More important, watching Roshi in a non-monastic setting gave me new insight into just how seamlessly he had made the Zen tradition his own--and vice versa. An uneasy tension had always existed between my free-spirited self and the hyper-disciplined, even militaristic conventions of formal Zen practice. But that week in the hospital I began to see that the proper relationship between an individual and a tradition is one of tension--healthy tension. That is what produces spiritual growth, both in the individual and in the tradition itself: not the individual's solo efforts nor the tradition's overarching forms, but the two locked into a single struggle/dance, from which a new kind of person--and practice--emerges.
With the full force of the tradition behind him, my teacher searched within himself (the "backward step," as Dogen called it) and eventually broke through, turning himself inside out and taking the outside in. The tradition became personal and the personal universal. As the religious historian Karen Armstrong has pointed put, the tendency in our age is either to reject the traditional and remain isolated, secular individualists, or cling to religious forms and ideals and become fundamentalists. But the truth, like all truths, lies somewhere in between: We can't do it on our own, nor can the tradition do it for us. When the individual and the tradition are perfectly wed, intermingled and indistinguishable, a spiritual heavy hitter--a genuine master--is born, and an institution is revitalized.
In short, the tradition must be dissolved within the individual, and the individual must dissolve within the tradition.
A month or so ago I had finally picked up the classic Being Peace by Thich Naht Hanh, and in Chapter Two I came across a passage which read, "Whenever I say, 'I take refuge in the Buddha,' I hear 'The Buddha takes refuge in me.' " That kind of phrasing seemed a tad familiar to me, although we took developed it in different ways.
