formal weekly practice. Not all problems are ethics problems, and while faith communities often discuss most issues as if they are, the bigger problem is that half of what’s causing friction at the Holy PTA Meeting is matters of taste.
And that brings me back around to syncretism, and my broader points. I don’t refuse to serve you a ground beef patty cooked medium as a matter of taste. I do it out of a concern for safety. I don’t maintain a zazen practice out of a sense of aesthetic curation. It’s a necessary practice that forms another plank in my tree-fort of “stupid walks for my stupid mental health”. It’s my Buddhism, Toby, and it works for me.
No engineer is out there putting a tool into their workflow for aesthetic purposes. They’re doing it because it has a value to them.