An interview with Helen Tworkov, editor of Tricycle magazine
by Amy Edelstein

Introduction

It was one of the first warm days of spring, and the crab apple trees were in bloom all along Riverside Drive. As I entered Manhattan and crossed the crowded and alive streets of the West Village, I found myself wondering: Who is Helen Tworkov?

We met in the stairwell on the second floor outside of the Tricycle offices, the “smoking annex,” where she was perched on a step, finishing a business meeting with her publisher. She shook my hand warmly, looking me straight in the eye. Twenty years my senior, having begun her spiritual quest when I was just learning to walk, Helen Tworkov has lived through many of the critical chapters of American Buddhist history. She was part of the movement that cut the first trails to the East, the movement that made “karma,” “nirvana” and “enlightenment” household words.

We first thought of interviewing Helen Tworkov for this issue of WIE because she, like almost no one else, has had a bird’s eye view of the evolution of the American Buddhist world. The founder and editor of America’s most widely circulated Buddhist review, she has met, written about or practiced with many of the most influential Buddhist teachers of our time, both Eastern and Western. But it was not only Tworkov’s unique experience that had piqued our interest. Four years ago Tricycle had published the bold Afterword to the second edition of her book Zen in America, in which she had voiced vociferous criticisms of the watering down of the goal of the Buddha’s teachings in America. Her astute insights regarding the assimilation of Buddhism in the West were provocative and illuminating, and she obviously cared passionately about the enlightenment tradition and its future.

When asked how she got involved with Buddhism, Helen Tworkov’s eyes brightened; she was still moved by the recollection of what it was that had compelled her to take such unusual risks at such a young age. Agonized by the war in Vietnam and the failure of American culture to provide meaningful answers, she, like others of her generation, had turned toward Asia and Buddhism. In her view, this was a collective movement, a movement for change, a movement to transform what was unacceptable in the society and in the government and, as a logical corollary, a movement to eradicate the roots of that which was unacceptable in themselves.

During this period, Tworkov came across D.T. Suzuki’s writings on impermanence and death. “It was so radically different from what my own culture provided,” she explains. “It didn’t seem mystical or alien; it just seemed real. And you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to get it!” So when she was twenty-two, just after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, she headed for Japan, one of the first Westerners, and one of the first Western women, on the Eastern spiritual circuit.

Tworkov found Japan and the Japanese monasteries intimidating and inaccessible, and discovered little that made sense to her in that very foreign culture. But in spite of this, she stayed in Asia for two years—far longer than she had originally planned—eventually traveling from Japan to Nepal, where she worked with Tibetan refugees. Her experiences with the Tibetans marked her deeply. It was only four years after the brutal Chinese invasion of Tibet, and these were people in exile from their homeland, who had fled destruction, torture and the imprisonment and death of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns. “There was something amazing about working with the Tibetans at that time,” she recalls. “Their situation was so rough, and yet they still seemed to be able to access genuine joy and happiness. Given that the refugee camp was filled with individuals who had just seen members of their own families tortured and killed, that was miraculous to me.”

Helen Tworkov returned to America in the mid-sixties, by her own account still a “book Buddhist,” not knowing how to translate into her own experience the teachings that had captivated her and yet still remained elusive, alien and seemingly only for those born in Asia. By now, the first Japanese teachers had begun touring the States, and only days after Tworkov had returned to the West, The New York Times published a front page article announcing the convergence of hippies in Kathmandu. An exodus began for Asia, but Tworkov had resettled in the West. Some years later she started studying with the great Tibetan master Dudjom Rinpoche. She describes him with deep reverence and affection as perhaps the most enlightened man she has ever met, but—at the same time—one to whom she could find no cultural bridges. “I was inspired by him,” she explains, “but I couldn’t really learn from him.” Eventually, she found herself attracted to the teachings of a native New Yorker, later to become dharma heir [teaching successor] to Taizan Maezumi’s Zen lineage, Bernard Glassman. Even at the time, she thought it ironic that she would be studying Zen after her experience in Japan. But the shift, she explains, was not so much from Tibetan Buddhism to Zen Buddhism as from Asian teachers to American teachers. With Glassman there was no language barrier, and she didn’t have to build any social or cultural bridges. But though her American teachers could speak the same language and understand her cultural background and questions, it is to her Asian teachers that she looks when recalling those individuals she has known who had authentic “awakened mind,” who were “holders of the transmission” in the truest sense of the term and who, because of who they were, could communicate a real and palpable sense of what she calls “the unknowable and unthinkable” to their students.

