The Current State of Zen in Europe

Here is a photo of me in Amsterdam lamenting that reality is based on space and time.

Or is it... ?

I recovered from the recent hospital stuff and now my European tour 2011 is well and truly on. The first date is in Nijmegen, Netherlands (where I am writing this) tomorrow at 7 pm. The info for tomorrow's date is at this link.

The next stop will be Bonn, Germany on Saturday at the San Bo Dojo. That will be a day-long zazen thing. This will be followed by another day-long zazen thing on Sunday (the next day) in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Info for that and for the talk I'm giving in Rotterdam the following day (Monday) is at this link.

Find out about the rest of the tour by clicking here.

This is the second European Zen tour I've done. I'm gradually becoming familiar with how Zen is perceived over here. It's a bit newer to Europe than it is to the United States. That is to say, Zen literature got to both places around the same time. But it seems like the establishment of actual practice centers lagged a little behind the US.

The largest Zen organization in Europe appears to be AZI, which stands for Association Zen Internationale. This was established in France by a Japanese monk named Deshimaru. Deshimaru and my teacher Nishijima Roshi were friends. Even so, I've never been invited to speak at an AZI center. I think they're very particular about having only people from their lineage speak at their places. Fair enough.

Noah Levine has authorized a few teachers to start Against The Stream groups over here. And I'm speaking at a couple of their places in The Netherlands. Noah isn't a Zen teacher. But he's "Zen friendly." I've spoken at a number of the places he established in the US, Canada and now Europe.

Over in Poland and Finland, where I spoke last year, Philip Kapleau established a few centers that are still active. Kapleau was the author of the highly influential book Three Pillars of Zen.

The San Francisco Zen Center has a couple things over here, I think. But they run their organization pretty loosely. When a teacher from SFZC leaves, she or he usually establishes a place that has no official ties to San Francisco. However, the centers they establish all seem to network quite closely with each other. The only place I've been to in Europe that was started by an SFZC teacher is the Black Mountain Zen Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

There are a number of other teachers over here on the continent. One of those I met last year was a Dutch guy named Ton Lathouwers. He was a fun and funny guy. He studied with Masao Abe.

All of the foregoing doesn't tell you much about the overall state of Zen in Europe. And it's hard to say with any authority what that is. I've encountered a number of very sincere practitioners working hard at making Zen available. It's not all good news, though. Genpo Roshi is quite active here in The Netherlands. But his influenced has waned considerably lately. It's hard to tell if that's just because of the very highly publicized and largely meaningless sex scandal or because people realized what a joke the whole Big Mind® thing was.

New Age stuff is as much a booming business in Europe as it is in America. This stuff always has a kind of run-off effect upon Zen. New Age book shops usually stock a few Zen books. Which is good in that it gets the written part of Zen out there. But one wonders if purchasers just combine all that stuff in their minds into one big eastern spirituality blob the way Americans tend to.

I'll be seeing a lot more Zen in Europe over the coming six weeks. I'll let you know what I find.