Dae Soen Sa Nim was fully aware that his direct and clear way of teaching Zen in the western context would/should come back to disrupt the orderly deadness of traditional Chogye Buddhism. He often referred to his new expression of Zen as “our Zen revolution“.

Little did he know how quickly his own expression would become ossified into an administratively inert, predictable, formulaic, even dogmatic iteration that we see now in the Western school he left behind, what has devolved into what is seen in today’s Kwan Um Zen.

Heirs of his Dharma have a sacred obligation to keep the ferment and disruption alive and fresh and spontaneous and new. This is the responsibility of anyone who benefitted from his expression on their own two feet: not to repeat some formula and ensure its homogeneous replication, and thereby its certainly becoming an object of ridicule, and its death.

Share this on: