Essays, reflections, and longer prose.

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 seriously come to appear at all?

Whimsically, we call this recurring outlook YMCA. The title is, of course, jokey, and was coined because of the song, but the point is serious. YMCA means Yielded Metaphysics of Conditional Arising.

What? Metaphysics? Isn’t metaphysics long dead?

The word metaphysics is certainly a red flag to a particular 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 somehow dropped from the sky into his lap 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. Unless these people have genuinely received a revelation that there is no truth, which would be absurd, circular, theatrical, and childish, 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, metaphysics means something quite plain: an attempt to say what sort of world this is, how the things appearing within it come about, and what kind of reality selves, traditions, institutions, and moral worlds actually have.

YMCA begins with 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 appear under my Buddhist name, Bupsahn Sunim. By government name, O’Hare; by legal status, British. The name Bupsahn comes from the Korean Zen tradition in which I was ordained.

Whether the subject is meditation, doctrine, morality, food, politics, or tradition, these writings return to the same questions: 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. It is one way of naming a recurring concern within these writings and, arguably, within the Zen tradition itself.