“The book you have in your hands will carry you along. Its author, an American who’s spent a long lifetime practicing and wondering about Zen, writes with ease and seems to have thought through just about any implication, conception, or objection to Zen practice anyone could possibly have. Also, he spent many years studying with an important (if not so well known) Japanese Zen teacher, and represents that master’s teaching eloquently and faithfully — which in itself would make this book well worth your reading. But there’s more. To say something about this ‘more’ I want to sketch some historical background.
Michael Elliston’s teacher, Rev. Soyu Matsuoka, like the other Japanese Zen pioneers in America, was born in the early years of the twentieth century. He came to the United States in 1939. To leap across the ocean to America from Japan was, at that time, a far more enormous and daring undertaking than we can imagine from today’s perspective, when people travel all over the globe, and far-flung cultures seem to know each other’s business. Pre-War America and Pre-War Japan could scarcely have been further apart. Which raises the question: what compelled Rev Matsuoka and his contemporaries to do this outrageous thing?
To appreciate this you have to understand the enormity of the year 1868 in Japanese history. This was the year of the Meiji Restoration, a massive political and cultural reorganization, that lasted for generations, through which the Japanese undertook, with all their disciplined force, to end the project of trying to keep the Western Barbarian influence at arm’s length (an effort they were forced to give up when Admiral Perry’s warships sailed into Edo Bay in 1853) and instead absorb Western ways in order to surpass them.
Zen priests like Soyu Matsuoka who came of age in those days of cultural foment couldn’t help but question their tradition in light of the West. Studying with searching and critical eyes both Western religion and philosophy as well as Zen, they felt compelled to revise, renew, reenvision. They seemed intuitively to understand that they could not do this freely within their own cultural context, that they needed to see more directly through Western eyes. And so the most lively and daring among them gave up their secure careers at home to live permanently in the West — without any idea of how they would survive or what they would do. They were determined to bring Zen to the West — a Zen they knew they’d have to discover in the process.
I point this out in order to indicate that though the Zen transported from Japan by Rev Masuoka and others was authentic and traditional, it was also a Zen intentionally torn free from its traditional Japanese context, and was, therefore, at the same time, completely different. This new Zen reflected American values that these Japanese priests were drawn to — independence, creativity, iconoclasm, and personal experience — values that are indeed implied in traditional Zen literature but were not necessarily evidenced in Japan, or anywhere else in Asia. In this sense, these men (for they were, sadly, all men) were indeed pioneers, Japanese Daniel Boones — frontiersmen not only of the Original Frontier but of cultural and historical frontiers as well.
Enter then the second Zen pioneer this book offers — Michael Elliston, its author. Like Rev Matsuoka, Michael Elliston is perhaps typical of his generation, the generation of Americans that passionately and completely received Zen from the first Japanese teachers to come to the West. A lively and independent-minded person, searching for something beyond the traditional Midwestern virtues in which he was raised, and, not incidentally, a creative person, a visual artist and designer by trade (it is astonishing how many of the first generation American Zen students came from arts backgrounds; indeed Zen was initially understood in the West as more art form than religion) he encountered Rev Matsuoka while he was a design student in Chicago, and never looked back.
I hope all this is enough to indicate why this book isn’t exactly what it appears to be, a book about the Zen tradition for new or experienced students. Yes, it is that, but also, given its cultural matrices (post-Meiji Japan and 1960’s America) it is more — a record of two generations of seekers in two different realms of modern upheaval, two individuals who saw in Zen a path toward their own unique authenticity and individual vision lived in response to uncertain times.
Although Michael wonders, in the introduction, why in the world anyone would want yet another Zen book, and why, even if there were no Zen books at all, one would even be necessary, since Zen is about simple straightforward living— despite all this, The Original Frontier is full of useful ideas and reflections about what Zen is about and not about. (I especially appreciated the wide-ranging sections on Differentiating Zen Meditation and Deconstructing The Senses). It’s certainly the case that Zen, as Rev Matsuoka and Michael Ellison transmit it, is not a doctrine or a cut and dried set of teachings or techniques (as other schools of Buddhism can tend to be). The paradox is that though there is nothing to say about Zen, this book is quite thoroughgoing and original, the thoughts and counter-thoughts of a person who loves his teacher, loves his tradition, values it absolutely, and is willing to say so in as many ways as he can think of.”
Norman Fischer is a poet, senior Zen Buddhist priest, and author most recently of The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path (prose) and On a Train at Night (poetry).
Zenkai Taiun Michael J. Elliston sensei began his engagement with Zen in the 1960s, when he met Rev. Soyu Matsuoka, Roshi, founder and head teacher of the Chicago Zen Buddhist Temple, soon becoming his disciple. In the 1970s Elliston sensei founded the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, and in 2010 the Silent Thunder Order, of which he is currently the guiding teacher and Abbot, and which is one of the largest and most active organizations for lay practitioners of Zen in the US today.
