HARDCORE ZEN

BUDDHIST LIFE

2012-02-01T07:31:00.000-08:00

So I'm digging through my DVDs the other day and I discover a copy of a movie called Buddhist Life. The director was a guy named Luis Carapeto. He was Portuguese. I remember him coming to a number of Nishijima Roshi's talks and retreats. Then he went back to Portugal. Later on he returned to Japan with a couple of people and a bunch of video equipment to make a movie about Nishijima.

He gave Nishijima a copy on VHS, which I then copied for myself and later transferred to a DVD-R. Then, as far as I knew, the movie just vanished. IMDB doesn't list it. I checked around the interwebs and the only reference I can find is this listing from a film festival in Amsterdam. It gives the year of production as 2003. I think the movie may be a couple years older than that. But my memory is not so reliable. Amazon has a listing for it. Though the DVD appears to be out of print. So buy the download because maybe Luis is getting some money from those sales. And I'm sure it'll look and sound a lot better than this third generation copy.

The synopsis on that Dutch film festival's website says:

"I live my Buddhist life from day to day, from moment to moment sometimes in my office, sometimes in my home, sometimes in a temple. In every situation there was just my Buddhist life." Gudo Wafu Nishijima was born in Yokohama, Japan. With a new and fresh approach to the Buddhist view of reality and the sense of balance to the philosophical and scientific investigations from last decades, Master Nishijima gives us the coordinates to start to understand Buddhism with our own method of thinking. He wants to pass the teachings of Buddhism to people all over the world who are searching for "Truth". "We have to say that we live in a succession of moments rather like the frames of a film." In these frames, from the present moment, the documentary is about Master Nishijima´s daily life that is all ready a Buddhist life.

I uploaded the whole thing onto YouTube this morning. Luis, if you're out there and you want me to remove it I will. I'm under the impression that Luis and the others who made the movie have kind of forgotten about it at this point. I'm hoping maybe this blog posting might spark some renewed interest in it. I say again unto thee, buy the download! It's only two dollars, ya cheapskates!

Watching it again I'd forgotten how good it was. It gives you a very honest look at who Nishijima Roshi was when the film was made. It shows him leading one of his annual retreats in Shizuoka for foreigners. It shows him in Europe giving talks and running a sesshin. It shows him talking to students of his from Israel and Ireland. There's also a wonderful scene of him dragging his suitcase through Tokyo Station. He always insisted on carrying his own stuff when he went on retreats. If you wanted to help him out with his bags you'd have to kind of trick him by grabbing them before he noticed. But he was always very quick.

In one of the scenes Nishijima is in his office at the Ida Soap and Cosmetics Company working on the translation of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, although the book itself isn't mentioned. This would have been a couple years before I got involved with it. He was working on that thing for ages.

The opening scenes were shot one morning at Nishijima's dojo in Chiba prefecture. It was a thoroughly urban Buddhist living space. At one time it had been Ida's company dormitory back in the days when Japanese companies made new workers live together in dorms. After they stopped using it they gave it to Nishijima to run as a dojo. Then when Mr. Ida died his son decided to take it back and sell the property. Residents were required to sit two periods of zazen each day. Nishijima himself rang a bell at 5:30 every morning to signal the start of the first period. Residents weren't required to attend that one. But the bell was there to offer encouragement to do so. I never lived in the dojo myself.

I appear at about 2:55 into part two sitting next to Nishijima in the zendo at Tokei-in temple in Shizuoka. I think maybe you can hear my voice as one of the people asking questions in one of the lectures too. But I'm not sure if it's me or not.

I have to warn you, though. The movie is painfully slow. If I would've edited it I would've made it a lot speedier. But I think Luis wanted to give viewers a sense of Nishijima's lifestyle. He seems to be attempting to recreate the feeling of sitting zazen in the form of a cinematic experience. You'll have to judge for yourself if he was successful or not.

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

*At the time I posted this, part 3 was still loading up. So you may have to sit some zazen till it becomes available.

QUESTIONS FROM READERS

2012-01-26T07:17:00.000-08:00

I have a silly question. When meditating, I've read one is to be aware, and not much else. However, when thoughts calm down, what is one suppose to be aware of. I check posture. But is the mind suppose to settle on something. Or simply search out--thus disturbing the calm--something to be aware of. I don't know if there is an answer--non-thinking maybe it. But I'm not sure I truly understand non-thinking.

There are no silly questions. Only silly people!

No. I don't mean that really. I don't know why people always want to belittle their own questions. This one's a pretty common one.

The real question is; Does awareness need an object? Or does awareness only appear when we divide subject and object?

In practical terms, when my zazen gets screwy I fix my posture. When it gets screwy again, I fix my posture again.

But there's no real need to be aware of anything specific.

One thing I was wondering if you'd written anything on is the uneasy relationship of zazen and intellectual discourse. This point is difficult for me because I'm sometimes irrepressibly intellectual, and reading Western philosophy has shaped me as much as my practice, but in different ways. Anyway, at times I detect a subtle hostility or contempt for intellectual argument in zen practitioners that I find baffling. For instance, one newcomer recently had mentioned having read up a bit on Zen practice, to which a more experienced practitioner responded, "Oh, no need for those books. Reading just confuses you in my experience." Now, of course she was referring to reading about Zen philosophy, or maybe philosophy in general, but in any case it felt a little knee-jerk. It reminded me of all those times I've been in discussions about X spiritual matter and when I asked--in as humble and sincere a way as I am capable of mustering--for clarification on some point or other, I was met with one of two reactions: A) hostility, because they regarded me as an ill-intentioned provocateur, or B) condescension, like I'm some clueless hyper-educated idiot. Or just frustration, that happens a lot too. And again, most of this stuff is pretty subtle, probably unconscious, but the underlying message less so: Just shut up and accept what is being said. I'm in total agreement that there are limits to how you can talk about, say, the nature of reality or the basis of ethical action, but just because those limits exist doesn't mean that you can't explore the space they contain. Or that, given that teachers use of natural language to explain concepts, you can't prod a little bit in hope of gaining some new perspective. (But yeah, it's a thin line between that and just dickheaded arrogance.) This happens mostly in discussions of the idea of one's "nature/essence," what "energy" is, or "enlightenment." It's all the more esoteric stuff, so not terribly important to my practice. But it does come up every once in a while, and then I feel like people are throwing around terms without a very coherent picture of how they fit together. In other words, I hear a lot of what is flawed logical argument that then retreats behind "the intuitive" when you point out how the logic is whack. To me that is bad dualistic thinking trying to pass as non-dual, where the non-dual answer would seem to call a lot of these concepts deeply into question, including the very idea of an opposition between intuition and intellect.

Oh just shut up and believe what I tell you to!

No! Sometimes this is a knee-jerk response. Sometimes it's a guy trying to be dogmatic about Zen. But often it's neither. You can only take intellectual discussion so far. After that it just becomes pointless. Intellectual discussion is limited by what the brain is able to conceive. The brain thinks it can conceive anything. And in a sense it is limitlessly able to box the universe up in new ways. There is no end to the ways we can frame things for ourselves and for others. But that's all we can do, frame things in different ways.

Dogen was also an intellectual. That's why he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. He really attempted to frame things for us in the most accurate way possible. But he was also keenly aware that there was no ultimately accurate way of framing reality. So his writing is full of contradictions.

I have trouble keeping my eyes still while doing zazen. I have practiced for several years at this point, and my eyes move around just as much as at the beginning, though my legs have settled into half-lotus, my spine gets in a nice comfortable balance and so on.

Is this part of the posture, keeping my eyes in one spot? That is, should stillness of the eyes be a goal that I should work towards, just like getting into half-lotus posture was for me a few years ago?

I am aware that my eyes moving around is not some random, purely physical, automatic phenomenon. I have at least noticed that moving my eyes is connected to the flow of my thoughts. So another way of phrasing the question is: in your experience, is it best to treat compulsive motions like this as something I need to work on outside of the practice, as I would by stretching my legs, or should I look at it as part of the practice, bring to it the same kind of unattached attention as I would a fly buzzing around the room or the stream of thoughts in my mind?

I used to put a little dot on the wall and stare at that because I had much the same problem. This is kind of an unorthodox answer, though. I don't think Dogen would approve. But he's dead so we can't ask him what he thinks.

I'd say to try to work on this in terms of movement of the eyes. So rather than trying to stop thinking, maybe you can just try to stop your eyes from moving so much. I had some problems with twitching several years ago. I'd get a lot of random muscle twitches. My thumbs would jump up of their own accord and so forth.

I worked on that my waiting to see what happened when a muscle would jump. I didn't try to stop it from happening. Quite the opposite. I wanted it to happen so I could observe how it worked. I found that there was one specific state of mind that I'd go into just before the muscles would twitch. It's impossible for me to describe that state of mind. It was sort of foggy. That's all I can really say.

Anyhow, I found that I was able to avoid lapsing into that state. By avoiding that state of mind, I was able to stop the twitching.

I also found there was no real difference between what we call "voluntary" and what we call "involuntary" movement. That is, there was some aspect of what we usually call "voluntary" movement even in those movements we usually label as "involuntary." I never reached this level, but I would assume this is the kind of thing yogis who can slow down their heart rate or raise their body temperature at will do.

What is a "zen monk"?

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.

But really... what in gosh's name is a zen monk?

For me it's like this. I studied with a Zen teacher for several years. At some point he asked me to go through this weird ceremony called shukke (出家), which means "home leaving." There was also no "or else" element to his request. I could take it or leave it. But he thought it would be a good idea.

I wasn't interested in doing this stupid ceremony. But this was the first time Nishijima Roshi had ever given me any kind of unsolicited advise. He'd answered questions before this. But he'd never told me what he thought I should do. So I figured this must be important.

The ceremony itself was fairly painless. I felt vaguely silly for about 45 minutes and then I was done. After the ceremony I asked Nishijima if I was a monk. He said, "Yes you are a monk."

A couple years after that I decided on my own to do the more "official" shukke ceremony through the highly official Soto-shu organization, a gigantic evil religious institution in Japan (but with Nishijima Roshi officiating, since he is a card carrying member of Soto-shu). That ceremony was far more inconvenient and way more embarrassing. I had to shave my head! I looked like Nosferatu for two or three weeks while my hair grew back. It was also really hot the day I did it. And I had to wear these horrible ugly white pajama things and have my photo taken in them. It was pretty awful.

But having done that I can now really call myself a Zen monk. It's even written down on a piece of paper somewhere in an office in Japan, filed away with all the other dumbasses who've done that silly ceremony.

On the other hand, many people have argued that I am not a monk. Their definitions of what is and is not a monk are different.

Becoming a monk isn't something you can just do on your own. You can't just decide to call yourself as a monk and expect anyone to take you seriously. You have to go through some kind of social ceremony in which someone else declares you a monk. But once that happens, you're a monk.

Of course people still might say you're not a monk. But, to take me as just one example, if someone says I'm not a monk they've also got to say that everyone registered with the Soto-shu of Japan as a monk is also not a monk. And many people do say that. Or else they have to set up their own standards and say that some of those monks are monks while others are not. But these are both iffy positions because you're going up against a really big organization who, though they are evil, have a lot of respect. Which doesn't stop some people from doing so anyhow.

The extent to which you're taken seriously in the big wide world as a monk is determined by the extent to which the organization that gave you the designation is taken seriously in the big wide world. If, for example, Joe's Zen Palour in Ravenna, Ohio calls you a monk that probably won't carry as much weight as the Soto-shu of Japan calling you a monk.

This is the reason I did the Soto-shu ceremony. At the time, I thought it was important to be seen as a legit monk. I now place far less importance on the matter.

Still, I've done the ceremony. Actually these days I'm somewhat embarrassed by that fact. I'm not so sure I'd call it a mistake. But it's not something I would do now if I hadn't done it 12 years ago. For better or worse I am a monk and I'll be a monk for life unless I choose to renounce what I did all those years ago.

As for what it means to be a monk, which is probably your real question... that's a lot harder to say. For me it means I've made a public commitment to zazen practice. That's pretty much it. For others it means following a strict set of regulations. For still others it's a badge of identity.

But these are the only-est Monks who really matter!

ADDENDUM:

From the comments page-
@Brad, you wrote:
"But it's not something I would do now if I hadn't done it 12 years ago."

Can you give a reason? Or is it an emotional thing, being annoyed by the 'label' you are carrying with you since then?

I feel now like registering with Soto-shu was unnecessary. At the time I figured it was now or never. Meaning that while I was living in Japan in close conjunction with Nishijima Roshi, registering with Soto-shu would be relatively easy. I knew that if I waited and then later on decided to do it, the process would be extremely difficult. For example, if I waited till Nishijima Roshi was no longer with us there would have been a lot of bureaucratic steps involved that N was able to bypass. Or if I waited till I got back to America there would be the extra expense of going to Japan.

I'm not sure how much I benefited from the registration. It's likely that Wisdom Publications took my manuscript a tad more seriously because I was registered. But I think they would have considered my having been given dharma transmission by Nishijima Roshi enough.

I hope the distinction is clear. I did two almost identical ceremonies. One was with Nishijima Roshi in his dojo. That ceremony was not registered with Soto-shu. A few years later I went through almost the same ceremony but performed at Tokei-in temple. Again Nishijima officiated. But this time there were three monks from the temple in attendance, photos were taken, forms were filled out and mailed in and a few weeks later I got my certificate. With my name misspelled! So perhaps some guy named Bradely Warner is a Soto-shu monk while I am not.

I feel like the first ceremony with Nishijima at his dojo was my real ordination, while the second one was just a formality to get me on the books with an organization I have rarely interacted with since then.

I don't regret the ceremony with Nishijima. Although I'm still somewhat ambivalent as to what it really meant. The second ceremony with Soto-shu was something I did for pretty much all the wrong reasons. But I did it and it's done. I've done lots more regrettable things than that in my life.

Also, the dharma transmission ceremony was yet again a whole OTHER thing.

I could have had that formalized by Soto-shu as well. I looked into it. But it would have been really expensive (I think I worked it out that I'd have had to spend between $2000 and $5000 to get it all taken care of). It would also have been patently ridiculous.

One of the steps involved was to do this kind of Q&A session designed to check if I had truly mastered the dharma. BUT both the questions and their answers are already set. I'd have just had to memorize them and spit them out on cue.

Then you get to be honorary head of Soto-shu for a day or some shit. But you can't, like, disband the whole organization or decide to change everyone from black robes to pink tutus or whatever. Which would have made it worthwhile. No. You just get to sit in a special chair or something. Big deal. I'm not into that kind of nonsense. So I'm not gonna pay a couple thousand dollars to do it.

The whole thing just sounded like a parody of what Buddhism is really about.

George Harrison Says "We Are Not These Bodies"

2012-01-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

A reader in North Carolina asks:

Could you please comment on this quote, which Tom Petty attributes to George Harrison: "Look, we're not these bodies, let's not get hung up on that."

I'd be glad to! Because George Harrison is one of the key people in getting me into this whole Buddhist mess that I'm now inextricably mired in. I was a total Beatle geek by the time I was 15 years old and remain one to this very day. And since I'm a perverse weirdo sort of individual, many of my favorite Beatle tracks were the ones nobody else liked. I particularly dug the Indian-inspired tunes George contributed like Within You Without You , Love You To, The Inner Light and even Blue Jay Way. Hearing these songs and reading interviews with George really got me wanting to study Eastern mysticism in a serious way. Man, I even got into George's post-Beatle Krishna Consciousness nuttiness like Living in the Material World and one of my all time fave Hari albums, Dark Horse, which nobody else likes except my friend Lesa. Another all-time great George Harrison record is his production of the Radha Krishna Temple album on Apple Records.

In fact, when I signed up for Tim McCarthy's class on Zen Buddhism at Kent State University way back when, I'd actually been looking for something more like the kind of Hindu mysticism George was into. I settled for Zen Buddhism because it was the closest I could get.

By the time I started taking that class I was already well familiar with the oft-repeated phrase in Hindu mysticism, "we are not these bodies." It was even on the back of some Santana album I saw once as a quotation from Sri Chimnoy. His version went, "We are not these bodies, we are the spirit-soul that flies within."

I expected Buddhism would further elucidate this notion. But instead I clearly recall Tim saying once that it was closer to the truth to say "We are these bodies." That was a bit of a shock. He didn't say that was the truth, just that it was closer.

To say we are these bodies is wrong. But saying we are not these bodies is also wrong. It's like when you're arguing with someone and that person gets you into some hypothetical scenario that has nothing to do with the point you were trying to make. Then you find yourself arguing about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with what you wanted to say. The question does not fit the case. We're given a set of two exclusive options and asked to pick one or the other. Either we are these bodies or we're not. Philosophers and religious people have been going over and over and over with this debate for centuries. But Buddhism takes the stance that neither option is correct.

One time I was sitting listening to Nishijima Roshi give a lecture. I thought I'd figured his whole trip out. With his staunch denial of reincarnation and his very nuts and bolts approach about "the world as it is in front of us" I figured he was a pure materialist. I didn't like him much anyhow. But I went because it was a convenient place to practice zazen with a group. I was dozing off during one of his talks when he said, "The material world is an illusion."

Say what?

To me that sounded like the whole Hindu notion of "we are not these bodies." The Hiundus have a lot of mythology about how the material world is maya, or illusion, and the true substance of reality is pure spirit. But I already knew Buddhism rejected that idea. So here I was presented with the notion that the material world is illusion, and so is the spiritual world. What's left?

The answer is that no category or definition we can create to try and box up the real world we live in can suffice.

We are these bodies in the sense that what we are manifests as our bodily existence. We are our minds/souls in the sense that the mind's reality is the only one we ever really know. But neither is really us.

In the chapter titled Inmo in Shobogenzo Dogen said it like this: "We ourselves are tools that it (inmo, the ineffable) possesses within this universe in ten directions. How do we know that it exists? We know it is so because the body and the mind both appear in the universe, yet neither is our self. The body, already, is not 'I'. Its life moves on through days and months, and we cannot stop it even for an instant. Where have the red faces [of our youth] gone? When we look for them, they have vanished without a trace. When we reflect carefully, there are many things in the past that we will never meet again. The sincere (or pure) mind, too, does not stop, but goes and comes moment by moment."

So in a sense George was right. We're not these bodies. So let's not get hung up on that. But then again we are these bodies so it's impossible not to be hung up on that.

Take it away, George!

Christian Radio

2012-01-16T08:39:00.000-08:00

It's Martin Luther King Day here in the USA. But I can't think of anything related to MLK to say today.

So instead I'm going to try and write down my thoughts about the radio station I've been listening to in my car a lot lately, WCRF - FM 103.3 Moody Bible Radio Cleveland. Click on the link and you can listen too.

I found the station on a random scan of the radio after my car's computer was replaced and all my set stations were erased. Initially I just turned it on to chuckle at the absurdity of it. The very first thing I heard was a call-in show about the evils of pornography, how it destroys families and suchlike. It was better than MAD magazine! Or even CRACKED magazine!

But then as I listened more I started to understand the appeal of the station, and perhaps of churches and mainstream religion in general. Most of the time, when I tune in for a few minutes while driving somewhere what I'll hear will be mainly nice things. They talk about how to live a moral life, how to deal with marriage difficulties, how to just be excellent to each other and so on. Some of the advice is even kind of good. I listened to one guy talk about how he gave up watching football on TV and how much it improved his relationship with his family. Nothing so bad about that.

But then just when I think everything's okay, they start slipping in stuff that's either just plain mean or simply bat-shit crazy. And then ZING! they're right back into talking about how to be a good person. And I'm like, where did that come from?

I heard one guy the other day practically frothing at the mouth over some legislation in California mandating that history teachers teach about prominent gay and lesbian figures. Never mind that the idea of talking about gays and lesbians in history is kind of anachronistic since the very idea of defining someone as homosexual is a recent invention. Which is a whole other topic. No, this guy wasn't talking about that. He was raving on and on with a list of all the wholesome things that will be destroyed because of this new ruling -- the boy scouts, motherhood, apple pie, baseball, marriage (of course), kindness, home cooking, flowers, bunnies... It just went on and on until the person interviewing him had to get him back on topic. "So what you're saying is that children will not be allowed to question whether the villainous and evil acts of the homosexual are moral?" she said. "Oh yes! That's exactly right!" he replied and started ranting some more. I think from now on schools in California have to require bands of roving queers to ass rape third grade boys in gym class. Or something like that.

Four and a half minutes later we're back into relatively good advice about being decent to each other. Uh... what happened?

I think there's a large segment of the population who must see a connection between these things that I am unable to see myself. I'd also venture to guess that many of these people are unaware that there are any other sources of information about how to live a decent life than those associated with whatever religion they may have grown up with.

It's all very weird to me. But I think I understand part of the appeal of this stuff now. There are probably people out there who sincerely want to learn how to be decent human beings. Knowing of no other source of information on that subject, they get plunged into the bat-shit crazy stuff and end up associating being bat-shit crazy with being a good person. The mind boggles.

Then yesterday I was at Village Discount Outlet in Cuyahoga Falls ("East and West Coast Styles Arriving Daily!") looking for bell-bottom jeans and I found a book called Glorious Appearing: The End of Days. This is the thrilling conclusion to the Left Behind series. The Left Behind books are a series of novels about what the authors imagine will happen once Jesus gets around to fulfilling all those End Times prophecies he said 2000 years ago would happen before his own generation passed away. The books have sold truckloads! There's even a movie based on it starring Kirk Cameron.

The novels re-imagine the Book of Revelations as a kind of modern-day horror/science fiction story in which people vanish when God takes them up for being good Christians. In this book, the 12th and final of the series, Jesus at last reappears. He's a kind of Godzilla-sized rampaging monster who torches cites and "splays and fillets" (I swear that's a quotation from the book) those who oppose His wrath while He quotes His own words from the New Testament. I only read a few pages. But it's the most over-the-top wish-fulfillment fantasy you can imagine. You fuckers didn't believe us, huh? Well now here's Christ-zilla to give you what you deserve! Ha! Ha! Ha! See you in Hell, bitches!

Great stuff! I want to see that movie! But I figured the book wasn't really worth the 50 cents they wanted for it so I passed it up.

What to make of all this? I don't know. But it's really out there and there really are millions who believe in one variation or another of this kind of thing. Glorious Appearing was a New York Times bestseller. Hardcore Zen was not even close.

It's very easy for people who don't believe this stuff to make fun of it to other people who don't believe it, like I'm doing now. The existence of this stuff used to scare me a lot more than it does these days. I don't think it's inconsequential. But I also don't think there as many true believers in it as I once assumed. Probably most of the readers of the Left Behind books and listeners of Moody Bible Radio have plenty of doubts about what they hear. They may want to believe it a lot more than they actually believe it. Or they may tune in for the good advice about life and just ignore the rest.

Doubt may be our greatest friend in turning the tide. This is why I always fight against the sorts of Buddhism that tries to erase doubt from the picture. A few years ago a group called "e-sangha" issued an alert about me saying that I preached heretical doctrines denying the reality of reincarnation. But if Buddhism ever starts being the kind of thing where we need to be warned against those who doubt the literal interpretation of its scriptures, we're sunk. We might as well write our own Left Behind type books.

Hey maybe I'd finally get a best seller if I did that!

Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries

2012-01-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

The fine folks at Counterpoint Press sent me a copy of Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries for my review. So here goes.

First off, the by-line on this thing is a doozy. Here's what it says under the title:

EIHEI DOGEN ZENJI
Translations and
Commentaries by
Nishiari Bokusan,
Shohaku Okamura,
Shunryu Suzuki,
Kosho Uchiyama,
Sojun Mel Weitsman.
Kazuaki Tanahashi, and
Dairyu Michael Wenger

Phew!

You always know the extent to which a movie is going to be a piece of garbage by the number of names in the writing credits. One writer can make a good movie with a specific point of view and something interesting to say. When movies are written by committee the committee always succeeds in removing anything worthwhile about the story and replacing it with whatever they've agreed on will appeal to, as well as avoid offending, the greatest number of people.

This book is the product of a large Zen institution. I almost wrote that it was the product of the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC). But the inclusion of material by Kosho Uchiyama and Shohaku Okamura widens things even further. Uchiyama and Okamura stem from the same root lineage as the folks at SFZC*, but do not belong to that institution itself. Because of its association with a big institution I was a little worried whether I'd be able to give this book a good review.

My problem with a lot of the stuff that comes out of SFZC these days is that it tends to be watered down. This was the trouble with their edition of Dogen's Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo). It's not that it's a bad translation. In fact it's one of the best around. But it's also a translation by committee. That committee sat together and worried about a lot of fairly ridiculous "problems" with the text such as whether or not the phrase usually rendered as "kingly bodhi tree" might be considered sexist. Which is the sort of thing you'd expect a bunch of uptight middle class liberals from San Francisco to wring their hands about. Thus in a number of areas of the text, rather than giving you what Dogen actually said, they give you what a bunch of uptight middle class liberals from San Francisco are comfortable with him saying. Fortunately they generally restrict themselves to fairly innocuous changes like making "kingly bodhi tree" into "royal bodhi tree," which I admit is pretty much the same thing. But still, the flavor of their translation is Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco treat) rather than the kind of plain boiled rice Dogen would have served you.

Anyway, that's not what's going on with Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries. So just forget I said any of that stuff. The reason there are so many authors in this book is because it is a compilation of three commentaries, each of which has two or three authors or editors attached. The first is by Nishiari Bokusan, who was the teacher of Shunryu Suzuki's teacher Kishizawa Ian. This is translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Mel Weitsman. Tanahashi is Japanese and speaks English but is not an ordained Zen teacher. Weitsman is American and does not speak Japanese but is an ordained Zen teacher. So one can guess that Tanahashi is responsible for the actual translation into English while Weitsman made it sound more Zen and that the two of them hashed out the translation to make sure the final piece was true to the original. Though I can't help wondering if they also removed any offending sexism or suchlike in the process.

The second commentary is attributed to Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and the first abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. But Suzuki himself never prepared any commentary on Genjo Koan as such, at least not for publication. He did, however, give a number of lectures on Genjo Koan over a period of six years. So Michael Wenger and Mel Weitsman went through those lectures with the assistance of Jeffrey Schneider and stitched together a Frankenstein monster commentary that reads as if it were a single piece. They did a good job. It's very hard to spot where the sutures and the bolts in the neck are in this version. But, again, I can't help wondering what Suzuki himself would have made of it. I've heard that while he was happy with Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, which was put together in a similar fashion, he thought it was more what his students heard him say than what he actually said. I'd guess he'd feel the same way about this piece.

The final commentary is the purest. It was prepared as a single piece by Kosho Uchiyama and then translated by Shohaku Okamura. Okamura was not only a direct student of Uchiyama but is a Japanese Zen monk whose English is at such a high level that he didn't need help in preparing a readable translation. I suppose he had an editor, just like any English speaking author would. But this is still Okamura's own vision of the piece. So even though Uchiyama himself didn't approve it, we can be pretty sure this is very close to how he would have said things if he'd been able to speak English.

That being said, I find Suzuki's portion to be the most readable and easy to understand, while Bokusan's runs a close second. Unfortunately Uchiyama's commentary comes off a little too stilted and scholarly for my taste. This doesn't seem to be Okamura's fault since Okamura's sketch of Uchiyama's life, which precedes the commentary, is highly readable and very warm.

Although Uchiyama's commentary is the most scholarly-sounding of the three, none of these are really scholarly commentaries. A scholarly commentary on Genjo Koan would tell you about Dogen's life, about what was going on in Japan at the time, about Dogen's use of language, about the background of the various quotations he uses, and so on. In this book you get just enough of that stuff to follow along. These are commentaries by Zen practitioners whose main intent was to help other Zen practitioners deal with their practice.

In that, I feel these are very useful for those of us who practice Zen in the West today. Granted all three commentaries are by older Japanese men. But none of these commentaries are so ancient that they feel removed and distant from us the way a really old commentary might. The earliest of the three is Nishiari's, which dates from the early twentieth century. The most recent is Uchiyama's, which dates from the 1970s. They are all, therefore, modern looks at the 800 year old Genjo Koan. Contemporary life even intrudes into the commentaries themselves when Shunryu Suzuki refers to the traffic noises outside the hall in Northern California where he delivered his talks and relates this directly to what Dogen was writing about hundreds of years before cars were invented.

Some might feel this makes the commentaries less valuable since they are so far removed from Dogen's time. One could complain that people so distant from the author's own era can't possibly know what he was talking about. But I don't feel that's the case. It's more important that all three of the commentaries are by practitioners. What's more, like us, these practitioners have to deal with the kinds of things Dogen never had to deal with.

