QUESTION (resumed) :
5) Can one practise and yet develop social and human experiences?
QUESTION (original) :
I admire you to have known how to create a community, even if you did not want it, even if your believers came like the butterflies attracted by flame. I admire you even more if you wanted it. But, I ask it to you, this community life, this life where everything is to be experimented, but within the community, how to know that it is not a life locked up? Because this chick who wants a baby, who has a profession, is she lost? To go to you to think that it is bad faith: you have never recommended not to make a baby! You have never recommended to have no profession!! You have never obliged your disciples to come to snuggle up like sheeps in the very warm sheepfold!!! But CONCRETELY? How can we reconcile a profession, a baby, a summer camp, the camp of each season?
ANSWER :
In old times, Zen was reserved exclusively to the monks who did not have the right to marry nor to have a civil life. Master Kodo Sawaki wanted it differently and started to teach in the universities and with laics of all kinds (actors, geishas...). He even had as a disciple, after the war, a Minister of Finances who today is an eminent Zen Master in Japan. It was for Zen a true revolution. Master Deshimaru followed his example and transmitted this teaching to laic French and Europeans. Myself, I am the example of my Master and must face the difficulties that it holds but, in my opinion: How enriching for Zen and how enriching for society!
KOSEN!