Core concerns and teachings
Although Richard Baker’s approach to teaching has significantly evolved over the past six decades, many of his core teachings and concerns have remained the same. According to him, Buddhism provides an alternative way of viewing and being in the world—one that can be truly transformative both for the individual and on a societal level. As such, he considers the Buddhist worldview to be much more wholesome and conducive to sanity than the conventional Western worldview, which he perceives as delusional in many ways.
Since the 1960s, Baker’s core concern has been the establishment of (Zen-)Buddhist practice in the West. Baker believes that the essence of Zen as he has received it from his Japanese teachers can be authentically transmitted within Western culture. However, such a transmission can only work when the specific forms of practice are adapted for people who have been socialized in a Western cultural framework. One example for this are the residential or monastic practice places Baker helped create: While their core practice closely resembles the way practice is happening in traditional Japanese temples or monasteries, other elements are more modern or Western. This includes their economic foundation: Unlike Japanese temples, which are largely funded through donations from the community, Baker’s centers needed to develop their own economic models. While all the Western centers he (co)-created did and continue to receive substantial donations, they also rely on charging fixed fees for Zen retreats and renting out spaces to external retreat and seminar facilitators. Zen students work as kitchen staff, in housekeeping, guest management, and other roles, and this is considered a key part of their spiritual practice. Baker first implemented such a model with Suzuki Roshi, his teacher, in the 1960s at SFZC’s Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Today it is widely used by many Buddhist retreat centers around the world.
Another way in which Baker adapted Zen teachings to the needs of Western students is his teaching style. The traditional Japanese approach to teaching Zen emphasizes close observation and careful imitation of the teacher by the student. This usually happens in a monastic setting where teacher and student live and practice together for many years. At SFZC, Baker still taught for a larger monastic or residential community, which allowed him to rely on the traditional model of implicit teaching. But at his new community, Dharma Sangha, most students have their own homes, from which they occasionally travel to meet Baker or another teacher for shorter periods of shared practice. These days, Baker feels he needs to teach much more explicitly, meaning he will often explain and spell out how certain Zen rituals and concepts work.
However, this style of teaching presupposes the existence of words that can describe such concepts and ideas. Baker points out that English and other Western languages do not actually have words for many basic Buddhist or Asian cultural concepts and experiences, which he considers fundamental for Zen practice. According to him, many words that are generally used to describe Zen or Buddhist practice carry inappropriate Western or Christian connotations. Consequently, he considers it essential for the establishment of Buddhist practice in the West to develop a new dharma vocabulary—or “dharmacabulary”, as he likes to call it. In recent years, his creative efforts at doing just that have become a signature feature of his talks. Ultimately, these newly created terms are supposed to create new possibilities of thinking and speaking about practice.
Baker has formulated four key assumptions that underlie all his teachings, which he calls the four possibles: 1. Personal and societal transformation is possible. 2. Freedom from mental suffering is possible. 3. Living close to how we fundamentally exist is possible. 4. Living in ways beneficial to all sentience and things is possible.
Baker emphasizes that Zen-Buddhism is based on a Yogic worldview, which becomes practicable and liveable through Zen. According to him, the core assumptions of Yogic cultures differ from those of Western cultures in fundamental ways. In his teachings he usually refrains from statements about the accuracy or truth of either cultural paradigm. Instead, he encourages his students to—at least temporarily—adopt key assumptions from the Yogic paradigm and observe whether that changes their way of being in the world towards a more wholesome orientation. These key assumptions or differentiations include:
Relationality versus reality: Baker posits that conventional Western worldviews assume the existence of a reality that exists independent of the person who perceives it. According to that view, what is “out there” has an inherent reality, and the most a person can aspire to is to perceive it more accurately. Yogic culture, on the other hand, suggests what Baker dubs a shared relationality, instead of a shared reality. It assumes that nobody and no thing possesses an inherent identity or quality, only a potential which is realized in an ever changing field of relations with other things or people. In order to explain this, Baker sometimes refers to how the board games go and chess differ from each other. Go stands for the Yogic worldview in this analogy, and chess for the Western worldview: Baker points out that in chess, each piece has its inherent, distinct way of impacting the game. The way a king may move across the board differs from the way a queen, knight, or pawn may move across the board. In go, on the other hand, all pieces are fundamentally the same. But the way one piece may impact the game depends—and constantly changes—according to its position in the relational field with all other pieces.
Continuity versus succession: Western culture usually imagines human consciousness as an uninterrupted, continuous flow of experience. According to this view, each cognition (meaning thoughts, feelings, and sense perceptions) flows into the next one, without any pause between them. Baker points out that a person who subscribes to this concept—as people from a Western paradigm usually and non-consciously do—will likely locate their sense of identity in this uninterrupted stream of cognition, since that is all they ever experience. However, the experienced cognitions are the product of cultural, social, and biographical conditioning, and thus limiting: Many people in the West have the sense that they are defined by key biographical events and factors, and that the most they can hope for is a certain degree of maturation, growth, or refinement of their personality. Baker on the other hand suggests that practitioners perceive their experience as a succession of distinct moments, which, in practice, are even separated by a sense of a pause between them. This pause, if actually noticed and practiced, can give rise to original mind, meaning truly spontaneous impulses that transcend the conditioned patterns of a person’s biographical identity.
