What do you think of me? What do I think about myself? What does the other person think I think about myself? What does she think I think about her?
We want a rating, five stars, thumbs up, a heart … at least. We crave for appreciation, constantly need to know how we appear in someone else’s eyes, reflect in the other person’s mind. But it quickly gets really complicated. And subjective.
Agreed, from a Buddhist point of view there is no “fixed self”, so why should we care at all? Let’s just stop it!
But there is this blog, my Zen diary in a certain way, my public trace of learning and doing. 15 years, 252 published posts within this blog, maybe a good time to ask for a thorough and honest feed-back! Does this blog reflect what I wish to communicate, even today? How would a “neutral” instance evaluate what I had written over the past one and a half decade? What image of it’s author does this blog reflect?
It seemingly became quite a fashion to ask the all-knowing AI for judging one’s work, so I asked ChatGPT (1) for a critical and open expert level review. I didn’t tell GPT that I was the author (to avoid the charming bias), but just informed it the blog was written by a person called “Genko”.
Here comes the rather detailed report (unshortened c&p), I humbly tend to agree to almost everything written therein:
Critical expert assessment of the Doraku-An Zen Blog
The complete WordPress export contains 252 published English-language posts spanning May 2011 to July 2026. The blog itself describes its purpose modestly as “Seminar Announcements and Incidental Remarks on Zen,” which is actually an accurate description of what follows: this is not a systematic exposition of Zen Buddhism, but a long-running record of one practitioner’s reflections, teaching experiences, travel observations and occasional attempts at Buddhist-philosophical interpretation. The corpus is therefore unusually useful for judging not merely what Genko claims to know, but how his understanding has developed over fifteen years.
My overall conclusion is quite clear: the author appears to be a genuine and experienced Zen practitioner and teacher, not someone manufacturing pseudo-Zen competence from clever quotations and copied internet material. His practical understanding of Zen is considerably stronger than his academic command of Buddhist philosophy. His writing is frequently original in perspective, although rarely original in the sense of contributing new Buddhist doctrine. The blog’s strongest material is its phenomenological and pedagogical description of practice; its weakest material occurs when Genko attempts to make precise historical, philological or doctrinal claims without sufficient scholarly apparatus.
The evidence for genuine practice is exceptionally strong. The blog repeatedly describes a continuous practice history rather than merely presenting an acquired vocabulary. Genko says that he met his principal teacher in 1998 and spent almost twelve years practising under his guidance before receiving permission to teach Zen and Hitsuzendo in 2010. He explicitly acknowledges what he does not do: he does not conduct dokusan, does not claim to confer clerical ranks, and does not pretend to possess qualifications for the institutional duties of a Japanese Zen priest. This self-limitation is important. It is also independently corroborated: a 2025 biographical document records Zazen practice since 1990, collaboration with Dokko-An Kokugyo Kuwahara from 1998–2011, the establishment of Doraku-An as a Shunko-In/Myoshinji-associated dojo in 2010, teaching authorization from Kuwahara, and later Buddhist ordination and study with Gensho Hozumi.
He continues to teach Zen-Ken-Sho at the Benediktushof, where his method explicitly combines Zazen, Aikiken and Hitsuzendo, with breath/body practice as the integrating element.
The blog’s content itself strongly confirms this practical background. One of its recurring themes is that Zen cannot be reduced to intellectual acquisition. In an early article Genko says that explanations of existential problems do not remove those problems merely through understanding; words can point toward practice, but collecting concepts while neglecting practice misses the essential point. This is conventional Zen territory, but it is expressed consistently with his actual pedagogical orientation. Similarly, his discussion of teaching Zen eventually concludes that the crucial qualification is compassion and the capacity simply to be present with students rather than constantly judging them. The striking feature of such passages is not doctrinal novelty but experiential credibility: they sound like reflections arising from sustained teaching rather than like somebody assembling attractive Zen slogans.
The blog is also unusually explicit about its lineage and about the fact that Genko regards his own contribution as modest. In one later article he writes that his teaching is transparently derived from his teachers and explicitly rejects the idea that it is some “home brew” mixture constructed from books and YouTube videos. This is broadly borne out by the corpus. The recurring combination of Zazen, Hitsuzendo and Aikiken is not an arbitrary invention but corresponds to the Omori Sogen/Kuwahara practice environment. Independent Buddhist literature documents Genko’s authorship of a Festschrift for Kuwahara and his co-authorship of Zen. Hitsuzendo. There is therefore no persuasive evidence that the blog is substantially plagiaristic. On the contrary, its personal anecdotes, autobiographical continuity and idiosyncratic examples make it quite unmistakably his own writing.
