The teaching of this temple,
No longer a boat of compassion and wisdom, sinks.
Deluded monks guiding this boat grasp at its oars
As if they were demons who would grant
them powers.
Each lay hold of the filthy end of
a defiled stick
And call it the 3 Jewels.
This boat with rotten moral keel and broken compass
Is swiftly rowed to hell.
Meritless, these horned monks think
They will be
saved at its gates
And blindly call it nirvana.
The revolution of their oars knows
no limits.
This boat is rowed by fools who do not see
That the fetters of their identity
Chain them to this sinking boat.
They think their determination to be
Determined by an identity,
Which is but the shadow of a phantom
That evilly haunts their minds,
Is a mark of virtue,
Think their deranged map that tears the land to pieces
Will guide them to Awakening.
Arrogantly, they call themselves bodhisattvas
And corrupt the Dharma with evil politics.
How far astray they have gone with
Their fixation on an identity that befouls the temple
With dark and noisome politics masked as virtue.
When the temple goes apostate and schismatic
Where will a new temple be found?
Will this boat of the teaching ever carry the moonlight
again?
It may have sunk too far.
Note: This poem is in response to my former sangha, the San Francisco Zen Center, having adopted a Neo-Marxist agenda. Identity politics, which have nothing to do with Buddhism, are now central to the culture of the temple and have usurped in primacy the ancient teaching of Zen, which eschews any notion of clinging to an identity, and certainly not a politicized one.
