How does a Jewish man born into a normal, middle-class American family end up a Japanese monk and scholar who hobnobs with neuroscientists? For Shinzen Young, it all started with a Friday-night double-feature at a tiny Japanese theater in downtown Los Angeles. That childhood exposure to Japanese culture fueled a lifelong passion and quest that lead Young to master several Asian languages, undergo rigorous training in each of the three major Buddhist meditative traditions, and become both a monk and a respected academician.

After many years in Japan, Young returned to the United States and set his sites on the growing dialogue between the meditative practices of the East and the technological science of the West. His studies in that field have led him to develop, among other programs, innovative pain-management techniques and a phone-based home practice. Here, Young talks to Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema about life in Japan, the rigors of meditation training, and the technological future of mindfulness practice.

Were your parents involved in Buddhism or meditation?

SY: No, my parents are Jewish, and I was born into a normal, middle-class situation in Los Angeles. When I was 14, my best friend was a third-generation Japanese-American. This was decades before Sushi became cool or people were interested in Asian martial arts; in fact, this was in the mid-50s, not that long after WWII, so Japan wasn’t really looked upon very favorably.

But my best friend and his family used to go to Japanese movies at this tiny little theater in downtown L.A., and they invited me one Friday to go with them. I had no interest, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I went.

It was a double feature. The first movie was a love story set in modern Japan, and it was completely boring. But the second one was a Samurai movie set in 17th century Japan, and I was mesmerized. The people in the movie were obviously human, but they might as well have been from another planet. Their culture was completely different from anything I had ever encountered: the way the dressed, the way they talked, their values, the way they fought.
After the movie was over, I started to interrogate my friend’s parents – “Why did they do this?” and “What did that mean?” – and they fed me snippets of Japanese culture and language. I started going with them every Friday to see these Japanese movies; afterwards, we’d go to Little Tokyo, which is the Japanese section of L.A., for Japanese food.

It was a foreign world to me, and a huge adventure. At the age of 14, I was learning a little bit of a foreign language, how to order in a Japanese restaurant, how to eat with chopsticks, in an environment where I was the only non-Asian. I had a major epiphany at the age of 14, that if I really wanted to understand this culture, mastering the language was the key.

RD: Did you start studying it then?

SY: No, I started by learning and hearing snippets of the language.

RD: You must have realized how hard it was.

SY: Eventually I did. It certainly wasn’t like trying to learn Spanish, or even Latin. It’s a language structured in a way that’s fundamentally different from a standard European language. I found out there was an alternative school system for Japanese-American kids that met in the afternoons and on Saturdays. The Japanese-American kids had to go to it, just like Jewish kids like me had to go to Hebrew school. But when I found out about Japanese school, I enrolled.

My parents thought it was terrific that I had such an esoteric intellectual interest at such an early age. So I graduated from Venice High School, and in the same week, I graduated from Sawtelle Japanese languages school, as the only non-Japanese-American kid. Then I went into UCLA as an Asian language major, and I did my senior year in Japan as an exchange student.

RD: What did it feel like to be in the country that you had been so enchanted with for so long?

SY: It was like a dream come true. It was the best year of my life up to that point. I was living my dream. I was fluent in Japanese, at a time when it was fairly rare for a foreigner to know the language. When I hit Japanese soil, I was like some rare bird, a foreigner with whom any Japanese person could converse.

I was supposed to go to school, but I ditched it, like every Japanese college student ditched school; you get a college education in high school in Japan, so once you hit college, you just goof off.

RD: Really? Like an extended senior year of high school?

SY: Yes, or at least that’s how it was in the ‘60s. So, like most Japanese college students, I goofed off. Instead of going to classes, I would wander around in the streets and if something caught my interest, I’d start to talk to somebody. They’d look at me, they’d look at my face, and then I’d start speaking this very polite, eloquent and educated Japanese. The response I got was usually something like “Yes, please come in. Oh, you like that 300-year-old painting? Please take it back to America!” Every door opened to me, from the Imperial Palace to the slums where the Yakuza, which was sort of the Japanese mafia, hung out. I could go anywhere I wanted, and I did. It was a huge adventure and learning experience.

RD: Did you have an intention of using that information later?

SY: At that time, I more or less wanted to become Japanese. I figured I’d probably go into something related to Asia in graduate school, to be an academician in the Asian fields. But one of the experiences I had that year in Japan was staying briefly at a Zen Buddhist temple. I watched them meditate, but I couldn’t see myself doing it. I was physically wimpy and very agitated; I had little ability to deal with physical or emotional stresses. But as I began talking to these monks, I got this vibe that they knew a secret, sort of the secret to unconditional happiness.