In her Afterword to Zen in America, Tworkov describes the rarity of the enlightened perspective, and succinctly and unflinchingly articulates her observations about how the significance of enlightenment has been minimized in American Buddhism. We were struck by her impassioned critique and her willingness to question, in a way that few others have dared to do, what is being taught as the path to awakening in many contemporary American Buddhist institutions. And we were excited and even relieved to have come across her views, for we had begun to arrive at similar conclusions ourselves while putting together this issue of WIE, and had been wondering—were we missing something essential?

Published in Tricycle under the title “Zen in the Balance: Can It Survive America?” Tworkov’s Afterword provoked a loud uproar in Buddhist circles. In it, she unreservedly criticizes a Buddhism that has lost its real dharma heirs, that has “co-opted enlightenment to add to a materialistic and self-serving lifestyle,” and that views the goal of enlightenment as an obstacle to, rather than as the purpose of, spiritual practice. Although she refers primarily to the denigration of enlightenment in American Zen, her reflections on the idiosyncratic influences of American culture on contemporary Buddhism in general are insightful and hard-hitting. We were very interested to find out if she felt her critique applied equally to the other Western schools of Buddhism. If she saw the same dissipation of the goal of awakening and cynicism about the potential for radical personal transformation that she had observed in American Zen, then what, we wanted to ask her, did she see as the future—and for that matter the present state—of Buddhism in America?

Tworkov’s firsthand observations of the coming of age of American Buddhism have led her to think deeply about the fallout from the failure of many teachers to uphold moral values, and about the tenacious independence and individualism, perhaps particular to Americans, that she terms “libertine antagonism to authority.” Both of these factors, she believes, have served to diminish the role, purpose and value of awakening among Zen Buddhists. In her Afterword, she responds unequivocally to this phenomenon, describing how “the quest for enlightenment has been derided of late as [a] romantic and mythic aspiration.” She laments the “denigration of enlightenment” as a “grievous and perhaps peculiarly American misinterpretation” of some of the great Zen masters’ teachings about the goal of the spiritual path. And in contrast to this view, she holds up the passion for change that brought Buddhism to America in the first place: “The original enthusiasm . . . was not just for personal discovery, but for the possibility of developing an appreciation for the unknown in an excessively cluttered society—it was an effort to break ground for new possibilities.”

Speaking with Helen Tworkov was a genuine pleasure and raised important questions about the kinds of effects our materialistic and gratification-oriented culture has had on what has traditionally been a renunciate tradition. Her personal involvement in the maturation of Buddhism in America offers us a view of our society and its influence on spiritual seekers that is penetrating and provocative, and which leaves us with the question: Is Buddhism surviving America?

Interview

Amy Edelstein: You’ve been watching the American Buddhist landscape for twenty-five years both as a practitioner and in your role as the editor of Tricycle magazine.

Helen Tworkov: Yes, it’s my favorite soap opera.

AE: Can you say a little bit about how you’ve seen that landscape change?

HT: There have been big changes. These days people seem to know about Buddhism, and they seem to be very interested in it. At this moment, it doesn’t seem to be adversarial to the society in any way—for better and for worse. In the sixties there was a tremendous rejection of the society and a quest for personal and social transformation, and there is no way to separate the Buddhist boom in America that was initiated at that time from the Vietnam War and from drugs. They are really inseparable. There was real despair about what was going on in Asia—the religions that we had grown up with in our Judeo-Christian culture had simply failed to provide any spiritual or moral fiber—so there was extreme disappointment in our country. Many of us who started practicing then were motivated by a very genuine combination of interest in both personal and social transformation. It was all about change—we wanted change. We wanted to change ourselves, we wanted to change our society and we wanted to change the world. And I think that this desire came from a very genuine place.

AE: Has that changed over the years?

