A metric is often defined as a system or...

A metric is often defined as a system or standard of measurement. For our purposes a Buddhist metric will be a standard for detecting false or counterfeit Buddhism from real Buddhism.

The most logical place to find the parts necessary to begin to assemble our metricand I am speaking mainly to the beginners who are suspicious that their teacher is not teaching authentic Buddhismis from the canon of Buddhism (yes, this also means the beginner is going to have to do a lot of reading).

Applying our metric to popular Buddhist books and publications, how much, for example, is nirvana discussed and unpacked using passages from the Nikayas and the Mahayana canon? Going with this a bit further, how much are the major terms in Buddhism discussed by the teacher and adequately unpacked such as dependent origination (pratityasmaputpada), mind (citta) consciousness (vijna), smriti (mindfulness/recollection), skandhas (aggregates) rebirth (punarbhava), liberation (vimukta), emptiness (shunyata), Bodhicitta, and so forth?

Using such metric on a Zen teacher who spends his time telling us about various ceremonies or how to sit in zazen, or how to sew our own rakusu, could tell the beginner that they are learning little if anything about Buddhism. Instead, they are learning a lot about a cultural adaptation of Buddhism which has been repackaged to form a cultus.

Certainly sitting in zazen, that is, just sitting or shikan-taza counts as a red flag if we cant find anything about this special practice in the Nikayas or the Mahyana canon (which is the case). Yes, you will find zhiguan in the canon (which sounds like shikan when pronounced in Japanese) since the Chinese characters stand for samatha-vipasyana meditation. But in no way is this like Soto Zens just sitting () or shikan-taza. The Buddha or subsequent Chinese and Korean Zen masters never used such a t! erm as j ust sitting ().

There are many more of these red flags that appear when we apply our Buddhist metric. Many of the popular Buddhist books dont rate very high using our metric such as Shunryu Suzukis book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. This goes for other books like Katagiris, Returning to Silence, or Joko Becks, Everyday Zen. Their Zen is always concerned with the spiritless or the same, it is only concerned with external conditions and how, as individuals, we might cope better with the mundane. Therefore, it is not strange that in Katagiris book transcendence is never taken up or meaningfully discussed. Other subjects, too, are not taken up such as the five skandhas and their central importance for understanding the message of the Buddha and how a proper understanding of them relates to the Buddhas notion of self or tman.

This Buddhist metric can be applied to all the popular forms of Buddhism. This will save the beginner and even the veteran years of frustration and hopefully help them to have a better rebirthrather than one in the hells for having followed a modern Soto teacher!