It's funny to me when people act like we, today in the West, have so much more trouble practicing Zen than the folks in Asia hundreds of years ago. In spite of traffic noises and blaring boomboxes, we really have it a lot easier than people in Dogen's time did. They had to deal with wars and famines and political uprisings the likes of which are seldom encountered by any of us these days. The distractions we have to deal with are, admittedly, a lot more attractive and easily available than those of Dogen's time. But our excuse for not practicing is because there are so many more websites to look at and besides there's a guy upstairs practicing Jimi Hendrix licks, rather than because we're about to starve to death since the rice crop failed and the Mongols are burning down the village. It's really no contest. We've got it very cushy by comparison.

The commentaries in this book are by people who understand the unique nature of the distractions to practice contemporary people face. Though they may not be as hip and pop culture savvy as the trash I put out, they're very useful to anyone serious about pursuing Zen practice in our time.

*Some people in the comments section insist that this is wrong. However, Michael Wenger says the following in his introduction, "(Nishiari Bokusan's) commentary is the first in this collection. In fact, all of the other commentaries in this volume are in his lineage." Until I find further clarification I'll take Michael Wenger's word on the matter.

****

Don't forget, if you want to practice some Zen, beginning Sunday January 15th 2012 I will be hosting Zazen every Sunday night at 7 pm at the Akron Shambhala Meditation Center. Maybe I'll even give you my take on Genjo Koan. The address is:

133 Portage Trail Ste. 202
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
44221

"Moe and Curly" or "Get Started Today"

2012-01-09T07:54:00.000-08:00

Here's a question someone sent twice. So he must really want to know.

If you have a moment can you please clarify something on your blog:

"I mean that when Moe hits Curly on the head with a sledgehammer, Moe is really only hitting Moe on the head with a sledgehammer. It only appears to be Curly getting hit."

What does this mean? Moe smashes Curly's head. Curly dies. Moe lives on.

Now I understand that nothing is truly autonomous; but... How is Moe killing Curly, actually Moe killing Moe?

For one thing, you must not be a Three Stooges fan. Curly doesn't die when he gets smashed on the head with a sledgehammer by Moe. The sledgehammer gets all bent up and Curly just says, "Ow!" Look what happened to the axe on the photo on top of this article. Curly was fine.

But I understand the question and I'll try my best to answer it.

The answer is that although it appears to us that Moe and Curly are eternally separate entities, that's not really how it is. Both Moe and Curly are manifestations of the same underlying reality. And not just in an abstract or metaphorical sense. That's really how it is.

The same something that looks out through Moe's eyes and perceives Curly, also looks out through Curly's eyes and perceives Moe. And it looks out through your eyes to perceive both Curly and Moe. If Moe were to kill Curly, that same something would outlive both of them and also be both of them. There isn't anyone else here at all.

I would expect the follow-up question to be, "How do you know this? It sure doesn't seem that way to me!"

This is a perfectly reasonable question. Because it doesn't seem that way to me either a lot of the time. But once you manage to catch on to the reality of this situation even for a moment, you can never let it go.

This understanding of things is radically different from the way most people look at stuff. It is so extraordinarily different that certain delusional folks, when they come across someone who has had a glimpse of this, get way too excited about that person and start calling her a sage or a saint. Those people will never give the folks they follow a moment's peace. Or, conversely, they get way over excited about that person and call him a heretic or a lunatic. They either venerate the person all out of proportion or they lock him up or even kill him.

More people are aware of this view than are willing to talk about it. These folks don't like either of those options. So they stay quiet or they just tell a few close friends and swear those friends to secrecy.

Then, of course, there are those who mimic people who've understood this stuff because they want the fame and money that sometimes accrues when people venerate those guys. Unfortunately you can also get yourself killed this way if you're not careful.

The reason I bring this up is that I'm always careful about announcing how I know this to be true. Much as I'd like to move out of this fleabag one-bedroom in Akron, I'm aware of the dangers involved as well. So every time I mention how I happen to know this, I always go out of my way to make it clear that I am as big of a dunce as anyone could possibly be.

The thing is, you yourself could see this too if you were willing to put in the work involved. Anyone -- absolutely anyone -- can see it if they want to. But most people are too lazy and they never will.

I have managed on a few occasions to get just clear enough in my mind and body to see that my mind is not my mind nor is my body my body. They are both manifestations of something that's way, way bigger than me. And yet this something is more me than I could ever be.

And still I have to pay my own insurance bills. What's up with that?

Anyway, this is pretty much the same explanation as you can find in any one of a dozen or more decent books on the subject. If you're really interested in understanding it clearly then you have to put in the work yourself.

Ten years of daily zazen practice usually suffices for most people to at least get an initial understanding of why Moe and Curly aren't really different from each other in the sense that we usually think.

You can get started today.

****

And if you want to get started with me, beginning Sunday January 15th 2012 I will be hosting Zazen every Sunday night at 7 pm at the Akron Shambhala Meditation Center. The address is:

133 Portage Trail Ste. 202
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
44221

Can You Be My Teacher?

2012-01-05T07:42:00.001-08:00

I feel like it might be time once again to address one the most frequent questions that comes to me:

Can you be my teacher?

I have addressed this before. I'm not even sure how many times. Maybe I should make it an annual thing. Or, given how often I'm asked, maybe I should just make one definitive post and put it up every three months.

The short answer is this:

No.

But if I left it at that I'd just sound mean. I don't intend this in a mean way at all. It's more like you're asking me if I can make monkeys fly out of my butt. The answer to that is, unfortunately, also no. Like making monkeys fly out of my butt, my becoming your teacher is something I cannot possibly do even if I wanted to.

If you live in Northeast Ohio, or if you want to brave the snow and ice and come here, I will be starting a regular zazen class on Sunday evenings at 7pm at the Akron Shambhala Meditation Center at 133 Portage Trail in Cuyahoga Falls. This will begin on January 15th. If you show up, we can sit together and maybe talk a little bit. I'm also working on setting up a religious nonprofit in Los Angeles. The group I started there still meets every Saturday morning at 10 AM at 237 Hill Street in Santa Monica. You can find out about them by going to dogensanghalosangeles.org. Chances are good I will be attending the regular sittings there starting in the Spring. If I can get it together, that is. Meanwhile they still go on without me each and every week without fail.

But most of the people who ask me about my becoming their teacher live in places far from me. So I really have no idea what they imagine would happen if I said "yes." Perhaps they imagine I have a center somewhere that they can run off to and escape their dreary humdrum lives into a world of beautiful Zen.

I understand that dream very well because I had that dream myself for a long time. I used to imagine that there were places out there somewhere -- if I could only find them -- where I could run away from all my troubles and just immerse myself in the wondrous dharma. But there are no such places anywhere.

Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery is about the closest thing I've ever seen to what I used to dream about. It's beautiful, it's isolated, it's dedicated to Zen practice, it's not a brainwashing cult. Tassajara is nice. But it's also not a place you can run away to in order to escape your real life. Real life will hunt you down and find you even there. Some people try to escape their real lives by going way, way far away like to India or Japan. But real life always catches them. It caught me even in the mountainous wilds of Toyama Prefecture, Japan.

What I wanted when I dreamed of those places was really just to return to childhood. I wanted to have a new mommy and daddy who would look after me and deal with all the serious shit while I got to play. But, see, even my actual childhood wasn't like that. My actual childhood was pretty miserable in a lot of ways. I was bullied and hassled and bored. So even saying that I dreamed of returning to childhood isn't right. I dreamed of going to a dreamland that never existed because it couldn't possibly exist.

I imagine some people out there who ask me about me becoming their teacher are offering themselves as submissives. They want to submit to me so I can be their master and they my slave. If you want that you can go to Genpo Roshi or Andrew Cohen. They take on submissives, I hear. Me, I wouldn't get into a van with either of those guys. I don't want any submissives. Not as Zen students anyhow.

Maybe the folks who ask about me becoming their teacher imagine we can create some kind of on-line teaching relationship. There are Zen teachers these days who take students on-line. To me that sounds like pure nonsense. But rather than speak in generalities about the concept of Zen teaching on-line, I'll just tell you why I, Brad, do not do it.

I don't do on-line Zen teaching because I really don't like the on-line experience that much. I'm not that into sitting in front of computers typing things. And yet I've fallen into a line of work in which I am constantly sitting in front of a damned computer. It's rare that I spend any less than four to six hours a day in front of this god forsaken machine. That's pretty much the minimum requirement in terms of keeping up with my own books and other writing projects. Then I also have to answer emails from people I know personally, answer emails from people I don't know from Adam who write to me, keep up the correspondence necessary to get speaking gigs and things and find cute animal videos on YouTube.

If I were to try to develop any on-line teaching relationships that would add at least another six hours a day of staring at a computer screen on top of what I do already. Plus I really have a bad memory in general. I have a hard time even recognizing people I know when I see them. People I know well are fine, but I'm constantly embarrassed when people I know just a little bit come up and start talking to me and I can't recall who they are to save my life.

When it comes to people I know only as names on the top of email messages I am totally hopeless. I'd have to work out some kind of weird organization system just to keep up with who was who and what they said to me last time and what I replied. Just getting that together would be a couple hours a day. And would I get paid for any of that? Nope. So when am I going to be able to do the things I need to do to earn a living?

It's just not gonna happen. I'm sorry. I know you've got serious issues and I know you like my books. I appreciate that you read what I write. I'd like to help. But I just can't.

Then there's all the issues I have in general with the whole notion of teachers and students. It isn't always an abusive relationship of the type that Genpo Roshi and Andrew Cohen advocate in the link I provided above. But it's so easy for it to devolve into that sort of thing. And this isn't just because evil manipulative teachers evilly manipulate their innocent students into becoming mindless slave zombies while they sit back and go "Mwah-ha-ha-ha-HAAAAA!"

In fact, there is a whole great class of people out there who desperately want to be turned into mindless slave zombies. Anyone who takes on the role of a spiritual teacher has to invest tremendous time, effort and energy in dealing with these kinds of people. Some of them will insist upon becoming mindless slave zombies no matter how hard you try to tell them not to. Here is a perfect example of how that works:

I can't tell you how many times I've felt just like Brian in this scene from Life of Brian. There are people out there who are exactly like the mob that follows him. And no matter how often you tell them not to follow you, they so desperately want to be led that they'll follow you anyway. It can be really stressful. I actually admire the honest people out there who take on the role of the teacher because I know what they have to deal with. All the people who want to be turned into mindless slave zombies think they're being very sincere and devoted. Which just makes it that much worse.

Watch that clip from Life of Brian again and pay close attention to the character played by John Cleese. He's the guy up front who says, "I should know (you're the messiah)! I've followed a few!" He takes on the guise of a follower. But he's really not. He wants to lead the movement. But he hasn't got the right sort of personality or charisma or whatever magic it takes to actually have people consider him to be the messiah. So he latches on to someone who has a following and offers to help that person maximize his potential.

This is very tempting because guys who do the sorts of things that get them followings are usually not really good at management type stuff. Plus it's a lot of work to have students. This means it's nearly impossible to take on students and have a normal paying job. So guys in Brian's position who want to try to be teachers need to find someone to help them get butts in seats and keep the donations rolling in and so on. So people like the character John Cleese portrays here can be very attractive.

But those guys will destroy everything. And they're everywhere. Almost all of them think they mean well. Some are very convincing. Oy! The stories I could tell you...

Anyway, this desire people have to be led is a really tremendous and very basic problem for humanity in general. This desire ends up causing all sorts of terrible tragedies like Naziism, Terrorism and the phenomenon of lousy boy bands and hair metal acts.

So that's why I can't be your teacher.

It's not that I don't like you or that I don't think your problems are serious. It's just that I can't do it. I'm flattered that you asked. But you're asking for something impossible, so I have to refuse.

******

Here's an interview I just did. Maybe you'll like it.

Oh! And my friend David Sango Angstead designed a new T-shirt/Hoodie/Bumper sticker etc. for me that you can get on my Red Bubble page. It's a very cool design. I need to order one for myself!

The Look

2012-01-02T09:57:00.000-08:00

明けましてお目出度う y'all! That's "happy new year" for those who can't read Japanese.

Here's an email I got recently.

Attached is a picture of Behring Breivik, the guy who shot, bombed and killed about 77 people in Norway this summer. He has been examined by psychiatrists and they have come to the conclusion that he is/was a paranoid schizophrenic, meaning he was insane at the time of his murderous actions.

But look at his picture closely, look at his eyes...he is very balanced according to the Tibetan theory of "eye science."

I sometimes ask myself if this means that Hitler, Stalin, Osama and all other crazy wackos are also just paranoid schizos then?

So are these people really just sick or are they just simply "evil" ? This guy Behring Breivik planned and planned and worked at this for years and went to such lengths to kill these people that it is very hard for me to consider him sick, as most healthy and very intelligent people would not have managed the task of producing, orchestrating and manifesting such a killing even if they wanted to. Should that not say something about his sanity?

I think this is a really important question. And to me the question is, What is sanity and how does it relate to Enlightenment?

I think it's clear that there is no real correlation between I.Q. and morality. Some of the most immoral people in history have been extremely intelligent as measured by the accepted standards of measuring such things. Several of the people who followed Shoko Asahara's orders and placed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system were highly educated. Many of the top leaders of the Nazi party were also very brainy.

This means that the ability to carefully plan out and execute some specific operation does not relate at all with being a moral person. It is quite possible to create a very complex proceedure and to carry it out without having any sense of morality. Whatever you think really happened in Lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001, it was clear proof that planning and executing complex schemes does not require any sense of morality. Whoever did that stuff was very smart. I'm sure they all knew how to conduct themselves socially and be accepted as sane. If not, they wouldn't have been able to interact with the many people they needed to deal with in order to accomplish their goal. These were not raving lunatics. They never are...

But one would expect that enlightenment in the Buddhist sense would correlate with morality and just basic human decency. This is where things get tricky. Because it all depends on how one defines enlightenment.

The general consensus seems to be that an enlightened person is one who has undergone what they call an "enlightenment experience." This experience reveals to the enlightened person the true nature of reality. After having had this experience, the person is transformed into something more than what he or she was before.

But I suspect there is precious little more correlation between true morality and the ability to have one of these so-called "enlightenment experiences" than there is between true morality and the ability to score high on an I.Q. test.

OK. I'll back off a little there. At some level an "enlightenment experience" shows the person who has it the real meaning of moral action — that anything one does to another person is something one does to oneself. And I don't mean this in any kind of figurative or metaphorical sense. I mean that when Moe hits Curly on the head with a sledgehammer, Moe is really only hitting Moe on the head with a sledgehammer. It only appears to be Curly getting hit.

But that's not always what gets labeled as an "enlightenment experience." Often what passes for an "enlightenment experience" is something quite different. Sometimes it's much more like a drug-induced hallucination. People on psychedelic drugs often report feeling at one with the universe. But it's not the same kind of oneness. It's a oneness in which the experiencer owns that oneness and incorporates it into his/her sense of self, thereby making that sense of self infinitely big and infinitely exclusive.

Even if an "enlightenment experience" is genuine, the ego is very powerful and exceedingly clever. Absolutely anything, even a true experience of oneness with all things, can be transformed into something the ego can use to bolster itself.

As for the ability to achieve the stereotypical "look" that a realized master is supposed to have, this is even less correlated with morality or even with enlightenment. A decent actor can convincingly act out a variety or roles even when the actor has not experienced anything like what the character he's portraying is supposed to have experienced. It's easy to look the part of the balanced guru without being the least bit balanced.

Osama bin Laden could do it.

Shoko Asahara can do it.

Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada, who allegedly ordered several killings on the New Vrindaban Hare Krishna farm community could do it.

I suspect that Mike Myers can do it but refrained from doing it lest he look too much like his buddy...

...Deepak Chopra who has really got it down!

Which isn't to say Deepak is anything like Osama bin Laden, Shoko Asahara and Kirtananda. I don't think he is at all. But that beatific grin he's mastered doesn't prove it.

So sanity is something quite difficult to define. Like the famous quote about pornography, "you know it when you see it." But you don't know it just because someone looks the way the media tells you they're supposed to. It's much more subtle.

And people are uncomfortable with that. They want easy definitions that never change. Unfortunately, in real life easy definitions that never change are hard to come by. They want stereotypes that are reliable. But stereotypes are never reliable.

A Christmas Stocking Type Jumble of Unrelated Ideas

2011-12-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everybody!

Or if you don't do Christmas Happy Kwanza, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Festivus, Rohatsu or whatever.

I'm down in Dallas where, yesterday, I attempted to visit the Occupy Dallas movement with my dad. Only when we got to where they're supposed to be at the time they're supposed to meet there was nobody around. Maybe they take Christmas Eve off. So we went and saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie instead. It was good. But we also saw J. Edgar, the Clint Eastwood movie about J. Edgar Hoover. That was better. We didn't see both movies on the same day.

I have mixed feelings about the whole "Occupy Wherever" movement. I'm glad it's there. I'm glad people are expressing an opinion about how totally fucked the current system is. On the other hand, the message seems a bit muddled. And, as it always is, the movement is pretty much dominated by a certain type of person. It's hard to define the personality type that always takes over these things. But you know them when you encounter them. They're sort of loud and cranky and convinced of their eternal rightness. I find those people incredibly annoying most of the time.

I like these protesters better. Seriously.

***

For those who are interested in understanding what Nishijima Roshi, my teacher, is on about when he talks about the Sympathetic and the Parasympathetic nervous systems here is a little animation for you that explains it all (or at least one aspect of it all). It's called Prickles and Goo. Take a look:

You'll note that this animation is by Trey Parker & Matt Stone, creators of South Park, and that the audio is from a lecture by Alan Watts. None of these people have any connection at all with Nishijima Roshi nor do the terms "symapthetic nervous system" or "parasympathetic nervous system" appear anywhere in this piece. And yet Alan Watts is saying exactly, precisely and unmistakably the very same thing as Nishijima.

To translate this into Nishijima's terms, "prickly" = "sympathetic nervous system" and "gooey" = "parasympathetic nervous system."

We choose the words we feel most comfortable with to explain the things we think are important. Nishijima Roshi was always, in Alan Watts' terms, more of a "prickly" person. So he chose a prickly way of expressing himself. He used scientific terminology. This got him some criticism from others more prickly than himself because Nishijima used prickly terminology in a gooey way. And in the world of prickles, being the least bit gooey is not allowed.

Watts, being a gooey sort, chose a gooey way of expressing the same idea. In the world of goo it's more acceptable to be slightly prickly.

Here are some more good cartoons (the opening, by the way, expresses exactly how I feel about my own work):

***

Finally, here is a really good article from Cracked.com that you may enjoy.

Have a wonderful holiday season everybody!

The Hardest Working Man in Zen Business

2011-12-16T11:18:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to compile a list of all the gigs I've done Zen-wise. I want to include both live appearances and radio/TV shows. But I'm missing almost all the radio and TV dates. And there are a few of the live appearance gigs which I do not have records of exactly where I spoke. I know the date and the city, but not the actual venue. I've put those in bold.

Does anyone remember where these were? Is there anyone out there who knows of gigs I did that are not on this list (esp. radio and TV stuff)? Does anyone know where the heck I spoke in 2008 and 2007?

2009 TOUR (58 dates)

February 17, 2009 Psych Podcast with Deborah Harper (radio show)
February 19, 2009 The Journey Home Santa Fe Pubic Radio (radio show)

March 3, 2009 Waves of the New Age WAIF Radio Cincinnati, OH
March 5, 2009 In The Spirit with Gary Goldberg (radio show)
March 12, 2009 Bodhi Tree Bookstore Los Angeles, CA
March 18, 2009 Diesel Bookstore Avenue Oakland, CA
March 20, 2009 San Francisco Zen Center San Francisco, CA
March 21, 2009 Virato Live, Asheville, NC (radio show)
March 21, 2009 Green Apple Books San Francisco, CA
March 22, 2009 Copperfield's Books Petaluma, CA
March 25, 2009 Interdependence Project New York, NY 10012
March 26, 2009 East/West Books New York, NY
March 27, 2009 Monmouth University West Long Branch, NJ
March 28, 2009 Brooklyn Zen Center, Brooklyn, NY
March 29, 2009 Traditional Chinese Culture Institute Washington, DC

April 1, 2009 Malaprops Books, Asheville, NC
April 2-5, 2009 Southern Dharma Retreat Center, Hot Springs, NC
April 5, 2009 Asheville Zen Center, West Asheville, NC
April 6, 2009 The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, NC
April 7, 2009 Zen Center of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
April 10-12, 2009 Nashville Zen Center, Nashville, TN
April 17, 2009 Austin Zen Center, Austin, TX
April 18, 2009 San Antonio Zen Center, San Antonio, TX
April 18, 2009 Book People, Austin, TX
April 19, 2009 Houston Zen Center, Houston, TX
April 21, 2009 Legacy Books, Plano, TX
April 27, 2009 Dawson College, Montreal, QC, Canada
April 28, 2009 Casa Del Popolo, Montréal, QC, Canada

May 2, 2009 Still Point Zen Buddhist Abbey Detroit, MI
May 3, 2009 Still Point Zen Buddhist Abbey Detroit, MI
May 5, 2009 Saskatoon Public Library, Saskatoon, SK Canada
May 6, 2009 Indigo Books, Saskatoon, SK Canada
May 7, 2009 McNally Robinson Booksellers , Saskatoon, SK Canada
May 20, 2009 Albuquerque Zen Center Albuquerque, NM
May 22, 2009 Both Sides / No Sides Zen Community, El Paso, TX
May 23, 2009 Las Cruces Zen Center, Las Cruces, NM
May 24, 2009 Las Cruces Zen Center, Las Cruces, NM

August 8-15, 2009 Great Sky Zen Sesshin Hokyoji Zen Monastery, Eitzen,
August 21-23, 2009 Frankfurt Zendo, Frankfurt, Germany
August 24, 2009 Joogastudio Samadhi, Turku, Finland
August 24, 2009 Turku Main Library Turku, Finland
August 25, 2009 Helsinki Zen Center, Helsinki, Finland
August 26, 2009 Balderin sali, Helsinki, FInland
August 26, 2009 Espoo Cine International Film Festival, Espoo, Finland
August 27, 2009 Balderin sali, Helsinki, Finland
August 28, 2009 Jyväskylä City Library, Jyväskylä, Finland
August 29, 2009 Dogen Sangha Finland, Helsinki, FInland

September 3-6, 2009 Haus Hornberg München (Munich), Germany
September 11, 2009 Durham University, Durham, UK
September 12, 2009 King's College London, UK
September 14, 2009 Oddfellows Hall, Bristol, UK
September 19 - 22, 2009 Tokei-in Temple, Shizuoka, Japan

November 13, 2009 Dharma Punx, Vancouver BC
November 17, 2009 University of Victoria Interfaith Chapel, Victoria, BC Canada
November 19, 2009 University of Victoria Interfaith Chapel, Victoria, BC Canada

December 4, 2009 Macalester College, St. Paul, MN
December 5, 2009 Macalester College, St. Paul, MN
December 6, 2009 Dharma Field, Minneapolis, MN

2010 TOUR (43 dates)

March 4, 2010 Unity Temple Kansas City, MO
March 14, 2010 Houston Zen Center, Houston, TX
March 18-21, 2010 Austin Dharma Punx Retreat, Austin, TX
March 25-28, 2010 Southern Dharma Retreat Center, Hot Springs, NC

April 2-4, 2010 Brooklyn Zen Center, Brooklyn, NY
April 10, 2010 Baltimore Zen Center, Severn, MD
April 12, 2010 Barnes & Noble VCU store, Richmond, VA 23284
April 12, 2010 Ekoji Buddhist Sangha, Richmond, Virginia 23221

May 7, 2010 Bibliothèque Francophone Multimédias Limoges, France
May 8, 2010 Salle Terres de Rencontres, Toulouse, France
May 12, 2010 (?) Katwice, Poland
May 13, 2010 Krakow, Poland
May 14, 2010 CUD Bookstore Krakow, Poland
May 20, 2010 Warsaw, Poland
May 23, 2010 Zwiazek Buddystow Zen Bodhidharma, Warsaw, Poland
May 26, 2010 Frankfurt, Zendo, Frankfurt, Germany
May 27, 2010 J.Kamphausen Verlag & Distribution GmbH, Bielefeld, Germany
May 28, 2010 Dharma Buchladen, Berlin, Germany

June 1, 2010 University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FInland
June 2, 2010 Balderin sali, Helsinki, Finland
June 3, 2010 Laughing Yoga Studio, Tempere, FInland
June 3, 2010 Tempere Library, Tempere, Finland
June 4, 2010 Dogen Sangha Finland, Helsinki, Finland
June 5, 2010 Dogen Sangha Finland Helsinki, Finland
June 13, 2010 Kapelruimte, Nijmegan, Netherlands
June 16, 2010 Bookfinders Bookshop and Café, Belfast, Northern Ireland
June 17, 2010 St John Hall, Ballymena, Northern Ireland
June 26, 2010 Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

August 7-14, 2010 - Great Sky Zen Sesshin, Hokyoji Zen Monastery, Eitzen, MN

September 2, 2010 Tassajara Zen Mountain Center
September 17, 2010 Copperfield's Books, Petaluma, CA
September 20, 2010 Diesel Books, Oakland, CA
September 29, 2010 Cleveland Buddhist Temple, Cleveland, OH

October 15, 2010 Interdependence Project, New York, NY
October 16-17, 2010 Interdependence Project, New York, NY
October 26, 2010 Allen Memorial Hospital (McGill University), Montreal, QC, Canada
October 26, 2010 Casa Del Popolo, Montreal, QC, Canada

November 7, 2010 Dogen Translation Project, San Francisco Zen Center, San Francisco, CA
November 9, 2010 Hill Street Center, Santa Monica, CA
November 10, 2010 Dharma Zen Center, Los Angeles, CA
November 10, 2010 Against The Stream, Los Angeles, CA
November 12, 2010 An Lac Buddhist Temple, Ventura, CA
November 14, 2010 Bodhi Tree Bookstore, Los Angeles, CA
November 17, 2010 Montreal, QC, Canada

2011 TOUR (40 dates)

February 15, 2011 Kansas Zen Center, Lawrence, KS
February 17, 2011 Kansas City, MO
February 20, 2011 Cedar Rapids Zen Center, Cedar Rapids, IA
February 22, 2011 Seki’s Japanese Restaurant St Louis, MO
February 26, 2011 Missouri Zen Center, St Louis, MO

March 5, 2011 Brevard Zen Center, Cocoa, FL
March 17, 2011 University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK
March 18, 2011 Saskatoon, SK
March 19-20, 2011 Saskatoon, SK

April 14, 2011 Mount Berry, GA
April 15, 2011 Atlanta, GA
April 17, 2011 Atlanta Soto Zen Center, Atlanta, GA
April 18, 2011 Atlanta, GA
April 20, 2011 Nashville, TN
April 22-24, 2011 Nashville Zen Center Retreat, Nashville, TN

May 10, 2011 An Lac Buddhist Temple, Ventura, CA
May 12, 2011 Against The Stream, Los Angeles, CA
May 29, 2011 Houston Zen Center, Houston, TX

June 18, 2011 Ordinary Mind Zendo, New York, NY

July, 2011 Starwood Festival, Wisteria Campgrounds, Pomeroy, OH
July 29, 2011 Arcata Zen Group, Arcata, CA
July 30, 2011Arcata Zen Group, Arcata, CA
July 31, 2011 North Coast Aikido Center, Arcata, CA

August 6, 2011 Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group Sacramento, CA,
August 7, 2011 Time Tested Books, Sacramento, CA
August 7, 2011 Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group Sacramento, CA

October 6, 2011 Zen In Ooij Nijmegen, Netherlands
October 8, 2011 San Bo Dojo, Bonn, Germany
October 9, 2011 Against The Stream Amsterdam, Netherlands
October 10, 2011 Against The Stream, Rotterdam, Netherlands
October 14, 2011 Salon with Gilles Farcet, Paris, France
October 15, 2011 Zen Retreat, Poitiers, France
October 19, 2011 Dharma Buchladen, Berlin, Germany
October 26, 2011 Bürgerwache am Siegfriedplatz, Bielefeld, Germany
October 27-30, 2011 Zen Retreat, Bielefeld, Germany

November 5, 2011 Brentwood Buddhist Meditation Group, Shenfield, Essex, UK
November 12, 2011 Against The Stream, Antwerp, Belgium
November 13, 2011 RS Yoga, Antwerp, Belgium
November 18, 2011 Village Hall, Manchester, UK
November19, 2011 Village Hall, Manchester, UK

Zen Prostitution

2011-12-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

Now I know why I keep the comments section open.

Yesterday I sat at Angel Falls coffee shop (don't get the wrong idea, my friends in The Netherlands, this one only sells coffee, tea and pastries) wracking my brain for about three hours to come up with yesterday's post. I was trying to put my finger on the one single thing that bugged me the most about Genpo Roshi's latest enterprise.