Awareness versus consciousness: Baker uses the term consciousness to describe an uninterrupted continuity or stream of conceptualized experience, as assumed in Western culture (see above). Whatever arises in consciousness does so in response to what has previously been in consciousness. As such, it follows specific personal or reactive patterns, which are conditioned and have a narrow focus. Awareness, on the other hand, is used to describe an open, free, and field-like quality of experience, in which truly spontaneous and original impulses can emerge.
Activity versus entity: This distinction expands on the above differentiations. Western culture usually considers beings and things as separate and fixed entities. Examples for entities could be “man”, “woman”, “lawyer”, “teacher”, “tree”, “bird”, “stone”. Baker points out that entities are imagined to possess or consist of specific, fixed qualities. A person who sees a “tree” does not see what is actually happening in front of them, but only their personal, mentally constructed concept of what the entity “tree” entails for them. And what specifically a person sees will largely depend on their specific sense of identity. (For example, a person who identifies as a logger and a person who identifies as a birdwatcher have very different ways of relating to trees. They might look at the same tree and yet have two very different visual and cognitive experiences.) In Yogic culture, on the other hand, there is no entity “tree”, only an ever changing process or activity, which is why Baker sometimes suggests that the verb “treeing” would be a more accurate term to describe what we usually refer to with the noun “tree”. Adopting this worldview, Baker argues, enables a person to experience and relating to what is actually happening in the moment, instead of only labeling and conceptualizing it.
Momentary versus biographical identity: This distinction weaves the above differentiations together. According to Baker, a person from a Western cultural paradigm usually locates their sense of identity in their culturally, socially, and biographically constructed personality, which manifests as conditioned thoughts, emotions, and learned patterns of perceptions, among other things. This process—of identifying with one’s personality—is so deeply ingrained that it usually happens automatically and non-consciously. It seems entirely choiceless to most Western people, and the idea that there might be an alternative could feel completely foreign or absurd. Baker, however, posits that identifying with one’s personality is just a learned cultural habit to which the Yogic cultural paradigm presents a viable alternative. This alternative, he explains, consists of placing one’s sense of identity in a momentary, ever shifting field of experience and relationality, meaning in the experience of whatever appears in one’s field of vision, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and otherwise feeling. That way, the biographically conditioned continuity of experience is interrupted, and truly original, spontaneous impulses can occur. Although a biographically conditioned personality remains intact, it ceases to be one’s locus of identity. Baker sometimes talks about “locationing” one’s identity—the gerund locationing, which he himself has coined, is meant to emphasize how this process involves both choice and activity. In other words, a person may consciously choose to shift the location of their identity from their personality to their field of momentary experience and relationality. And this is not just done once. Instead, it is an activity or practice that a practitioner can engage in each and every moment. One of its possible effects is a shift from perceiving oneself as an entity to perceiving oneself as a process or activity.
Pausing and unitizing experience: These are basic, core practices Baker suggests for practitioners who would like to cultivate a worldview according to the above assumptions of Yogic culture. A person may engage in the practice of perceiving units of experience one after the other, instead of conceiving of their experience as an uninterrupted stream. This could be as basic as feeling one inhale, one exhale, one step, or the sight of a tree, a stone, or a person. Each unit of experience is perceived of as arising, lasting, and ending—which is the definition of a ‘dharma’. Between any two units of experience, there is the potential to pause. The next unit of experience can then arise spontaneously from that very pause, instead of from conditioned thinking.
Construction of reality and identity: Baker uses the above distinctions to demonstrate that reality and identity are always constructed from a so-called internality – which is projected as an externality on the cultural board. Human beings have a choice as to how, and in reference to what, this construction occurs. In the Western cultural paradigm, the construction of identity is usually shaped by individual biographical events, and people are not aware of the possibility to participate in said construction, which can lead to the creation and persistence of immense suffering. The Yogic cultural paradigm on the other hand makes it obvious that a being can actively participate in the construction of identity and reality. According to Baker, Zen practice suggests to use the ideal of a Bodhisattva—a being who is committed to the liberation of all beings—as a model or reference point for constructing one’s identity. That, he says, leads to sanity and the cessation of suffering.
Separation versus connection (or "not abandoning any beings"): Combined, the above distinctions point to another fundamental key difference between Western and Yogic culture. In many ways, the former assumes and cultivates a sense of individualistic separation, which can lead to suffering, whereas the latter assumes and cultivates a sense of boundless connection, which can lead to the cessation of suffering. Baker says that the Yogic cultural paradigm is actually closer to the way in which we fundamentally exist—and closer to the findings of contemporary science. He emphasizes that Zen practice as wisdom can only truly happen with an attitude of “not abandoning any beings”. This is to say, a practitioner can never just practice for their own benefit, which would ultimately fall under the Western paradigm, but always needs to cultivate an awareness of their boundless connection with all beings, as described in the Bodhisattva ideal.