RD: What made you think that?

SY: They had a sense of a subtle, underlying happiness and absolute wellbeing, no matter what. I just got a vibe. It was like they knew a secret and they would share it, but they wouldn’t force it on you.

When I returned to the United States after my senior year in college, I learned of a Buddhist studies program at the University of Wisconsin, where I could get a Ph.D. specializing in Buddhism. They were giving defense scholarships because we were at war in Viet Nam, and they wanted people to understand Buddhism. I got a three-year defense grant to go.

RD: Why did the government want Americans to understand Buddhism?

SY: The assumption was that we needed people who understood Buddhism because it was a political force. They should have been funding Islamic studies; they were behind the eight ball on that. So I went to the University of Wisconsin, completed all my course work very quickly, and then went back to Japan to research my Ph.D. thesis.

RD: Were you studying a particular version of Buddhism in Wisconsin?

SY: Yes; East Asian Buddhism was my specialty, East Asia being China, Japan, Korea and Viet Nam. But they required that you have a strong background in Indic Buddhism as well, so I had to learn Sanskrit and Pali, and I also studied Tibetan. So I went back to Japan, and I was to do research on my Ph.D. thesis, which was to be Singon Buddhism. Singon Buddhism is Vajrayana. It’s related to the Tibetan practice, not in that it comes from Tibet but in that both Tibetan Vajrayana and Japanese Vajrayana go back to the same late Indic sources.

RD: So your area of study at UW was one of the two versions of the Japanese Vajrayana?

SY: That’s correct; essentially no Westerner had ever specialized in Japanese Vajrayana. By that time, many were specializing in the Tibetan Vajrayana, but very few were interested in the Japanese form.

You needed a very special language skill set to study this, which I had. I went to their main training place, Mount Koya, Japan, with a letter of introduction from the Koyasan branch center in L.A., and with my impeccably impressive language skills and a battery of other skills that had always opened every door for me in Japan. But when I showed up, they more or less said, “Get out of here, kid. We don’t want to have anything to do with you. This is not for you to adorn your academic ego with. This is a practice that we do to go beyond the small self and become liberated. If you want to do it from that perspective, fine. But otherwise, here’s the door.”

RD: And your idea was to do research there?

SY: My idea was to spend a year researching Shingon academically, come back, write a Ph.D. thesis based on Shingon that would become the basis of a book, and become the man for Japanese Vajrayana in the Western world. I was going to carve out my own little academic kingdom. But I guessed they sniffed that out, and their position was, “If you want to study this stuff, you have to become a monk, and you have to practice it.”

RD: So there’s that meditation cushion staring at you again.

SY: Yes, and I was still saying “No way.” I was pretty pissed off, because I’d never had the door slammed in my face.

Then something happened that really twisted me around emotionally. When I was at the University of Wisconsin, my major professor and my idol was a man named Richard Robinson, who had the most impressive intellect of any human I have ever met. His specialty was Buddhist logic, a study that’s used to show contradictions and paradoxes – rather similar to what happened in ancient Greece with the School of Parmenides – and therefore bring people to an understanding of what in Buddhism is called emptiness. He was my ideal of what I wanted to become.

While I was in Japan, I got a letter that informed me that he had had a horrific accident in his house. A fuse blew out, and he went down to the basement to change it. There was no source of light, so he struck a match; he didn’t know that there was a gas leak, and he basically became a human torch. He was completely maimed; he lived for just a month.
The first noble truth of Buddhism, the truth of the suffering nature of existence, hit home at an emotional level. I thought to myself, my God, this is the smartest man I know, and what good is that going to do, if you just writhe in agony, and you can’t use your brain, you can’t think?
There’s no way out of that, other than what the Buddhists promise, which is liberation from the mind and the body, happiness independent of conditions. Writhing in agony is just a condition. If the happiness is true, it truly is independent of any and all conditions. Buddhism actually makes that claim.

After hearing of Richard’s accident, I was ready to take them up on it, to do it their way. I said, “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll become a monk. You tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

RD: So the year you planned to use doing research, you ended up learning how to be a monk?

SY: Yes, but it took a year just to learn how to get around in the temple. Then, after about a year, when it was coming up to winter, and the weather was getting colder, the Abbott of the temple said, “If you want to do this, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way, in winter. You’ll do 100 days in isolation. You won’t be talking to anybody but me, and you’ll only talk to me for a few minutes every few days. You can’t have any food after noon. You’ll be spending the bulk of your time in the main hall doing the Vajrayana rituals, and there is no source of heat, just a thin wall between you and the blizzard outside. And there are certain other esthetical practices around cold that you will be required to do.” I said okay – of course, with enormous trepidation, because this was the last thing in the world that I would ever think of exposing myself to.

RD: You don’t look like the kind of guy who likes to be cold.

SY: I don’t. But I thought about Robinson, and what can happen to a human being, and I didn’t want to have my happiness dependent on conditions. I didn’t want to live under that sword of Damocles, that hell is just a telephone call away. So I had some motivation, to do something that was completely against my physical and mental nature.

In the Vajrayana practice, there are many complex ceremonies that involved evoking and venerating deities. But at the depths, it’s a meditation practice. I had to do three of these ceremonies, called sadhanas, every day. Before I began, I had to go to this frozen cistern outside, break the ice on it, fill a huge wooden bucket, take off all my clothes, and pour this ice water over myself. That’s called “mizugori” in Japanese, which means “cold water purification.” The water would actually freeze as it hit the ground, so I was slipping around barefoot on ice.

On the third day, I had an epiphany: “Okay,” I thought. “I have to do this three times every day for 100 days. I’m on day three, so I have 97 more days of this. I have three choices here. I will either give up, because I just can’t take it. Or I am going to suffer egregiously for 97 days. Or I am going to stay in a concentrated state all my waking hours for the next 97 days.”

When I was doing this cold-water purification, I noticed that if I stayed focused, it didn’t bother me as much. But if my consciousness was scattered, I was in suffering city; I was just freaking out, and completely overwhelmed. So I said, “Okay. I’m going to just do my damndest to keep in a focused state all my waking hours as I go through this thing.” It was like a feedback mechanism: if I was suffering, it meant I had lost my concentration and focus.

I went into the practice one person; 100 days later, I came out, and I was fundamentally re-engineered. I was just not the same person. I had very different values. I was no longer strongly interested in the academic study of Buddhism. I was more interested in the experience of Buddhism, so I stayed on.

RD: Did the austerity comprising that 100 days continue in your monk life?

SY: There were varying cycles or periods of more intensity and less intensity, but I always had this feedback device. So as long as you stay focused, you’re perfectly happy, but it’s when you get scattered that your life becomes unhappy. I came to realize that life is actually a giant biofeedback device. The reason you go to the monastery is so you eventually come to the place where you can see ordinary daily life as a monastery; it just took a special situation in order to develop that sensitivity.

In any event, I stayed on, and I continued to do practice. I didn’t just do Vajrayana; I also did Zen while I was in Japan. At a Zen retreat, I had a pivotal event. As the retreatants were coming in at the beginning of the retreat, I noticed there was another Westerner – not just any old Westerner, but a Roman Catholic priest. He had a Roman collar, a reddish complexion, and he really stood out as a foreigner. I thought, “Wow. A Catholic priest at a Zen retreat. What’s that about?”

At a break period, I struck up a conversation. The priest’s name was Father William Johnston. He’s written many books, but at that time, he’d only written one, called Christian Zen, which was about the dialogue between Catholicism and Zen. More broadly, that’s part of a dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity, and he was a major player in that dialogue.
I didn’t even know such a dialogue existed. I would have never thought there was even a basis for a dialogue. Catholicism and Buddhism? What do they have in common? As it turns out, they have a mystical core in common. The kinds of experiences that occur to people when they do Buddhist training and the kinds of experiences that constitute traditional Catholic contemplative practice are the same kinds of experiences.

Suddenly I realized, oh my God. What I’m learning in Buddhist practice is not limited to Buddhism. It’s a universal that’s found all over the world. I came to discover that there was a Jewish meditative tradition and an Islamic meditative tradition. Although the cultures and theologies and practices of these religions vary enormously, and seem to be at odds with each other, the core experiences of the meditators overlap. This absolutely blew my mind.
In her book The Interior Castle, when Saint Theresa describes her journey through life, it fits perfectly with Buddhism. The theology is completely different; there’s no mention of God in Buddhism. But if you look below the surface, and see what’s actually going on, you see that it’s the same kinds of experiences. You can see it in Rumi, who is Muslim. You can see it in Isaac Luria, who is a Jewish Kabbalist. This is a universal, human phenomenon, that doesn’t even have an accepted word.

I came to see what I was doing in Buddhist practice as part of a much bigger picture. Suddenly, everything fell into place, and I could see there was a core set of experiences that were universal to all forms of spirituality.

I have to thank Father Johnston for that, and for something else. Just before I left Japan, he gave me an article talking about scientific studies on the brainwaves of meditators. He was excited about this, because it would seem to lead to the possible integration of science and spirituality.

I had no science background, and had always considered myself very poor in the science fields. I felt like I’d never understand the sciences. But now I had a reason to be interested, now that science was related to meditation. So I had another epiphany: if we think of Asian culture as a mountain, what is at its peak? What has Asia done better than any other culture? It created the technology of meditation.

The Buddhist and Hindu approach, as exemplified through Yoga and Buddhist practices, were incomparably more systematic and clearer and better organized and more efficient than the approaches of other cultures. It’s pretty hit-and-miss with the Christian contemplatives; it’s amazing that they were able to do as well as they did, given the lack of a system in their studies and practices. In Buddhism, I saw a science and technology of internal transformation that was superior to anything else the world had come up with.

At that point, I felt I had gone as far as you can go with Asia; I was on the peak of this mountain, and I’m looking out. Is there another comparable peak somewhere in the world that’s as impressive? And it occurred to me that Western science and Western technology represented a different peak, one that was superior to anything else any other culture had come up with.

What would happen if the internal science and technology of the East were to successfully mate with the external science and technology of the West? Maybe something that would really change the world, quickly and dramatically, deeply, and for the better.

I decided I was just going to study science on the side. That way, I thought, if this field develops in the future, when I’m a pretty experienced meditator, I will have enough background in science to dialogue intelligently with scientists who are interested in looking at the underlying physiology of meditation. That set the course for the rest of my life.
But I had been terrible at science in school. I hated it. So I used my meditation skills to overcome my emotions, my deeply rooted belief system that I could never do math and science. I knew I’d become a different person than I’d been in high school. And it worked. I had to start with addition and multiplication tables, with 5th grade math, to get the concept of what adding and subtracting was, then ended up studying graduate-level math and science, the stuff I would need to intelligently dialogue with scientists.

It turns out that I was right: the dialogue between science and Buddhism did, in fact, take off. The Mind and Life Institute in Colorado is the main force that caused that to happen. A number of people had the same idea I did, but totally independently. They pulled it off, and now there are huge programs at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, all over the world, where serious scientists are studying meditative states. Equally significantly, the scientists themselves are practicing the meditation, and the Buddhist monks are being taught science. It’s a two-fold agenda: get the scientists to meditate so they’ll appreciate the depth and subtly of what they’re trying to study, and get the monks to learn science so that they can have this other perspective.

RD: How important is this dialogue between meditative practices of the East and the science and technology of the West?

SY: I think it may be the most significant event of the 21st century; this may turn out to be one of the most important events in the history of humanity.

RD: And during all of this, you were continuing your science studies and your meditation. From there, how did you get involved in teaching meditation?

SY: You know the expression “When the student is ready, the teacher appears?” For me, it was “When the teacher is ready, the students appear.” As I continued to practice, people started to come out of nowhere, asking me to teach them to meditate. Without any official pronouncement, I started to move into the role of teacher.

As I was teaching, I realized that in order to effectively teach this stuff in the West, I would have to radically reevaluate the entire Buddhist tradition, take it apart and put it back together, informed by the spirit of science. I wanted to create something that worked naturally for this culture. Because I had an academic background in Buddhism, and because I had a pretty solid self-taught background in science, and because I meditated for year after year, decade after decade, I started to have some confidence in creating a contemporary approach to classical enlightenment. I would never claim that it was a better approach; it was just a different approach, one that had certain criteria.

RD: What were those criteria?

SY: I wanted it to be, in a sense, secular, not formulated in the language of religion. But I also wanted it to lead to the classical results: insight into impermanence, no self, freedom from ego. I wanted this approach to capitalize on all the major innovations in the history of world mysticism, because different things work better for different people. I also wanted to create a system that would be easy for scientists to study.

I also wanted to create a system that could be supported interactively. The standard way of teaching meditation is “Here’s the cushion, here’s the technique, now go to it, get back to me in a few days and we’ll talk about what’s going on.” A more efficient way is to give people interactive, personal coaching sessions, analogous to having a private trainer.

I discovered that if I sat down with a person and gave them a meditation technique, and then a few minutes later asked them what was happening, and gave them some feedback, and then asked again, and gave feedback again, even a rank beginner could typically meditate for 90 minutes, and have a quality experience.

I found that for teaching people initially and for supporting them when they’re passing through challenges, this interactive approach works really well. I wanted to create a system in which coaching would be done by people, but could also be partially automated and implemented by an artificial intelligence program that talks to you and listens to you – not a text-based program, an advanced artificial intelligence program that has voice recognition, that would be completely indistinguishable from a session with a live coach.

Instead of thinking of that program as a lesser version of a teacher, I tell people to think of it as a vastly improved version of a book or a guided CD. It interacts with you and responds to exactly what you are experiencing now, but it saves in its database all your previous experiences, and it has a file on your strengths and weaknesses, so it optimizes the guidance moment by moment.

This system would work especially well for times when the shit hits the fan in your life, for times where you would grow immensely if you could meditate but you can’t meditate because it’s too overwhelming. Remember what happened to my idol and mentor? He was in a situation where he would have to either suffer or transcend. Although you might not die horrifically the way he did, something’s going to happen. Either you’ll be injured, you’re going to get sick, you’re going to discover a behavioral issue, you’re hooked on a substance. You’re going to be betrayed by a friend. You’re going to betray a friend. A parent will die.
Something is going to happen in every person’s life that’s going to put them into physical, mental and emotional intensities comparable to what people go through in traditional training. Even if you have a background in meditation, if the circumstances are severe enough, you might find that you can’t remember how to practice. But if somebody interactively sits down with you and takes you through it, you can get right back on track. You’ll get what I call MMM – maximum meditation mileage – out of what otherwise would be the worst experience of your life.

How many people can I possibly do that with? How many people can I train to do that? It’s very labor intensive. But what would happen if I created a meditation system that capitalizes on all the innovations in meditation, is fully secular and is culturally universal. Instead of appointing a successor like traditional teachers do, I’ll build my successor, an interactive version. It’s even better than me, because I won’t put any of my ego into it. Although it can maybe only do 60 or 70 percent of what I would do, it can do that for 10,000 people simultaneously around the world at pennies on the hour, so that anyone can have a senior personal meditation coach.

In addition to that, I wanted to run traditional retreats where people come for a day or a week. But most people don’t have the time, they can’t afford it, they don’t live around a retreat center. What if we ran another kind of retreat, based on telephones and conference calls as the delivery system? In addition to traditional on-site retreats, I would also give conference-call retreats, short – only about four hours long – but very intense. In other words, it would be a fully modern path that was convenient for scientists to study and would bring about the traditional results of liberation from body and mind.

RD: How can our readers learn more about that program?

SY: Just go to my main website, basicmindfulness.org. I have a practice program set up in such a way that it requires no previous experience in any form of practice. The second weekend of every month, I do a Friday, Saturday and Sunday program made up of many rituals, from two to four hours long. They’re all independent from each other, and there’s always one intro program.

RD: I assume that part of all this practice is to achieve some kind of enlightenment. Are there different stages or degrees of enlightenment? Or are you either enlightened or not enlightened?

SY: In traditional Buddhism, there are four levels of enlightenment. The first level is relatively common, the highest level, relatively rare. The stretch between the first enlightenment and complete enlightenment is bigger than the stretch between non-enlightened and first enlightened. People who have had the initial experience of what we call “no self,” where they have actually seen that there is no thing inside them called a “self,” which also could be called the experience of oneness, are not that uncommon. As for people who are fully enlightened, I’ve only met a few.

RD: Would you say you are enlightened, that you have achieved the goal of mystical practice?

SY: That’s an interesting question. When asked pointedly, “Are you enlightened or not?” people who are enlightened have a whole bunch of ways of dealing with it. Most people will not say “yes.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. On the other hand, to be coy is also the wrong answer. If you’re coy about your own personal experiences, if you’re not willing to put them into words in some sort of public venue, people won’t know it’s possible, and there will never be a unified science of mysticism.

In some ways, scientists have less ego than enlightened teachers. They have to put their results out into the public for public scrutiny and public investigation. One of the things that held science back in the Middle Ages was that it was a private endeavor; science was a secret, and it wasn’t subject to peer review or public analysis.

I decided to take an extreme position. My extreme position would be I would be willing to talk with anybody about anything I have ever experienced, very explicitly, and very openly.
So in answer to your initial question, “Am I enlightened?” I would say this: I don’t talk to people about anything that I haven’t personally experienced. I don’t teach people things that are outside of my personal experience.

RD: Well, is your reputation trashed? That’s one of the things spiritual teachers worry about.

SY: Yeah, well, as the Tao Te Ching says, “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” But actually that is profoundly untrue. There are numerous teachers who claimed to be enlightened, and use the “E” word in public, and say, “Yes, I am enlightened.”

RD: Or they just empower their followers to say the same thing, “My teacher is enlightened.”

SY: Yes, that’s a third-party sell. People will tell me, “Hey, check out this website. There’s this kid out in rural Vermont who claims to have enlightenment,” or whatever. The very first thing that goes through my mind is “They probably are.” But you can’t know for sure. I’m inclined to believe it, because enlightenment is natural for everyone; it’s just waiting to happen.