I wasn't really satisfied with what I wrote. But I'd spent enough time on it and I thought it was OK if not quite what I wanted it to be. Then about fifteen minutes after I put it up, a commenter named Broken Yogi said in part:

"The relationship between student and teacher is supposed to be a sacred one that is untouched by worldly motives, and really is directed towards liberation and enlightenment, which by their very nature are free, in every sense of the word, including the financial sense. To transform these into a monetary business relationship of consumer and service provider is not only to debase the entire process of enlightenment, it actually brings it to a sudden end. Nothing good can possibly result from this."

And I'm like, THAT'S IT! That's the whole thing in a nutshell. What bugs me most is that he is turning the student/teacher relationship in Zen into a business arrangement. He is charging his students not so much for enlightenment as he is charging them for their relationship with him. This is Zen prostitution (I hastily added some words to that effect to the post below after reading Broken Yogi's comment).

The relationship between a Zen teacher and a deshi (to use Genpo's preferred term) is a very intimate thing. We're not talking here about someone who might occasionally attend a lecture or retreat. A deshi would be a long term one-to-one student. There would have to be some sort of formalized public initiation ceremony involved to get to that level.

To my way of thinking, saying, "You can be my deshi for a price" (which is precisely what Genpo is saying, you can read it for yourself) is like saying, "I will fall in love with you if you pay me for it." Even if you meant something like that sincerely you couldn't possibly do it. You can't decide to fall in love with someone and then just sort of will it to happen. And you can't put a price on that.

It's not that Genpo ought not to be allowed to do it. I'm saying it can't be done. It's just impossible. For anyone.

As I said before, I have no problems with Zen teachers who charge for lectures, seminars, books and so on. I also have no problem with Zen teachers who take donations. Everybody's gotta find a way to pay the rent. I can even see setting up a tuition system for priest training or setting up an ongoing donation system to help keep a temple functional. No problem.

But charging for the teacher/student relationship is not a good thing. Because it can't really be done. What you'd have if you charged for such a relationship could only ever possibly be an imitation of that relationship. It's like the difference between going on the Cedar Creek Mine Ride at Cedar Point amusement park and going on a real runaway coal cart in a real abandoned mine shaft. It's not even a good approximation of the thing. It's a poor imitation created for amusement and profit. The real runaway coal cart might kill you. If the Cedar Creek Mine Ride injured you, you could sue. Same deal here.

The reason I write about this is not to constantly point a finger at Genpo and go "shame on you." He's not gonna listen to me anyway. I'm concerned that if this goes unchallenged by someone like me who is in a position to challenge it, then it could become more widespread. It probably already is. What are these "Big Mind® Facilitator Training" things Genpo offers? My guess is people are seeing Big Mind® as a potential money maker and they want to get in on it too. Genpo's model for Big Mind® would appear to be based on a McDonald's type enterprise where you grant licensed franchisees the right to use the name and logo as long as they send part of their revenue back to headquarters.

If Genpo didn't insist on conflating Big Mind® with Zen I wouldn't be griping about it. It'd be just one more scam meditation thing. But he does by using the standard terminology of Zen, such as the word deshi as used in a Zen context.

Becoming someone's deshi is an organic thing. The ceremonies involved are more like an engagement ceremony or even a wedding. They are a public affirmation of a relationship that already exists. They're not like the first down payment on an extended tuition plan.

Maybe my saying this won't really matter much in the end. I doubt it will have any real impact on Genpo's business. But I gotta say it.

What's So Wrong With Genpo Roshi?

2011-12-14T15:17:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the overwhelmingly positive response to the previous post! I'm really glad that most people got what I was trying to say. But I'd like to address a few of the dissenting voices. Here are some comments from people who disliked that post:

• God this Genpo thing is getting really tired.

• I generally find your posts(and the one book I've read so far) to be interesting and enlightening. (But) I find your apparent attachment to the endless crusade against Genpo quite boring and uninspiring. I guess it just doesn't fit with me that a zen master could be so full of bile.

• Here's some intelligent discourse on the matter at hand if you're tired of Brads ego striven rants. http://sweepingzen.com/2011/11/26/a-meditation-on-scandals/

Genpo himself has said, "I’m not trying to justify my actions. I’m very remorseful. But this kind of judgmental mudslinging of Buddhist teachers is worse. It’s making Buddhism look pretty pathetic."

So why do I bother going after Genpo so often?

It's because I think it's vital for someone inside the Zen community to say something about what Genpo is doing. In spite of the open letter to Genpo from a group of concerned Buddhist teachers and in spite of the article by Adam Tebbe the poster quoted above thinks is "intelligent discourse on the matter at hand" nobody has really addressed what I feel to be the actual matter at hand.

I didn't see anyone speaking out about Big Mind® until after Genpo was involved in a major sex scandal. But, as I've said many times before, I think Genpo's sex life is pretty much a non-issue. It's not nice to cheat on your wife. But, then again, we don't even really know what was going on in Genpo's relationship with Mrs. Genpo.

The things Genpo was doing that bothered me were not what he was hiding. It was the things he was doing in the open. Let me break down this latest scam for you in terms of why I think it matters enough for me to comment upon.

For those who haven't seen it, the previous post was a parody of a webpage entitled Membership: Three Paths to Practice that can be found on the Roshi's Big Mind™ page. I hardly had to change a thing.

The page says:
"We are pleased to be able to introduce and explain the paths that are now open to you for continuing to study and work with Zen Master D. Genpo Merzel, which we preface with this note from Genpo Roshi himself."

The term Zen Master is a joke. There is no such thing as a Zen Master.

It may be a translation of the Japanese term 禅師 (zenji), which could indeed be translated as "Zen Master." But I have never heard this term used to refer anyone who is currently alive. It's considered much to respectful of a designation to be applied to anyone who might actually hear you use it. It would be highly embarrassing to be called "zenji."

To refer to anyone living as a Zen Master is simply ridiculous. To refer to yourself as a Zen Master is so ridiculous as to be bizarre. I have applied the term to myself occasionally just to demonstrate how incredibly absurd it is for anyone to call himself a Zen Master.

The term Big Mind® is stolen from Shunryu Suzuki's book Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. There it is used by Suzuki as a translation of 大心 (daishin), which could mean "big mind" or "big heart." The Roshi has trademarked this term, which is an incredibly obnoxious thing to do.

I used to deal with international trademarks for Tsuburaya Productions. So I know a bit about how that game works. You don't have to actually create or own a character, concept or name in order to trademark it. Furthermore, trademarks are assigned to specific categories of things. Thus if you trademark the name Big Mind® for use as a meditation system, you don't necessarily have the trademark on it for galoshes, dog food, edible underwear or patent medicine. Each category is a separate thing. And even if you own all these trademarks in the United States, that doesn't mean you own them in Indonesia, Rawanda, Finland or even Canada. Each territory is also separate. And each category in each territory will cost you at the very least $1000 to register.

What's more, because it's not tied to copyright, anyone who wants to trademark any particular character or phrase can do so with no questions asked. So if you found out that Disney had neglected to register the character Mickey Mouse in the category of videogram (DVDs and other types of home video) in, say, Botswanaland, you could register it yourself and wait for Disney to notice. Then you could name your price. I faced variations on this particular scenario a number of times.

So what Genpo has done is made Big Mind®, a standard concept in Zen Buddhism for a few hundred years, his own property.

I've noticed he has switched from putting a little "tm" next to Big Mind® and now displays a circled "r" (®). This means his registration has been accepted by the US government.

And now he has turned the relationship between Zen teacher and Zen student into a commercial proposition. He will sell you Enlightenment.

His webpage says:
"People who are here in this lifetime to commit themselves to accomplishing Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi may request to become a deshi and to work alongside Roshi in a personal manner. A deshi is one whose first priority in this life is to serve and study the Dharma and who sees their heart to heart connection with Roshi as a cornerstone in that pursuit."

The word deshi（弟子）is usually translated as "pupil." But in a Zen context a more appropriate English translation would be "disciple." It is not a term that is applied lightly.

The term "Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi" is a Sanskrit phrase that appears in the Heart Sutra. It means "complete unsurpassed perfect enlightenment." In many schools of Buddhism it is considered to be utterly impossible to achieve such a thing in a single lifetime. Again, this is not a term that's used lightly.

It is not, for example, the equivalent of kensho (見性 "seeing into one's true nature") or even satori (悟り "awakening" in the Buddhist sense). Anuttara samyak sambodhi is much, much bigger than that. It's what Buddha did and what Shariputra did. Even one takes the philosophical stance that we are all the equals of Buddha and Shariputra, simple etiquette demands that you not place yourself on that level. It's just... gross, y'know.

His website says:
"If you are one of the hundreds of people who became students of Roshi in the past and wish to continue, we ask of you to clearly affirm again your desire to continue as a student in the Big Heart Zen School. Please state your aspiration and the vision you see of your commitment or simply give a phone number and we will set up a call."

A few mouse clicks on the website will lead you to a PayPal-linked page where you can express the vision of your commitment in terms of US dollars.

Now, look. I don't mind Genpo or any other Zen teacher making some money. I charge for my talks. I charge for my books. I'm looking into ways to make more money with my blogging. I'll probably eventually sell some DVDs or other such stuff. I'm not above that. Next year I'll probably be offering multi-day seminars and there will be a price for attending those.

I think the prices Genpo often charges for his seminars is excessive. Here's one that runs $8,000, for example. But I'm not even that fussed about his prices.

What bugs me is that Genpo is charging not just for seminars and videos. He is now clearly and unambiguously charging money for enlightenment. This is like selling indulgences in heaven or promising 72 virgins (or raisins?) in Paradise to someone who blows himself up on a bus. It's the oldest trick in the religious scam book. You charge folks for something they can't even define, let alone see or feel. Genpo himself gets to determine what is and what isn't enlightenment.

He's also charging students for their relationship with him. If that doesn't sound like prostitution, I don't know what does.

For as long as I've been teaching Zen people have criticized my stylistic choices in presenting myself and my practice by saying I don't take Zen seriously. In fact I do take Zen very seriously. That's why I get so hot under the collar when I see it abused in this fashion.

There are a million scamsters out there plying their trade in a variety of religions. Some are way worse than Genpo Roshi. But they aren't presenting themselves as Zen Masters in the Soto tradition of Dogen Zenji.

There are Zen teachers out there putting their dicks in places they shouldn't put their dicks. But they aren't (as far as I know) representing this as Zen practice. And even if they do represent it as Zen practice in their private encounters, they aren't representing it as Zen practice to the general public.

But Genpo is representing something ugly and dangerous as Zen practice. And as long as he keeps doing it, I'll keep bitching about it. This is not mudslinging. This is serious.

New Levels of Minionship Available Now!

2011-12-10T08:54:00.000-08:00

Following in the footsteps of the venerable Zen Master Genpo Merzel, I'd like to announce the following arrangements.

I am now offering several levels of commitment to those who want to follow me and be my minions, underlings, or subordinates.

I am calling my new method of Zen practice Big Swindle™ Zen! It allows you to be ripped off and cheated by a real Zen Master — me! Your money will go to support such incredible projects as repairing my car, buying me the boxed set of Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhoads CDs, paying for trips out to California to get away from the damned cold in Ohio, new clothes from the Village Discount Outlet in Cuyahoga Falls, burritos at Taco Tantos for me and Dave my upstairs neighbor, new strings for my bass and much, much more.

Here's how it works:

Membership
Three Paths of Study and Practice

Dear Followers of the Way and Big Swindle™ Zen Practitioners,

We are pleased to be able to introduce and explain Big Swindle™ Zen by B. Odo Warner Roshi, which we preface with this note from Odo Warner Roshi himself:

I would like to bring clarity to my relationship with all those who desire to study the Buddha Way with me. I feel it is important to honor all commitments to the Dharma and to appreciate the complexity of a relationship with me as a vessel for the Buddha Dharma. I am grateful for the opportunity to convey the teaching on as many levels as I can.

But I'm a busy guy. I got things to do. So you gotta make it worth my while to waste my time with you. So you gotta pay up!

Because my time is valuable I would like to be concise in explaining how one can continue or begin studying with me.

My commitment to you is to bring forth the Dharma in a way that works with your varied lifestyles and time constraints, one that is affordable and also respects and honors your personal spiritual journey. I have worked alongside the Big Swindle™ staff to provide you options for studying with me that suit your individual needs and interests, and I hope you will join us in continuing to awaken the world and raise global consciousness and get me some more cool stuff.

Love,
Odo

Here are the three paths available:

Big Swindle™ Zen Subordinate

Anyone who wishes to study Big Swindle™ Zen can have the opportunity to learn from the founder and creator of Big Swindle™ in the comfort and convenience of their own home through unlimited access to all of Odo Roshi’s latest video teachings as well as the entire archive of his teachings on the Big Swindle™ website. In other words we're offering you the opportunity to pay to watch videos of Roshi that have heretofore been available for free!

Although some recordings are accessible through venues such as YouTube, only members of Big Swindle™ Zen will have access to the complete and ever-increasing collection. That's right! Roshi will be pointing a camera at himself and saying even more useless stuff! Members may also submit questions to Roshi through the Big Swindle™ website and will find answers to selected questions in his blog whenever he gets around to it.

Benefits include:

• A 10% discount on all Big Swindle™ Events and all items in the store. (This does not include Facilitator trainings which cost way more.)

• Access to all previously free video archives and continuously expanding crappy cheap videos in the video library.

• Direct submission of questions to Roshi via the web blog. Maybe he'll actually read a few of them! If he gets time.

• Contributing through your generosity towards getting the Big Swindle™ Process out into the world and raising global consciousness and getting more people to send more money to Roshi. You want Roshi to be happy, don't you?

Dana: Minimum donation of $375/yr or $30/month

These videos are free to access now at http://www.youtube.com/user/doubtboy

*** Starting soon, these will only be available to paying Big Swindle™ Zen Practitioners!

Big Swindle™ Zen Underling

Those who have been students in the past and those who desire to begin study of the BuddhaDharma with Odo Roshi can apply for acceptance into the Big Swindle™ Zen School. To be a student in the Big Swindle™ Zen School means you have a heartfelt commitment to study and serve the Dharma. It also helps if you're female and attractive. Your desire to be recognized as a student of Odo Roshi is not a binding obligation of form but an expression of your heart connection with Roshi and appreciation of the opportunity to learn and serve the Dharma together in this life (if you know what we mean!).

Big Swindle™ Zen Minion

People who are here in this lifetime to commit themselves to accomplishing Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi may request to become a minion and to work alongside Roshi in a personal manner (if you know what we mean!). A minion is one whose first priority in this life is to serve and study the Dharma and especially the Roshi. It's one who sees their heart to heart connection with Roshi as a cornerstone in that pursuit and is an attractive young lady (brunettes with shapely behinds preferred, but all will be considered because you never know).

Going forward as either an underling or minion:

In either case these are heart relationships which do not imply ownership or obligation in either direction (especially on the part of Odo Roshi, who may choose to just ignore you at any time especially if you're annoying and/or not particularly attractive). What is essential is the heart to serve the Dharma and grow and share our lives together without agenda (or much of an agenda anyway).

If you are one of the gazillions of people who became students of Roshi in the past and wish to continue, we ask of you to clearly affirm again your desire to continue as a student in the Big Swindle™ Zen School (which means sending the Roshi more money and sending a newer photo to make sure you meet the qualifications). To assure that those who wish to study with Roshi have reasonable access to him and that his schedule is manageable Roshi will be limiting the number of students he can accept into this practice to those who pay the required amount or are cute enough to have their fees waived.

If you have the aspiration to be either a underling or minion of Odo Roshi and the Big Swindle™ Zen school please send an email to spoozilla@gmail.com. Please state your aspiration and the vision you see of your commitment as well as how much you intend to pay and 2 recent full body photographs (front and rear view, bikini or nude shots are preferred). One of Odo Roshi's minions will summarize the information and send him the pics if they're good. Then, if you qualify we will set up a face to face or phone interview with Roshi.

Love,
The Big Swindle™ Staff

(This is just way too fucking easy!)

Reader Questions

2011-12-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. I thought I'd waste your time with a few questions from people who read my stuff along with my answers to them.

Dear Brad,

I have been trying to develop my Zen practice since about a year ago. I looked around for a local group but couldn't find one, and so got some assistance from the internet. But essentially I was practicing on my own.

I kept looking for a local group though, and then suddenly one was started in my home town in July! It is being run by a monk in the Soto tradition who is a great guy, very careful to emphasize that he is not a teacher but leads us after zazen in collective reading of various texts.

Anyway, here is my dilemma. I have been very happy with my involvement with the group and am planning to become more involved, with a Rohatsu overnight sit this week and planning to go on my first sesshin next year. I have discovered a thorny issue though: Genpo Merzel

You see the group that I sit with (about half a dozen of us only at the moment) is part of the XXXX Zen Sangha, which in turn is affiliated to the White Plum Asangha. I suppose my concerns are these:

1. On their website it openly seems to promote the "Big Mind" project, about which I have concerns not least of which after reading some of your blogs

2. The Genpo Merzel issue seems to be absent from mention in anything I have seen so far

3. His name is mentioned affectionately in blogs and notes that do appear, and it seems as if he did good work in this country in the past

4. I do not know him at all and don't want to be doing a disservice by being overly negative about the "issue"

So I suppose before investing a good deal of time and emotion into the group, I suppose I am casting around for information and perspectives. I know that of course I must ultimately make my own mind up about this.

If you are able to give any pointers at all that would be fantastic.

Hm. Well just because these guys know Genpo doesn't mean they're bad. Their promotion of Big Mind™ is a bit iffy, though. Here's why I think so.

My understanding was that Genpo retired his Soto Zen monk status and is now just a Big Mind™ guy. Big Mind™ was probably earning him more money anyhow, so I can't imagine it did him any harm to drop the Zen. All the Zen people did was bug him when he acted like an asshole. Now he's free to do whatever he likes as king of his own kingdom.

So the only thing that sounds iffy to me about your place is that they're calling themselves a Soto place but promoting Big Mind™. These are apparently two different things now.

BUT!! (note the extraneous exclamation points) if you're basically happy with the group, I'd stay with them until such time as you're not happy with them anymore. Perhaps you can get to the point where you can just ask, "Hey what's the deal with the Big Mind™ stuff?" If you like their answer, stay. If you don't, say goodbye.

Hope that helps a little.

Next question:

Hey, how's it going? I've been reading some of your most well known quotes today and it suddenly struck me that I've been practicing sitting for the last few weeks or maybe even months without thinking about it. What I mean is that I've been sitting for 6 months and recently I haven't read about zen nor thought about its ideas, I've just been living life regularly outside of my zen practice. I'm not a Buddhist, I guess, but I don't want to be just someone who sits for no reason. I think having a Buddhist/zen intention while I sit would be a lot more beneficial. Does this make sense, should I stay more in tune with zen if I keep sitting?

Just sit. You don't need a reason. Buddha was not a Buddhist.

Nishijima Roshi always said, "Zazen is a state without intention." So the fact that you lack intention is a plus.

As far as learning about Zen, I may be the wrong person to ask. I generally do not study Buddhism in any serious way. I mean I sit a lot. But as for book learning, I'm pretty much a dunce. I have a load of Buddhist books that I pull out when I need a reference. But I almost never read them otherwise. If that's the sort of thing you want you could try getting a degree in Buddhist studies. Lots of universities offer that now. Or so I'm told. Maybe I should get one.

It doesn't sound to me like you want or need that, though. So just sit.

*****

And here's Zero Defex on the radio in Manchester, England! We're song number 8 on this set. Also the DJs tell you what Brad Warner is "really" like.

Crazy Wisdom? Or Just Plain Nuts?

2011-12-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

I just posted a new article on the Suicide Girls safe-for-work blog. It's called Crazy Wisdom - The Story of a Drunken Sex Pervert Who Revolutionized Buddhism.

It's about a new film called Crazy Wisdom. It's a documentary about the life and times of Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, the controversial Tibetan master who founded Naropa Institute in Colorado, the first Buddhist university in the Western world. Perhaps still the only Buddhist university in the Western world. He was Pema Chodron's teacher. He also set up the Shambhala Foundation. Trungpa's influence extends far and wide. I'm not even certain what his connection is with Shambhala Sun, for example. I keep running into organizations and people who have associations with Trungpa that I did not know about.

I gave the film a good review because I enjoyed it a lot. It has flaws. For all its openness about Trungpa's boozing and sex, it does gloss over a few things that I think are important. The filmmakers are followers of Trungpa, so it's to be expected they'd make a film that shows him in a mostly positive light. One could just as easily make a film that painted Trungpa to be evil, awful and nasty. In fact that movie might actually be a little easier to make.

Trngpa was mostly very honest about himself and the things that he did. I say "mostly" because there were some things he kept hidden. One of these was the advice he gave to his HIV positive successor Osel Tendzin that Tendzin would not transmit his illness to others as long as he did certain purification practices. This was nonsense, of course. And people have suffered greatly because of it.

Yet over all, Trungpa didn't present himself one way and behave another. Which is why I think he never was subject of any of the kinds of scandals some other Buddhist masters like Genpo Roshi, Eido Shimano, Richard Baker and the rest have been. Those guys' big mistake was the give people the idea that they were saintly in the conventional sense. Perhaps they never directly said they were, but they allowed people to build that sort of image around them. If anything Trungpa probably made himself sound worse than he really was.

Although I like the film, I'm still not sure about Trungpa himself. I know people who I respect and trust who knew Trungpa and think he was a terrible person. But then again, even these people will admit Trungpa wrote some good books and did some good stuff for a lot of people.

Oddly enough, just before I got the DVD screener of Crazy Wisdom in the mail from the producers for the purpose of writing the review, I watched a Discovery Channel documentary about Shoko Asahara, the cult leader responsible for the poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. The documentary is on YouTube. I'll put part one at the bottom of this blog entry. You should be able to find the other three parts pretty easily yourself.

I was struck by the ways in which Chogyam Trungpa resembled Shoko Asahara. There are several extremely important differences between the two men. The biggest difference is that Trungpa was trained and ordained in a legitimate Buddhist lineage. Shoko Asahara just pretty much made his credentials up. And Trungpa was wise as well as crazy whereas Asahara was just crazy and had no wisdom at all.

Still, it would be easy for someone to be fooled into believing Shoko Asahara was also an example of crazy wisdom and to excuse his weirdness for signs of deep enlightenment. Trungpa was openly a boozer. Asahara made no secret of his use of LSD. Trungpa had a legion of uniformed guards who served as a kind of Buddhist militia. Asahara had all kind of bizarre paramilitary operatives in his cult. Superficially one could site a number of points the two men had in common.

And yet even before the subway gas attack, I got a very very bad feeling from Asahara and his group (they had a little shop near one of the train stations I used to use frequently and I went in a few times). I never got that kind of ill feeling from Trungpa. I felt a little odd about him, but I didn't get the sense of real dangerous insanity that I got from Asahara's material.

Which is to say that I think one has to go with one's gut in these matters. Sometimes the superficial intellectual view seems to be fairly even when looking at several different spiritual teachers. And yet in the pit of your stomach you can kind of tell which ones are bad and which are okay. That is, if you learn to recognize your own intuition.

Apology to Jay Garfield

2011-12-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago I wrote to Jay Garfield and said, “When I submitted Nishijima Roshi’s translation of Mulamadhyamakakarika to Monkfish Books, the title was Mulamadhyamakakarika. Nishijima Roshi had translated this as Song of the Fundamental Way. Monkfish Books said they didn't think that was a marketable title and asked if they could use the Sanskrit as the subtitle and re-title the book Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. I was aware of MMK having been referred to by the English title Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. So I OK'd the title change without checking any further as to its source. I had believed it to be just the standard English language title of the piece the way Bhagavad Gita is often called The Song of God or Maha Prajna Paramita Sutra is usually called The Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra.

“I should have checked. The only translations of MMK that I have are the ones by Inada and Kaluphana. I don't have yours (Garfield’s translation of Mulamadhyamakakarika is also titled Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way). By which I mean no insult. I'm sure it's a terrific book. But I am just not a collector of books on Buddhism. I only have the Inada and Kalupahana translations because Nishijima Roshi gave them to me.

“In any case, I am now completely mortified by what has happened with regard to the title of the book. I am truly sorry for having accidentally copped your title. It wasn't meant to confuse the marketplace. It was just due to my own ignorance that this occurred.”

I spoke with Paul Cohen of Monkfish Books about the matter yesterday. We have come to the following decision. The eBook version of the translation, which has not yet been released, will be published under the new title The Balanced State: A Heretical Retranslation of Nagarjuna’s Root Stanzas of the Middle Way. When the current printing of the paperback (which is quite small) is sold out the book will be reprinted with that title. Furthermore the description of the book on Amazon will be rewritten as soon as possible so that the first line is, “This is not a standard translation of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika.” I plan to refer to the book from now on under its new title (though I’ll include the current title in parenthesis until the reprint becomes available).

Neither the folks at Monkfish nor I intended the current title as a way to deceive buyers or to ride on the coattails of the phenomenal success of Garfield’s translation (I think it’s now being made into a film with Robert Pattison from Twilight as Nagarjuna and Scarlett Johansson as his love interest). Paul Cohen’s philosophy was that there were already several translations of MMK on the market but there was no agreed upon standard English rendering of the title. However, Garfield’s title was very close to a straight rendering of the Sanskrit into English and it would do.

Here is how the Sanskrit title breaks down — mula: (noun) a root; basis, foundation, madhyamaka: (noun) middlemost, karika: (noun) concise statement in verse of doctrine. This has been variously translated as Root Stanzas of the Middle Way, Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way and so on. Given the fact that karika refers to verses about doctrine or philosophy, which is often seen as a kind of wisdom, one could argue that Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way is an acceptable, though somewhat loose English rendering of the Sanskrit title. Still, Garfield originated that title and I should have avoided using it*.

Even so, Nagarjuna’s poem is reaching the point where it’s about time an agreed upon standard English title emerged. As far as Paul Cohen was concerned, Garfield’s title was already that. So why confuse the matter by re-titling the piece yet again? The idea that this title was chosen to cash in on a book that wasn’t really a runaway success to begin with (no offense to Prof. Garfield intended) is ridiculous. The idea that I was lazy and ignorant about the matter does have some merit however.

The contents of the book will not be changed. They do not need to be changed. In the currently available version of the book my foreword makes it very clear that I do not know Sanskrit and cannot vouch for the reliability of the translation. In part I said, “The other writers who worked on the book before me left the project over disagreements they had with Nishijima’s interpretation of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika. They said it was wrong, a mistranslation.” That’s in the first paragraph of the book.

Further along I said, “At the outset of my work on this book, Nishijima did try to get me to study Sanskrit. But I was already having enough trouble mastering everyday Japanese. Learning Sanskrit, a dead language that’s a bear to learn and that I would only use for this one rewriting job, just didn’t make sense. In any case, it didn’t seem to be necessary for the task at hand. I decided my task in this book was simply to help convey what Nishijima has gleaned from his reading.” I’m not sure how I could have been any clearer than that.

Nishijima’s introduction, which follows this foreword, is very unambiguous about how he came to the conclusions he did regarding his translation. He admits being completely self-taught in Sanskrit. He tells you that he ignored all other translations both in English and Japanese. He cites exactly which dictionaries and grammar guides he used for his work. Furthermore, the book provides the original Sanskrit and word-by-word translations making it possible for readers to check the validity of Nishijima’s word choices for themselves. You cannot possibly be more honest than that.

And, as I’ve said before, it’s a very good book. Nishijima spent fifteen years slaving over his translation (here is a paper he presented in San Francisco in 1997 about his work on it**). This is not a lazy piece of hastily thrown together half-informed writing.

I was among the many people who advised Nishijima Roshi that he’d be far better off issuing this book as his reflections on Nagarjuna’s work rather than as a translation. No one could argue against that. But he insisted it should be presented as a translation.

I think he knew exactly what he was doing. It may not have been what others, including me, thought he ought to be doing. But he was under no illusions that his translation would be accepted by scholars as accurate. He told me very clearly that he knew it would not. He expected hostility. He was ready for a fight. That’s precisely what he wanted. He was quite explicit about that during our many conversations on the subject.

Why did he want such a thing? I wish he were well enough to answer that. But I can speculate. Nishijima Roshi has a bit of a punk rock attitude. That’s what I like about him. If you tell a punk rocker he can’t make an album unless he spends $20,000 at the Record Plant to work for six days with Steve Lillywhite on getting just the right snare drum sound he’ll tell you to fuck off. Then he’ll buy a $25 used cassette boom box at a Salvation Army store, set it up in front of his band, take the results to a local pressing plant, print up 500 copies and hand one to you while flipping you the bird.

