Buddhism starts with ethical behavior
By David Haerle – Daily World writer
Saturday, February 16, 2008 9:05 PM PST (Reprinted with permission of The Daily World)
Kobai Meditating - DAILY WORLD / DAVID SANDLER
DAILY WORLD / DAVID SANDLER
Kobai Scott Whitney, a practicing Buddhist, meditates during a Buddhism class
at the Paisley Penguin, a bookstore and art gallery in downtown Aberdeen.
Scott Whitney believes some tenets of Buddhism are misunderstood, even by Buddhists themselves.
“American Buddhism has mythologized and mystified enlightenment,” he said, “and it’s been very unhealthy, actually, because we haven’t understood what the Buddha meant.”
And Whitney, 61, who also goes by his Buddhist moniker “Kobai,” should know. He’s an ordained Buddhist chaplain who’s been intensively studying the religion since 1975. Today, he serves or has served as a chaplain in numerous prisons across the state, including Stafford Creek. Since moving to the Harbor in 2006, he’s also been leading classes and retreats that focus on Buddhism and other belief systems.
Whitney was born into a large Catholic family — he’s the oldest of 10 kids — in Fresno, Calif., which back then was little more than a burgeoning farm town in the amazingly fertile San Joaquin Valley. His journey toward becoming a man of the cloth began early, but in a different direction, as he entered the The Novitiate at Mont La Salle in the Napa Valley as a teenager, studying to be a Catholic monk under the order of the Christian Brothers, who also operated the famed Napa winery of the same name for many decades. “That was the late 1960s and early ’70s and we’re hearing rumors of drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll coming over the wall. So I was curious and I left. Then I spent 10 years being sort of an existentialist,” Whitney said.
He traveled and lived something of a vagabond lifestyle.
“So I just left all religion. I wanted nothing to do with religion for many years,” he said “And I went to Europe for a while, studied at the University of Madrid. I was in a lot of street riots. I spent that year traveling around Europe and studying the existentialists.”
Group Excercise - DAILY WORLD / DAVID SANDLER
DAILY WORLD / DAVID SANDLER
Whitney leads students Stanley Phillips and Dave Forbes, right, in exercises to prepare them for sitting for long periods so they can meditate at a class at the Paisley Penguin in downtown Aberdeen.
Life went downhill
He eventually returned to the United States and northern California, this time ending up in San Francisco, where he joined legions of others who were tuning in and dropping out. “When I came back to the U.S., I just really dropped out. I could barely stay in school. I discovered drugs and alcohol. So that was my life for a good number of years.”
Like many people his age, he gravitated to the famed Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. On its outer edges, two blocks down from Haight Street in a neighborhood known as The Panhandle, Whitney was introduced to the San Francisco Zen Center.
It was there that he first discovered Buddhism, and it has guided his path ever since.
But it was in Hawaii that he would embrace the religion. He moved there and studied under Robert Aitken, master of Diamond Sangha, a Zen Buddhist society he founded in Honolulu in 1959. It was Aitken who gave Whitney his Buddhist name “Kobai,” which translates to “old plum.”
“He was one of the original populizers of Buddhism in America,” Whitney said of Aitken. “It’s one of the first American-style Buddhist groups.”
Fast forward almost 20 years later and Whitney moved to Washington from Hawaii to take a job as a Buddhist chaplain for the state Department of Corrections. “That was sort of a circuit-rider job,” he said “So I did that for a year and that included Stafford. And then I got a separate contract with Stafford and came out and spent the whole day every Wednesday. Then I got very dissatisfied with the Department of Corrections contract, and I left and went to work for a Buddhist retreat house in Castle Rock. So I did that for a year … Then I got a call from somebody I knew at Stafford Creek.” There was a job opening, and Whitney became the institutional chaplain at Stafford Creek in October of 2006. “That lasted six months and we parted company … for a number of reasons, but it was not a good fit,” Whitney said. “I was not happy and they were not happy with me. But in the course of doing that I moved to a weekly motel in Westport and started exploring the Harbor and decided that I liked it here.”
Becoming a teacher
He moved to the Harbor and discovered a number of neophyte Buddhists meeting regularly here.
“After I left the prison, I started meeting with a group that had met every week,” he said. “They didn’t have a teacher. They met every week and played tapes and then tried to meditate. So they asked me to come talk to them, and I did. That sort of formed the core of the group I’m running now in Grays Harbor. It’s called Plum Mountain Refuge.”