The originality question is more nuanced. Genko is not an original Buddhist philosopher. He does not develop a new theory of emptiness, consciousness, Buddha-nature or enlightenment. Much of the doctrinal content is recognizably inherited from standard Zen and Mahayana themes: practice versus conceptual knowledge, non-attachment to rank and status, the integration of practice and ordinary life, the importance of direct experience, the insufficiency of merely talking about Zen, and the use of ordinary activities as practice. His interpretation of bowing to Buddha is a good example. He rejects supernaturalism and treats the Buddha image as an occasion for gratitude toward the lineage of human beings who transmitted Buddhism and Zen. That is not philosophically new, but it is a coherent and personally articulated interpretation of ritual.
Where the blog becomes genuinely interesting is in its unorthodox synthesis rather than in new doctrine. The self-designation “Raku Zen” is particularly revealing. Genko explicitly describes his practice as Rinzai Zen without koan practice, supplemented by Hitsuzendo and Aikiken, with fewer institutional rules and without the aspiration to reproduce Japanese monastic culture in the West. This is certainly not “new Zen” in the grand historical sense, but it is a distinctive modern Western adaptation. His persistent insistence that Zen should be reconstructed without fetishizing Japanese robes, titles, institutional rank or monastic status is also more radical than ordinary introductory Zen literature. His 2013 critique of Western Zen attacks precisely these forms of authority and calls for a “Zen revolution.” Importantly, this criticism is not merely rhetorical: it is accompanied by his own refusal to claim ranks he does not possess.
The chronological development is otherwise fascinating. The early period, roughly 2011–2014, is prolific and exploratory. There are many short observations about Zazen, Japanese culture, teachers, ritual, ethics and travel, and the author is clearly working out his own Western interpretation of Zen. The writing is sometimes naïve, sometimes polemical, but remarkably energetic. By 2014 the author is already questioning his own lineage, including Omori Sogen’s wartime politics, and explicitly states that this conflict forces him to re-examine everything he inherited rather than simply invoking “the Master” or “Japanese Tradition.” That is one of the strongest indicators of intellectual independence in the entire corpus. The middle years become less prolific and increasingly reflective. The later posts are fewer but generally longer: the archive shifts from frequent travel anecdotes and introductory explanations toward questions of transmission, abuse, teacher responsibility, lineage, cultural appropriation and the philosophical implications of Buddhist practice. Thus I see maturation rather than degradation in practical and ethical judgment, but not a corresponding progression toward scholarly Buddhist philosophy.
One of the most impressive characteristics of the entire corpus is its attitude toward authority. Genko repeatedly tells readers not to trust a teacher merely because of robes, titles or lineage, and explicitly tells prospective students that neither his own qualifications nor anybody else’s can substitute for their independent judgement. This is particularly significant given the documented lineage controversy surrounding his own training. Rather than concealing the absence of formal Dharma transmission, he makes the issue central to his public presentation. His position is unconventional, but it is transparent. His criticism of abusive teachers is also not abstract: he discusses the responsibility of students to leave relationships that become destructive. This gives the blog an unusually strong ethical dimension.
The external reception is modest but real. The blog itself is not an important source in academic Buddhist studies, and I found no evidence of substantial scholarly citation of its articles. It does, however, appear in practitioner discussions. His wider work on Hitsuzendo has a more substantial external footprint: Buddhismus Aktuell cites his Festschrift and his book Zen. Hitsuzendo, and artists trained first by Kuwahara and subsequently by Genko document his role in continuing that practice lineage. There are also independent contemporary records of his continuing teaching activity at established retreat institutions.
My final assessment is therefore deliberately differentiated. As Buddhist scholarship: approximately 5.5–6/10. As practical Zen teaching and phenomenological reflection: approximately 8/10. As originality of presentation: approximately 7.5/10. As evidence of genuine Zen practice: 9/10. As a source for someone trying to understand one distinctive Western adaptation of Rinzai-derived Zen: 8/10. I would not recommend the blog as an authoritative source for Buddhist history, Buddhist philology or precise doctrinal interpretation; serious readers should verify its technical claims against specialist scholarship. I would recommend it as unusually revealing primary material for understanding how an experienced Western practitioner has tried to reconcile Japanese Zen, lay practice, martial arts, calligraphy, science, family life, ethical independence and Western culture.
The central paradox of the blog is therefore also its greatest strength. Genko’s strongest Zen material is precisely where he stops trying to be a Buddhist intellectual: cleaning the dojo, sitting with difficult people, questioning teachers, practising calligraphy, accepting ordinary life, refusing spiritual status, and repeatedly insisting that words must ultimately give way to practice. His weakest material is where he tries to convert that experiential understanding into authoritative statements about Buddhist philosophy or textual history. I find no convincing evidence of a fraud, a plagiarist, or a pseudo-Zen teacher. I find instead a genuine practitioner with a distinctive and sometimes quite perceptive Zen pedagogy. The blog is consequently worth reading—but with the author’s own best advice applied to the blog itself: do not take the words, titles or claims on authority; examine them, practise, and see what survives.
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(1) Generated by the free version of https://chatgpt.com/ on August 18th 2026 after exporting the complete published blog as XML-file and uploading it to ChatGPT