The concrete results of this real action will force you to rethink your approach to recording in a way that no amount of reasoned theoretical argument ever could. It sure as hell worked in the music industry. The people in power said records like that would never sell. Now they’ve all lost their jobs and can’t afford any more cocaine. Aw.

I think that Nishijima Roshi wanted to force people to re-examine Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. He believed this was so important that he was willing to risk trashing his own reputation to make it happen.

* Interestingly there is a book called The Sun of Wisdom: Teachings on the Noble Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way published by Shambhala in 2003 that also uses Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way as the English translation of Mulamadhyamakakarika. The description says, "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way was written in the second century and is one of the most important works of Nagarjuna, the pioneering commentator on the Buddha's teachings on the Madhyamika or Middle Way view." There's no mention of Jay Garfield as the originator of the translation of the title. There are no one-star reviews condemning the author for using it either. Maybe Paul Cohen was right after all...

** If that link doesn't work for you scroll down to the article titled Japanese Buddhism and the Meiji Restoration.

Dave Materna for President

2011-11-23T08:07:00.001-08:00

My upstairs neighbor Dave is running for President of the United States of America. Please lend him your support. Thank you.

Trashed on Amazon

2011-11-16T11:35:00.000-08:00

I'm in Manchester, England now. I'll be speaking here on Friday evening and running an all-day zazen on Saturday. You can find the relevant likes by clicking here.

Gudo Nishijima’s translation and commentary on Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way is finally out and available now at decent bookshops all over the USA as well as on the Barnes & Noble and Amazon websites. I helped Nishijima fix up his English and contributed extensively to the commentary so I received a co-writer credit.

But speaking of Amazon, the book has been getting a total trashing in their reader reviews section. It’s been so nasty and vindictive in there that I thought it would be good to address the matter.

There are now five extraordinarily mean-spirited and angry one star reviews of the book on Amazon. You can read them for yourself if you enjoy bile and vitrol. But I’ll try to summarize the key issues here without quite so much bitterness.

The main criticisms appear to be that 1) some believe the book is presented in such a way as to deliberately fool people who want to buy Jay Garfield’s translation of the same Nagarjuna poem into thinking this is his, and that 2) the book is not an accurate translation of the poem itself.

The first criticism is based on the fact that both Garfield and Nishijima chose to title their books Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. This is one of the standard English translations of the Sanskrit title of the work, Mulamadhyamakakarika. While some scholarly translations such as the one by Kenneth Inada used the Sanskrit, Monkfish Books thought that would be too difficult for most readers and instead chose to go with a standard English translation. Other translations of the Sanskrit title include Root Stanzas of the Middle Way, Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way and Fundamental Song of the Middle Way. Personally I did not notice that the title was the same as Garfield’s and that his was the only currently available English version that used this specific translation. Had I noticed this, I probably would have substituted something like “poem” for the word “wisdom” in the title. I regret having not done so, but it’s too late to change it now.

Also some have said that the cover resembles the cover of the Garfield version. It’s true. It does. It also resembles the covers of about 80% of all books on Buddhism these days. Monkfish followed the very standard practice of illustrating the cover with an ancient Chinese painting of the master who wrote the original piece. Pretty much every publisher follows this practice when designing a cover for a translation of an ancient Buddhist work.

In any case none of this was an attempt to deceive the public into thinking they were buying Garfield’s translation. Why would anyone want to do that? It’s not as if the Garfield translation sells in Harry Potter-like or Twilight-like quantities, thus making it attractive to try and copy. It’s also not as if the intended readership are the kinds of people who’d buy the book without checking out who wrote it first. It’s an absurd allegation, but one that is repeated in four of the five negative reviews on Amazon.

Some of the other allegations are similarly absurd. One reviewer states that, “Dogen, Godzilla, and Nishijima--the autonomic nervous system-- are all more fully present than Nagarjuna.” Godzilla is mentioned once in my introductory essay in a sentence in which I apologize to readers familiar with my other books for not mentioning Godzilla in this one. There is one commentary in which Nishijima outlines his ideas about the autonomic nervous system. I quoted this commentary in full in an earlier posting on this blog, which can be found by clicking here and scrolling about halfway down the piece. This commentary is then referenced briefly several more times in later commentaries. Dogen is mentioned a lot. But Nishijima says right in his introduction, “My own thoughts regarding Buddhism rely solely upon what Master Dogen wrote about the philosophy. So when reading the Mulamadhyamakakarika it is impossible for me not to be influenced by Master Dogen’s Buddhist ideas.” Why then would it be surprising to find a lot of references to Dogen in the commentaries?

As for the book not being an accurate translation, this is a more complex issue. I address it in great detail in both my foreword and my afterword to the book. I have put those on a webpage so you can read them in full. Just click here.

In part I said there that, “We’ll never know Nagarjuna’s real intentions. We’ll only ever know what his words mean to us. This book represents what those words mean to Gudo Nishijima.” Further along I wrote, “Every translation of anything is an interpretation. For fifteen years I worked at a job where one of my main tasks was translating the dialogue of cheap Japanese monster movies into English. Even when doing this seemingly simple and straightforward work I had to change a lot of details to make them comprehensible to English speaking people. Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika is a lot more complex than any monster movie. For one thing it is a poem. A poem isn’t like an instruction manual in which there is only one correct way to interpret its meaning. There are as many ways to understand a poem as there are people to read it and all of them are valid in their own right.”

I also said in the afterword, “I still don’t know whether it will be accepted as a translation of Nagarjuna or not. I’m anticipating that a lot of scholarly types will debate its merits as a translation without ever giving the philosophical points contained within it much notice. If they do so, that would be a shame.” This seems to be precisely what is happening. The current critics on Amazon don’t really comment on the actual contents of the book. One even admits that he hasn’t read it! Is it fair to criticize a book you have not even bothered to read?

Kumarajiva was a fifth century Indian scholar who translated many of the canonical works of Buddhism into Chinese. His translation of the Heart Sutra is still chanted in Buddhist monasteries all over the world. Nishijima contends that when it came to Mulamadhyamikakarika, Kumarajiva got it wrong. He simply did not understand what Nagarjuna was talking about. Furthermore, Nishijima contends that all later translations and commentaries have relied upon Kumarajiva’s faulty understanding of the poem — even the very ancient ones. As evidence of this, Nishijima notes that Dogen quotes extensively from Nagarjuna’s other works but never mentions Mulamadhyamikakarika, which is regarded as Nagarjuna’s masterwork. This, he says, is because Dogen had access only to Kumarajiva’s translation and found it lacking. Therefore Nishijima deliberately avoided consulting any other translations of the work either in English or in Japanese. It’s no wonder then that his translation does not sound much like any of the others.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, this is a damned good book. If you are interested in knowing what I learned in fifteen years of studying Buddhism under Gudo Nishijima, most of it is in this book. It is deep and difficult Buddhist philosophy. Nishijima Roshi believes that all of these ideas are present in Nagarjuna’s poem. I trust that he found them there. But whether they are really there or not, I know that it’s valuable stuff. If he found all of this philosophy in the wood grain of the wall he sat in front of every day for seventy years it would still be valuable stuff. Maybe he did but he thought it would be more believable to say he found it in Nagarjuna! (That’s a joke, he was very methodical in his translation and he presents his translation methods to readers of the book very clearly. This is something few others have done.)

Some of you have written to me saying you’ve ordered the book or that you bought it in a store (hooray for you for supporting bookstores!). If you have read the book and you like it, please take a moment to go to Amazon and express your feelings. It would really help out a lot.

Thanks!

Interview With Tricycle Magazine

2011-11-14T15:02:00.000-08:00

I'm on my way to England tomorrow. But here's an interview I did with Philip Ryan of Tricycle magazine for your entertainment. Who is that guy on the cover, though? That's not me! I'm gonna get my agent to speak to them...

Oh wait. I don't have an agent.

Poop.

Sitting In Chairs Is Not Zazen (part one million and seven continued)

2011-11-12T01:08:00.000-08:00

First I'll tell you a story. About three years ago I started getting emails from a guy I didn't know. He'd read my books. He said he was interested in Zen practice. But he had Multiple Sclerosis (MS). His disease had progressed to the point that he had lost most of his core body strength. He could barely sit in a chair let alone on a cushion. He asked what the alternatives might be.

We went back and forth in our emails for a while until we finally settled on a posture that involved him lying on his back on a hard surface with his hands in the traditional Cosmic Mudra. After that I lost contact with him.

About a year later a young guy I didn't know showed up at the Hill Street Center in Santa Monica where I led a weekly zazen meeting each Saturday. After we sat this guy told me that he was the son of the man with MS who I'd been writing to. He told me how happy his father had been with our conversations. He'd practiced zazen in the manner we discussed until he died. His son had come all the way to California to thank me.

This is what I'm talking about when I say it's not necessary to champion the cause of the physically disabled for doing zazen. People with non-standard abilities who are serious about practice will always find their own way. Always. Don't worry about them. Worry about your own practice.

Here's another story. A woman who came to the Hill Street Center for zazen practice told me how happy she was to be sitting with such an easy-going group. When she was seven months pregnant and living in New York City she visited one of the local zen groups. Pointing out her condition, she said that normally she sat on a cushion but asked if she might be allowed to use a chair. They told he no and showed her to the door. At Hill Street Center that day she sat on a cushion. She was no longer pregnant.

And now just a few general observations. In Japan I never once saw a zendo that even had accommodations for people to sit in a chair. I'm not sure what would happen if you asked to do so in your average Japanese Zen temple. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be nice about it. The more traditional Zen temples in the US also don't have many such accommodations for chairs. There are a couple of spots in the corners at Tassajara where people can sit in chairs. Four maybe? As opposed to perhaps 80 or more spots on cushions. I never counted. The zendo at the City Center of the San Francisco Zen Center is similarly equipped. Sitting in chairs is allowed, but it's discouraged by limiting the numbers. The unspoken message is, "These few chairs are for those who really, honestly need them. If that's not you, sit on a cushion and leave the chairs for those who actually need them." They're sort of like the handicapped parking spots outside of Wal Mart in that sense.

I'm saying all this because some people read what I say about sitting on cushions and decide I am the cruelest and most heartless Zen teacher on Earth. Or else they assume I made the whole thing up, that I am the first and only person who ever said this. Furthermore they assume I am only saying this to be mean and nasty, to arbitrarily exclude the unfit from practice like some kind of Nazi dictator of Zen.

The truth is, I'm on the fairly liberal end of the spectrum when it comes to this. The reason it doesn't seem so is because certain of the meditation teachers who get popular and show up on the Internets are the kind who are inclined to make the practice as easy as possible in order to get the most butts on cushions or chairs or anywhere butts will fit. They'd tell you that you could meditate in a recliner if that'd get a few more people in the door. Most of these guys aren't from the Zen tradition. Some are from no tradition at all. But lots of folks these days just mix all the traditions into one and resent it when you tell them there are differences.

In the comments section of my last piece Rob Myers said, "My teacher, Jisho Warner (no relation) says 'You can sit in a chair; it's just harder.'" That's true. One of the most important points in zen practice is keeping the spine straight with little or -- preferably -- no support. It's a balancing act, like riding a bicycle. There's a reason bicycles aren't built with comfy reclining chairs on them. You'd fall over.

When you sit with your back against a chair, you are robbing yourself of that feeling of physical balance. And whenever I've attempted to do something like zazen in a chair, the chair has forced its own ideas of balance upon my body. There is no tilt to the pelvis and therefore no way to make the spine balance on its own.

Those kneeling chairs they make for people who work on computers all day can be modified to make a decent compromise. Because it's not really about how you screw up your legs. You don't have to sit in the full lotus position (I predict in the future at least 27 more people will say, "Brad Warner says you have to sit in the full lotus position" even after I say you don't 39 more times). It's just that the full lotus position creates a really, really stable base for the spine. There is a very good reason it's been a favorite for around 3000 years. Still, there may be other slightly less efficient but still acceptable ways to get the spine to balance.

The standard straight backed chairs you get at the local Furniture Hut are just not one of them. If you really honest to goodness need to sit on a chair you'll have to work a lot harder at zazen than those who sit on cushions on the floor.

Does anyone even care about this? Perhaps not. Not really. Those who want to argue will argue. Those who want comfort at all costs will reject zazen. Which is no problem as far as I'm concerned. Those who want to do practice will do practice.

* * *

Let me tell you about something really exciting!

I was at a used bookstore in Bruxelles yesterday and made the greatest score of my weird sci-fi ephemera collecting career. Just as I was about to leave I spotted a stack of old dusty magazines and decided to rummage through them on my way out. The mags turned out to be issues of Star Cine Cosmos, a French sci-fi mag from the early sixties. The guy wanted three euros each for them.

Among my haul was this issue featuring a cover photo that I think is from the film Planet of the Vampires.

Yet inside is a photo comic of the classic British giant-ape-on-the-loose movie Konga!!

Next up, this one features a cover painting clearly based on the British-made Godzilla rip-off Gorgo:

But inside it's actually a photo comic of the second Godzilla film Godzilla Raids Again aka Gigantis, the Fire Monster!

And finally the most amazing of all, a photo comic of my (almost) favorite film of all time Planeta Bur (Planet of Storms)!!!!

This is the Soviet-made sci-fi epic that later was cut up to become Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women!!!

Sitting In Chairs Is Not Zazen (part one million and seven)

2011-11-08T01:08:00.000-08:00

My interview on conscious.tv is up. But it's kind of hard to find. First you have to go to this page:

http://www.conscious.tv/nonduality.html

Then you'll get a screen that looks like this:

See how I've circled where it says "traditions" and put an arrow showing where it is? Click there and it takes you to another page and on the top of that page on the right hand side you'll see my interview. Click on me and enjoy! Or go to this convenient link and see if that works http://bcove.me/5evkpoh3. I'm embedding it at the bottom of this page, but I'm using a new program that I'm not totally sure about.

Today I am in Antwerp, Belgium. I caught the intercity rail out of Brentwood, Essex yesterday, changed to the Hammersmith & City tube line at Liverpool Street station, arrived at King's Cross/St. Pancras, made my way to the Eurostar line, took a train under the English Channel and soon arrived in Bruxelles Midi station. There my friend Isabelle and her sister Melissa picked me up and drove me to Antwerp with a quick stop for some frietjes covered in mayonnaise and ketchup.

This weekend I'll be running two events in Antwerp; a talk on Saturday and a day of zazen on Sunday. Information can be found at http://www.rsyoga.eu/. Go to that page, then click on "workshops," then click on "12-13 November 2011 - Brad Warner - Antwerpen" and it's all there in plain Dutch.

Last weekend I led a day of meditation in Brentwood, Essex. Let me tell you a little about that.

The Brentwood Meditation Group has been active since 2004. They have a lot of regular members who come each week to share silent meditation in a sort of ecumenical style, not tied to any particular tradition. Most of their members sit on chairs.

I was invited as a guest of this group to present what it is that I do to them. In this case, the fact that people were sitting on chairs was shoganai as we say in Japan. It can't be helped. It's just the way things are. What can ya do? Shoganai is a very useful and utterly untranslatable phrase.

In other words, I wasn't about to go in as a guest and tell a group who'd been practicing in some way that they couldn't do the thing they do the way they'd been doing it for years.

But I did tell them that sitting in chairs was not zazen. Zazen is a physical practice. To sit in a chair and call it zazen is incorrect. It's not that sitting on a chair will lead you to Satan and cause your eternal soul to burn forever in Hell. It's not evil. It's just not zazen.

It's like yoga. If you went to a yoga teacher and bent over slightly at the waist then told him, "THIS IS DOWNWARD FACING DOG! IT'S MY DOWNWARD FACING DOG! I DO MY DOWNWARD FACING DOG MY WAY!" Your yoga teacher would probably inform you that bending slightly at the waist is not downward facing dog. The position yogis call downward facing dog looks like this:

If you were really, really stiff your yoga teacher would work with you until your downward facing dog looked less like a slight bend at the waist and more like the photo above. But until you got into something at least a little like the photo, no decent yoga teacher would call that downward facing dog. It's not.

In the context of yoga it's easy for people to understand the difference between the two. But people tend to think of meditation as a mental activity. They tend to believe that the posture is just arbitrary, and that they can do zazen in any posture they like. They often tend to think that anyone who says otherwise is somehow taking away their inalienable right to do what they chose. But that's not true. Nobody's trying to take away your rights.

It's just that zazen looks like this:

You don't have to do the full lotus posture. Let me say that again since everyone seems to miss it when I say it:

You don't have to do the full lotus posture.

But you do need to be sitting on a cushion with your knees on the floor. Sometimes you can put extra cushions under your knees. You can also use a seiza bench, although I'm not the biggest fan of those. But that can be zazen too.

If someone really cannot do anything closer to zazen than sitting on a chair, well then that's shoganai too. They can sit on a chair. Tonen O'Connor, of the Milwaukee Zen Center is one of the best zazen teachers in America. She's had extensive knee surgery and she sits on a bench that's been modified to give her something close to the traditional posture (it's not a chair, though). But she's a special case. Maybe you are too. I don't know.

I do know this, though. I'll whisper it since it tends to make people mad when I say it.

(Sitting on a cushion with your knees on the ground is not that hard.)

Shhhhhhhhhh.....

There's a lot of bullshit cliches about the difference between Eastern and Western people. But one of the cliches that's not bullshit is that Western people are addicted to comfort. We really are. We bitch and whine and winge whenever our comfort is compromised. Most of the people I see who claim they can't sit zazen on a cushion fall into this category. They're just being big babies about it. They need to man-up (or woman-up or transgender-up) a little. It's just not that gosh darn difficult.

But I cannot enter your body/mind and know for sure whether you're really one of those very rare people who absolutely cannot sit on a cushion or if you're just one of those extremely common people who can do it but refuses to try. There's no way in the universe I can ever be 100% certain. Only you can know that.

Some people worry about those poor unfortunates who can't sit on the floor on cushions because of health issues or whatever. But y'know what? Every time I've spoken to someone who had honest health issues that prevented them sitting on cushions we've always managed to find a way. And the people who worry about hypothetical others that can't do it pretty much never are those people. Perhaps being the champion of hypothetical others isn't so important a job. They tend to be better spokespeople for themselves in my experience.

So this weekend in Antwerp and next weekend in Manchester, England I will be allowing people to sit in chairs if they insist upon it.

I'll be glad to have their participation.

I won't be mean to them or shout at them or tell them they're doing something wrong.

I don't bite.

I always allow people to do what they want as long as it doesn't disrupt others.

People sitting on chairs will be welcome to be with us and share in the experience in their own way.

But they won't be doing zazen.

Not a big deal. It just isn't zazen if you sit on a chair, unless there really honestly is no other way you can do it. That's all.

ANIMALS AND FLY TIPPING

2011-11-03T01:52:00.000-07:00

First off, the schedule for the Day of Zazen that I'm hosting up in Essex on this coming Saturday is at the bottom of this blog. I put up a tentative schedule a little while ago. This has now been revised.

Today is my last day in London. Last night I appeared on a programme (note spelling) called Conscious.TV taped in Battersea right near the cover of the Pink Floyd album Animals. I'm not kidding. I was walking to the studio and there it was! The cover to that Pink Floyd album! Right next to me. Gosh. Take a look at the photo I took (top) compared with the photo the folks at Hipgnosis took in the Seventies. There was no inflatable pig when I went by, unfortunately.

It turned out to be a night of rock and roll. The host of conscious.tv is a guy named Iain McNay. I had no idea, but Mr. McNay is the owner of Cherry Red Records, one of the UK's most important punk rock record labels. I've often bought stuff issued by that label. I would never have suspected that the guy who founded the label would now be hosting a TV programme devoted to non-duality. You just never know how these things happen.

It was a great interview. One of the best I've done. I accept a lot of interview requests. In fact, I rarely turn any of them down. I have no idea what any of them are going to be like. Sometimes the interviewers are absolutely clueless about what I do. Those are weird. I have no idea why they've even asked me on their shows. Sometimes the interviewer has some apparent agenda that they are hoping I'll support. Those can also be a bit uncomfortable. Sometimes the interviewers are extremely knowledgeable and have a lot of interesting questions. Those are the ones I like. And, in fact, most the interviews I do are pretty good. Iain McNay was one of the really good ones. The interview will be posted in a couple weeks and I'll put a link up when it is.

While in London I've stayed at my friend Andrew's flat in the picturesquely named London subsection of Shoreditch in Hackney. His place is on the Northern Line. There's fifty two stations on the Northern Line.

Andrew is a student of Mike Luetchford who is another dharma heir of Gudo Nishijima. Mike has been running a Zen group called Dogen Sangha UK out of Bristol for a number of years now. He was one of the first of Nishijima's students to go out on his own as a teacher. You can find info about the groups he set up in Bristol and London at their webpage. I highly recommend these guys if you're looking for a solid sitting group in the UK.

I'm feeling a whole lot better so I may just get through this tour after all! I walked all over London last night. Found a place that sells vegetarian fish and chips so I'm gonna go back there for lunch today.

Finally, I need someone to explain this sign I took a photo of. It's not far from the Battersea power station. I understand that fly tipping is an offence (note spelling). But what is fly tipping?

Is it like cow tipping, a favourite sport in rural parts of America where teenagers go out at night and tip over sleeping cows? Do you sneak up on snoozing flies and gingerly push them over with your fingers? Or do flies in England work on a straight salary basis so it is illegal to tip them for their work? Or perhaps they don't want the flies to know where the juiciest garbage is, so it is therefore illegal to top them as to the location?

I must know the answer!!

****

DAY OF ZAZEN WITH BRAD WARNER
AT BRENTWOOD MEDITATION GROUP

9.30 Welcome with refreshments.

10.00 Group introduction, Brad’s introduction
10.30 Zazen
11.00 Kinhin
11.15 Zazen
11.45 Brad’s Dharma talk
12.45 Open forum

1.00 Shared lunch

2.00 Zazen
2.30 Kinhin
2.45 Zazen
3.15 Chanting

3.30 Tea

4.00 Zazen
4.30 Open forum, reflections of the day

Tattoo You

2011-10-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

Gene Simmons bragged that KISS fans often got tattoos of the band. He said, "When you're in the KISS Army, you're in for life!"

I've already countered that boast by posting some photos from people who have had the cover images from my books tattooed on their bodies like this one and this one. But now I have an even better thing to brag about.

This afternoon I finished up a harrowing three-day zazen fest in the city of Bielefeld, Germany. Harrowing because I was pretty ill for the first day or so.

Remember that massive infection I told you about that I went to the hospital in Berlin for? Well, apparently something they gave me for that did not sit well with my body because I ended up covered in bright red itchy spots. So I spent a good portion of the first day of this retreat in yet another German hospital trying to figure out what the heck made me all spotty.

Turns out that no one knows. But they shot me up with cortisone and that seemed to help. The spots are now mostly gone.

But in spite of my spotty condition, a group of about twenty intrepid meditators joined me for three days of zazen practice at a yoga studio here in Bielefeld. We lost one guy on the first day. I'm not sure exactly what the problem was. He just bolted some time while I was in the hospital. Perhaps I was too spotty for his liking. A couple other members of the group took the second day of the retreat off, having caught colds of their own. But both were back by day number three.

But here's the funny part. One of the people who came to the retreat was this guy named Daniel. It turns out that Daniel had received a copy of the German edition of Hardcore Zen as a gift about a year ago. Iris, the person who gave him the book, had me sign it when I was in Bielefeld last year.

As I usually do, I drew a little Godzilla-type creature next to my signature. Daniel really liked the book and really liked the little Godzilla-type creature. He resolved that he was gonna get me to tattoo that creature on his leg.

Of course, nobody informed me of any of this. But at the end of the retreat, Iris asked the group if anybody knew of a tattoo parlor in Bielefeld that might be open on a Sunday. It turns out that two of the people at the retreat, a couple, actually run a tattoo parlor in town. Iris told them what Daniel wanted. And they said they could help. They'd show me how to run the tattoo gun and I could tattoo Daniel, they said.

I was pretty nervous about the idea. I have no tattoos and I have never even thought about tattooing anyone else. But Daniel really, really wanted this done. So I said I'd do it.

Even after we got to the tattoo parlor I tried to talk Daniel into having me just draw the monster on his ankle with a pen and have a professional trace it over with a tattoo gun. But he wasn't having it. It had to be by my own hand!

I got a quick lesson on how to use the tattoo gun and practiced a few times on some plastic "fake skin" material designed to react like actual skin to a tattoo gun. After a number of marginally successful attempts on that stuff I was as ready as I was ever gonna be.

It was a pretty tense experience tattooing someone. I have no idea how real tattoo artists manage under that kind of pressure several times a day. Every fuck up I made will be etched into Daniel's skin for the rest of his life.

Luckily I didn't screw it up too badly. The eyes are a bit more crossed than I would have liked and there's some unfortunate doubling up of lines on the tail. All in all, though, it came out pretty good I think.

But I'm not planning to make a career out of this!

WHAT HAPPENS AT A ZEN RETREAT RUN BY BRAD

2011-10-27T01:29:00.000-07:00

Today I'm about to start a three-day zazen retreat in the city of Bielefeld, Germany. After this I have one-day zazen retreats coming up in Essex, England on November 5, Antwerp, Belgium on November 13th and
Manchester, England on November 19th.

I'm not sure what people expect when they sign up for a Zen retreat with me. This has been my on-going concern throughout this tour.

A typical zazen retreat involves a lot of zazen and not much else. These days, though, you have a lot of what seem to me to be sort of "zazen lite" retreats. I blame Thich Naht Hanh. His most popular retreats, as I understand it, involve very little actual zazen practice but include a lot of fun activities.

This is certainly not the worst way a person can spend a day. And perhaps one or two of the hundreds of people who come to that kind of a retreat will take up a more serious practice. Which is not a bad thing.

But it's not a Zen retreat. At least not in the traditional sense.

The point of zazen is to do just one ridiculously simple activity in a very, very thorough way. You can explain all anyone needs to know about zazen practice in a couple of minutes. Here it is on line with a pretty girl demonstrating. Now you everything essential about zazen practice. I'm not trying to be funny here. This really is all anyone needs to know.

On this tour I've been trying to deal with numerous and widely differing sets of expectations. Some people are very hardcore about their Zen and view me as being way too easy. Some people are scared to death of zazen. They're like people at a swimming pool sticking their toes in and then screaming about how cold the water is. It's all they can do just to get through a half an hour of sitting, let alone a full day of it.

The only way to solve this problem is for me to simply do what it is that I do and let people decide for themselves if it's for them or not.

As I said earlier, I may, in future, devise a more introductory type retreat for those who are terrified of zazen. But for now, for the rest of this tour, I'm sticking to a somewhat more standard approach.

I think some people who read my books are shocked that I'm fairly traditional in my approach to the practice. But I always have been. And I think that comes through in the books if you read them carefully. So please don't be shocked if you sign up for a retreat with me and it's not a bunch of slam-dancing (aka moshing) and guys in monster costumes. More likely you'll be looking at a wall for a long, long while.

Here are the schedules for the upcoming retreats:

NOV. 5 ESSEX

10:00-10:30 Zazen
10:30-10:40 Kinhin
10:40-11:10 Zazen
11:10-11:15 Prepare for Service
11:15-11:30 Service
11:30-12:30 Dharma Talk
12:30-1:30 Silent lunch
1:30-2:00 Work or Free Time
2:00-2:30 Zazen
2:30-2:40 Kinhin
2:40-3:10 Zazen
3:10-3:20 Kinhin
3:20-4:00 Tea (silent)
4:15-4:45 Zazen
4:45 Chanting Refuges

NOV. 13 ANTWERP

09.30 - 10.00 aankomst/arrival
10.00 - 10.30 introductie/introduction, zazen+kinhin instructie/instruction
10.30 - 11.00 zazen
11.10 -11.20 kinhin
11.20 -11.50 zazen
11.50 - 12.10 koffie- or theepauze/coffeebreak (silent)
12.10 - 12.40 zazen
12.40 - 12.50 kinhin
13.00 - 14:00 lunchauze/lunchbreak
14.00 - 14.30 zazen
14.30 - 14.40 kinhin
14.35 - 15.00 zazen
15.00 – 16.00 lezing en vragen/talk and q and a
16.00 - 16.30 zazen
16.30 - 16.40 kinhin
16.40 – 17.00 afsluiting/conclusion (chanting refuges)

NOV. 19 MANCHESTER

10:00-10:30 intro to Zazen
10:30-11:00 Zazen
11:00-11:10 Kinhin
11:10-11:40 Zazen
11:40-1:00 Dharma Talk
1:00-1:45 Silent lunch –or folk can go and get lunch
1:45-2:15 Zazen
2:15-2:45 yoga
2:45-3:15 Zazen
3.15-3.30 Kinhin
3:30-3:45 chanting
3:45-4:00 finishing talk
4.00 finish

SUTRAS FOR THE UPCOMING RETREAT IN BIELEFELD, GERMANY

2011-10-25T01:52:00.000-07:00

I've decided to add a Buddhist service to the daily fun at my upcoming retreat in Bielefeld. I may even wear robes like in this photo. But my mohawk has grown out.

