Few of these titans are as impressive shed of their robes as the practitioners I have found in the Japanese lay Buddhists zazenkai s or Zen study groups. Yet they take every opportunity to practice. Without any question, the strongest Zen men and women I have met come out of these groups. Their Zen must be real practice, as they face every day the impermanence of the work place. Next to them in strength are some of the temple priests in the rural areas, who have shown me an incomparable wisdom and compassion gained from years of practice and dealing with the hurly burly of their parishioners lives and deaths.
Form is emptiness, no different from form.
The problem I find with pay practitioners in the West is that most of them are spiritual dilettantes or hungry ghosts. Non traditional spiritual practice tends to be a buffet item for these people, after a main course of materialism and the search for sexual gratification. Do not get me wrong, these are people hurting just as much as any other human being and deserving of compassion, but it is very hard to get their attention. If you try to trap them in some elegant form of practice, you can hold them for awhile, but do them no good and in the long run you increase their suffering. If you ignore form and tradition all together, you end up with a practice that slowly merges into a kind of psychologized version of the unpalatable staple of Zen Center life, the dreaded tofu omelet.