One day many years ago, in a short break on a retreat, I was standing outside the Chan Hall in the sun. I noticed a beetle stuck on its back, trying to roll over. I squatted down, flicked it over the right way up, and moved on. Later that day, in interview, John asked me, “How is your beetle?” I hadn’t known that he had observed me, and it seemed such an insignificant act not worthy of comment, and yet now John was asking me about it in interview. I replied, “I turned it the right way up and it walked away”. John commented, “That kind of thing often happens here, the beetles that live here are very lucky!”
History
In very many ways the Western Chan Fellowship has been shaped by John Crook, and so in considering the legacy he has left behind we inevitably reflect on how it arose in that way, based on John’s approaches and personality which in turn are based in his personal history.
John had some childhood experiences of deep peace and joy, arising spontaneously in quiet solitude as he explored the New Forest whilst bird watching. Neither his parents nor his school teachers seemed able to relate to what he described to them but in his reading he discovered that Buddhism not only knew about such experiences but also trained in them.
He explored Buddhist monasteries whilst serving on National Service in the army in Hong Kong in the 1950s, 1 and received some teaching from Mr Shi Liang Yen, a layman who had trained with Chan Patriarch Xuyun. After leaving the army, he went to Cambridge for his PhD, and was involved in the Cambridge Buddhist Society. But it seems his prime focus thereafter was on his academic work until the late 1960s when he was a research fellow in California and he became excited by and involved in the personal growth and Encounter movements. He continued this interest after his return to UK, establishing the Bristol Encounter Centre. But he had not forgotten about Buddhism, and he learned and practised meditation especially at Samye Ling and at Throssel Hole Buddhist Priory (as it was then called). He worked towards integrating into a Buddhist context the skills and exercises he had learned in the Encounter Movement, establishing the Western Zen Retreat at Maenllwyd in 1975. He continued his contact with diverse forms of Buddhism, including his encounters with Tibetan yogins 2 during academic work in the Himalayas in 1977 and 1986. 3
His approach was exploratory, enquiring, experimental, sharing with friends the excitement of both the journey and the discovery, but in a way which was not casual – he was committed to this exploration, for example buying and restoring the Maenllwyd especially as a property suitable for this purpose, and ultimately taking early retirement to release more time for it. What was his motivation?
No doubt he was partly driven by wishing to train his own mind, having confidence in the practices and the potential of the human mind to experience the world in ways other than its usual habit. Setting up group events provided an opportunity for this, though in fact he himself more readily practiced and found a quiet mind in quiet solitude than in a group situation: on a solitary retreat at Maenllwyd; travelling in the Himalayas; simply being in nature; and in his later years living alone at his home at Winterhead. His motivation for leading group events was probably twofold. Undoubtedly there was his Bodhisattva spirit, the joy of liberating others, of helping others in their difficulties though applying insights and methods of practice. There was also his stated fascination in the human condition: he enjoyed people-watching both from afar and in the intimacy of the interview room. This was not voyeurism but rather a desire to help – sitting with John in interviews I saw him moved by the pain of other people’s lives and trying his hardest to help them.
Perhaps this might have been as far as it went, effectively a one-man show running occasional retreats at the Maenllwyd. But circumstances led, unplanned, to activities moving up a gear. He had continued to make occasional visits to his original teacher in Hong Kong, who in the meantime had become the monk Yen Why Fashi. But Yen Why Fashi became old and deaf, and after visiting him in hospital John realised that he could not rely on him being his teacher for much longer. He felt the need for an authentic teacher, not least because he was aware of a lack of acceptance of his work, with some quarters regarding it more as an extension of his Encounter Group work than authentic Buddhism. As he left the hospital there was a Buddhist bookshop across the road and he went to browse in it. There was only one book there in English, Getting the Buddha Mind. 4 From this he first heard of Chan Master Sheng Yen, and he realised that attending retreat in New York would be more accessible than travelling to the Far East.
