What are these writings?
These writings are musings on the Zen tradition: devotional, critical, argumentative, and sometimes deliberately awkward in the face of whatever has become stale, pious, confused, or merely mindlessness repeated.
Some pieces are about meditation, conduct, doctrine, morality, food, politics, and tradition. Some try to defend what is living in Buddhism by speaking against what has become nonsense within it. What holds them together is a recurring question: how do the things we take most seriously come to take shape at all?
Whimsically, we call that recurring outlook YMCA. The title is jokey, but the point is serious enough. YMCA means Yielded Metaphysics of Conditional Arising, and yes, it was coined because of the song.
The word metaphysics is a red flag to a certain kind of modern Buddhist or postmodern reader, especially the sort who imagines he has heroically moved beyond truth, only to find that the truth of non-truth has dropped from the sky into his lap and those of his fellow postmodernists like a fresh set of tablets from Mount Sinai. As the Oxford philosopher F. H. Bradley saw long ago, the man who claims to have transcended metaphysics is still a brother metaphysician with a rival metaphysical theory of his own. And unless these people have really had it revealed to them that there is no truth, which would be absurd, circular, theatrical, and childish, then we are simply back where philosophy has always been: asking which account of reality is better and which metaphysics makes better sense of the world. Here, then, by metaphysics we mean something quite plain: an attempt to say what sort of world this is, how what appears in it comes about, and what kind of reality selves, traditions, institutions, and moral worlds actually have.
YMCA begins from a simple claim. What we call a self, a tradition, a belief, an institution, a meal, a political identity, or a moral world takes shape through conditions. It holds together for a time, then changes as those conditions change.
That is why the word yielded matters. Something is yielded when it is brought about by conditions rather than simply given. It is made, sustained, and altered. It is not eternal, but neither is it imaginary. It is something formed.
These writings are written under the name Bupsahn Sunim. By government name, O’Hare; by legal status, British; ordination name Bupsahn and ordained in the Korean Zen tradition.
Whether the subject is meditation, doctrine, morality, food, politics, or tradition, these writings keep returning to the same kind of question: what produced this, what keeps it going, what does it do, and what becomes possible when it begins to come apart? In that sense, YMCA is not something added to Zen from outside, but one way of naming a recurring concern within these writings and, arguably, within the Zen tradition itself.