It currently occupies a home in Hoquiam, but Whitney wants to move it to a yet-to-be-determined space in downtown Hoquiam. “I wouldn’t call it a temple. I refer to it as a center. It’s just a house with a large meditation hall and then an office,” he said.
Today, he’s still doing chaplain work at prisons in Tacoma and Eastern Washington, while also leading retreats and classes in Grays Harbor and elsewhere in the state. “I’m sort of a freelance monk,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I try and do one retreat every month. Sometimes it’s in this local area. I have a small group in Spokane, so when I go over there I do a half day. I just did a retreat last weekend at Camp Bishop.”
He also has weekly classes and meetings at the Paisley Penguin book shop in downtown Aberdeen. “The Thursday night class is actually kind of a more academic thing. It’s looking at the mystical traditions of all the world’s religions, so Buddhism is just one section of that,” Whitney said.
“The hard thing to remember, or for Americans to understand and accept, is that Buddhism does not require any creed,” he said. “We’re used to religions insisting on a list of things, and if your list doesn’t match that church then you go down the street (to another church) where it matches. In Buddhism, you can believe in God or not. You can believe in gods, or not. You can believe in a creator or not. It doesn’t matter.
“The Buddha, actually, refused to answer any very speculative questions, including about what happens after death. He completely discouraged that kind of speculation because he said, basically, it’s not helpful. He taught how to be happy in this life. Period.”
Caught up in meditation
But many American Buddhists, Whitney said, get caught up in the meditation aspect of the religion rather than seeing that as merely a tool. “His teaching starts with ethical behavior,” Whitney says of Buddha. “People think it starts with meditation. That’s wrong. Meditation’s down the road.
“In (Buddha’s) original theory, you cannot settle your mind and your body unless you are an ethical and compassionate person. Then you can move on to the more advanced practices,” Whitney said.
“But becoming an ethical person, in his view, was the same thing as settling your body and settling your mind. Because, if you’re completely ethical you no longer have to argue with yourself about how you duplicated your tax returns at the office, and how you took a few paper clips, and how they don’t pay you enough anyway, so it’s all right,” he added. “And all this stuff that goes through our heads — the little white lies, the little fudging. The Buddhists take care of all the stuff: Stop gossiping. Don’t work at a place that manufactures poison or that buys it — that gets some of us in trouble already — and then, you’re able to settle down and ease into mindfulness practices … and meditation,” Whitney emphasized.
“The role of meditation is to begin to sit still with your own suffering, your own body, your own mind and do nothing about it except accept it. Meditation is also a practice of sitting still and not judging — anything — including yourself, including how you are doing at meditating.”
Enlightenment can be tricky. Whitney said the idea of enlightenment can also be a stumbling block for some. “Too many American Buddhists … get all mystical about this idea of enlightenment,” he said. “Enlightenment, in the Buddha’s terms — original teachings — had two parts. One was ordained enlightenment in this world, and that merely meant when you experience moments when you are not subject to what are called the three poisons — greed, hatred and ignorance.
“So the Buddha says, when you experience moments when you’re not hating, and you’re not greedy and you’re not confused, then that is cessation, which is another word for enlightenment … the flame of desire going out.”
All these nuances are the reasons we “practice” religions like Buddhism and all the others.
“We all still need work here,” Whitney said. “I tell inmates that are trying to practice: If you still look at the cops as the enemy, then you’ve still got work to do. If you still look at — and I have trouble with this one — all lawyers as the enemy, then you’ve got to work on it. You’ve got to keep working.”
For the most part, Whitney says he’s been made welcome by the other local clergy. “My orientation is very ecumenical,” he said. “The Episcopal Church here loaned me folding chairs when I first started. I’m on good terms with a lot of the local clergy.”
But he says that is to be expected, especially considering the way his Buddhist philosophy views other denominations.
“The (Buddhist) lineage I’m in is very interdenominational,” he said. “It stems out of the Thai forest tradition. That tradition emphasizes that, for instance, if the Catholics are running hospitals, our job is not to start competing hospitals, but to help them run theirs. If the Methodists are feeding people, then don’t set up a competing soup kitchen. Help them, or do something they aren’t covering.” In that way, he sees Buddhism as a way to get through life’s every day tests.
“It’s a giant recovery program,” he says of his religion. “The recovery in this case is a recovery from suffering, or at least from the suffering we cause ourselves. We don’t get out of things like going to the dentist or being depressed by the umpteenth day of rain. We don’t get a pass on that, but we get a new relationship with that.”
David Haerle, a Daily World writer, can be reached at 532-4000, ext. 137, or by e-mail: dhaerle@thedailyworld.com
Copyright © 2008 The Daily World.