ZCLA - and a Zen priest is made

Zen’s had a west-coast literary flavour for some years. Kerouac and the Beats flirted with it; Gary Snyder went further and entered a monastery in Japan. (Snyder gave up poetry for his first years there, so he could take his new religion seriously, then was told ‘poetry is hard, Zen is play’ and realized he had understood it the wrong way round.) Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance gave Zen a popular face, which has grown till now the term is branded, Zen denoting some kind of pure aesthetic as a label for soap and wallpaper.
It was a treat to be at the Zen Center of Los Angeles and trace Zen from its western makeover back towards its ancient source. James Soshin Thornton was being ordained as a Zen priest, into a lineage of Buddhist teachers stretching back inside the Japanese Soto Buddhist Order and beyond to the original Shakyamuni Buddha of some 2500 years ago. This picture comes from the close of the ceremony, when priests circle the newly ordained figure, Buddhas bowing to Buddhas.