From the mid-1980s he took to travelling to New York to train there on retreats with Shifu, simply for his own training and not seeking any recognition. After a few visits, wishing to share his new-found teacher with those who practised with him at the Maenllwyd, John was successful in persuading Shifu to come to Maenllwyd to lead retreats. He was very surprised when, at the end of his first UK retreat in 1989, Shifu gave John permission to teach Chan in Europe as Shifu’s personal representative. Of course, this was not a random event; Shifu had already made an assessment of John’s experience, understanding, and capabilities over a few retreats led by Shifu where John had been a participant. Nevertheless John was greatly surprised by this event, and even more so when in 1993, unheralded, Shifu gave Dharma Transmission to John, making him Shifu’s second Dharma heir (after Ji Chern Fashi) and the first Western Dharma heir.
In effect giving Transmission implied an acceptance of the work John had been doing with his creations such as the Western Zen Retreat, and indeed subsequently Shifu asked John to lead Western Zen Retreats at his Dharma Drum Retreat Center in upstate New York. In fact initially he proposed that we should lead them six times per year, but we felt that might be excessive! However we have led them annually since 2001, either John with me, or me with Hilary, and in fact I am typing up this article whilst sitting on a plane to New York to lead a Western Zen Retreat there once again! We have also led Koan Retreats there on several occasions.
So recognition had certainly moved up a notch, and activity began to do so too. The Bristol Chan Group was founded following Shifu’s first visit to UK in 1989. Shifu had confirmed my experience in 1992 and I subsequently began training with John to lead retreats. Also John had retired and offered more retreats per year.
In February 1995 John convened a meeting at Maenllwyd of a few ‘seniors/regulars’, including myself, to consider further developments. Subsequently in New Chan Forum 12, 5 John proposed founding a charitable institution. Though there was a natural reluctance to taking on such bureaucracy, and indeed John himself has been wary of institutionalisation, it seemed a natural step to move towards taking the administrative burden off John (at which he had never been very efficient!) e.g. advertising retreats and taking bookings. But more than that, we were consciously founding an organisation with the intention of establishing something which at least potentially could continue beyond John’s lifetime. More meetings followed, a constitution was drafted and tweaked and retweaked, 6 and the Western Chan Fellowship was founded and subsequently registered as a charity in 1997.
The constitution was carefully worded to try to build in checks and balances to reduce the risk of abuses of power that have occurred in some other Buddhist institutions. It also included a leap of faith: to be eligible to be elected Teacher following John’s death a candidate had to be a Dharma Heir of Shifu or his descendants, but at that time there were none (other than Ji Chern Fashi)! However I subsequently received Dharma Transmission from Shifu in 2000, and other Dharma Heirs of Shifu created subsequently, as well as John’s own Dharma Heirs (had he created any), would also have been eligible. The constitution also recognised the importance of the emerging network of local groups, and these have grown further since then, and in various ways the organisation has supported the groups: training and mentoring for the group leaders; publicity via the WCF website; in some cases help with start-up funds; reclaiming Gift Aid on donations.
We still continue to tweak the constitution, to consolidate the same principles and to adapt to changing circumstances. For example the original drafting occurred when John was the only retreat leader doing all the teaching, but now we have several experienced retreat leaders and the constitution needs adaptation to reflect this.
Legacy
John Crook started teaching with no support, no contacts, no accreditation, and for several years on a very small scale. I don’t believe John set out to found a Chan institution, nor even to become an accredited Buddhist teacher. Yet he did these and more. So, where are we now, what legacy has John left us? Most forms of Buddhist practice in the West in the 1970s were essentially copies or direct translations of Asian Buddhist traditions. John pioneered and innovated, integrating techniques learned from personal growth work with traditional Buddhist practices, in the context of intensive meditational retreat practice. This produced an approach which is not merely a hybrid nor a corruption of Buddhism but which is an appropriate development of practice methods which originally evolved to suit Asian cultures and which need some adaptation to be most effective for engaging and liberating Western personalities. 7 This is perhaps most apparent in the Western Zen Retreat but these skills and approaches have also transferred to our other retreats. And yet to complement these we also represent traditional formal practice, for example with our Silent Illumination retreats, and we have the benefit of holding a significant lineage to sustain us, that of the Dharma Drum lineage of Linji and Caodong Chan.
Our practice has depth and breadth. We have depth through John’s emphasis on the importance of experiential learning on intensive retreat, and breadth due to his openness in learning from different traditions including Chan, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism. The practice has been tuned to the needs of practitioners in our time and place and, importantly, due to the emotionally opening effect of the innovation of the Western Zen Retreat we do not tend to have a problem with our practitioners being stuck in quietism as can occur with some practices. This verbal method of self-inquiry is ideally suited for Western minds which are educated to explore and be critical of didactic knowledge. This method had not evolved in Asian Buddhist practices as these cultures do not so readily engage in self-inquiry in this way as it is not in conformance with their cultural values of respecting given teachings and humbly avoiding talking about themselves.
Traditional teaching would say not to try to inquire using words as it would waste time. John would agree that the answer is not to be found in words, but noticed that Westerners will in any case respond by thinking in words, as they have been educated to analyse what is given to them. So, he offered these exercises which speed up the process of discharging words so that the Western practitioner can more quickly enter a traditional non-verbal meditative enquiry once they have exhausted all possible trains of thought.
This exercise was itself derived from Zen practices, in particular the interview with the master when words are used, so it is not out of place in a Zen retreat. However this particular combination of practices was a novel development and turned out to be very powerful and we continue to run these retreats regularly several times a year over the last 37 years gaining much experience in this process of inquiry. This is an example of John’s approach to teaching – by taking a more or less conventional approach to teaching, but making relatively small adjustments to make it more directly applicable to Western minds which tend to be more ready to engage in verbal enquiry. This attitude of emphasising inquiry, alongside calming, is apparent in our more traditional retreat formats as well as in the Western Zen Retreat. As he established his teaching career John taught a wider range of methods of practice, based in tradition but also perhaps with careful adjustments based on his experience of teaching to Westerners.
For example, our Silent Illumination retreat (Silent Illumination is one of the main methods of Chan and related to the Japanese practice of Shikantaza) is very traditional in format and teaching, and indeed, when I have taught to audiences including Chinese monastics they say that it is the same as hearing the teaching of the late Chan Master Sheng Yen. But based on our experience of the risks in excessive quietism we take care that practitioners do not lapse into Silence alone but also cultivate insight/illumination.
John also received permission to teach Tibetan Mahamudra practice from a text that was given to him by a yogin whom he had met in the Himalayas. This text and the story behind it is described in a book which John co-authored with James Low, The Yogins of Ladakh. So each year John also taught a Mahamudra retreat as he felt this was similar to and complemented the practice of Silent illumination. Based on his experience of how Western practitioners sometimes have difficulty engaging with methods such as the huatou/koan (which is the other main method of Chan practice), John also developed a slightly adjusted approach to this practice. Our Koan retreat is very traditional in emphasising wordless investigation of the koan, but to facilitate reaching the wordless state we teach practitioners how they can discharge words rather than just suppressing them. In this way they engage more fully with the koan in a shorter time, which is especially important to lay people who do not have much time available for intensive practice.
So John’s academic background as rational scientist, investigator, experimenter, being informed about Western psychological techniques, has led to the teaching of practice in ways which are definitely traditional Buddhist practice but which are fine-tuned to engage more directly with the typical personality and mental habits of the Western practitioner. John was also a poet and story-teller, and enjoyed the magic and mystery of Tibetan Buddhism, but took these to be psychological practices rather than belief systems and was able to use them as such in his teaching.
A consistent theme in his approach to teaching was the importance of self-confrontation. We must continue to investigate the mind even if it gets difficult due to reasons such as encountering shameful or other painful memories, or else we shall get stuck if we opt out and suppress these thoughts.
The Western Chan Fellowship
We now have a well-established institution, 14+ years old, with a strong constitution and a clear administrative structure, and a developing membership. We have a well-established retreat programme offering a range of retreat types (Western Zen Retreat, Silent Illumination, Koan, Huatou, Mahamudra, and others). For some years we have been running retreats in several locations, not only at Maenllwyd, but we also continue to use Maenllwyd. About a year before his death John facilitated the negotiation of a rental agreement for Maenllwyd between WCF and his children, and this agreement continues. We are no longer a one-man operation. We have a team of trained and experienced retreat leaders who are able to continue and develop this programme. We have a network of local leaders and groups who are supported by the mentoring of our retreat leaders and by annual training events. And we have a committee and others assisting in our administration.