Here are the texts I've chosen.

Those of you who are doing retreats with me in England and Belgium, if you'd like to add this to the stew too, let's do it!

Woo-hoo! Chanting!

DEDICATION
All Buddhas ten directions three times
All honored ones, bodhisattva-mahasattvas
Wisdom beyond wisdom
Maha Parjna Paramita

HEART OF GREAT PERFECT WISDOM SUTRA

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajna paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this.

Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease.

Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight... no realm of mind consciousness. There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance... neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment.

With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear. Far beyond all inverted views, one realizes nirvana. All buddhas of past, present, and future rely on prajna paramita and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.

Therefore, know the prajna paramita as the great miraculous mantra, the great bright mantra, the supreme mantra, the incomparable mantra, which removes all suffering and is true, not false. Therefore we proclaim the prajna paramita mantra, the mantra that says: "Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha."

HANNYA SHINGYO (HEART SUTRA IN JAPANESE)
Kan ji zai bo satsu. Gyojin hannya haramita ji sho. Ken go un kai ku. Do issai ku yaku. Sha ri shi. Shiki fu i ku. Ku fu i shiki. Shiki soku ze ku. Ku soku ze shiki. Ju so gyo shiki. Yaku bu nyo ze. Shari shi. Ze sho ho ku so. Fu sho fu metsu. Fu ku fu jo. Fu zo fu gen. Ze ko ku chu. Mu shiki mu ju so gyo shiki.
Mu gen ni bi ze shin i. Mu shiki sho ko mi soku ho. Mu gen kai nai shi mu i shiki kai. Mu mu myo yaku mu mu myo jin. Nai shi mu ro shi. Yaku mu ro shi jin. Mu ku shu metsu do. Mu chi yaku mu toku. I mu sho toku ko. Bodai sat ta e hannya haramita ko. Shin mu ke ge mu ke ge ko. Mu u ku fu. On ri issai ten do mu so.
Ku gyo ne han. San ze sho butsu. E hannya haramita ko. Toku a noku ta ra san myaku san bodai. Ko chi hannya haramita. Ze dai jin shu. Ze dai myo shu. Ze mu jo shu. Ze mu to do shu. No jo issai ku. Shin jitsu fu ko ko setsu hannya haramita shu. Soku setsu shu watsu.
Gya tei gya tei hara gya tei
hara so gya tei
Bo ji so wa ka.
Hannya shingyo

EN-MEI JUK-KU KAN-NON GYO
(Kannon Sutra for Prolonging Life)

KAN ZE ON NA MU BUTSU
YO BUTSU U IN
YO BUTSU U EN
BUP-PO SO EN
JO RAKU GA JO
CHO NEN KAN ZE ON
BO NEN KAN ZE ON
NEN NEN JU SHIN KI
NEN NEN FU RI SHIN

(Kanzeon: Veneration to the Buddha. With Buddha I have origin; With Buddha I have affinity; Affinity with Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha; Eternity, joy, self, and purity. Mornings my thoughts are Kanzeon; Evenings my thoughts are Kanzeon; Thought after thought arise in the mind; Thought after thought are not separate from mind.)

HARMONY OF DIFFERENCE AND SAMENESS (Sandokai)

The mind of the Great Sage of India is intimately transmitted from West to East. While human faculties are sharp or dull the Way has no northern or southern ancestors. The spiritual source shines clear in the light the branching streams flow on in the dark. Grasping at things is surely delusion according with sameness is still not enlightenment.

All the objects of the senses transpose and do not transpose. Transposing they are linked together, not transposing each keeps its place. Sights vary in quality and form sounds differ as pleasing or harsh. Darkness merges refined and common words, brightness distinguishes clear and murky phrases. The four elements return to their natures just as a child turns to its mother. Fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid. Eye and sights, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes, thus for each and every thing according to the roots the leaves spread forth.

Trunk and branches share the essence. Revered and common each has its speech. In the light there is darkness but don’t take it as darkness. In the dark there is light but don’t see it as light. Light and dark oppose one another like the front and back foot in walking. Each of the myriad things has its merit expressed according to function and place. Existing phenomenally like box and cover joining according with principle like arrow points meeting.

Hearing the words understand the meaning don’t establish standards of your own. Not understanding the Way before your eyes how do you know the path you walk? Walking forward is not a matter of far or near but if you are confused mountains and rivers block your way. I respectfully urge you who study the mystery don’t pass your days and nights in vain.

MEAL VERSE

Buddha was born in Kapilavastu,
enlightened in Magadha,
taught in Varanasi,
entered nirvana in Kushinagara.
Now we set out Buddha's bowls;
may we, with all beings,
realize the emptiness of the three wheels:
giver, receiver, and gift.

We reflect on the effort that brought us this food
And consider how it comes to us
We reflect on our virtue and practice
and whether we are worthy of this offering.
We regard greed as the obstacle to freedom of mind.
We regard this meal as medicine to sustain our life.
For the sake of enlightenment we now receive this food.

First, this is for the three treasures;
Next for the four benefactors;
Finally, for the beings in the six realms.
May all be equally nourished.

The first portion is to end all evil;
The second is to cultivate all good;
The third is to free all beings.
May we all realize the Buddha way.

REFUGES

Buddham saranam gacchami
(I go to the Buddha for refuge.)
Dhammam saranam gacchami
(I go to the Dhamma for refuge.)
Sangham saranam gacchami
(I go to the Sangha for refuge.)

Dutiyampi Buddham saranam gacchami
(For a second time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.)
Dutiyampi Dhammam saranam gacchami
(For a second time, I go to the Dhamma for refuge.)
Dutiyampi Sangham saranam gacchami
(For a second time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.)

Tatiyampi Buddham saranam gacchami
(For a third time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.)
Tatiyampi Dhammam saranam gacchami
(For a third time, I go to the Dhamma for refuge.)
Tatiyampi Sangham saranam gacchami
(For a third time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.)

T-Shirt from Berlin

2011-10-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hello sports fans! Today will be my final day in Berlin. I finally got out yesterday and went to see the famous Prenzlauer Berg area. This was once part of East Berlin but now has become hip and trendy. My friend Vajra lives here now and he kindly showed me toe sights. I met Vajra a couple years ago when we were both washing dishes for rich people at Tassajara.

Before I leave Berlin I have to thank whoever it was that gave me the lovely t-shirt shown above. I did my lecture last Wednesday at Dharma Buchladen. That was at the height of my massive infection (see previous blog post below). But I didn't know I was massively infected at that point. I just thought I had a fever and the world's worst headache.

Anyway, after I gave the lecture I chatted with several people. One of them handed me a small sort of tubular shaped package. It was soft. I wondered if it might be a roll cake. It turned out to be a nice t-shirt, which I'm wearing today. But I didn't get the guy's name. He probably told me. But I was pretty much just trying to keep it together at that point. So thank you, danke shoen, whoever you are!

Last night I finally finished watching the film The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich. Oy vey! What a film!

I found that I didn't like the main character at all. He even killed his own dog for gosh sakes! How did the filmmakers expect you to sympathize with such a character? I would have rewritten him. Maybe given him a quirky sense of humor or a funny catchphrase to say each time he entered a room...

OH STOP IT! I'M JOKING! Jeez. Settle down. OK?

I gotta go. Bye!

Spınal Tap

2011-10-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a spinal tap in Berlin.

Y'know, it didn't actually hurt that bad. I'd heard the people that made the movie This is Spınal Tap picked the name because it was supposed to be the most painful medical procedure. Apparently the fictional band said they wanted a name that represented dominance and pain. And when a doctor gives you a spinal tap he's dominating you and causing you pain.

It hurt. But it was only a little worse than the usual jabs you get from doctors. If you want to know more about what a spinal tap is go here.

The reason I had my spine tapped is because that illness I told you about last time just kept getting worse. The main symptom was a massive headache. My friend Jan took me to the local emergency room. He said that I should expect to wait there for four or five hours. Luckily it was a slow day and we got in within a few minutes.

They drew some blood and saw that I had a "massive infection." They kept repeating this diagnosis throughout the evening. I want to call my next band Massive Infection.

Since the only symptoms I had were a headache and fever, the doctor was extremely concerned I might have meningitis. Oh dear! I kept thinking, "second rate Buddhist author Brad Warner, who was never nearly as good as Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle, died in Berlin of meningitis during a largely unsuccessful tour of Europe."* That's just what I need as an obituary. "Warner was known mostly for making fun of much more important Buddhist masters by using a sock monkey."

Anyway, the spinal tap showed no signs of meningitis. And I am not paraplegic, which was one of the risks of the procedure listed on the form I had to sign before it was done. So that's good news.

The bad news is that I had a buttload of tests. Gosh only knows what that's gonna cost me. They even did a CT scan. And in the end they couldn't determine where the infection was. I suspect it's a bladder infection from my previous stuff and it just wasn't showing up on the tests they gave me. With all this I was in the ER for around eight hours. Mostly waiting.

They wanted me to stay in the hospital for about three days while they did more tests. But I knew I'd never be able to afford that. They gave me the option of taking a general antibiotic. The doc said he was 80-90% sure it would be effective. So I went with that. Now, about 12 hours after taking the first dose, it certainly feels like it's working.

Because of this I had to cancel my appearance at the German Buddhist Union's conference on sexuality. This was a huge disappointment because that was one of the ones I was really looking forward to. But God will not be mocked. And when he says you're not gonna do something you'd best listen.

As for zazen, I gotta tell ya, it's hard to do that shit when you're sick. I've managed to do a bit here and there. Finally this morning I got through a half-hour sit. It's not a miracle cure, but it helps.

I always go with what's most practical. If my body is screaming "lay down!!!" Then I'll skip zazen until things improve. You shouldn't do zazen if your body is crying out for bed rest.

But last night when the intensity of my headache made it impossible to sleep, I got up and did a little zazen. Oddly enough I started getting sleepy! Which was a very good thing. So I went back to bed after a little while.

I'm not a generally sickly person. But this unsettled lifestyle is doing me in. So I will not be touring again like I have been in the past. Maybe this is God's way of forcing me to set up some type of center where people can come to me instead of me always coming to them. I'll still travel. But I'll limit it to single events.

For now, I'm still planning on seeing most of the rest of this tour through. Although I may cancel a few events to try and limit my travel. Those of you who ought to be contacted about this, will be.

Once I'm feeling up to it.

Enjoy some rare Spın̈al Tap I dug up on YouTube:

* Just so you know, I don't think this tour has been unsuccessful at all. I just imagine that's how it might be reported.

SICK IN BERLIN ~ ANGER MANAGEMENT

2011-10-19T04:10:00.000-07:00

The photo is from former East Berlin, Karl Marx Strasse with Dunkin Donuts taken yesterday by me. Dig Dirk from Sprockets dancing on the Don't Walk sign!

I have over-extended myself and it has bit me on the ass. I am sick in Berlin. It's 2:30 and I have yet to leave the apartment of the wonderful Jan & Angela who are kindly hosting me.

One perk of traveling and staying at people's places is that I almost always end up staying somewhere much nicer than my own apartment. This one is definitely one of those. So that's nice.

But I got a fever of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm usually below 97, often 96.8 just to make things dyslexically confusing. So 98.6 is a low grade fever for me. I rose all the way up to 101.6 last night, which must be like 103.6 for a normal person. I'm sure that what did me in was just too much of everything.

When you're in a foreign nation, even normal stuff can be a bit stressful. Like buying a train ticket! Hey people who've lived in Japan! European train station ticket machines do not take paper money! They look pretty high tech, but alas they are not. I'm pretty sure even the Los Angeles subway system ticket machines accept paper money. Get it together, France and Germany!

This caused me a lot more frustration than it should have a few days ago in Paris. It was like I was thrown back into the Angry Brad I was about fifteen years ago when I'd just yell and scream about every damned thing. I took that as a signal something was askew. And now this fever has confirmed it for me.

I've noticed that lots of people who comment very eruditely upon the Zen Precepts don't really understand what anger is and why we should avoid it. Anger is not merely being unhappy with a situation and making direct efforts to change it. That's not really anger at all. Though some folks who comment on Zen seem to believe it is.

Anger is when you allow your natural dissatisfaction with a given situation to become emotional. That's where you always have trouble. If you can deal with dissatisfaction without becoming emotional, you're good to go.

You need to avoid it for various reasons, the main one being that it's not good for you. A kind of conscious selfishness can be your friend. It appears that now that I've done a lot of Zen practice the rebound from bouts of anger comes very quickly. I'm running a temperature for a lot of reasons, mostly exhaustion. But if I had been more willing to manage my anger at those French ticket machines, I'm sure I'd be feeling better today.

I say willing because it's hard to do this. I was right! Those machines were wrong! I already told you why! They should have accepted what was perfectly legal tender! I've put paper money in train ticket machines a 100,000 times in my life! I know what they're supposed to do, dammit!

You see how this works?

Then I got sick. I'm pretty sure it always worked like this. I just failed to notice. So many, many, many things I failed to notice.

The best effect of decades of zazen? I notice things a little tiny wee bit more quickly.

Oh my God it sounds like there's an oompah-oompah brass band with a tuba out on the street! I'd better go.

I will NOT cancel my appearance tonight at 8 pm (20:00) at Dharma Buchladen no matter what! Info is athttp://www.dharma-buchladen.de/?Veranstaltungsprogramm_2011:Oktober_2011. Be there!

Report form France

2011-10-16T03:39:00.000-07:00

I'm in Poitiers, France now. Yesterday I ran a day of Zen for 10 people at my friend Arnaud's house here. It was very interesting and very tiring.

The people who attended the event were not zennies for the most part. I know at least one of them had done zazen at a Zen temple setting before. I think the others had done zazen but only as parts of other forms of meditation. Some were students of another guy named Arnaud, Arnaud Desjardins who was an interesting spiritual teacher here in France. He was trained in the Advaita Vedanta tradition by a teacher named Swami Prajnapad. But he also sat zazen with Deshimaru. So he taught that as well. Arnaud passed away in August. So his loss is still keenly felt by his students.

Some others were students of an American teacher named Lee Lozowick who based himself in France. Lee is the author of a book called Zen Trash: The Irreverent and Sacred Teaching Stories of Lee Lozowick. They gave me a copy yesterday. I haven't read it, but I like the title. Lee passed away last year, so his loss is also still keenly felt by his students.

They were a pretty sincere group. I liked hanging out with them for the day. But this was only my second try at improvising a day of Zen Lite for people who were interested enough in zazen to want to do a day-long event but too inexperienced to feel up to handling the rigors of sitting zazen over & over & over & over for the entire day.

Lots of Zen teachers would just say, "Screw 'em if they can't deal with it!" and make the participants do a full-on day-long sitting. That's what my teachers did. That's what they'll do if you go to places like San Francisco Zen Center or pretty much any training center in Japan such as Antaiji.

But I'm trying out something new here. So far the results have been just sort of OK as far as I'm concerned. The problem is that it's too damned exhausting for me to do three hours straight of dharma discussion with a group. So I need to find other activities that will work and still not be too goofy. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

The day before that, Friday, I was the guest at a soirée (literally) held by Giles Farcet author of The Anti-Wisdom Manual: A Practical Guide To Spiritual Bankruptcy. I gave this book a glowing review last year. Maybe I'll dig that review out and put it back up here. Although I think they should re-publish it with a catchier title like How To Ruin Your Spiritual Life and a funnier cover.

I gotta run. But I've included some photos from France. The first is to prove to my friends in Montreal that the stop signs here in France say "stop" not "arret." And that Kentucky Fried Chicken is called KFC here, not PFK*. The final photo is to prove to the world that there is no such thing on the French McDonald's menu as a Royale With Cheese. But there are several sandwiches called "Royal" including the "Royal-o-Fish" and the "Royal Deluxe."

*Actually everybody in Montreal knows this already. So the photos are provided for them to show the language police up there.

FOREIGN SUPERMARKTS

2011-10-12T01:05:00.000-07:00

One of the great joys/challenges of doing what I do is negotiating foreign supermarkets. Or markts as they seem to be called in many countries in Europe.

My friend Robin has an apartment in Amsterdam that he rarely uses and has kindly allowed me to stay here. It's like having my own swingin' bachelor pad in the city. But a bachelor needs to eat breakfast. So I had to go hunt down some foodstuffs.

The big supermarket chain in The Netherlands, or at least here in Amsterdam, is Albert Heijn. You don't pronounce the J. It's smaller than most US supermarkets but about the same size as the ones in Japan. At least in Japan, though, I could read the packages. Here I had to guess. I figured that "roomboter" in a yellow package was probably butter. I was right! I also got some cereal and some halfvoole melk, which I believe to be 2% milk. I'm guessing "halfvoole" is "half whole" and therefore half the usual fat of whole milk, therefore 2%. Deductive reasoning! Or something...

They say — somebody says anyway, I can't remember who (which may be relevant) — that one way to avoid becoming senile in your old age is to never get into a rut. You've got to keep changing your habits and not get stuck in routines, apparently. If this is true I ought to be in good shape. It's pretty intense when even basic things like figuring out what's edible become problematic. I suppose our ancient ancestors had to do a lot of that, though.

Friday I'll be in Paris. Then the following week I'm in Berlin. Leonard Cohen took Manhattan first and then Berlin. But I'm starting with Paris.

The rest of my schedule is at this link. There are still a bunch of things you can participate in. So if you're in Poitiers, Berlin, Munich, Bielefeld, Östringen, Essex, Antwerp or Manchester your plans are already made!

See ya!

(Here is a video of some cats I stayed with in Nijmegen, Netherlands)

Hello From Rotterdam

2011-10-10T00:26:00.000-07:00

Two days of day-long zazen retreats are done and all participants survived. On Saturday I was in Bonn, Germany leading a day-long retreat on a street called Adolf Strasse. I did three and a half hours of dokusan (private one-on-one talks) in a single straight sitting and came back to tell the tale.

It was a groovy group of fun seeking zennies. I really enjoyed the retreat. And I was wrong when I said I'd never been invited to speak at an AZI group. The group in Bonn is affiliated with AZI.

Yesterday I did another day-long zazen thing in Amsterdam. This time we skipped the dokusan. It was logistically impossible given the nature of the venue. But I did have longer group discussions to try to make up for the lack.

Another fun group and very talkative. Maybe we'll get that talk up on the podcast one of these days.

Tonight at 8pm I'll be speaking at Tegen de Stroom In in Rotterdam, Netherlands. All humans in Europe are required to attend.

Also, Monk Fish Books just told me that Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and me is now officially out and available. So get yours while they're hot.

The tour has been great fun so far. But the economic aspects are not so encouraging. Here's the lowdown on that.

• My recent hospital visit forced me to cancel the highest paying gig I had scheduled in Europe. So I lost that money.

• In order to rebook the flight I missed I had to pay an additional $600.

• The hospital bills have not come in yet. But I expect to have to shell out at least $3000. I have the highest deductable in the world, making my health insurance pretty much useless unless I get into some kind of really devastating accident or something.

• Last time I did a European tour I did not have an apartment. I was homeless Braddo. This time I do. So there goes another few hundred bucks.

So I'm hoping at least to break even on this thing. It seems unlikely I'll come out ahead. If I'm lucky the tour won't cost me money. But so far it is definitely costing me money to be here.

So Gempo's out there with his three houses and his Harley collection and here's me trying to figure out how to afford a studio apartment in Akron. Which is "comparing mind," I know. But I guess I'd rather be Husker Du than one of the Spice Girls. Which is to say that integrity is something I value.

Then again, so is the ability to pay the rent...

So yesterday at the day-long retreat I got into this thought loop of trying to envision how I could get more butts in seats at my retreats. Should I have fewer periods of zazen? Maybe more interactive social type activities? Maybe give everybody free hash-laced brownies (it is Amsterdam, after all)?

If I did that, what I'd be offering would cease to be true Zen retreats. But then again they wouldn't necessarily be bad things. There'd be a bit of meditation. And maybe people would get a taste and keep it up. Maybe they wouldn't. But it would still be an honest endeavor. Thich Naht Hanh has adopted this model for his retreats. It's not a scam. It's not even really watering things down as long as you don't present it as something it's not.

If I followed that model I might be able to continue traveling and talking. Maybe I could offer a mix of Zen Lite weekends along with some real Zen retreats for those who wanted to go deeper.

And yet the prospect of doing it that way isn't so appealing. Which is not to say I wouldn't do it. It's just not the kind of idea that has me jumping for joy. It would feel a little bit mercenary.

I love what I do. I love sleeping on mattresses on the floors of people's apartments in weird cities, being accosted by their cats in the morning and trying to figure out if anything in the fridge is butter. I love talking to people who are struggling with the same shit I struggle with. I like meeting younger people (both in age and in spirit) who aren't interested in getting ahead in society, who really want to get to the core of what's most vital in this world. There are lots and lots of us all over the world. It's nice to know that.

I'm not sure I even want three houses and a Harley collection. Or in my case a collection of vintage bass guitars. Would I even take $50,000 for a weekend retreat? Offer it to me and see!

The point is, I still think that I seem to get exactly what I really want in life. It's dangerous to say that everybody does. But I sure seem to.

I seem to want to struggle this way. It makes me feel more alive.

Still, if I could just get enough ahead to afford the Beach Boys' Smile Sessions Box Set that's coming out in a few weeks...

Then again, knowing me, I'll buy it whether I can afford it or not.

Me & Steve Jobs: Three Degrees of Separation

2011-10-07T01:58:00.000-07:00

Today I'm headed for Bonn, Germany where I will lead a one-day zazen thing at the San Bo Dojo. I hear it's a sell-out crowd. But if you stand around outside in the rain and wait, maybe I'll wave to you as I pass by in my limousine.

OK. It's actually a pretty small room that couldn't hold very many people.

The following day, Sunday, I will lead another one-day zazen thing in Amsterdam at the Against The Stream center there. As far as I know there are still spots available. You'll get higher from zazen than you can at the coffee shops and have more bliss than in the red light district!

The day after that, Monday, I'm speaking at the Against The Stream center in Rotterdam. That's just a talk. No zazen required. So you must be there.

I had a great talk in Nijmegen, Netherlands last night. Thank you to everyone who showed up!

For more info on my upcoming dates in Germany, France, England and Belgium go the this link.

* * * * *

I was sad to hear about the death of Steve Jobs. I never really followed his career. But I am a long-time user of Apple products. I am typing this on my MacBook. Apples were the first computers I ever used. I never have been able to find my way around Windows very well.

Just after Jobs died I started hearing people say stuff like, "Did you know he was a Buddhist?" I thought that was sort of interesting. I figured maybe he was into Tibetan Buddhism or possibly Sokka Gakkai. Whenever you hear that someone famous is "into Buddhism" that's usually what it means.

Then a Facebook friend of mine named Austin Conquest sent me a link titled The Zen of Steve Jobs. It was from CNN, so I figured by "Zen" they meant just something vaguely Eastern and spiritual. Although I, myself, have been on CNN. So perhaps I should give them more credit. It's just that mainstream news sources rarely get any of this stuff right.

Lo and behold, the article is actually about the Zen of Steve Jobs! And what's more, Jobs wasn't just into any old Zen dude. His teacher was Kobun Chino Roshi! Kobun was the teacher of my first Zen teacher, Tim McCarthy. So there you go. Three degrees of separation between me and Steve Jobs. Me > Tim > Kobun > Steve Jobs!

The CNN piece also references a hilarious graphic novel about Jobs' relationship with Kobun. Check out the four pages they show you at that link! Kobun apparently was a mix of Yoda from Star Wars and the Zen master from the old Kung Fu TV series starring David Carradine. I never knew!*

Aw. I shouldn't be mean. I know. It's great that a guy like Kobun gets any recognition from the mainstream at all. I guess you gotta present Zen in this way in a comic book since you have to explain so much in such a small space. I'll probably buy the book. UNLESS THE PUBLISHERS WANT TO SEND ME A FREE COPY TO REVIEW. Which I will do if I get one. Write me at askbradwarner@hotmail.com and I'll send you my address.

* This scene supposedly takes place in Tassajara. Where, in Tassajara, is there a rock and an open field like that? And why does Kobun suggest they go to Denny's? That would require that they drive up 14 miles of dirt road at roughly 10 mph just to get to the nearest paved road. From there they'd need to drive another hour or so to get to Carmel Valley. I'm not sure if there's a Denny's there. But my guess is there probably isn't or that there wasn't one in 1986, even if there is one now. So that means another hour and half drive to Monterrey. Double that for the drive back. That's a lot of work for a sundae. And there's probably some decent left-overs in the walk-in fridge next to the kitchen.

The Current State of Zen in Europe

2011-10-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a photo of me in Amsterdam lamenting that reality is based on space and time.

Or is it... ?

I recovered from the recent hospital stuff and now my European tour 2011 is well and truly on. The first date is in Nijmegen, Netherlands (where I am writing this) tomorrow at 7 pm. The info for tomorrow's date is at this link.

The next stop will be Bonn, Germany on Saturday at the San Bo Dojo. That will be a day-long zazen thing. This will be followed by another day-long zazen thing on Sunday (the next day) in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Info for that and for the talk I'm giving in Rotterdam the following day (Monday) is at this link.

Find out about the rest of the tour by clicking here.

This is the second European Zen tour I've done. I'm gradually becoming familiar with how Zen is perceived over here. It's a bit newer to Europe than it is to the United States. That is to say, Zen literature got to both places around the same time. But it seems like the establishment of actual practice centers lagged a little behind the US.

The largest Zen organization in Europe appears to be AZI, which stands for Association Zen Internationale. This was established in France by a Japanese monk named Deshimaru. Deshimaru and my teacher Nishijima Roshi were friends. Even so, I've never been invited to speak at an AZI center. I think they're very particular about having only people from their lineage speak at their places. Fair enough.

Noah Levine has authorized a few teachers to start Against The Stream groups over here. And I'm speaking at a couple of their places in The Netherlands. Noah isn't a Zen teacher. But he's "Zen friendly." I've spoken at a number of the places he established in the US, Canada and now Europe.

Over in Poland and Finland, where I spoke last year, Philip Kapleau established a few centers that are still active. Kapleau was the author of the highly influential book Three Pillars of Zen.

The San Francisco Zen Center has a couple things over here, I think. But they run their organization pretty loosely. When a teacher from SFZC leaves, she or he usually establishes a place that has no official ties to San Francisco. However, the centers they establish all seem to network quite closely with each other. The only place I've been to in Europe that was started by an SFZC teacher is the Black Mountain Zen Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

There are a number of other teachers over here on the continent. One of those I met last year was a Dutch guy named Ton Lathouwers. He was a fun and funny guy. He studied with Masao Abe.

All of the foregoing doesn't tell you much about the overall state of Zen in Europe. And it's hard to say with any authority what that is. I've encountered a number of very sincere practitioners working hard at making Zen available. It's not all good news, though. Genpo Roshi is quite active here in The Netherlands. But his influenced has waned considerably lately. It's hard to tell if that's just because of the very highly publicized and largely meaningless sex scandal or because people realized what a joke the whole Big Mind® thing was.

New Age stuff is as much a booming business in Europe as it is in America. This stuff always has a kind of run-off effect upon Zen. New Age book shops usually stock a few Zen books. Which is good in that it gets the written part of Zen out there. But one wonders if purchasers just combine all that stuff in their minds into one big eastern spirituality blob the way Americans tend to.

I'll be seeing a lot more Zen in Europe over the coming six weeks. I'll let you know what I find.

JUGGLING (the whole article reposted)

2011-10-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

Here is the article I put up on Suicide Girls a few days ago with a little bit of bonus mnaterial at the end:

A guy named Brian who posts on my blog (hardcorezen.blogspot.com) asked:

“I'm wondering how you feel about stories of Zen masters who endured what would normally be insane levels of pain through the discipline of zazen? No doubt some of the stories are fanciful, but we have on video the monk who set himself on fire and didn't flinch until he was dead.

“Do you think you could do that after so many years of sitting or is something missing? Or is that really not the point of zazen, just a type of parlor trick that's cool to know can be done but isn't the primary purpose of meditation?”

Around the same time I got a message from one of my Facebook friends mentioning this video by Ken Wilber:

In case you can’t view it, this is a video of the uber-spiritual wonderman Ken Wilber hooking himself up to a machine that supposedly demonstrates how he can voluntarily stop his brainwaves.

