Once upon a time, there was a genuine master, who travelled from India to China. He was known as Bodhidharma.
He was destined to introduce Zen to another large country, in order to benefit sentient beings, and help them out of confusion.
The buddhist establishment did not like him and his way of practicing very much, because what he was saying was that temples and hierarchies darked what Buda taught, many years ago. He was "formally" incorrect, and had to pay the price for that.
Zen has always been a way to go beyond what is formally correct; Zen is not concerned about "good" or "bad" reputation.
Zen is seeing the nature of your own mind and stay in that. Very simple.
But after the genuine masters are gone, then come the zen preachers, the zen experts, the zen authorities..., who talk a lot about ZEN but know NOTHING about the nature of mind. These are the ones who NEED RITUALS, DISCIPLINE, DIPLOMAS,... just because they miss the only important thing: KNOWING THEIR OWN MIND. It is not that all these accessories are useless, but the fanatic ignorants put them on an altar, as if they were supreme, when the truth is that they are relative and dependent on each practitioner. Maybe they are useful for me today, but not next year.
These fanatic preachers CLING to these accessories just because they are "experts" on these rituals and know them by heart, and this confers them "authority" over the "profane", the ones who do not know them. So they defend something relative as if it was absolute. That is so because of their hunger for "power" and "recognition", and that is why they always use hierarchy and ritual to rule over other miserable egos like them. Miserable in the sense that they only look for "power" and "control" over other egos. They are called Asuras or demi-gods, that is, relatively powerful egos. This is what happens EVERYWHERE, in all INSTITUTIONS, in the east or in the west, buddhist and non-buddhist; they end up controlled by Asuras, when the genuine masters are gone.
They create a whole fictitious conceptual world, where they contrive the mind of the poor practitioners who enter their dark world, looking for ZEN, enaslaving them in the net of "recognition", "tradition", "respectability", "ritual"... and usually, either they quit, or they become asuras themselves, struggling for "power" and "recognition". This is why all institutions DEGENERATE into caves of asuras, preaching a doctrine that they don´t put into practice, and establishing DOGMA and RITUAL to control the mind of the followers. This is what present day "zen" has become: DEGENERATED zen, a dark shadow of ZEN.
Whenever you see somebody hiding behind titles like "holiness", "eminence", "excelence", what you usually find behind is EGO and not genunine masters.
One of the last examples of this sort of faked ZEN is Mr. T.Deshimaru.
He was a fanatic who knew nothing about living ZEN. He could only teach you how to sit and become a poor devil like himself. He was the kind of dark practitioner who in times of Hui Neng tried to kill him, and now, he pretended to be a Zen master, when in fact, he was a cheap imitation, and he knew that, so he was a deceiver too.
I used Mr. "Ashura" Deshimaru as an example of this DEGENERATED FAKED MASTERS, but just because he is well known in the west, but in Japan there are plenty of his sort, and they are the ones who pretend to keep the tradition, when in fact they never have been part of the ZEN LIVING LINEAGE, just because they never saw the NATURE OF THEIR OWN MIND.
Times change, apparently, but the stubborn mind of these kind of fanatics, remains the same.
They will always hide themselves behind RITUAL, DOGMA, AUTHORITARIANISM and TRADITION.
Zen is alive, and does not need the archaic forms and rituals of a distant time and a foreign land.
Zen always flourishes and adapts its form to the environment and the culture that serves as a basis for its sprouting.
Zen IS NOT what people like Mr. Deshimaru and the like "practice" and "teach". They are slaves of "form": rituals, methods, and traditions. In fact, Zen, like Dzogchen, Mahamudra... always has a shadow in this samsaric world, and a serious practitioner has to face this "wall" or tomb, and penetrate it to reach the LIVING ZEN.
Zen in the west will take a different form than the one that it took in the east, that is for sure. It will sprout from the genuine masters, and not from the bluffers. The western bluffers will come later, when the genuine masters will be gone. This is the law of life.
Zen transmission only requires a genuine master holding the flower of awakened mind, and a genuine practitioner ready to SEE the NATURE OF HIS OWN MIND.
That´s ZEN.
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