Religious affiliation gives us a powerful sense of familial belonging, of feeling embraced by a like-minded group of people, and can strengthen our resolve to practice. Religious groups can become a central part of our life, and devotion to them is often encouraged by the organization to help foster solidarity among its members, expand fund-raising opportunities, and strengthen social, religious, and political agendas. As social institutions, religions are necessarily dependent on membership to maintain the complex and dynamic infrastructure that provides ceremonies, rituals, food, support staff, and salaries.

Religious affiliation gives us a powerful sense of familial belonging, of feeling embraced by a like-minded group of people, and can strengthen our resolve to practice. Religious groups can become a central part of our life, and devotion to them is often encouraged by the organization to help foster solidarity among its members, expand fund-raising opportunities, and strengthen social, religious, and political agendas. As social institutions, religions are necessarily dependent on membership to maintain the complex and dynamic infrastructure that provides ceremonies, rituals, food, support staff, and salaries. A challenge chan practitioners sometimes encounter is balancing their spiritual life with their engagement with a chan group, temple, or monastery. Our spiritual life – our chan practice – can become undermined by the social, cultural, and political aspects of religious groups.

The early development of Buddhism in northern China as a result of the Xiong Nu invasion after the collapse of the Han dynasty and subsequent Three Kingdoms period, offers an example of this phenomena. Eurasian nomads, the Xiong Nu entered China from the north, killed the two reigning emperors, and assumed control of the northern regions of the country. They quickly discovered that, to gain the trust and support of the population they had conquered, and to collect taxes, they needed to nurture Buddhism, which they knew the population was very fond of. To that end, they built huge lavish monasteries and elaborate, ornate, statues, such as those at Datong (the Yungang Grottoes) and Luoyang (the Longmen Grotttoes). The strategy was effective and gave them the needed political capital and money to govern. Government funded and controlled temples quickly grew into large feudal estates which managed labor pools and large expanses of land. Buddhism’s state-sponsored model of Buddhism, as established in northern China by the Xiong Nu, would become the dominant version inherited by both Korea and Japan, for reasons of both geographical favor (southern China, which offered a different approach to Buddhism, was distant and largely inaccessible and not state-controlled), and because it was an attractive model for foreign governments, as it provided a ready means to control and subjugate citizens, phenomena exposed in the historical records of both countries.

When we are under the spell of an institution or group, whether it’s a famous monastery or a small group of friends meeting at someone’s home, we can easily become unwittingly manipulated into thinking things and doing things that may not be in our best interest for spiritual growth, but which, instead, serve to support the group or institution. The same is true if we become emotionally attached to a spiritual leader, many of whom have charismatic personalities that encourage such relationships to develop: we may serve the leader rather than our own spiritual pursuits; we may mistakenly convince ourselves that our spiritual pursuits and our devotion to the leader, or to the group, are equivalent.

While membership to a religious community has clear benefits for the institution—and in some cases, the state—it doesn’t always benefit the individual member who, taking refuge in that community, may become subservient to it and lose personal agency—the ability to act freely and autonomously, to effect control of our own lives—an essential ingredient for spiritual growth. As chan’s popular ox-herding pictures and poems show and describe, the spiritual journey is dependent on our independent will and motivation to transcend suffering – if that will is subjugated for any reason we can go off course. We must be careful to maintain our own agency and not relinquish it to others who may be higher in ecclesiastical or institutional authority, or who we may view to be superior to us in some way.

As chan enthusiasts, how do we “stay safe” when belonging to a religious organization, such as a Buddhist temple, local sangha, or even a group of like-minded people who gather in a living room? Asking ourselves some intimate questions is a place to start:

• Are we observing our state of mind? It’s helpful to observe our emotions and thoughts as they relate to our motivations for practicing chan and joining meditation groups. Such reflection often reveals hidden truths that can help guide us.
• Why are we in the group? If we are seeking support for our practice, that’s a great reason, as long as we’re getting that support. If we are members for other reasons, like socializing, we may want to consider a different activity, as this motive may also lead us to interfere with other people’s practices.
• What is our motivation for “doing” chan? Unless we’re doing it to answer meaningful and urgent questions about life, it’s not likely to help us.
• Are we projecting onto a spiritual authority in the group? It’s fine and well to respect a spiritual teacher, one who has gone before us so can help guide us into the unknown, but if we become subservient to that person, or anyone else, if we put them on a pedestal, we may lose our autonomy, replacing our personal agency with that of another person. This common occurrence can lead to many problems, some of which have been thoroughly researched and document by Stuart Lachs.

The disciplines of chan are intimately tied to the religious backdrop from which they were founded, so the serious student of chan would be remiss to overlook, ignore, or avoid chan’s religious heritage. The chan approach, as we explore religious/institutional aspects of Buddhism, is to keep an open mind, apply “great doubt”, as master Ben Huan was fond of saying, and avoid falling into the projection trap. In the chan tradition, we explore everywhere, living no stone unturned, while forming attachments to nothing.