HT: Yes. Right now we see a whole new generation of people coming to Buddhism, but if there is a collective motive among them in the way there was for us, I’m not sure what it is. We were a big wave. We had our music, we had our books, we had our heroes and we had our choices at that moment. Now I see much more subtle currents motivating the people in their twenties who are coming into Buddhism, and I don’t know if they even know what they are. I don’t know if they’ve come together in a way that’s allowed them even to formulate or articulate a collective motive. There’s such a tremendous sense of alienation in our culture. I think they would like to feel themselves to be a part of something. There’s so little cohesion and so much disintegration that in a way it’s made these young people more available for the dharma [Buddhist teaching], more ripe for the possibility of discovering a new sense of identity that is not steeped in a cultural identity.

AE: Historically, Buddhism has had to adapt each time it has entered a new culture, as, for example, when Buddhism went from India to Tibet, China and Japan. In the Afterword to the second edition of your book Zen in America—

HT: That Afterword got me into a lot of trouble! [Laughs.]

AE: Well, you made some fascinating observations. In it you seem to suggest that Buddhism’s adaptation to American culture is qualitatively different from any adaptation it has previously had to make. Because in attempting to take root in America, Buddhism has encountered and has had to adapt itself to a society that, as you say, “fails to recognize or validate the enlightenment experience.” Could you explain what you mean by that and what you’ve observed?

HT: Do you want to talk about it specifically in terms of enlightenment?

AE: Yes.

HT: Well, when we started off practicing, we didn’t know what enlightenment was, and we still don’t—we have no idea. But the way we think about it has shifted. If you go back to before the sixties, you find that Zen practice was the first, most extensive kind of Buddhism that was picked up by the new Buddhists in this country. D.T. Suzuki had a tremendous amount to do with developing and creating a climate for Zen practice in America, and he had a great deal to say about enlightenment. He talked about satori and kensho [enlightenment experiences]. What happened in this country is that we developed all these ideas about enlightenment, about emptiness and about what Zen practice was all about. And then we got tremendously disappointed in our teachers. That happened after about twenty years of practice in the Zen centers. In that time, we also went from being in our twenties to being in our forties. We became middle-aged, many people had children, and then there was a need to figure out how we were going to live in this society of ours with our conventional needs. One of the biggest differences we’ve seen in America is that there’s been no great interest in monasticism.

AE: You’re describing what has happened in the Zen community in America, but would you say the same kinds of things have occurred in the other Buddhist schools in America as well?

HT: Yes. Except that the Zen tradition has always been more affiliated with monasticism.

AE: You’ve made some interesting observations about American culture and how what you call “secular materialism” in America is influencing the way the Buddhist community is interpreting ideas like enlightenment and what it means to live an enlightened life. Today, for example, in the most popular schools of contemporary Western Buddhism, teachers and practitioners speak about bringing enlightenment into everyday life. The term “everyday Zen” perhaps best epitomizes this school of thought, even though this concept is not limited to Zen. Some popular Vipassana schools similarly refer to “mindful awareness in everyday life”—mindful awareness while you’re getting into a relationship, child-rearing and making money. My question is: Is America reshaping Buddhism according to its own secular and materialistic agenda? Are practitioners in the American Buddhist community trying to add enlightenment to their lives just as they are without changing anything?

HT: Yes, I think they are. Of course, that’s the danger that any dharma tradition is going to have here. We want the dharma to accommodate itself to us; we don’t want to accommodate ourselves to the dharma. That’s the American way.

There were lifestyles that evolved in Buddhist countries that required you to accommodate yourself to it, whatever that “it” was. There was value in just having to say, “I have to take off this set of clothes and wear that set of clothes. I have to get up at 4:45 a.m. whether I want to or I don’t want to.” But in this country, our daily life is made up of endless decisions that are all totally inconsequential. Do you want to buy a Chevrolet or a Ford? All day long we’re being asked to say, “What do I want?” Sure, you can unhook your own ego and your own personal little selfish self in the midst of this everyday life. But you have to be a spiritual genius because you’re being assaulted all day long with a decision-making process that reinforces and reifies the small self. So yes, you can do it, but—

AE: The culture doesn’t support it.

HT: No, not in the least, no.

AE: In your Afterword you also wrote, “The most compelling question today is whether the Americanization of Zen now underway is a necessary process of cultural adaptation, or if what we have confidently called ‘Americanization’ has become a justification for the co-optation of Zen by secular materialists.”

HT: Probably one of the traditions that lends itself least to the secularization of Buddhism is Zen. You can have a completely secular Tibetan Buddhism and the same thing may be true of southeast Asian Buddhism, whereas I personally think that the best of Zen perhaps needs the monastery. I’m not sure that you can really get it in a secular society, because Zen plays with reality in a way that your PTA meeting wouldn’t allow. There are many traditions in which the lines between lay and monastic, mystical and mundane, ordinary and extraordinary, or esoteric and exoteric can be very gentle paths that lead from one to the other. Zen is the one tradition where it feels to me that really too much gets lost in the process of secularization. The quirkiness of Zen—the total, complete transcendence of conventional form—can only take place in a highly secure, collective, shared sphere that allows for this. You can’t just walk around the world appearing crazy. It doesn’t have any value for people.

AE: Monasticism and renunciation have traditionally occupied a central role in Buddhism. Gautama the Buddha found it essential to renounce everything, leaving his kingdom in his quest for enlightenment. Apparently, he also passionately encouraged many others to do the same. Today, this kind of renunciation is rarely spoken about within American Buddhist circles and, as you have observed, monasticism has never really taken root among Western Buddhist groups. Yet there are people like Professor Robert Thurman who feel that Buddhism can never take root in America without a living monastic tradition. What do you think about this?

HT: I agree with that.

AE: Is it because monasticism itself is important, or because of the quality of renunciation that monasticism requires?

HT: I think that you have to have a concrete physical space that becomes a pressure cooker for practice. It’s going to be very hard to go deep with the dharma without having that distilled place where we say, “This is all we’re supposed to do.” Today you have all these Buddhists running around and they’re supposed to get enlightened, they’re supposed to be very nice to everybody, they’re supposed to be carrying out the precepts—and that’s all possible—but meanwhile they’re also raising children and furthering their careers and building houses and doing this and doing that. The role of the monk is to just do the dharma.

AE: Is this kind of renunciation being spoken about among Western Buddhists? Or are most individuals putting their attention on “how can I do everything that I want to do and be on the path to enlightenment?” Because as you said, monasteries are a pressure cooker—and they’re a pressure cooker for what? To make something happen, to move from ignorance to enlightenment. It would seem that this is something that very few modern Westerners are interested in.

HT: Yes. You asked before about the society being antagonistic to any kind of spiritual development. Well, this society, for example, is unbelievably antagonistic to silence. It finds silence extremely threatening. It’s not coincidental that you have so few monasteries here and that even the Christian monasteries are practically extinct. The monastery represents silence; it represents a space in the culture that says, “Stop, slow down, be quiet.” Whether it’s a Christian or a Buddhist monastery, it’s a physical space that says, “Just quiet down.” But our society doesn’t like that. It’s very threatening. If you make a lot of noise, then everyone’s very happy.

Of course, there is the possibility of creating temporary situations that can give people a very deep experience and a real taste of what renunciation means, which can then be brought back into society. Maybe in this country we’ll develop a temporary ordination, something similar to what you have in southeast Asia and in the Far East or in Tibet. Somebody I know recently referred to periods of intense practice as “binge Buddhism”—and they referred to themselves as a “binge Buddhist.”

AE: What does that mean?

HT: They said they go on retreat for three weeks and then they don’t practice again until the next time they go on retreat.

AE: What do you think about that?

HT: It’s better than not doing anything at all.

AE: But isn’t there a danger that if the “binge Buddhist” model becomes the most popular model, it could dilute genuine aspiration for radical change?

HT: Of course. But look at the history of Asia. Why is America going to do something that’s radically different than India, Tibet, Japan, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia or Vietnam? Very few people are interested in getting enlightened, very few people are interested in waking themselves up, very few people are interested in truly living in a nondualistic view. So when you talk about “enlightenment,” you’re talking about only a handful of people. Meanwhile, you’ve got all the rest of humanity suffering and you try to do what you can to create an environment or an awareness that helps to alleviate that.

AE: Is there any way, though, within the context of this pluralistic view, to insure that regardless of whether or not I personally choose to give my life to that supreme possibility, or whether or not Jane Doe or John Schwartz does, that that possibility itself isn’t being diluted—that enlightenment is still being viewed as the ultimate or supreme possibility—and that one would also know if one wasn’t striving for that? That, to me, is the question: What is American Buddhism doing with enlightenment?

HT: I think that’s a really good point. My hope would be that a monastic situation would create that witness. But again, if you look at Asia, it’s not necessarily true. In fact, it’s not unlike what happened in the Roman Catholic Church. The bureaucracy of the Church eventually just ate up every shred of mystical possibility, so that it was no longer being imbued with any mystical elements. The question is—how can you maintain something within the culture so that the enlightenment tradition within a secularized Buddhism actually can function to enlighten or awaken? How can you keep some dialogue going? In the Church, the dialogue got broken, at least as far as we know. You grow up in the West never knowing that anybody in the Church ever contemplated the reality of not–knowing at all—which of course they did.

AE: Yes, they must have.

HT: If you read the writings of the early church fathers, they sound exactly like the Zen masters, but that’s not what we were taught. This was something that we, as secular people, didn’t have access to. So as far as I’m concerned, the best we can do is to keep the channels of communication open within a pluralistic, diverse kind of Buddhism, because of course it’s a given that you’re going to have a very secular Buddhism. Whether or not it’s going to be any more interesting than secular anything else, I really don’t know—it might not be.

But on the other hand, I think Buddhism has an enormous amount to offer to this country and is having a tremendous effect on the consciousness of America. You don’t have to have a big mystical relationship to life to understand what the value of Buddhism could be or what the need is—and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or St. John of the Cross to see it. You can see Buddhist views filtering down into the death-and-dying literature and into some of the environmental movements, with a kind of pragmatism that in my mind is not a mystical approach, it’s just a realistic approach.

AE: I agree with you about the kind of influence Buddhism can have on a relative level, but you made some pretty provocative statements in your Afterword to Zen in America. You made very clear the distinction between effecting change on a relative level—raising the standard of ethics or morality, for example—and interpreting one’s experience from an enlightened point of view or having one’s actions be an expression of a truly enlightened perspective. You said that replacing the goal of enlightenment with a goal of ethical behavior uninformed by an awakened mind “both feeds on and fuels the human resistance to the unknown and the unknowable, which lies at the heart of all religious pursuit.”

HT: That’s right. But it all has to go on at the same time, because the effect of any one person’s enlightenment is only going to be as far-reaching as the rest of the society is prepared to go.

AE: Can you explain what you mean?

HT: Well, you can have a great saint in your midst, but how fertile is the ground to receive what they have to offer? Very few people want to get enlightened. Maybe that’s something that happens in the evolutionary process of humanity—I have no idea. I don’t know whether people these days want to be more or less enlightened than they did two thousand years ago. But it’s absolutely true that we want to know about things. And we don’t want to know about not knowing. Very few people want to know about that.

AE: Do you think that Buddhist practitioners nowadays know that they don’t want that?

HT: No, I don’t—I don’t.

AE: Do you think they’re deluded? Do they think they want enlightenment?

HT: Of course they’re deluded! Of course. Who among us is not deluded?

AE: I mean in terms of one’s basic understanding of one’s own relationship to the path. One could know, for instance, that one wants to be a good samaritan, wants to be generous, wants to be compassionate—but doesn’t want to be enlightened.

HT: Yes, and I think that one of the things that’s happening now is that people have grown up and found out that maybe they don’t want what they thought they wanted. You’re on the path for twenty years and you’ve taken all these vows of renunciation and then you find out that you don’t want to renounce anything. I described a conversation in the Afterword I’d had with a Buddhist teacher, who said, “I don’t give a shit about enlightenment.” Now that’s a very silly attitude for any Buddhist to take, be it a Zen Buddhist or anybody else.

But what we’re seeing is that now we have a group of people who are disappointed with their practice. You could sit for twenty years and not get enlightened. So you say, “Hey, what happened? To hell with this tradition. I didn’t get enlightened, so screw it.” You get disappointed and then you start changing your view about it. This change in view is going to secularize the teachings. The secularization is coming from people who have had a big falling out with their teacher. They discover that they don’t like their teacher or that their teacher is not who they thought he or she was. Then their views change through anger, through bitterness and through disappointment—it doesn’t really matter why. Still, the secularization of these teachings is inevitable. There are very few people who want to go the distance with living a truly mature, authentic, nondualistic or autonomous life.

