I came across this interview with Kenneth Rexroth (writer, journalist, essayist, poet, and MC at the 6 Poets at 6 Gallery reading) in which he addresses some of what we discussed in class last night. I hope this clears things up a bit. This is not entire interview, only an excerpt.

The following is a reprint of “The Jewel Net of Indra,” an interview with [Kenneth] Rexroth conducted by Rick Fields and Eric Lerner in 1980 for the Buddhist magazine Zero. The interview took place in Rexroth’s Santa Barbara home in a large workroom, “a rough, wooden outbuilding to the trellis-surrounded house,” that was filled with high bookshelves, three or more desks, various typewriters, tape recorders, and piles of manuscripts.

INTERVIEWER: In both your life and your work there seems to be an implied connection between a certain kind of political awareness, planetary consciousness and a mode of artistic expression. How is this connection informed by the underlying religious, or contemplative sensibility that appears throughout your work?

REXROTH: The questions you raise are about a world which to me is essentially illusory. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have reality in the ordinary sense of the word but it has no substantiality. The substantial thing in life is the religious experience itself. This is the essence of the teaching of Buddha: that the religious experience is self-sufficient. Behind it lies no god, no immortality, none of these things. He always refused to answer questions on these subjects: “What happens after nirvana?” “Is there a God?” – the answers are not relevant. And as for politics? A life lived according to the Buddha law will not need much from politics. If Christianity was put into effect tomorrow every state on Earth would collapse within twenty-four hours. My interest in politics is largely that either of a journalist, an analyst of what is happening, or that its interest is unreal. Many years ago I was sitting in Café Dome with Eric Severeid who was then young and full of piss and vinegar and I said, “Why don’t you tell it how it is? How they run things?” And he said, “Look Rexroth you’re a journalist, a columnist, just as well as me, and you know perfectly well that if we got up on a lecture platform at a university and told the audience exactly how the world is run and what kind of people run it, they’d call for the men in white, and they’d lock us up and we’d never get out and we’d be diagnosed as hopeless paranoiacs.” Well in recent years some of this has come out, since Watergate broke the pucker string.
I have never, so that’s not true, I have met idealistic, misguided, politicians. Some of them of considerable power. One is a friend of mine, a perfectly sincere man, a congressman. But by and large, just as there are no honest cops, an honest man is not to be found in the profession. See, we not only live in a world of unreality, but we live in a world of lies. People say, “What do you mean by the social lie?” And I say, “It usually begins at home, when Momma says, ‘Daddy never masturbated in his life.’” The Freudians could build the entire structure of a sociology on that. And we live in a society where the worst rises to the top. By and large a police sergeant is not as good a man as a patrolman; and a lieutenant not as good a man as a sergeant; and a captain is not as good a man as a lieutenant; and a chief is worst of all. And people say, “You don’t really mean our president?” Well just figure out how that compounds, increases geometrically. That’s like putting one bean on the first checkerboard square and two beans on the next and four beans on the next, finally you have millions of beans. Well you’re doing the same thing in politics. Imagine how many beans you’ve got on the presidency? I simply have no belief in those things.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a consistent position for anarchists to take these days?

REXROTH: Sure I just took it. I don’t like to call it anarchist.

INTERVIEWER: What word would you use instead?

REXROTH: What’s the difference in that and being a Buddhist? A person who lives the Buddha life to the best of his ability does not need the state and does not need law. That’s a different thing from a political anarchist. This person certainly does not need politics. He may engage in political actions when a Buddhist community is being persecuted as in South Vietnam. But that’s a different matter. And also you can’t expect every monk in South and East Asia to be a model of Sakyamuni. Buddhism really isn’t even passive resistance, it’s ignoring the state, in all of its ways. It’s ignoring the social lie.
This does not mean that individual Buddhist sects and individual Buddhists are not extremely political. Much of Japanese Zen is identified with the great rich, and with the officer caste who are its supporters. And the identification is perfectly correct. This is the reason why Americans who used to come to Japan announcing, “I’m a Zen poet,” discovered that they met no important Japanese poets, to whom Zen is quite distasteful politically. But this does not mean that people like D.T. Suzuki, sensei, was a fascist, black dragon or anything like that. But Suzuki Zen is very much like Martin Buber’s Chassidism. It bears very little resemblance to what you find in Daitoko-ji, any more than Martin Buber’s Teachings of a Chassidic Master resembles the people that you’d meet at 34th St. and 7th Ave. in New York.
On the other hand I have no use for hippy and beat Zen because it’s essentially antinomianism. I was playing the Five Spot, a café in New York some years ago, and the chief beatnik was standing at the bar. We hadn’t opened yet. And a court officer came in to serve this fellow with a summons for child support and alimony for his wife and child, both of whom had tuberculosis. When he was handed the summons he announced, “This doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m a Zen Buddhist.” And he tore it up. The owner said, “I don’t give a damn if you’re Mary Baker Eddy and a Christian Scientist. Get out of here.” That’s what the kids all over the world have eaten up: Buddhism means irresponsibility. Well, it so happens that the Buddhist law for the layman in the simplest Theravada sect has between 40 and 48 commandments, all of which include the Mosaic code except Sabbath and business about God. So to say, “I’m a Buddhist, I don’t believe in the Ten Commandments,” is not Buddhism. Buddhism includes the Ten Commandments and surpasses them. So I think this stuff is largely pernicious.