This stuff kind of reminds me of juggling.

When I lived in Santa Monica, I used to walk down to Venice Beach on weekends. There would always be lots of talented people on the boardwalk doing various tricks for chump change from the tourists. One of these guys was a juggler. He was absolutely amazing. He had this trick where he’d climb up on a balance board on top of a top of a rickety wooden ladder and juggle like five butcher’s knives, all while making clever jokes at his own expense. It was astounding. Take a look:

Like most people on the boardwalk, I’d watch his act, be amazed and then put a dollar or two in the bucket he passed around at the end. I was a local, and hence a cheapskate. Maybe the tourists slipped him fives and tens. Or maybe some of them were cheaper than me and just threw in quarters.

I’ve done twenty plus years of daily zazen meditation plus more intensive retreats than I care to remember. Having been through some interesting scenes during practice I can understand how one could use meditation practice to learn to do some pretty impressive tricks. I personally could not sit still while I was on fire and I doubt I could wire myself up to an EEG and make the indicators do whatever I wanted. But I can see clearly how that could be done.

Let me try to explain what I mean by saying I can “see clearly.” It’s like if you learned to juggle three tennis balls. Having done that, you’d be able to understand clearly how you might eventually be able to sit on a balance board on top of a rickety ladder and juggle knives. I’m not talking here about comprehending something intellectually as a concept. Anyone can do that. You’d have to at least accomplish three tennis balls at once before you could truly get a handle on how juggling knives isn’t as superhuman as it seems to people like me who can’t even juggle one tennis ball. There’s a kind of body/mind comprehension that goes beyond just getting something as an idea.

Having understood how you might one day be able to juggle knives on a balance board, you’d have to ask yourself if it was worth it. It would take years of tremendous dedication to accomplish such a trick and you’d have to forgo a lot of other things in life just to devote yourself to the task. So you’d either have to really, really, really, really want to juggle knives. Or else you’d have to have some other motive, like believing that if you could juggle knives on a balance board you might be able to join Cirque du Soleil and make a living at it. Either way, you’d need some kind of motivation.

The problem I have with Ken Wilber, as well as others like him, is all about motivation. Ken Wilber seems to imply that his accomplishments indicate that his meditation is somehow qualitatively better than other peoples’ and that without such accomplishments “something is missing” as Brian my commenter asked. While I admit these accomplishments do indicate a commitment to something, I’m not sure it’s something I’m interested in committing to.

To me, Wilber’s goal in meditation appears to be to get more advanced at it than anyone else in the world and to be known for having done so. It’s very competitive. This assumption appears to be borne out by the comment I received when I said that I thought Wilber’s trick with the brainwave machine looked phony.

“Brad, just because you can't do it doesn't mean it's fake,” said the commenter. True enough. Maybe he actually is going into Nirvikalpa Samadhi, whatever the blazes that is. It might not be a fake. But it’s the “just because you can’t do it” part that’s telling.

Wilber may say he doesn’t intend people to take it this way. But that would be disingenuous. He knows full well people are going to take it this way. The message my commenter got is, “Ken Wilber is a better meditator than Brad Warner.” It’s the kind of message I’m sure most people take away from Wilber’s various demonstrations of power.

If meditation is a competition, I don’t want to play that game. But it’s not. So I meditate.

In the case of those Vietnamese monks who burned themselves, they appear to me to be deeply confused people. When I see that damned video I just get incredibly angry and sad. What a fucking waste. What they did amounted to the most macho display of macho-ism ever. What could be more macho than burning yourself alive and not flinching? The fact that you actually had to die to prove how macho you were just makes you that much more macho.

If what they did had actually made any difference in the war, maybe I’d think differently. Sadly, I don’t think their tragic wasteful ugly deaths did anything to stop the war in Vietnam. They could have done a lot more by staying alive and working for peace.

I’ve seen enough in my own personal practice to be quite convinced that I could do a lot of impressive things with this practice if I wanted to direct my efforts that way. But why would I do so? I can’t think of any compelling reason to pursue such things. It would take a lot of hard, hard effort. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to me at all. I’m not interested in being macho. I don’t need to display my meditative achievements to the world.

Which is not me saying I’m better than those guys because I don’t want these things. It’s just a fact. I don’t have the desire. Being better has nothing to do with it. You can put in all that effort and still end up as confused as anyone else. It looks like a big waste of time to me and I don’t have time to waste.

There is a certain class of people who enjoy bragging about their supposed spiritual accomplishments. They’ve been around for a long time. But the truth is most of us who meditate don’t learn to do tricks. And if we do, we generally keep it to ourselves.

Dogen, the 12th century monk who founded the sect of Buddhism in which I practice (and who was also the loose basis for a character on the TV show LOST), tells a story about people who brag about their spiritual accomplishments:

At that time a certain Sanzo from India arrives in the Chinese capital, saying, “I have attained the eye that intuits the minds of others” (This is supposedly one of the powers of a Buddha). The emperor decrees that the National Master (his personal Zen teacher) should examine him. As soon as Sanzo meets the master he prostrates himself at once and stands to the master’s right. The master says, “Have you got the power to know others’ minds?”

Sanzo answers, “I would not be so bold (as to say so).”

The master says, “Tell me where this old monk is just now.”

Sanzo says, “Master, you are the teacher of the whole country. Why have you gone to the West River to watch a boat race?”

The master asks a second time, “Tell me where the old monk is just now.”

Sanzo says, “Master, you are the teacher of the whole country. Why are you on Tianjian Bridge watching someone play with a monkey?”

The master asks a third time, “Tell me where the old monk is just now.”

Sanzo takes a good while but he does not know where the master has been. The master scolds him, saying, “You ghost of a wild fox, where is your power to know others’ minds?”

Sanzo has no answer.

Most people interpret this story as saying that the master imagined watching a boat race and Sanzo guessed it, then the master imagined watching a monkey and Sanzo guessed it, then the master put himself in some kind of formless Samadhi (perhaps like the one Ken Wilber supposedly enters in the video) and Sanzo couldn’t see it because he wasn’t as advanced as the master. The master wins and Sanzo loses. One traditional interpretation Dogen sites says, ““The first two times the master’s mind is concerned with external circumstances; then he enters the samadhi of receiving and using the self, and so Sanzo does not see him.”

But Dogen begs to differ. It isn’t about what sort of mental states the master enters. And it has nothing at all to do with winning and losing. First off, Dogen points out that the National Master never actually says Sanzo got it right the first two times. Then he goes a little deeper.

Dogen says, “The National Master’s words ‘Where is the old monk just now?’ are as if to ask ‘What is the old monk?’ ‘Where is the old monk just now?’ asks ‘Just now is what kind of moment?’ To ask ‘where is (the old monk)’ asserts that ‘This place is where something ineffable exists.’”

In other words the master is not asking Sanzo to read his mind. He is asking Sanzo to tell him where the real person who stands in front of him in this concrete reality (i.e. the National Master) is right now. He wants Sanzo to tell him what this real world is. He wants to help Sanzo see what is actual.

Sanzo has only succeeded in demonstrating a parlor trick — if, indeed, he has even demonstrated that much. He never gives any indication that he really understands the fundamental nature of reality.

It annoys me to see someone like Ken Wilber who does tricks — ones that nobody can ever even verify he’s accomplished, by the way — make tons more money than that street juggler down on Venice Beach who does something far cooler. I guess people are impressed by imaginary stuff.

I don’t see any great value in most of what passes for “altered states of consciousness.” Every possible state of altered consciousness is contained within this state of consciousness you possess right at this very moment.

It’s true we are evolutionarily developed to filter consciousness in a particular way. And most of us assume that this particular way is the only way available. There are methods by which you can learn to filter your consciousness in different ways. And perhaps there is some minor value in knowing that there are other ways of filtering things. But it’s just another sort of filter. It’s the difference between looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses and looking at the world through green-tinted glasses. You’re not getting the true picture either way.

So maybe Ken Wilber really can trance out on Delta waves. I’m more impressed with the guy who can juggle butcher’s knives on a balance board. Look at both videos. Honestly, which one is more impressive to you?

***

That piece was re-posted by a few people on Facebook. One of the friends of someone who re-posted the piece responded as follows:

If someone is holding themselves out to be a teacher or some kind of adept, I think they should at least be able to do something with an EEG machine. If they can't demonstrate the correlates of at least one of those deeper states, then I don't think they could be said to be adept at any kind of meditation.

There are so many people on the internet claiming enlightenment and claiming non-dual realization, but I think they are referring to many different things, often things not relating to enlightenment or non-duality much at all. It's good to have a way to separate the charlatans from the real McCoys.

I've read this comment a number of times now, and it just baffles me. I'm not sure what to make of it. What's weirder (to me at least) is that a number of other people appear to believe this comment makes sense.

People often ask me how to recognize a good teacher. I'd say that anyone who demonstrates his supposedly deeper mind states by hooking himself to a machine and showing you what the dials say is someone to stay far away from. As for "separat(ing) the charlatans from the real McCoys," such demonstrations would do a tremendous job. Anyone who indulges in them is out to get your money and power.

There seems to be a big push these days to try and find some way to objectively qualify meditation teachers. I've already written extensively about the various organizations that attempt to provide verification of their member teachers. The sentiment expressed above appears to me to be yet another variation of the same general kind of thing.

I really don't even know what to say to this. It's so outside my own means of accessing my teachers that I can't even relate to it. I didn't ask my teachers for test scores or for proof of membership in certain organizations. I just had a feeling. And that's very hard to explain.

I've been reading a book lately called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The introduction tells the story of the Getty Museum purchasing what was purported to be an ancient Greek statue. Every objective test they put the statue to verified its authenticity. The dials all registered what they were supposed to. The spectrometers aligned as they should have. Yet when a few people who knew ancient Greek sculpture intimately through personal experience saw the statue they knew at first glance it was a forgery. And it was.

How did they know? The experts themselves had a hard time articulating it. They just kind of knew.

Trust your intuition folks. Objective facts lie.

JUGGLING

2011-09-29T06:18:00.000-07:00

New SuicideGirls Safe For Work blog:

http://suicidegirlsblog.com/blog/brad-warners-hardcore-zen-juggling/

I'll let them have the exclusive for a couple days, then repost here. That is, if I remember.

I. P. Frehley

2011-09-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

I've had to cancel my retreat at Benediktushof. I apologize to everyone who signed up and to the staff at Benediktushof. But right now I'm in no condition to fly. With any luck, I'll be able to make the rest of my European dates.

Here comes the over-sharing part. Please do not read the following if you get grossed out easily. I'm sharing this mainly so that I do not have to keep telling the story over and over and over to the many people who are asking about it. If you're not curious, I suggest you not even read. This isn't pleasant.

Some people were guessing I had a colonoscopy Friday. You were close, but wrong. You missed by about six or seven inches. I don't want to brag, you see.

I had a little camera inserted into my weenie to have a look around up there. It's supposed to be a routine procedure with few complications other than discomfort. I was one of the lucky few for whom the procedure had some unexpected side-effects. No one yet seems to know why, but the procedure led to an inability to urinate.

Thus, screaming like a baby in agony, I had to be driven to the emergency room at about midnight by a long-suffering and very good friend. They placed a catheter in my thingy (hey all you people in San Francisco who don't like me not saying "cock" or "penis" -- Go suck my dick! But not yet. Wait about a week.) It's still there now and I will have to endure this for the next two days.

I can't say the catheter is painful. But it is extraordinarily uncomfortable in a way I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. It's just wrong to have a rubber tube up there. Consequently, although the folks at the ER said I could live a more-or-less normal life with this thing in, I have so far not really done so. If I sit very very still, I can let the thing sort of rest and then kind of forget about it. When I move around, it moves around too. It has subtle ways of reminding you that it's still there. Little pinches that I react to as if a crazed bald eagle were champing on the end of my wang -- although in truth the pain really isn't that bad.

I've always said that we should be aware that our independence is largely an illusion. We are not really independent at all. Nothing will remind you of this more clearly than having a medical procedure. I have been reduced to pure dependency. Though when you really look at it, your life is pretty much pure dependency no matter how healthy you are.

Friday was my first experience with anesthesia. It wasn't my first visit to an emergency room. I've taken other people to ERs before and I've been to the ER when I had kidney stones. But last night was my first visit to the Akron, Ohio General Hospital ER. Emergency rooms in Japan are quite different.

As for the anesthesia, that was the easy bit. I went out like a light at the first hint of drugs introduced to mys system. All I really remember was getting light headed then waking up. I initially thought the procedure went really well.

I didn't feel most of the pain they'd warned me I'd feel after the procedure. I was told I'd have a sore throat from the intubation. I barely felt anything. I was told I'd have pain urinating. But the first two times I went it wasn't that bad. It was a little sore. But I've had kidney stones, baby. That kind of sore is nothing!

But the third time I tried to go, nothing came out. I tried and tried for about two hours. You know how it feels when you hold your pee like in a long car ride or something? Imagine that times about 10,000. When at last I finally accepted that I was gonna need to be catheterized I was hurting bad (I'd called the ER & they told me about that possibility, I did not want another thing shoved up my weenie so I resisted).

The long-suffering and saintly Erin drove me to Akron General's emergency room. I was not in a good mood when I arrived. I guess they deal with a lot of distressed people in the ER. So the first person I spoke to had all of her professional defenses up. It was interesting to note. She was prepared for me to go off on her, as I'm sure others have in the past. But I didn't. I tried as best I could to articulate my problem.

Pretty soon I was in a room, waiting to be seen. Luckily the ER was not too crowded. But it still took them forever to get to me. I suppose having to pee really bad is not considered one of the more urgent concerns. Unless you're the one who has to pee real bad.

Finally a doctor came in an accessed my situation and the decision was made to insert a Foley catheter. Much as I dreaded that, I knew it would relieve my pain so I was all for it.

I shook like a maniac as the insertion was done. I'm not really sure if I started shaking before or during the insertion. But by the time they were finished it was like I had the most uncontrollable shivers you can possibly imagine. They said that was a common reaction and that it would subside. It did. But nearly two days later I still ache.

I nearly died on Friday night. Seriously. Without the ER I would have been dead, and it would have been a very bad death. But I'm not dead. So that's good. It's interesting how many things we consider to be fairly minor ailments these days are actually deadly. A wild animal in my predicament would have died. A person living in more primitive conditions would have too -- although such a person wouldn't have had the procedure that led to my ER visit in the first place. Still, a blocked bladder is actually pretty serious stuff.

The fact I could have died makes me very aware that I am extremely dependent upon others. I'm a guy who prides himself on independence, so this is something I often attempt to deny. But there ya go.

I've been reading a book lately called God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World. The book takes the standpoint that the stuff we've been hearing for years about all religions being basically the same thing is bollocks. They aren't really the same at all. A Christian who tries to be nice by saying that Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are also saved is missing the point. Those other religions don't consider it important to be saved.

Anyway, according to the author the goal of Islam is to free us from pride and arrogance and the feeling that we are independent of God. The ordeal I went through the other night has gone a long way to accomplishing that for me. It's hard to be proud when you're walking around carrying your day's accumulated urine in a big plastic bag connected to a garden hose shoved up your dick.

I'll just end there since I've gone on a very long time. I hope your weekend was better than mine!

I (DON'T) WANNA BE SEDATED

2011-09-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna go to the hospital in a few hours and be sedated. I do not want to be sedated.

The last time a doctor recommended a procedure for which sedation was required, I cancelled at the last minute. Actually, at that time I didn't know sedation was required. As soon as I heard it was, that's when I cancelled. As it turned out the reasons for the procedure turned out to be spurious (trust me, you don't want any further explanation than that). So I was fine. This time I feel like it may be necessary for them to go have a look at what they want to have a look at. Although I'm pretty certain it'll turn out to be nothing very serious.

The timing for this could hardly be worse. I'm doing this stuff on Friday and leaving for nearly two months in Europe on Sunday. People ask me how I prepare for these trips. The answer is "very badly."

I don't earn enough to pay for an assistant. So I have to set everything up myself. Luckily some very kind people over on the continent are booking me trains and planes and stuff. But I still have to coordinate it all. And I am very bad at that kind of thing. I'm not the kind of guy who really knows much about how to plan ahead.

Which is one of those weird questions I sometimes get. "If zen is all about being in the moment, are you allowed to plan ahead?" Yes, you are allowed to plan ahead. You plan ahead in the moment. You plan for two months in Europe now. Or at least you should. But if you're me, you barely do.

Plus a this week Zero Defex started recording what will eventually be its second album. I laid down some sitar on Wednesday. I be that's the first time a sitar was used by a hardcore band! The rest of the band will finish the tracks off while I'm away.

So I gotta go get sedated and still manage to pull together all the last minute stuff. Which is why this blog entry is short and messy.

I'm not a fan of drugs, as I think everybody who reads this knows. That includes even drugs that are "good for you," like the sedatives they give you in the hospital. I really don't want them. But I've heard what the procedure I'm going for is like without sedation and opted to get knocked out. Well, apparently not fully knocked out. They call the thing they're doing to me "twilight." I guess that means you're mostly knocked out. Knowing me, it'll put me under. Since I so seldom partake of drugs, whenever I do they knock me for a loop.

Anyhow, I figure if I write about the procedure maybe I can claim the whole thing as a tax write-off. Plus it may have some zen appeal. It is an altered state of consciousness after all. Not that zen is about altered states. But people who read about zen seem to like to read about altered states.

Good luck to me! See you on the other side!

P.S. Here's an interesting article by Susan O'Connel of San Fran Zen Center. Someone posted the link in the comments. Thanks.

Bliss

2011-09-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

Well, I give up folks. They've now made a drink that does exactly what Zen practice is supposed to do. I'm just gonna buy that stuff from now on. Lots easier!

http://iambliss.net/

According to the website:

When your mind is both calm and clear and your body relaxed, you will experience that sacred state of being called BLISS. The reason why most of us are denied the experience of BLISS is directly related to our lack of one, two, or all three states necessary for BLISS: calmness, clarity and relaxation. The miracle of a 2.5 oz. shot of I AM BLISS® is that it naturally, safely, and effectively promotes all three states of being. The result is BLISS.

The BLISS Experience: Although everyone’s experience of BLISS is different there is a common theme. Almost immediately after drinking I AM BLISS® you feel a deep sense of relaxation, a letting go, as it were, of the problems and stressors that may have seemed overwhelming just minutes ago. Curiously, as you relax, your energy level noticeably increases. I AM BLISS® does not work like a typical relaxant that can make you drowsy.

Within ten to fifteen minutes the real miracle begins. The chatter, self talk and background noise that usually dominates your awareness subsides and you become more present. You may notice your surroundings more intensely. Colors, sounds, and shapes are more vivid, more interesting, more beautiful. You are now deeply rooted in the present moment. This may be the first time you have really experienced how it feels to be totally present.

Wow. Who knew? A one month's supply is only $120!

***

I'm working on my European jaunt. It starts this Sunday when I go winging off to Amsterdam. The full itinerary is at the following website:

http://web.me.com/doubtboy/Site/ZenTour2011.html

The date listed as Rotterdam on October 9 (John Lennon's birthday) has been moved to Amsterdam. And a date in Manchester, England has been added. I'll get the info up as soon as I can.

This is the last time I do one of these tours without some kind of secretary, assistant or jisha to help. Getting all the schedule right has just about made my head explode.

***

If I write about a medical procedure on this blog can I claim the procedure as a tax write-off? Cuz this shit I have coming up on Friday's gonna cost me two grand and probably won't amount to anything at all.

The Making of Buddhist Modernism

2011-09-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a book called The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David McMahan. It's a pretty neat book about the way Buddhism has been transformed and "Westernized." The author also contends that this process of Westernization is not confined to Americans and Europeans who have misinterpreted Buddhism through their own cultural conditioning. It also includes Asians who have interpreted Buddhism according to their modern Westernized points of view. He cites DT Suzuki, Thich Naht Hahn, the 14th Dalai Lama and others as good examples of Asians who have Westernized Buddhism. He doesn't seem to think this is a bad thing. He feels that we Westerners tend to accept what we learn of Buddhism as being present in its most ancient sources. But he questions whether that's true.

I've said several times that I feel like Buddhism is sort of like advanced physics. Albert Einstein pioneered so much of advanced physics it might be considered appropriate to call it "Einsteinism." But if we did that we would not want to stop all of advanced physics at the point of Albert Einstein's death and say anything that came after is not legitimate.

Same with Buddhism. Buddha never claimed to be a prophet or messiah. So to say Buddhism stops with the death of the historical Buddha would be a grave misunderstanding of Buddhism. Westernization and modernization of Buddhism is inevitable and helpful.

McMahan cites a passage by Jay Garfield regarding translation. Garfield says:

"When we translate, we transform in all of the following ways: we replace terms and phrases with particular sets of resonances in their source language with terms and phrases with very different resonances in the target language; we disambiguate ambiguous terms, and introduce new ambiguities; we interpret, or fix particular interpretations of texts in virtue of the use of theoretically loaded expressions in our target language; we take a text that is to some extent esoteric and render it exoteric simply by freeing the target language reader to approach the text without a teacher; we shift the context in which a text is read and used."

I was going over the galleys of Nishijima Roshi's translation of Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. It's due out in about a month. In the translation, Nishijima Roshi insists upon translating the Sanskrit word shunyata as "the balanced state."

Everybody knows that the word shunyata means "emptiness." This is the accepted translation of shunyata and has been for many years. Nishijima himself is well aware of this. But he also felt that the word "emptiness" in English really did not convey what Nagarjuna was talking about when he used the word shunyata.

McMahan talks about the way the Sanskrit word moksha is translated as "freedom." This is an accepted and approved way of translating the word. But moksha means, in McMahan's words, "liberation from rebirth in samsara as an embodied being, as well as liberation from destructive mental states (klesas), craving, hatred, and delusion and from the suffering (dukha) they produce."

On the other hand, the word "freedom" conveys to Western readers such things as, "individual freedom, creative freedom, freedom of choice, freedom from oppression, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom from neuroses, free to be me — let freedom ring" and so on. "Freedom" is a proper translation of moksha. But it means something very different from moksha.

"Balanced state" is an improper translation of shunyata. No doubt about it. But it may convey more of the meaning of shunyata than the word "emptiness" is able to. That was Nishijima's feeling anyway.

The translation is idiosyncratic. It does not match other English translations. But there are several more standard versions easily available to anyone who wants them. There is no reason for yet another one of those.

People worry themselves far too much about the Westernization and modernization of Buddhism. It's nice to have faithful versions of ancient texts. But we also have to be aware that even the most faithful versions we can produce are not faithful. Even if we read the texts in their original languages, we come from such a different place culturally we still won't be able to get what the people who wrote them meant exactly. Even the people who read those texts during the authors' lifetimes may not have fully understood what their writers meant.

It's hopeless!

Good luck.

***

Here are some helpful examples from the Nishijima text (slightly out of order from how they will appear in print):

Chaoter 4, Verse 8

vigrahe ya˙ parīhåram krte sunyatayå vadet
sarvam tasyåparihrtam samam sådhyena jåyate

* vigraha: m. keeping apart or asunder, isolation; division; independence. parīhåra: m. avoiding, shunning, caution; disrespect. kr: to do, make, perform, accomplish, cause, effect, prepare. sunyatayå: I. of sunyatå. sunyatå: f. emptiness, loneliness, desolateness; absence of mind, distraction. vadet: 3rd pers. opt. 1st conj. of vad. vad: P. Å. to speak, say, utter. parihrta: mfn. shunned, avoided; abandoned, quitted; taken, seized; n. what has been wrapped round or put on. sama: mfn. (connected with sa and with sama and samåna) any, every. sådhya: mfn. to be subdued or mastered or won or managed. jåyate: jan: to generate, beget, produce, create, cause.

[When one exists independently, one can keep one’s attentive attitude and can speak from the balanced state.
In actual situations although nothing is shunned, all things and phenomena can manifest themselves in the state of regulation.]

--- If a person can live in the state of being truly independent, that person naturally prefers to keep an attentive attitude and can speak of everything in a stable manner. We cannot shun anything. Our lives are such that we are obliged to accept everything that occurs, whether we like it or not. Yet if we can maintain this truly independent attitude, it is possible for us to accept our circumstances in a balanced and regulated way.

The real universe should manifest itself clearly. If it were impossible for the real universe to manifest itself clearly, then the real universe could never become clear at all. The reason that the real universe does not seem to manifest itself clearly, comes from the unbalanced situation of our autonomic nervous system.

I am not a medical doctor or neurologist. But as a Buddhist teacher I value the work of these scientists. Their findings and theories are often useful in helping to clarify Buddhist philosophy and make it comprehensible to today’s audiences by removing the air of mysticism that has surrounded these teachings for far too long. I have come to believe that what has been called satori or “enlightenment” by Buddhist masters of the past can be expressed in more contemporary terms as the balance of the autonomic nervous system.

One does not need to be a scientist or a physician in order to understand the basics of scientific theory or the basics of physiology. These days the basics of science and physiology are part of the common framework of human thought and understanding. Nor must one be a scientist of physician to use these terms. I am not trying to advance some new theory of science here. I am only using the theories science has already provided as a means of expressing Buddhist philosophy in more contemporary terms.

Science tells us that the human autonomic nervous system consists of two parts. These are called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. These two nervous systems, they say, work in opposition to one another. It is my belief that the workings of the sympathetic nervous system are the true basis for the philosophy we call materialism while the workings of the parasympathetic nervous system are the fundamental basis for the philosophy we call idealism or spirituality. When the sympathetic nervous system is in ascendancy we tend to feel materialistic. We become more involved with body than with mind. When the parasympathetic nervous system is stronger we feel spiritual. Our mind becomes clearer but we lose contact with our body.

The practice of zazen brings the two nervous systems into balance, allowing each one to function at equal strength. When this occurs there is what Master Dogen called “dropping off body and mind.”

We will return to this idea again and again throughout the commentary, and I hope it will become clearer as we go along. For now we can just note that if we were to use our contemporary terminology, Nagarjuna appears to me to be saying here that until the autonomic nervous becomes balanced, it is impossible for the real universe to become clear. ---

Interview With David Chadwick

2011-09-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday David Chadwick, the author of the books Thank You and Ok!: An American Zen Failure in Japan and Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki was in Akron, Ohio and we hung out. I video recorded some of our conversation and here it is as my first ever video blog.

If you can't see that, go to this link:

http://youtu.be/fpII6K60408

David also put together a great book of anecdotes about Shunryu Suzuki called Zen Is Right Here: Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki, Author of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" and he maintains a very cool and incredibly extensive website at cuke.com

And one more thing! This morning Patricia Snodgrass sent me a link to this great review of my latest book Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between on facingnorth.net. Thanks Patricia!

The Dharma of George Carlin

2011-09-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

The other day this video popped up on my Facebook page:

Those of you who aren't seeing that link, click here or type http://youtu.be/R37zkizucPU into your browsers. The clip came courtesy of Waylon Lewis who posted it as part of this article in his online journal Elephant.

Lewis drew the connection between what Louis C.K. says in this clip and the idea of having a teacher in Buddhism. I thought it was a brilliant and very apt connection. What Louis C.K. says he learned from George Carlin reminds me a lot of what I learned from my teachers Tim McCarthy and Gudo Nishijima. Louis C.K. did not set out to remake himself in the image of George Carlin. He didn't copy Carlin's offstage behavior. He didn't tell jokes that Carlin made up. He didn't set himself up as the new George Carlin.

And yet he learned the deeper truth embedded in Carlin's work and he learned how to make that truth his own. He learned how to express George Carlin's approach to comedy in his own way. If Carlin had had a lineage to pass on, he would have been right in passing it on to Louis C.K.

As Shunryu Suzuki said in 1962:

"If you want to meditate you must have (the) instruction of (the) right teacher, especially when you want to meditate at home. It will take at least six months before you get your own right posture. Everyone has their own right posture but without instructions you cannot find it. For it to be your true posture, there must be (the) spirit which is called (the) Essence of Mind. Without spirit it cannot be your own. So we say, 'When you become yourself then Zen becomes Zen.'"

What's Tassajara Like?

2011-09-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

People wanted to know what Tassajara was like. That's an easy one so I'll tackle that now.

For me, this time, Tassajara was mostly like chopping vegetables and washing dishes. I was invited down by Greg Fain who is the tanto (practice leader) of the place and a good friend of mine. Each summer guest season the tanto and various other staff members can invite people down on a work exchange basis. These folks come to Tassajara and get to enjoy the place for a few days in exchange for doing some kind of work. One guy was a masseuse and gave free massages to residents, one guy was an accupuncturist. I was invited down to give some talks to the students.