AE: Right, that’s true.

HT: But that doesn’t mean you can dismiss the rest of it, because the rest of it has tremendous—

AE: Relative value.

HT: Yes.

AE: But what will help to keep the enlightenment tradition alive?

HT: I think monasteries represent that, and it’s important to have that representation. It doesn’t mean they are enlightenment factories, but they are beacons of that possibility. It’s very hard to create beacons of that possibility without it. I don’t know that you can’t do it; it’s just difficult.

In the Jewish tradition you don’t have a history of monasticism, and you don’t have a strong living enlightenment tradition outside of the Hassidim [an orthodox branch of Judaism]. But if you look at Hassidic culture, it’s about as monastic as you can get. It has sex and babies but it basically takes all the men and women and children and brings them together into a pressure cooker situation in which the Rebbe is like a Zen master. He has all these ecstatic experiences and incredible enlightenment visions, and whatever he says goes.

AE: He was involved in every aspect of community life.

HT: Absolutely. The Rebbe is like a monastic in the sense that he spends his entire day engaged in the tradition and reading the traditional texts. So from an anthropological point of view, a great deal of what would define the “enlightenment factory” elements of a monastery would apply to the structure of the Hassidim.

AE: So do you think it’s important for the teachers of the dharma in the West to have some kind of realization?

HT: Yes, of course. I would love to see all the teachers become fully realized, but the sad truth is that they’re not. We see more and more teachers who are teaching who don’t have a clue about it. That’s inevitable. That’s just the way it’s going to work out.

AE: But how do you feel about it, besides recognizing that it’s inevitable?

HT: Well, there are a lot of teachers who are teaching Zen who are Zen senseis [teachers] or Zen roshis [masters] or whatever, and in a perfect world, in the Zen tradition they would have at least some experience of—

AE: The nondual?

HT: Well, I’m sure they do have some experience of that. But they would be accomplished in their understanding. And that’s clearly not the case right now. When you look at the teachers who taught the previous generation and you look at the American heirs of those teachers, there’s a big difference. That’s true across the board, whether you’re talking about Tibetan Buddhism or Zen or Theravada. And the people who are the most aware of it are the American teachers—the teachers who studied with real teachers. They know the difference; they’re not stupid.

It’s hard to express to people who have come to the Buddhist community recently—the second and third generation of practitioners—how unbelievably lucky we were in the sixties and the seventies to have the teachers who came here. These were not ordinary Buddhist teachers; we got the cream of the crop as far as I could tell. Even before His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to the West, we had Dudjom Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche, the Karmapa and Trungpa Rinpoche. There was an extraordinary level of dharma coming in.

AE: You’re describing people who emanated a certain kind of realization.

HT: Yes, and the same thing in Zen—you look at Soen Roshi, Yasutani Roshi, even Nyogen Senzaki—you’re not talking about your average Zen abbots. These guys who came were really very extraordinary! So of course at some point, Buddhism is either going to stay in this kind of little, elitist situation or it’s going to spread. The secularization of the teachings is inevitable. There’s no point in bemoaning it; it has to happen. Buddhism, like any tradition that’s been around 2,500 years, is enormously flexible, otherwise it would have never gotten past India.

AE: You said earlier that you felt that many of the teachers teaching today don’t have the same kind of transmission of awakened mind that their teachers did—

HT: Yes, but I have to deal with my own preconceptions. I was trained and influenced by teachers who were extremely strict on issues of dharma transmission. Some of these same teachers are now giving dharma transmission to every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along. They changed. So maybe I have to look at where I’m stuck.

AE: Perhaps, but earlier you referred to striving for that which you call “the unknowable” and “the unthinkable.” You seemed to be suggesting that if a teacher is teaching scholastic dharma, without communicating the essence of the spiritual path and goal, then something essential is being lost.

HT: We don’t know yet. Maybe there is. At least with all of these teachers in the Zen tradition, their students are sitting regularly. Maybe the best anybody can do is to show people the meditation cushion.

AE: Is that what you think?