By some standards we are a small organisation, e.g. if we compare ourselves to those large international Buddhist organisations with thousands or tens of thousand of members. But curiously we are also a relatively large organisation by some standards. I was invited to a conference of 230 Western Buddhist teachers in June 2011 at the Garrison Institute in USA, 8 and in conversation many teachers there said they would consider us as a large organisation because so many sanghas are not much larger than one of our local groups – 15–25 people congregating in one town around one teacher.
We are a non-residential lay organisation, rather dispersed across our country and members of our different local groups do not often meet, but we do have a sense of community as well-demonstrated at our recent memorial events for John.
We have national and international connections in a variety of ways. We have our advisory board, defined as per our constitution, comprising some prominent Buddhists from various traditions. We have good relationships with Dharma Drum Mountain, the root of our lineage, and with Dharma Drum Retreat Centre in upstate New York where John and I have been teaching since 2001. But, importantly, we are independent of these organisations and able to regulate our own activities.
We are invited to lead retreats at Gaia House every year since the 1990s, and have friendly relations with Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey. We are longstanding members of the UK Network of Buddhist Organisations (NBO) 9 where for many years our own Sally Masheder was the Secretary, and three years ago we joined the European Buddhist Union (EBU) 10 and I have attended their AGM each year as our representative. In association with the EBU AGM there is an annual meeting of European Buddhist Teachers (BTE ),11 which I have attended annually since 2003, of which I have been the organiser since 2007, and which John also attended several times. Through this I have built up good relations with several senior European Buddhist teachers. Both John and I were both invited to the Western Teachers ‘Maha Teacher Council’ meeting in Garrison Institute in New York in June 2011,12 though John was not able to attend. Of course we also have affiliated groups in Poland and Norway, and contacts elsewhere in Europe.
We have a good public image with our website, Facebook page, conferences, and our longstanding publication New Chan Forum which for many years has been edited by John with many articles being written by him. Very importantly we have avoided creating scandals due to misbehaviour. John’s motivation in insisting that our constitution included provisions for regulating the Teacher was because he had not only read about scandals in other organisations but had also experienced the after-effects of abuse when asked to help at least two sanghas recover after difficulties with their previous teachers. As a result of such events newcomers can rightly be wary of engaging with some organisations, and some newcomers tell me that indeed they checked us out carefully before attending for the first time, both hearing our reputation and checking our constitution.
Future
There is a tendency for teachers to teach the methods and approaches which worked best for them. This is natural, since they have most confidence and experience in those methods. Gutei learned from his teacher raising a finger, and used that trick often throughout his own teaching career. John similarly taught what worked for him – emphasising the power of silent and isolated places, preferring to practice in such places, and emphasising the importance of intensive silent retreat. Part of John’s legacy is that those who practiced with him would also be those who appreciated this approach. Perhaps our challenge for the future is to take care to maintain that aspect of practice whilst also developing additional approaches which can spread the Dharma more widely to others of different temperaments. We also need to deepen the practice of our members – John was especially concerned about deepening practice so as to be able to maintain the lineage, especially so after the question was raised whether lay lineages can ever be sustained beyond a couple of generations.13 John respected tradition but did not feel bound by it, being able to make adaptations where appropriate. Perhaps this sums up our approach to his legacy – we must respect his transmission to us but, as I think he would have expected, continue to develop it rather than fossilise it.
Notes
- John Crook, Hilltops of the Hong Kong Moon, Minerva Press 1997
- John Crook, Yogins of Ladakh, Motilal Banarsidass 1997
- John Crook and Henry Osmaston, Himalayan Buddhist Villages, Motilal Banarsidass 1994
- Master Sheng-Yen, Getting the Buddha Mind: On the Practice of Chan Retreat. 1982 Dharma Drum Publications
- John Crook, A Fellowship of Western Ch'an Practitioners?, New Chan Forum Issue 12 Autumn 1995
- John Crook, The Western Chan Fellowship: Constitutional Discussion, New Chan Forum Issue 14 Spring 1997
- Simon Child, Presenting the Dharma Within Western Culture: Finding New Expressions While Preserving Authenticity, Chan Magazine Summer 2009
- http://www.garrisoninstitute.org/index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/event/info&reset=1&id =106&Itemid=998 : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/14/america-buddhism_n_876577.html : http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=6,10263,0,0,1,0
- http://www.nbo.org.uk
- http://www.e-b-u.org
- http://www.e-b-u.org/buddhist-teachers-europe.html
