In the aftermath of student strikes in 1968, Alan left Columbia University and moved to Berkeley, California. There, he found himself amid a whirlwind of social unrest: the counter-culture movement, anti-war protests, experimentation with mind-altering chemicals, and increasingly violent crackdowns by the police. Eventually Alan came across Philip Kapleau’s book, The Three Pillars of Zen, and was immediately intrigued.
Zen was not completely unfamiliar to Alan. Coming from New York, he was personally familiar with several Beat writers and their flirtations with Zen. But in Kapleau, found something much more substantial. This led to Alan’s first engagement with Buddhist practice, and he eventually took up the meditation of Sōtō Zen, “a practice that is quite receptive and fluid.”
As Alan was refining his life as a practitioner, he also started reflecting on the connection between spirituality and broader social and political issues. This led to Alan’s evolving into an “Engaged Buddhist,” through which he viewed the eradication of suffering as applying both to individuals as well as communities.
Alan also became increasingly interested in Myanmar. Observing the constrictions that had been placed on the monkhood under a military dictatorship for so many years does not leave him feeling optimistic about the future of Buddhism there. Neither has the lack of involvement by the Sangha in the democratic movement gone unnoticed by Generation Z protesters, who are now sacrificing everything for their country’s freedom. One of the unintended consequences of the coup is that, however it ultimately sorts out, the future of Buddhism in Myanmar is uncertain.
Alan’s perspective on the Burmese resistance is quite relevant, given his own involvement as a Buddhist practitioner in “street politics” during the turbulent 1970s in the US. While he came to the conclusion that personally supporting violence would ultimately not be effective, he acknowledges that 2022 Myanmar is not 1968 California, and doubts that a strict adherence to nonviolence alone would be effective in Myanmar’s case.
Engaged Buddhist action stands in stark contrast to the widespread spiritual bypass that seems to characterize a large segment of the Western meditator community. Alan has also observed this, commenting that it occurs “often in an individual context where people allow their practice to just cover for the work that they need to be doing on themselves… The spiritual bypass is putting on blinders so that you really can't see what's in front of you.”