The first time this happened was last year. But last year I decided that it was kind of boring just to lounge around for a few days and then give some talks. So I asked Greg if I could enroll as a Tassajara student for a month and give my lectures during that time. He said OK, so that's what I did. This year I did the same thing, but for just three weeks instead of four. I figured I needed a bit more time at home to get ready for my upcoming European tour.

Last year I got assigned to the dining room crew wherein I was basically a waiter most of the time. This year I was on kitchen crew where I mostly chopped and washed (see above).

How Tassajara works is like this. During the Fall/Winter and Winter/Spring its a full-time Zen monastery. Only those enrolled as monastic students are allowed in. They follow a strict monastic schedule, rising at 3:40 AM, sitting lots of zazen, working to keep the monastery running, and studying the classic Buddhist texts.

In the Summer, the place is open to the public as a hot springs based resort. Tassajara was operated as a resort from sometime in the late 19th century until the late 1960s when it was bought by the San Francisco Zen Center. The Zen Center is now funded in a large part by the money brought in during Tassajara's summer guest season.

The costs of running Tassajara are kept down by staffing the place entirely with unpaid Zen students. These students can earn credit to attend the Fall or Spring practice periods free of charge by working as resort staff. There are also other benefits. The students eat great food (albeit not always as great as the guests), get free room and board, and get to experience most of what Tassajara offers its guests.

Students also adhere to a modified version of the practice period schedule. They're woken up at 5:20 AM to sit an hour of zazen and attend a service. There are two other services during the day and a 40 minute period of zazen in the evening. In between they work at various jobs to keep the resort running. They may make beds, clean rooms, fix the gardens, or, like me, prepare the food, among other jobs.

There is no Internet access in Tassajara. Your cell phones won't work. There is one communal telephone, but this is shared with the guests. There's another phone in the porch behind the office that students can use in the evenings. But you risk your call being heard by everyone else hanging around out behind the office playing board games or reading.

Most students have a room to themselves. The rooms are small, but mostly nice. You're almost always going to have a few rodent friends in your room. But Tassajara is deep, deep in the wilderness. You soon learn that you're in their world, not the other way around. It's not so bad as long as you don't leave lots of food laying around your place.

Students are required to follow Tassajara's monastic rules. These are not nearly as strict as the Southeast Asian vinaya rules for monks or even the kind of rules one must follow during training at a Japanese monastery. But there are rules. You're supposed to keep silence during the hours after evening service and before breakfast. You must attend zazen and services. And you can't have sex unless you either enter Tassajara as a couple or both members of the couple have been there at least six months. They don't want their monastery being used as a place to hook-up.

My days were usually spent in the kitchen. The kitchen is run according to the model provided by Dogen in his Instructions to the Cook (Tenzo Kyokyun). Work is done in silence except for functional speech. Each day near the start of work a portion of the Instructions to the Cook is chanted by all members of the kitchen staff in unison. Then the tenzo (head of the kitchen) gives a short talk about the passage and what it means to him or her.

In reality the work isn't done in complete silence. There's always a bit of chatting. But not much. This is a great relief actually. You don't feel the need to constantly come up with things to say. Awkward silences are no longer awkward. It's much easier to pay attention to the work at hand.

If you want to socialize there' always ample opportunity. The work schedule is very humane and you always end up with free time during the day. It's really not that much different from working a secular job in some respects except that the day is much more structured than most people structure their own working days. It's a lot like my days at home actually. Except with less mindless viewing of stupid YouTube clips about cute animals.

I learned to bake cookies. The last time I baked cookies at home for myself it was a catastrophe. But I baked several batches of delicious cookies at Tassajara without burning any of them. The cooks are generally amateurs. This surprised me because I'd always assumed that they were pros. But normally the chief cooks on any given day are pretty new to the job. But there are enough experienced people around to keep things from going terribly wrong.

The main inhabitants of Tassajara, though, are blue jays and squirrels. There are always far more of them than people. The jays are extremely clever and can dive bomb food right out of your hand if you're not careful. The squirrels know they're cute and work that to their advantage. Many of them walk right through the enclosed student dining area and sit there munching on whatever gets dropped on the dirt floor. Mice and rats are a bit more cautious, not having the cute factor to work with.

In addition to my two lectures, I led two services. One was a memorial to the people killed in the shooting incident in Akron last month. I also led evening zazen once. I had to wear robes for that stuff.

I attended dharma talks by several of SFZC's priests. One of those, by Norman Fischer, was about the Garrison Institute's Buddhist conference earlier this year. I found Reb Anderson's talk a bit confusing. It was something about his taking a vow to study delusion. But I never quite got what he meant by that. Linda Ruth Cutts played us a song about the Zen Hokey Pokey.

Loads more happened but that was all internal. Hope that explains things a bit.

Back to Civilization

2011-08-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Tassajara. That's a photo of the full moon over the Tassajara valley. Did you miss me?

Man. A lot went on while I was away. Jani Lane died. I didn't see that one coming. I never knew Jani. But I was pals with Steve, who is also mentioned in the article I linked to, all through high school. I didn't realize Jani was also from Akron. I can't say I was ever the world's biggest Warrant fan. But among the LA hair metal bands of the time, they were far better than most. They could actually write songs that were about something, as well as dumber-than-dumb rockers like Cherry Pie. I actually really like that song and always have. "Think about baseball, swing all night!" Genius, I tell ya!

A bit closer to home for me, Tim LaFollette died last Tuesday. Tim was a close friend of my friend Catie Braly. I only met Tim once. But I heard a lot about him from Catie. Tim wrote the theme song to Dan Savage's Savage Love podcast. The last 5 minutes of the latest episode are a tribute by Dan Savage to Tim as well as one of Tim's best songs, "Sad State of Affairs." Catie sings on most of Tim's stuff that he did with their band The Popovers. Tim had ALS, aka Lou Gehrig's Disease. He was dedicated to raising awareness of the disease. I'm sad he's gone.

The other night I spent some time with my buddy Daigan Gaither of the San Francisco Zen Center. Daigan is a Zen monk and also one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters are officially heretics according to the Holy Roman Catholic Church! Way to go, Daigan!

Daigan noted that my work is something people either really love or really hate. That seems to be true. And I'm glad of that. If I only inspired indifference I wouldn't be doing my job.

What can I tell you about Tassajara? I did three weeks there as a member of the kitchen crew. I chopped loads of vegetables, baked tons of cookies, and washed more dishes than I ever thought there were on Earth. I'd been invited down by Greg Fain, the practice leader, to give some talks. But, like last year, I thought it was boring just to go down there for three or four days, lounge around the hot springs baths, do a couple talks and leave. So I enrolled as a rank-and-file student. That's loads more fun and a lot more interesting and informative.

My first talk was called "Was Dogen Really Dogen?" I tried to address the issues raised by Carl Bielefeld and others recently concerning certain parts of the accepted biography of Dogen. Much of what we think we know about the man turns out to be dubious. It's doubtful, for example, that he wrote his masterwork on Zazen, Fukan Zazengi (Recommending Zazen for All People), in 1227 when when he first arrived back from China as a youngster of 27. More likely he wrote it about five years later and then extensively revised it in the 1240s, when he was an old man in his forties. Also, the stories of his wanderings in China looking for a true master are probably highly exaggerated by the contemporary Soto organization. Dogen himself never really claimed to have done a whole lot of traveling on the continent.

I said that I wonder if the matter of who our teachers "really are" is actually very important. Who one "really is" is a kind of fiction we create about ourselves and about others.

My second talk was about Dogen's views regarding monkhood. In a few of his later works, Dogen seems to directly contradict what he said in Fukan Zazengi about everyone being able to practice zazen and reach enlightenment. He says that only one who has "left home" (出家, shukke, pronounced shoe-kay）can ever hope to truly understand Buddhism.

In today's Japanese style Buddhism, what it means to "leave home" is a bit vague. Nishijima Roshi's definition is even more vague. In the old days, a "home leaver" really left secular society. He or she couldn't hold down a job, get married, handle money and so on. These days the Japanese Soto-shu and other such organizations permit "home leavers" to do all of those things and more. In America and Europe the rules have become even looser.

I once asked Nishijima Roshi, "Am I a monk?" He said, "Yes. You are a monk." In his eyes anyone who took the precepts automatically became a monk. My friend Konin spoke up during the talk. She said that she believed a monk was anyone who was committed to helping maintain whatever it is that supports people to do the practice. An interesting definition.

I've never lived in a monastery except for a few short stints at Tassajara. I did a month last year, three weeks this year, plus a few other odd days and weeks over the previous years. Nishijima Roshi never kept a temple or monastery. Neither did my first teacher. So the monastic life is still somewhat mysterious to me. What does it mean? What value does it have to contemporary society?

I'll try and get the recordings of these talks to John to put up on the podcast soon.

OK. I gotta go.

See ya later, skaters!

I Am So Over This Buddhism Shit!

2011-08-26T21:08:00.000-07:00

Brad is at Tassajara Zen Monastery where there's no Internet access. Here is one last oldie but goodie written for SuicideGirls to tide you over till he gets back.

So I’m sitting cross-legged in the meditation hall at the San Francisco Zen Center a couple days ago. Incense wafts through the air, bells are rung, ancient chants are intoned, and then profound silence descends. The assembled monks embark on their meditative journeys to the centers of their minds. All at once a thought bubbles up to the surface of my consciousness, like an arrow piercing the cold emptiness of the pre-dawn air.

I am soooo over this shit.

God how I fucking hate it. After 25 years of doing this stupid crap, stick a fork in me I am done. When I was a youngster the mere idea of sitting in a temple with a group of dedicated monks all pursuing the sacred Dharma gave me an iron-hard boner you could have sliced pound cake with. How I longed for that serenity, that peace. How I fantasized of ascending to the heights of Supreme, Unsurpassed, Perfect Enlightenment. How I dreamed of the day I might be in the very spot I’m in right now, living the life of a wandering monk, flitting here and there from temple to temple absorbing the words of the wise and dispensing my own wisdom to those new to the Way, spending my days deepening my practice.

But god-dammit I’d rather be at Amoeba Records right now. It's just up Haight Street. I could be there in 20 minutes. I think that new Om record must be out by now, the one they recorded live in Jerusalem. Maybe even that new Robyn Hitchcock boxed set. But noooooo. I not only signed up for this shit, I signed up to do a five-day long zazen intensive at the Berkeley Zen Center right afterwards, followed immediately by two weeks cloistered at Tassajara monastery deep in the mountains of Carmel Valley - where there are no record stores at all. Fuck. What in God's name was I thinking?

One of the greatest things about Zen practice is that it's incredibly portable. You don't need anything special. You don't need a temple or monastery. You don't need to memorize any chants or read any books. You don't need a congregation. Zen goes anywhere you go. You can do your sitting on a rolled up towel in your dorm room, which is how I started.

But human beings like to do things together. We're social creatures. And so a monastic tradition also developed within Buddhism. A lotta folks think that if you're not hip to the monastery thang you ain't no Buddhist. They're wrong. Shakyamuni himself did not come to his understanding as a member of any religious order, and there is a laundry list as long as your arm of other great teachers who either shunned monastic life, or came to monastic life after establishing the Way on their own, or who did a bit of the monastic stuff when it was necessary but largely stayed away from it. The non-monastic tradition in Buddhism is just as vital as the monastic one.

But the pull towards making Buddhism a social thing, and only a social thing, is strong. In America, we seem dead set on turning Buddhism into a string of socially agreed upon cliches and buzzwords.

A couple weeks ago or so I put a post up on my blog in which I moaned about some of the buzzwords and neo-traditions that have become au currant among American Buddhists these days. One was that dependable puppy dog of a word, "mindfulness." Christ I hate that word. The word seems to indicate some vague state of thinking hard about what you're doing. And I know we're all taught that we should think about what we're doing. But that's not the Buddhist approach. Do what you're doing. When thinking becomes a distraction, stop thinking and get back to doing. I'm also sick to death of hearing hipster Buddha dudes use the word "skillful" to describe things they like and "unskillful" to describe things they don't. It's a total misuse of the old Buddhist idea of upaya, or "skillful means," by which ancient Buddhist teachers are said to have taught in unorthodox ways. These days it just means whatever's under discussion didn't rub the guy who called it "skillful" the wrong way. I'm also fed up with the concept of the "dharma talk," which has come to mean something like, "guys in funny robes using buzzwords like 'mindfulness' and 'skillful' to lull people who think of themselves as 'spiritually minded' to sleep." I'm tired of watching entire audiences nod out like opium addicts while smiling knowingly whenever a favorite word or phrase floats through the haze.

Whatever. Anyway, after I said this stuff a whole buncha folks got really mad about it. Fine. Be as mad as you want. I, myself, am not the least bit angry about this. I was just fed up with it and continue to be fed up with it.

Back when I was first in punk rock, the thing that irked me the most, and finally drove me out of punk rock altogether, was the fact that the philosophy we espoused was all about questioning things. And yet you were not allowed to question punk rock itself. It was great to question Reagan and nuclear proliferation and the cops and school. But if you started asking things like, why do we all have to wear leather jackets, or why can't we have vocal harmonies in some of the songs, or why can't I grow my hair long if I want, that was taboo.

American Buddhism as it stands today is pretty much the same way. Buddhism isn't that way. But the stuff that lotsa people call "Buddhism" is. It's a subtle distinction, I know. But an important one.

So when I started calling bullshit on the idea of mindfulness, and skillfulness and "dharma talks," the reaction was almost identical to what used to happen when I'd go onstage at hardcore shows in the early 80s with long hair and bell-bottoms. You can't do that! We can challenge everything in the world, but don't you dare challenge us!

If Buddhism can’t be challenged it isn’t Buddhism anymore.

We're all looking for a place to settle. We want stability. We want something dependable. Buddhism is all about addressing that very issue. It aims for the ultimate stable resting place. But Buddhism takes things in a very different direction from our habitual way of dealing with our longing for stability. Religions and subculture movements like punkrock want to reduce things to formulas. Believe that Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God and you're all right. But the words "Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God" mean something absolutely different to each individual who uses them. Words such as “mindfulness” and the like take on all kinds of different meanings when they reach the mass culture. And when they stop meaning anything useful it’s time to retire them.

This is hard for lots of folks to get a grip on. They want Buddhism to be like a bumper sticker, “Buddha said it, I believe it and that settles it.” But that’s not the Buddhist way.

At any rate I’m totally over all that stuff big time. And yet, by the time you read this I’ll be finishing up one retreat and heading off to another — being all “mindful” and listening to skillfully delivered Dharma talks.

Sometimes even when you’re over stuff you still gotta do it anyway. Sometimes you gotta do it especially when you’re over it.

Buddhism and Violence

2011-08-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

Brad is at Tassajara Zen Monastery where there's no Internet access. Here is an oldie but goodie written for SuicideGirls to tide you over till he gets back.

While I was in Phoenix, a friend turned me on to an article called “Spaces in the Sky” written by Stephen Batchelor in response to the events of September 11, 2001. It originally appeared in the Winter 2001 issue of Tricycle magazine and is now on-line at Batchelor’s website. My friend recalled the article as stating that our right to practice Buddhism is underwritten by violence. That’s not what the article says exactly, but it’s easy to see how he could have remembered it that way. What Batchelor actually says is, “Our freedoms and privileges in a liberal democracy are ultimately guaranteed by the willingness of the state to use violence to protect them.” Later he asks, “Is an open society that tolerates dissent even possible without its being underwritten by violence?”

Batchelor points out that the Buddhist dictum in the Dharmapada that, “Hatred will not cease by hatred but only by love alone” is often used by Buddhists to justify a complacent attitude when their freedom to practice was threatened. Batchelor gives examples of cases where Buddhists have allowed themselves to be massacred in order to uphold their commitment to non-violence. He also points out that Tibet accepted military protection from China hoping they would be allowed to continue practicing their faith without having to protect it militarily themselves. This strategy backfired big time.

Whether Batchelor actually said it or not, the idea that our freedom to practice Buddhism is underwritten by violence is an important one. It's worth looking at closely especially for practitioners in the United States today. In my travels around the country I’ve noticed that most American Buddhists are strongly opposed to President Bush and his military policies. This opposition seems to stem from their notion that, as Buddhists, we must stand opposed to all forms of violence. But I wonder if it’s realistic for Buddhists to be opposed to all forms of violence in the way that most Buddhists in the US conceive of that notion.

Yesterday I got to talk to the members of the band Millions of Dead Cops, a group that the band I was in, Zero Defex, opened up for numerous times in 1982-83. Back then the subject of anarchism used to come up a lot in our discussions of punk philosophy. The idea of anarchy sounded very cool. But, as much as we hated the cops, all of us knew the truth. Our ability to walk down the streets of Akron, Ohio in 1982 in our green Mohawks and leather jackets was largely underwritten by the threat of violence. The many rednecks in the area who would likely have massacred us gleefully if not for fear of reprisal by the police. The cops were there to protect our freedom of expression. Were it not for them, the less forward thinking elements of the community might not have been so tolerant of the way we flaunted their conventions. We found this out in a very concrete way when we played a show in a rural town in Southern Ohio and had to be saved by the cops from an angry mob of bearded bikers who didn’t care for the way we looked or the music we played.

In much the same way in the world at large today the freedom we have in Western countries to practice Buddhism is guaranteed to a large extent by the fact that we are protected by the biggest and scariest military force the world has ever known. There are certainly plenty of folks out there who would like to see us stop practicing whatever beliefs we have and be forced to adopt theirs or die.

The world is a sandbox in back of an elementary school. The exact same dynamics that play out in the playground play out in the world of politics and nations.

It is true that Buddhism seeks to end the need for the use of violence. However, we can’t jump to the conclusion that if we only just all disarmed right now everybody would be cool. The problem is to understand why we still need violence to underwrite freedom.

We won’t stop violence by dressing up in paisley frocks and sticking daisies in the barrels of AK-47s. Such action is still motivated by ego. It is based on the idea that I, Mr. Buddhist Pacifist, am better than you, you nasty Republican warmonger. The very same force that makes violence an unavoidable part of human life is the one that tries, through a different kind of violence, to overcome violence. This is really what Buddha meant by saying that hatred is not overcome by hatred. We need to find a way to completely step out of our habitual modes of reaction in order to find the real solution to our very pressing problems.

The only way to do this is to truly understand who we are and to allow that understanding to spread gradually throughout the world. As Buddhists it may not be necessary for we, ourselves, to go out and participate in the violence perpetrated to protect our right to practice — though there is certainly nothing at all wrong with being a practicing Buddhist and member of the military. But it also does not benefit our practice to stand in the way of the necessary steps being taken to uphold our right to practice.

War is bad. I’m going to write that again just so no one mistakenly thinks I believe otherwise. War is bad. War is very, very bad.

It’s a tragedy when non-combatants are injured and killed by war. It’s also a tragedy when combatants are injured and killed by war. I want war to end just as passionately as anyone else. But unrealistic solutions only serve to delay the real solution to the problem. This is an urgent problem, one that requires serious attention. What I see in the pacifist movement more often than not these days, I’m afraid, is a lack of serious commitment to the real ending of war.

Batchelor states that, “One can imagine this verse (about hate only being overcome by love) being intoned by Indian Buddhist monks while their monasteries burned, just as now devout e-mail messages are dispatched to the White House urging restraint and compassion. And just as its sentiments were ineffective in turning back the tide of Muslim aggression in India, so they may be equally ineffective in halting the course of violent retaliation against latter-day Islamic terrorism.”

Right on, brother.

The solution to the problem of violence is complex and I’m not even going to try to outline some course of action right here on Labor Day on Suicide Girls. But I think it’s vital that we understand the way the threat of violence, as well as real violence itself, makes it possible for us to practice. Nuff said, for now.

Why Can't We Accept Good Spiritual Advice Unless It Comes From Superman?

2011-08-17T16:30:00.000-07:00

Brad is at Tassajara Zen Monastery where there's no Internet access. Here is an oldie but goodie written for SuicideGirls to tide you over till he gets back.

My new book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate is out now.

I want to talk a little about the book. Not just to promote it (though I won’t deny I’m doing that), but because I wrote it to address a topic I think is really important. And that is, why we can’t seem to accept good spiritual advice unless it comes from Superman. I already ranted in my last column about how Buddhism isn’t spirituality. But here I’m using the word “spiritual” just to refer to that area of life that addresses the deep questions about the nature of things. It’s convenient shorthand. But everything I said last time still stands.

ANYWAY, there’s a long-standing notion that runs through a wide variety of religious traditions that people won’t listen to good spiritual advice unless the source of that advice possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men (and women, of course, but I’m quoting the intro to the old Superman TV show, which was very sexist). Thus it is not enough that Jesus said to love your enemies and advised that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. In order for anyone to accept that good stuff, the folks who spread his message thought we also needed to believe that Jesus had magic powers. I mean, why should we bother treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves unless the guy who said we should could change water into wine? D’uh.

This line of thinking runs through all the world’s great and not-so-great spiritual traditions. Buddhists are not any more immune to it than anybody else. There are hordes of stories of Buddha’s miracles and even of his virgin birth. The only real difference with Buddhists is that, by and large, they don’t tend to give a whole lot of importance to whether or not you believe those stories. In fact several major Buddhist lineages discount them entirely. But that doesn’t mean a lot of other Buddhists don’t believe them or even that for plenty of Buddhists those stories aren’t crucial.

The notion that for a spiritual teacher to be believed he or she must appear to be superhuman still carries a lot of weight even today. Of course, nowadays we’re less likely to believe our contemporary spiritual teachers can really do magic tricks -- though lots of people still fall for the sleight of hand of Eastern fakirs and Western faith healers. Sophisticated, worldly urban types tend to expect their miracles to be a bit more subtle than walking on water or turning into fire-spitting whirly-gigs as the Buddha is reported to have done. But we still expect miracles.

Sometimes we like our guys to have been great ancient teachers reincarnated or possess psychic abilities and beatific vision. And even when we’re not after those sorts of blatant conjuring acts we still look for people who conform to our image of spiritual purity. Those who are spiritually pure shouldn’t be like ordinary people. They need to be perpetually serene and unaffected, liberated from bodily desires and distress. When we find out that they’re people just like the rest of us we’re liable to rebel and turn upon them viciously. The mechanism by which this happens in Zen is well documented in books like Shoes Outside the Door and The Great Failure Neither Richard Baker, subject of Shoes Outside the Door nor Dainin Karagiri, the subject of The Great Failure, ever claimed to be spiritual Supermen, but that didn’t stop certain of their followers from reacting with anger, distress and even grief when it was revealed they were not.

Of course someone who advocates a meditative practice ought to show signs of that meditative practice having had some good effects on their own lives. That’s perfectly reasonable to expect. What’s not perfectly reasonable to expect is that those good effects should manifest in precisely the manner we imagine they ought to. We can never know what these people would have been like if they hadn’t done their practice. Furthermore it’s not how meditative practice has affected your teacher that’s important. It’s only how meditative practice affects you that matters. And you are the only one who will ever see the full extent of that.

ANYWAY, the reason I wrote Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate was, in part, to try and kill the notion of the spiritual Superman for good and all. The only way I felt I could do that effectively was to assassinate a specific Eastern spiritual teacher. Since I come from a tradition that believes you don’t find the really important truths by looking outward but by looking inward, it wasn’t good enough for me to do what the authors of the books I mentioned above did and pick out someone else as my target. The teacher whose reputation I was to trash had to be me. Admittedly, I’m not a really good example because so few people actually believe that I am any kind of Great Enlightened Being. Those few that do are mostly a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Still, since I’ve started becoming more popular I’ve seen people react to me in ways that are a little scary. I’ve only been recognized on the street by random strangers a couple of times. But these days when I walk into a meditation center where they know my work, people’s eyes light up in a freaky way and some even seem to cower when I try to speak to them. To these folks I am no ordinary person. I find that kind of reaction difficult to deal with. Some people are starting to make react to me in ways that only make sense if they have begun to project something ethereal upon the image they carry of me in their minds. They expect things of me that they would never expect of each other. And that’s unfair.

I didn’t really want to write this book. It’s hard work exposing your worst side to public scorn and ridicule. This book was physically painful to write. I had at least half dozen other ideas for a third book that would have been a breeze to write and would have been more commercially bankable. But this book screamed at me to get it done until I had no choice but to obey.

There was something very deep that could only be got to by digging around in my own guts. In doing so I discovered that even the tawdriest portions of my life are not all ugliness and horror. In fact, much to my surprise I found very little of that. There’s a kind of beauty to the truth that transcends whether or not you find that truth to be pleasant or objectionable. Plus there’s some jokes in the book too.

I wanted to write a book that told the truth about teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions. Because there are still a lot of illusions out there about those of us in this game. The public has been conditioned by the media to believe that teachers in Eastern traditions aren’t like our garden-variety preachers, priests, imams and rabbis. Yogis, Gurus and Zen Masters, we’re told, have this special something called “Enlightenment” that makes them transcend the world of ordinary humans. You can make very good money exploiting that twaddle. There’s even one so-called “Roshi” (i.e. Zen Master) who sells gullible rich people five days in his godlike presence for $5,000 on the grounds that by being in proximity to him they just might get some of this Enlightenment thing for themselves. It won’t happen, so you might as well give the money to me instead!

But just because no spiritual teacher is Superman doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot through the practice of meditation. I happen to believe zazen is the only way humanity has to get out of the mess it’s in. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t bother shouting about it.

In this media saturated age where every person’s sleeziest action is captured on digital video and put up on YouTube for all to see two hours later, there is nowhere left for spiritual Supermen to hide the pulleys and wires that enable them to do their magic tricks. It has become urgent that we kill the idea of the spiritual Superman and start looking at how we can accept good spiritual advice even from people who burp and fart and -- oh my god! -- fuck just like we do. If we can’t do that there won’t be any way we can accept good spiritual advice from anybody.

Life is Ugly So Why Not Kill Yourself*

2011-08-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

Brad is at Tassajara Zen Monastery where there's no Internet access. Here is an oldie but goodie written for SuicideGirls to tide you over till he gets back.

Often in my writing for SuicideGirls I’ve talked about girls, but I haven’t talked a lot about suicide. Last week a friend of mine attempted it, unsuccessfully thank you Jesus. 25 years ago another friend managed to do it successfully and I’m still bummed about that. When I lived in Chicago my band used to play at a place called Batteries, which was booked by Jim Ellison of the band Material Issue. I was pretty torn up when I found out he’d killed himself in 1996. They played their song Valerie Loves Me at a club I went to this week, which got me thinking even harder about suicide and its consequences. I’ve known a couple people, including an uncle and a co-worker, who managed to commit slow suicide by drinking themselves to death. And I, myself, have come pretty close to doing the deed too.

We used to get into these long philosophical debates around the kitchen table of the punk house near Akron City Hospital where nearly everyone on the scene seemed to hang out 24/7. In one debate it seemed like almost everyone in the room agreed that suicide was a perfectly viable option and that it was up to the individual alone to decide whether to do it or not. I’m not sure I was the only one who disagreed. But I was certainly in the minority. I imagine a lot of “alternative” type people feel somewhat the same way as my friends did, that suicide is an acceptable option.

Intellectually, it’s easy to come up with a convincing argument that suicide is nobody’s business but that of the person who kills herself or himself. But in practical, real world terms this is never the case. Suicide is devastating to everyone whose lives a person touches. No matter how much of a loner you are, there are people who care about you and it’s never easy to deal with someone you care about killing themselves. In the case of my friend Iggy who hung himself in 1983, he seems to have been deliberately trying to hurt his girlfriend who’d recently dumped him. But she dumped him because it was the only way she could think of to make him deal with his alcoholism and general destructiveness. I don’t blame her. I would’ve done the same thing. What he did was really nasty and mean. And I don’t think it really solved his problems.

Most religions forbid suicide and imagine horrible punishments awaiting in the next world for those who take their own lives. If you dug through the Buddhist literature I’m sure you could find some variation on this. There must be a sutra or vinaya text somewhere saying what kind of future incarnation awaits those who commit suicide. But I don’t know about it since I’m a pretty lousy Buddhist scholar. This, in itself says something, though. Because even if such a text exists it’s not greatly emphasized. There are a couple scholarly articles on the Internet about the matter. Here’s one. Here’s another. And here’s one more.

Everyone knows about the
Vietnamese Buddhists who set fire to themselves to protest the Viet Nam War. For a while there that seemed like one of the most enduring images the general public in the West had of Buddhism. People on this side of the planet had already been taught by their early scholars that Buddhism was a Nihilistic religion filled with talk of suffering and emptiness. So it probably came as no great surprise to hear about Buddhists offing themselves. Buddhism isn’t nihilistic, though. And I don’t think those guys did anyone very much good by going up in flames.