HT: Of course I would rather that everybody was studying with wildly enlightened masters. Show me one. Of course! Wouldn’t it be great if the world was populated with fully awakened, enlightened people? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? It doesn’t seem to be that way.

AE: You’re saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if they were enlightened?” Someone else might say, “Well, I don’t mind. I don’t mind if someone just shows me the cushion.” So you obviously feel that there’s a big difference between having an enlightened teacher and having an unenlightened teacher.

HT: No, actually, I’m not sure that there is. How many people can use an enlightened teacher? You’re trying to box me into a place of yes or no, but we just don’t know. For example, I think Tricycle is enormously valuable. But it’s not an enlightened magazine. All it’s doing is introducing people to the dharma. People have to find their own way and they have to be inspired by their own perceptions.

As a Buddhist and as a practitioner, I’m always going to be interested in Buddhism. I’m always going to be interested in Zen. I love the tradition. But as an editor, what preoccupies me is, “What does Buddhism have to offer this country that’s not already here?” If all you’re doing is doubling up what’s already here through the Christian and Jewish traditions, then it seems to me to be a complete waste of time. Take “engaged Buddhism” as an example. There’s certainly no problem with any individual Buddhist who wants to work in a prison or an AIDS hospice, or whatever it is they want to do. It’s wonderful work. Yet personally I’ve never known what makes any of those programs Buddhist. And I’ve also never known what makes them “engaged Buddhists” rather than just Buddhists. I’ve read a lot about “engaged Buddhism”; it sounds a lot like Buddhism. I’ve never gotten the distinction. I also haven’t seen that that kind of activity is different than a lot of Christian charity work. The true sense of Christian charity is wonderful. And it’s not that it’s not wonderful to do AIDS work or hospice work or whatever kind of charity work it is. But I’m more interested in seeing what Buddhism has to offer that we don’t already have here. We already have a sense of social action that’s deeply part of our culture.

AE: So what do you feel Buddhism has to offer?

HT: I think that what Buddhism has to offer that’s not in this culture are teachings on the nature of mind. Understanding that your own mind has the capacity to create a tremendous amount of suffering for yourself and others, and also that it has the capacity to dissolve a great deal of suffering for yourself and for others. You don’t have to be a mystical genius to use those teachings to help your life a great deal. We’re talking in a very profound and subtle way about the nature of mind, and when you take on the possibility of a nondualistic reality, even the sense of compassion becomes different.

AE: When you speak about understanding the nature of mind, are you speaking in any sense about a realization of the Absolute or some sense of the nondual? Do you think that the difference between what you refer to as Christian ethics and what Buddhism has to offer as an ethical perspective comes from an awakened mind, comes from some understanding of the nondual?

HT: Yes, but again, there’s probably about a half-dozen people who genuinely, truly can tolerate the heat of living in a completely nondualistic reality.

AE: But thank God we have those examples so we know that there is something higher to strive for, because without them or the writings about them—

HT: Sure, and it would be great to have those teachings of Buddhism manifested by a mind that is so empty that you get a taste of that capacity yourself. You have to have some experience of the possibility of emptying your mind out or it just becomes theoretical. But even in theory it’s pretty powerful.

The teachings of mind are the enlightenment tradition. Those teachings are very alien to this culture but they can be brought into this culture in a widespread and beneficial way. They can have enormous effects on society and on the sense of responsibility that people have for themselves and for others around them. That is the enlightenment tradition.

AE: I have one last question for you: Imagine you leave your apartment in Chelsea and you walk downtown to the Tricycle offices. As you get to Vandam, you look down the street and to your surprise you see a throng of ten or twenty thousand monks and nuns crowding the entire block. You make your way through the mass of monks and nuns to your building. When you get to the entrance, you look up and see someone standing before the door—it is none other than the Buddha himself. As you look at him, you have absolutely no doubt that it is, indeed, the Buddha. If this were to happen, and if he looked at you and said, “Okay, Helen, your time has come. Leave everything and come join my order of monks and nuns,”—would you do it?

HT: I have no idea! It’s so hypothetical, I can’t even imagine it! It’s not even a fantasy I can imagine. I feel like I’m disappointing you, but I can’t even think about it. It’s too hypothetical for me. I’m just trying to get to the place where I walk out the door and down the street, do you know what I’m saying? I’m still dealing with walking down the street!