Now people who go to Japan to study Zen have read about it in the writings of Suzuki and R.H. Blythe and myself,
 and very often they're in for a curious shock.
 They suppose that Zen people are kind of Quakerish,
 and they are shocked to find that procedures in a Zen monastery, in Zen temples, are highly ritualistic,
 that the temple buildings and grounds are positively sumptuous,
 and that Zen is existing in terms of a big ecclesiastical organization.
 Most of the monks in the monasteries are the sons of priests.
 You see, a Zen monastery is a seminary more than a monastery. It's a training school.
 It isn't a monastery in our sense where you take life vows,
 and you enter into the monastery for your whole life with the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
 It's a training school from which you graduate in due course when the teacher thinks you're ready.
 When you've taken the training, there are various options open to you,
 and the usual one is to become a temple priest.
 Every Zen monastery stands in the middle of an enormous campus.
 There is the training center, and then surrounding it ever so many separate buildings which are individual temples.
 And these temples were originally built by wealthy patrons of the monastery
 to provide a place where a priest would for all time chant sutras
 for the future assistance of the wealthy patron through his future incarnations.
 Occasionally they will take a few students for meditation,
 but by and large the Zen priest is a sutra chanter,
 and this is true of almost all Buddhist priests,
 serving the community in much the same way as a Catholic priest serves a parish.
 But you see, these temples are passed down in the family from father to son.
 So my oldest son should take over the temple from me if I'm a priest.
 So I say, "You go to the Zen monastery, and you train there until the teacher says you're ready,
 and then you can come back and help me out around the temple, and when I die or retire, you take it over."
 So most of the boys, and they are boys, many of them just out of high school,
 the boys in there are not really there because they have a strong vocation for it.
 They are there because they've been sent there through parental authority.
 And therefore it is not surprising that their attitude to Zen is rather mechanical.
 I notice this more in the Soto sect than in the Rinzai sect,
 but to a great extent it is a kind of mechanical existence.
 They are going through a prolonged hazing process, as it were,
 in order to be fit to take over father's job and to have Zen style.
 Zen style is very important, just as we train physicians to have a good bedside manner,
 or a priest to behave as a priest in the style of a priest,
 and that carries with it a certain aura of tradition and authority and conviction.
 And so these boys are trained very carefully to walk, to carry themselves, to speak and behave according to Zen style.
 And it's very pleasant, I must say. They are very presentable people.
 They are unlike ordinary Japanese people in that they're not nervous, they don't giggle when embarrassed.
 It's difficult to embarrass them.
 And occasionally, every now and then, one of them turns out to be an enthusiast and really gets through with Zen.
 But by and large, I'm sorry to say, that in both the Rinzai and the Soto schools,
 a large number of products are graduated who really have no feeling for Zen,
 who never quite got the point, but managed to struggle through the motions.
 And thus there are increasingly few great teachers of Zen in the country.
 There is, however, an awakening going on.
 And times are beginning to change, and to a great extent this is the result of the Western interest in Zen.
 As a matter of fact, this sort of revival is true all over Asia.
 If you read a book by Ernst Benz called "Buddhism or Communism," it's very fascinating.
 And he shows to what extent there has been a Buddhist revival in Asia through Western intervention, interest, and so on.
 And this is particularly true in Japan.
 But the real struggle and the real problem is this.
 The younger generation in Japan is not interested in Buddhism, period.
 If you ask a Japanese, say, roughly between 30 and 40, "What's your religion?"
 He's apt to say, "My parents are Buddhists."
 As for himself, he has no interest and he knows nothing about it.
 When they hear sutra chanting, they think, "Oh, what a bore."
 Nobody understands it anyway because the sutras are chanted in the Sino-Japanese, that is to say,
 it is a peculiar Japanese way of pronouncing Chinese.
 It is not the Japanese way of pronouncing Japanese.
 And so nobody knows what it's about.
 Most of the people who are chanting don't know what it's about.
 And of course, some of it, insofar as it's what's called "Darani," didn't mean anything in the first place.
 And so they have this modern feeling, "What does it all mean?"
 Second-generation Japanese in the United States can't stand it when the priests chant a sutra
 to pacify the old folks.
 They want the whole thing changed, and they sing in the Buddhist churches in the United States,
 "Buddha loves me, this I know, for the sutra tells me so."
 They have Sunday school and everything, they organize just like a Protestant church.
 Because the Nisei and the Sansei, second and third generation Japanese, want to slip into the American scene.
 And unlike the Chinese, who are very retentive of their culture,
 the Japanese settlers here seem to want to lose it and become Rotarian.
 And so in Japan today, much the same situation prevails.
 There is an extraordinary outbreak of new religions, which we here would call cults, like Tenrikyu and so on.
 But so far as Buddhism is concerned, the younger generation couldn't care less.
 And that's why, you see, the only young people who frequent the temples, by and large, are priest's sons.
 So there is this tremendous problem of, unless the Buddhist tradition is to go down the drain completely,
 of re-familiarizing the Japanese with what it's all about.
 So either the modern Japanese are going to let the whole thing go down the drain,
 or else somehow it's got to be re-presented to them in a modern idiom,
 so they wake up and realize that they have a treasure.


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