Western Leaders in Zen?

Prompted by a recent dialogue amongst RPA team members, we noticed that a rise in “Eastern” practices in the “West”, on an almost industrial scale in the 21st century, was starting some debate about credible and original western sources for their popularity. Although the Pirsig’s did their bit to support such practices , not least their association with the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center (see “Wendy Pirsig – a Life in Zen“) and its funding from early ZMM royalties, Pirsig was clear that ZMM itself “should in no way be associated with the great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice”.

Beyond D.T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, and Dainin Katagiri, when it comes to actual practice – Zazen – the original westerner that many modern advocates reference is Alan Watts. Given that Watts’ 1950’s/60’s activities overlap almost entirely with Pirsig’s early interest and research that became ZMM(1974) and Lila(1991) the question of one’s influence on the other became an interesting topic. RPA member Brandon Mayfield was moved to write a comparative essay on exactly that.

Zen Buddhism is only one thread of such so-called “Eastern” practice and, of course, even the words Eastern and Western are figurative short-hand here but, notwithstanding that, the influences are clear even without explicit references. Watts died the year before Pirsig’s ZMM was eventually published in rhetorical auto-fiction form, so we can only speculate what might have happened if best-seller Pirsig had come to Watts attention. What we do know is that beyond such practice, Pirsig’s primary work was to find a way to integrate such Eastern thinking with the Western intellectual canon.

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