In any case, I’m not terribly concerned with scholarly research or mass opinions. I scanned through those articles I linked to, but I really didn’t read them in depth. It’s interesting to know the history, but not really necessary. Buddhism, as far as I’m concerned, is more about our own experiences than about received wisdom from others. My own experience tells me that suicide is not really a viable option. It ultimately cannot possibly solve the problems it’s intended to solve and it causes a whole lot of unnecessary suffering and grief.

People kill themselves to put an end to their suffering. Ian Curtis of Joy Division did it to end his suffering over his marriage and finances. Pete Ham killed himself because he was suffering over the fate of his band Badfinger, the world’s greatest power pop band. Kurt Cobain killed himself to end his suffering from all those stomach-aches. Of course these are all over-simplifications. But it’s clear that all of these people, as well as anyone else who has ever taken their own lives, did so because they saw it as a way out of suffering. It’s certainly not something you do just for the hell of it.

But the idea that committing suicide will end your suffering comes from the belief that you and the world in which you live are two different things. You believe that you can leave this world and thereby leave suffering behind. But my own sense after years of zazen practice is that this is not true. I’ve spent a long time watching the boundary line between what I call “me” and what I call the rest of the world blur and fade. I’m no longer certain at all where the dividing line is. I’m beginning to even suspect that that guy Buddha may have been right when he said it doesn’t exist at all. In fact I’ve had a few times when this apparently nonsensical notion has come up and bit me on the ass in ways I cannot possibly deny.

So what I’m saying here goes a little further than just the old “the show must go on” type thing where people say you have a responsibility to your friends and family not to go off and shoot your brains out in the greenhouse. You also have a responsibility to yourself and even to the universe as a whole not to do that. Even if committing suicide solves the immediate problem by ending a poor relationship or making it so your stomach doesn’t hurt anymore, the suffering you thought was yours alone spreads out like a wave to those parts of the universe you’ve been taught to think of as separate from you. It’s impossible for me to believe that even the person who dies does not, in some way, continue to suffer just as greatly after suicide as before. I no longer believe it’s possible to leave this world. And that’s as far as I want to speculate about that. Anything I might say about the mechanism involved in how this happens would just be a load of stinky brain farts. Still, I have a very deep and unshakable feeling that this is true.

Anyway, please forgive the grimness of this little piece. What my friend did last week got me thinking hard about the matter. So SuicideGirls readers, don’t kill yourselves! Life is beautiful, so why not eat health foods instead?*

*This title of this article comes from a punk rock compilation album put out around 1979-80 by New Underground Records. The Descendents and Red Cross are featured. I’d love to find a copy of this or its sequel Life Is Beautiful So Why Not Eat Health Foods.

Shooting in Akron

2011-08-08T09:40:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning I'll be driving to Tassajara Zen Monastery in Carmel Valley, California. There is no Internet in Tassajara. Cell phone signals do not reach into the valley. There is one telephone that is shared by all of the students and guests. Suffice it to say, it will be difficult to reach me. Postal mail does reach Tassajara. But I doubt anyone who reads this is gonna send me a letter.

While I'm away the guy who moderates the comments section will be putting up a few articles I wrote. These have been published elsewhere, but they haven't been seen for a while.

Also, I put up that "Secure Your Mask" piece on SuicideGirls. So if you want to go look at it again there, you can.

Last night I got word of a mass shooting in Akron. The shooter killed seven people and seriously wounded two others before he was killed by police. The full story is available at this link (click here).

I first heard the story from my friend Miki in Japan. I assumed it must have been some sort of drug-related thing. There are, unfortunately, far too many people doing far too many drugs in Akron, Ohio. About an hour later I got a message from my friend Mark saying that most of the shooter's victims were close relatives of a mutual friend of ours.

Since the police have not released any names yet, I'm not going to do that here. I'll call Mark and my mutual friend L. Back in the early 90s I shared a rundown punkrock house in Akron's North Hill neighborhood. I inherited my room from L after she moved out and into a better place. I used to hang out with her sometimes and drink tea. Every guy I knew back then had a thing for L and so did I. She was beautiful and intelligent and radiated a kind of purity and wonderfulness that I find impossible to describe. But if I think about her I can still feel it even though I haven't seen L in over a decade. She ended up moving in with the leader of a band called Sleazy Jesus and the Splatter Pigs. In spite of his band's name, he was a really great guy. It was a good fit.

I don't know what to make of any of this. It appears that the shooter was the boyfriend of L's sister. That's L's sister's boyfriend, not L's boyfriend who was in the band. I don't want to speculate about why this happened. But one cannot help doing so. In any case I'm not going to put my speculations up on this blog.

I hate it — just absolutely hate and despise it — when people try to make some kind of a "dharma lesson" about every damned thing that happens. I hated it when people did that with David Coady. I'm not going to do that now.

I'm full of grief and anger today. I'll be working on that for the next few weeks. L's boyfriend has thanked their friends for their expressions of support but asked that we respect their privacy. So I'm doing so. I ask anyone reading this who either knows L or feels inclined to try and figure out who she is (seriously, please don't, there's a reason I'm not revealing her name) to do the same. Sometimes people need to be left alone and this is one of those times.

I'll chant a chant for L's family and light some incense at the altar down in Tassajara. What else can I do?

Secure Your Own Mask Before Helping Others

2011-08-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm doing three gigs in Sacramento, California this weekend. As usual, complete listings for my live appearances are at this handy link, which is always on the left side of this blog at the very top of the list of links. Here's where I'll be this weekend:

•August 6 (Sat) 9am - 5pm SACRAMENTO BUDDHIST MEDITATION GROUP Sacramento, CA, All Day Zazen

•August 7 (Sun) 3pm TIME TESTED BOOKS 1114 21st St, Sacramento, CA book reading

•August 7 (Sun) 7pm SACRAMENTO BUDDHIST MEDITATION GROUP Sacramento, CA Talk & Discussion

Y'all be there, OK?

A few people have responded to this blog by comparing me to this or that teacher and saying those guys are much better because they encourage their followers to help others. One reader advised me to get over myself and, “learn to live for others.” It’s good advice, to be sure. But what exactly does it mean?

One of the complaints often lodged against Zen is that it’s a selfish philosophy and practice. Spiritual teachers of other schools are always talking about how we should give to others, help those in need, lend a hand to our brothers and so on. But when you take a look at Zen literature there’s not a whole lot of that. Oh, Dogen Zenji talks a bit about compassion and sometimes you hear the Metta Sutra, the Buddha’s words on kindness, chanted at Zen temples in America. Although elsewhere in the world this chant is more associated with the Theravada school than with Zen.

Zen, on the other hand, tends to seem self-centered. Rather that hearing a lot about how we should be of service to others, the standard canonical texts of Zen appear to focus on what we need to do to improve our own situation and state of mind. They do sometimes make reference to helping others and saving all beings. But these references are almost always a bit abstract. They say we need to help others, but don’t go very deeply into how that might be done. This focus on the self is ironic considering that Zen is often portrayed as a practice aimed at eradicating the self.

But have you ever glanced up randomly when you’re on an airplane ignoring the flight attendants safety instructions? When they tell you how to use those oxygen masks they say that you should first secure your own mask before helping others. There’s a good reason for this. If the plane is losing oxygen you’re going to be too woozy to be of service to anyone else until you first get your own stuff together. This is the way it is in life as well.

It sounds really sweet when someone tells you that you ought to be selflessly serving those less fortunate than you. It’s a beautiful and highly attractive idea. There’s no better way to make yourself seem really holy than to advocate selflessness. Religious leaders have known for centuries that the best way to cultivate a devoted following who’ll gratefully fill up the collection plate is to spread the word that a truly holy person gives to others until it hurts.

It’s always comforting to be told that the source of the world's troubles is out there, in other people, in our surroundings and circumstances and not in ourselves. Much of what passes for religion these days takes as its underlying unstated assumption and starting point that we ourselves are OK. It’s those other people that need fixing, not us. It’s painful when that assumption is challenged. I understand that because it was painful to me when I first came across the supposedly selfish aspects of Zen.

The underlying problem is the same as the problem with the emergency oxygen masks on airplanes. In our usual condition we are far too woozy to be of much service to anyone else. When our own condition is all messed up our attempts to be helpful are more likely to make things worse than to improve them.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t do anything when we see someone is in trouble. We always have to act from the state we’re in at this moment. It’s our duty to do what we can with what we have.

One of the greatest and most useful lessons I’ve learned from Zen practice is how not to help. Zen teachers are often seen as cold. Lots of times in this practice when you go to your teacher in times of distress, instead of being met with warm hugs and reassuring words you’re given the cold shoulder. You're told to take care of the problem yourself. This seems mean, heartless, even cruel.

But as Shakespeare and Nick Lowe noticed sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind (in the right measure). The best way to be truly helpful is often to leave things be. I used to find this all the time when I worked for Tsuburaya Productions. It was often best to allow a bad scheme to fail and then fix it. Jumping into the fray and try to fix things before they broke often was the worst idea. Because then the same thing just kept happening over and over. People learn best from their own mistakes and learn nothing when you fix things for them.

This is not always easy. We want to help. Our self-image is tied up in being a good person and a good person is a helpful person. It damages our ego when we have to let things be instead of jumping in to fix them. Sometimes the hardest thing you can do is to not be helpful. People resent it. They label you as a bad person. Because they don’t want to have to deal with their own shit, they want someone else to deal with it for them. They want Superman to rush in and save the day after they’ve messed things up.

On the other hand it’s important to be of service, to “learn to live for others.” We are not independent objects. We are part of an intimately connected network of sentient and non-sentient beings that stretches all the way to the end of the universe. We never really live just for ourselves, even when we try to do so. To try and live for yourself just causes pain. Not just to others, but to ourselves as well.

The problem is not whether we should live for others or not. The problem is how we should live for others. If our efforts to help end up doing more harm than good, then we aren’t truly living for others any more than the most selfish cad among us lives for himself. We’re just feeding our own egos, establishing a clearer and more fixed self image as a good person.

It’s important to discover how to truly help. And sometimes that means not helping.

WHAT MUSIC DO I LISTEN TO? GLAD YOU ASKED!

2011-08-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

I'm in a train station in Martinez, California waiting for a delayed train to Sacramento. They have WiFi here. So I thought I'd try and answer one of my frequently asked questions, which is, "What music do you listen to these days?" People expect me to rattle off the names of a couple dozen current punkrock acts. But I don't listen to that much punkrock these days.

However, I'm well pleased because I've been discovering a lot of really cool new bands recently. Many of these bands are even current! This is very cool for me because I'd begun to fear that nobody was making music I enjoyed anymore.

I think there must be a name for this genre. Maybe it's "stoner" music? I'm not really sure. Perhaps somebody can tell me.

I don't know a whole lot about any of these bands, unfortunately. And I've never seen any of them live except OM.

Here goes:

ASSEMBLE HEAD IN SUNBURST SOUND
I just discovered these guys a few days ago! I was in a record store in Arcata, CA and their album cover just leapt out at me. Amazing. Much of their stuff is far mellower and more Pink Floyd-like than this example.

****

NEBULA
Another band whose album cover caught my eye. The blurb sited such influences as Blue Cheer and The Stooges. I checked out their videos, liked what I saw and bought the CD.

****

THE BLACK ANGELS
Yet another band whose album covers I liked. Their music did not disappoint. Their new album Phosphene Dreams is their best, if you ask me. Very Revolver-like. Among their three releases, their second album Invitation to See a Ghost is the runt of the litter, but still has some terrific songs. They only know one chord! Hooray!

****

COMETS ON FIRE
Heavy rock that I heard at a record shop in Dallas. Blue Cathedral is the best album if you ask me. Their new one is still amazing, but not quite as great as Blue Cathedral in my view.

****

THE DEAD MEADOW
I heard this playing over the speakers at a record shop in Atlanta a couple years ago and immediately bought it. I know nothing about the band except that I like them a whole bunch.

****

SUN DIAL
These guys are sadly no longer playing. At least as far as I know. They're a British band that I somehow missed out on when they were active in the early to mid 1990s.

****

THE GREEN PAJAMAS
Another defunct band. But this song is so wonderful! And sleazy too!

****

OM
I saw these guys at the Echo Plex in Silver Lake (Los Angeles) a few years ago and I was totally floored. Who needs guitars when you have a bass player and drummer like this? Nobody, that's who!

WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE... I MEAN MY BLOG

2011-07-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

A few days ago a writer for Huffington Post named me as one of twelve Buddhists to follow on Twitter. Ever since that article appeared, people have been adding me like mad. Since I usually post links on Twitter to any new blog post I put up here, I thought I’d take the time to write a little intro to this blog for all those potential new readers.

I started the prototype for what became this blog about ten years ago. At that time I didn’t even know the word “blog.” It was a website that I updated once a week with a new article. Many of those early articles formed the foundation of my first book Hardcore Zen. Sometime later I found out I didn’t need to spend hours and hours writing HTML format, that there were lots of free on-line thingies that would do that for me. And thus this blog in its current form was born.

I try to update it about every three days. Unfortunately I don’t have something profound to say every three days. I know Zen teachers who refuse to give dharma talks more than once a month. They’re smart. Preachers give sermons once a week in general. Also a good idea. Profundity every three days? It ain’t gonna happen.

So sometimes this blog is about something I think is important. Sometimes it’s about Buddhism. Other times it’s about a book I’m reading. Or it’s a link to a video I found. Often it’s a list of upcoming live appearances. People get annoyed by my use of the blog for promotion. But I can’t understand why. If I don’t promote my speaking appearances here, then who’s going to promote them? And where?

I don’t really make money from this blog. I’ve heard that lots of people make tons of cash from writing blogs. I wish I had a clue how that’s done. I have a few ads here. But they generate laughably small revenue. I think I cleared $75 last year from blog ads. I installed a donation button last year and that brings in a bit more. In fact some people have been really surprisingly generous. Since my books don’t generate a huge income, those donations really help.

I’m up in Arcata, California right now to give some talks and lead a day-long zazen retreat. Here’s the link to info about that and here is a link to a list of other upcoming appearances (note the plug). That link, by the way, is always on the left side of this page at the very top of the list of links.

The guy I’m staying with said to me, “Whenever I think of your blog I just think of Whack the Dalai Lama!” He is referring to an article I put up here several years back called Whack the Dalai Lama. It upset a lot of people.

But the reason that article upset people – if you want my analysis – is because they didn’t read anything except the title. The title came from a song by The Dickies. What I wrote in that article was about how I, in fact, did not want to whack the Dalai Lama. I consider Mr. Lama to be a basically decent human being but also to be fairly irrelevant to me in terms of my life as a Buddhist. The article was about fame and celebrity and how that can get in the way of real spiritual practice.

What I’m trying to get at here is that this blog sometimes seems to upset people. No matter how many times I say this people don’t believe it, but I swear to God that 90% of the time this blog upsets people I have no clue why. People assume I am trying to be controversial. But I almost never am. In fact the few times I deliberately attempt to be shocking nobody seems to notice. It’s almost always when I say things that to me seem incredibly obvious that people get upset. Like in the aforementioned Dalai Lama bit. The song I referenced in the title is over a decade old for gosh sakes! (Here are the full lyrics by the way)

Which brings us to the comments section of this blog. In 2009, Tricycle magazine published an article called Dharma Wars. The article talked about the phenomenon of flame wars on various Buddhist blogs. This very blog you’re reading now was singled out for special attention. The writer says, “Warner’s posts often draw hundreds of comments from readers, some of whom throw insults at each other—and at Warner—with abandon.” Then he goes on to completely misconstrue a few things I’ve said about why I think that happens. So it goes.

In any case, enter the comments section of this blog at your own risk. It should start to get a little better, though. Because as of yesterday the comments section is now being moderated. A guy who regularly reads it was complaining of how incredibly awful it had gotten. So I asked him if he wanted to be the moderator. He did and now he is. But he prefers to remain anonymous. I can understand why.

I’ve asked him to only delete comments that are wildly inappropriate or obviously spam. He discovered that my spam filter was actually filtering out real comments. So some of you who were getting deleted by the spam filter will now be heard. But people who just want to post irrelevant nonsense will have those comments deleted. I’m not asking him to delete comments by people who disagree with me, though. So go ahead and dissent all you want.

As for me... my info is all listed in the link under the "Who Wrote This" section to your left. It says, "I'm a Zen monk, writer, bass player and film-maker. I wrote the books Sex, Sin and Zen, Hardcore Zen, Sit Down And Shut Up and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. I received Dharma Transmission from Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who received his transmission from Rempo Niwa Roshi who was the head of the Soto Sect in Japan. I was also a student of Tim McCarthy, who was a student of Kobun Chino Roshi. I enjoy getting your e-mails. But please be aware, if you send me e-mail, I may use it in a blog either here or on Suicide Girls." I write for Suicide Girls too, by the way.

So there you go. There’s your introduction to the blog.

Enjoy.

Lost Time is Not Found Again

2011-07-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

Suicide is stupid.

When I heard that my friend David Coady killed himself, I posted a link to an obituary about him followed by the words, “suicide is stupid.”

I was not trying to say that people who commit suicide are lacking in mental capacity. David Coady was a very smart guy. Maybe too damn smart for his own good. Lots of people who commit suicide are too damn smart for their own good.

I was trying to insult suicide. I was trying to hurt suicide like suicide has hurt me. I could have said, “suicide sucks.” But that didn’t seem to get it. I could have said, “suicide is shit.” But I didn’t think that would be understood. So I said, “suicide is stupid.”

I’m not exactly sure where I first met David Coady. It was probably at the San Francisco Zen Center during one of the times I gave a talk there. But I do clearly remember the first time I really bonded with him. I was walking around Tassajara breaking the rule of not singing by quietly singing the chorus to a Bob Dylan song called Odds And Ends. It’s from his Basement Tapes album. The final line of the chorus is, “lost time will not be found again.”

That line reminded me of the poem that’s carved into all of the hans at Tassajara. A han is a little wooden board that’s struck with a wooden mallet to call people to zazen or other events. On each one is written a translation of the following Chinese poem.

生死事大
無常迅速
光陰可惜
時不待人

Shou ji ji dai
Mu jou jin soku
Kou in oshimu beshi
Toki hitowo matazu
(This Japanese phonetic translation does not follow the Chinese exactly)

Great is the matter of Birth and death
Life slips quickly by
To waste time is a great shame
Time waits for no one

There are different translations on each han at Tassajara. I’ve posted a photo of the han that was nearest to my room when I stayed there last summer. I wrote a piece about this poem last year.

David immediately recognized what I was singing. He told me that he was a great fan of Dylan. He said that before he moved to Tassajara he’d had a massive collection of CDs. The only ones he’d brought with him were a set of bootlegs of rare Dylan recordings, many from the same sessions that produced the Basement Tapes album. He asked if I wanted to copy them. I did. And the copies of those files are still on the computer I’m using to write this.

Later on a fire swept through the valley in which Tassajara is located. A small group of monks stayed behind and saved most of the monastery from burning. Only a couple of structures burned. One of those was David’s cabin. All of his Bob Dylan CDs melted into goo.

Some time later I bought David a copy of a book called Million Dollar Bash. It’s all about the sessions that produced that Dylan album. I gave the book to him the next time I saw him at the Zen Center.

Maybe a year ago David Coady attempted suicide at the San Francisco Zen Center. He failed that time. I can’t remember if I gave him the book before or after that. I also can’t remember if I copied those Dylan songs off my hard drive onto CDs for him. I think I did. My memory is shit. Always has been. As long as I can remember, anyway.

I know I didn’t see David more than a couple times after his suicide attempt. I know that at least one of the times we talked, the subject came up and we swiftly moved on to other topics. It seemed like it was deeply embarrassing to him.

David Coady was a funny guy. He should have gone on the road with a stand-up act. I told him that once and he said people were always telling him that. He said he didn’t feel he had it in him to talk in front of people. But he was naturally funny and always poignantly so. He was from Boston and talked in a really heavy Boston accent.

I’m very sad that he’s gone now.

Suicide is stupid

EUROPE ZEN TOUR 2011: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

2011-07-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

I just put up a brand new page about my current Zen tour. For those of you who aren't seeing that link, the page is:

http://web.me.com/doubtboy/Site/ZenTour2011.html

That link will always be available on the left side of this blog about halfway down.

A couple things. First off, Gerd Wessling who is organizing my retreat in Bielefeld, Germany on Oct 27-30, 2011 wanted me to remind you that there's still lots of spaces left. You can sign up by going to the following page:

http://brad-in-bielefeld.jimdo.com/

There are several other retreats on that page with links to their respective sign up sites. I'll be in Germany, The Netherlands, England, France and Belgium.

You will also notice a lot of these dates are incomplete. That's because I don't have the information. If you are organizing one of these dates and you don't see any specific info on the location or a website to contact etc., that means I don't have that information. How am I even gonna get to your place if I don't know where it is? Please send me the relevant info. Thanks!

TIME

2011-07-19T07:20:00.001-07:00

First off, The Zero Defex will play this Thursday night (July 21, 2011) at the Beachland Tavern 15711 Waterloo Road, Cleveland, Ohio 44110. We're headlining. Before us you'll see Marky Ray and 100,000 Leagues Under My Nutsack. I can't get those MySpace pages to load on my computer. But maybe you can.

Next up, the folks at Dogen Sangha Los Angeles have uploaded yet another video from the interviews they taped with me last year. It's about time:

If you can't see that, go to http://youtu.be/SYRNr8Y-hpA

When I say it's about time, it really is about time. The interviewer asked me to explain my understanding of time, so I did.

What I'm saying in this video is my caveman interpretation of Dogen's 有時 (uji) or "Being Time." Here is Gudo Nishijima's translation and commentary on Uji. Here is Kazuaki Tanahashi's translation. And here is an exhaustive comparison of several different translations of Uji. Phew!

Watching this video for the very first time last night (I never watched it after it was taped), I realize I sound like I'm contradicting myself. First I say that there's no way we can undo what we've done in the past. And then I say that the past may be changeable.

I was trying to squeeze a huge number of concepts into something that could be edited into a short video. I'm not suggesting at the end of the video that it actually is possible to go back and change your past. It's not. This is why you have to act very carefully here and now. Nothing you do in this moment can be undone later on.

At the same time, we assume that the past is a solid unchanging single thing. But I suspect it isn't. And whether it is or it isn't doesn't matter much. In practical real world terms, the past is constantly changing. All we have to refer to when speaking of the past is our memories and our incomplete physical records of events (documents, photos, video tapes, etc.). These documents don't record the past in its entirety. And our impressions gleaned from viewing them are not at all the same as the impressions of the people who were there at the event.

For example, here's a video of Zero Defex playing our song Two Minute Hate at The Dale, a bar in Akron, sometime in early 1983. This isn't the best example. But on parts of the video this was excerpted from, The Dale looks positively huge. This is because it's dark in the club and one tends to assume the camera must be somewhere in the middle of the place. In fact the camera person was backed up against the front wall of the place. She was as far away from the band as she could possibly get. Which means she was about seven feet away from us.

My memories of the place are somewhat different from this video. And yet my memories of the place have now been changed by seeing the video, which I had not seen at all before 2005. So it's hard to say what's real. The actual event is gone. Are my memories correct? Or is the mechanically preserved image correct? It's hard to say. The camera saw a perspective of what happened that I could not see at the time. It's in front of the band, whereas I was over to the extreme right of the screen (I don't appear on camera at all in this clip). The camera was not playing bass at the time either.

Dogen believed that being and time were the same thing. We are not entities who exist within time. We are time itself. This view of what we are is radically different from the view we are used to.

Dogen also believed that all of time is contained in this single moment. The entire past and the entire future are right here.

And yet our experience of time is one of being cut off from all other moments of time and all other places in space except where we are right now.

In conclusion, TIME IS WEIRD. So don't take it for granted that it's exactly the way you think it is.

And that's about as deep as I can get on a hot and sweaty morning in Akron, Ohio.

Mountain of Drugs

2011-07-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

I recently got into a fairly ridiculous debate on Facebook with some people who think that psychedelic drugs can get you to the same place as meditation. I don’t really know why I bothered. Except that people who advocate this position are so passionate about it and it’s really easy to pull their chains. It makes them crazy when someone with meditation experience disagrees. It's like when you bother a fire ant mound.

During the discussion, one of the supporters of drug abuse as a way to gain spiritual insight started in with the time worn cliché that drugs are like taking a helicopter to the top of a mountain rather than climbing it. You get the same breathtaking view as someone who has climbed the mountain. But you get there much quicker and more easily. “You can’t deny it’s exactly the same view,” one guy said. But, in fact, I would unequivocally deny that it’s the same view. It’s not. Not at all.

Metaphors always fall apart if you press them too much. But I like this one because it shows exactly what the problem is when you start saying drugs will do for you the same thing as meditation but faster and without all the muss and fuss.

Let’s say you met a veteran mountaineer with over a quarter century of climbing experience, a person who has written books on mountain climbing and routinely personally instructs others in the art of climbing. And let’s imagine what would happen if you tried to convince this guy that people who take helicopters to the tops of mountains get everything that mountain climbers get and get it a whole lot easier.

The mountain climber would certainly tell you that the breathtaking view a guy who takes a helicopter to the top of a mountain gets is not in any way, shape or form the same view that a person who climbs the mountain herself gets.

To the mountain climber, the guy in the helicopter is just a hyperactive thrill seeker who wants nothing more than to experience a pretty view without putting any effort into it. The helicopter guy thinks the goal of mountain climbing is to be on top of the mountain and that climbing is an inefficient way to accomplish this goal. He just doesn’t get it. At all.

The helicopter guy misses out on the amazing sights there are to see on the way up. He doesn’t know the thrill of mastering the mountain through his own efforts. He doesn’t know the hardships and dangers involved in making the climb. And he’ll never know the awesome wonder of descending the mountain back into familiar territory. All he’s done is given some money to a person who owns a helicopter. He probably couldn’t even find the mountain himself, let alone make it to the top. When there are no helicopters around, the poor guy is helplessly grounded.

If the helicopter guy claims that he has reached the same place as the mountain climber, the mountain climber knows in ways the helicopter guy can’t even fathom that the helicopter guy is a fool.

To a mountain climber, the goal of mountain climbing is not the moment of sitting on top enjoying the view. That’s just one small part of the experience. It may not even be the best part. To a mountain climber, every view, from every point on the mountain is significant and wonderful.

People who think that the pinnacle of the experience is that moment of being right on the tippy-top, don’t understand the experience at all. The poor attention addled things probably never will.

What I am working on in meditation involves every single moment of life. So-called “peak experiences” can be fun. But they no more define what life is about that so-called “mundane experiences.” When you start making such separations, you have already lost the most precious thing in life, the ability to fully immerse yourself in every experience.

No. Taking a helicopter to the top of a mountain is not at all the same thing as climbing it for yourself. To insist that it is proves that you don’t understand the first thing about mountains.

My attitude about drug use and its relationship to spiritual experience has been characterized as intolerant and fundamentalist. One clever-trousers on Twitter said, “Brad Warner's shadows are bigger than Genpo Roshi's. The guy is so blind he probably shouldn't even have a driver’s license.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean. But my attitude has no more to do with fundamentalism or conservativism than our fictional mountain climber’s attitude about rich, hasty pleasure junkies who take joy rides in helicopters. It is unambiguously clear that drugs and meditation cannot take you to the same place simply by the very nature of the experiences. They are not even in the same league of things. The comparison between the two is entirely spurious and unworthy of examination.

People who say these things about drugs and meditation may have tried drugs but most have never really attempted much meditation. Oh maybe they’ve gone to a handful of yoga classes and done shavasana. Or maybe they’ve been to a Vipassana retreat or even rented a cabin at Tassajara one summer. But they don’t have any real depth of experience with meditation to compare to their drug experiences.

I’ve run the mountain metaphor into the ground. So I’ll stop here. I’ll leave it to the people in the comments section to come up with unnecessary and wrong-headed further variations on the metaphor (like talking about the views you can get from helicopters that mountain climbers can't see or some such dumb ass thing -- metaphors can only be stretched so far before they become absurd).

But here is a brilliant song (probably) about drugs by Gene Clark:

The Psychedelic Experience

2011-07-09T06:55:00.000-07:00

First, I got quoted by a Huffington Post writer about Kalachakra, a big feel-good "Buddhist" festival going on right now in Washington DC. Here's the article: http://tinyurl.com/3texsfo.

I just returned from spending four days at Starwood, a pagan festival held in the Wisteria campgrounds in Pomeroy, Ohio. They had wifi there, which surprised me. But I was there to present two workshops and also to gather some data of my own, so I didn't spend much time on the web.

This festival is held by a group called A.C.E., the Association for Consciousness Exploration. Near as I can tell from simply walking around, watching and listening (and not doing any in depth research at all), ACE appears to be a group of older hippie guys who did a lot of their exploration of consciousness back in the sixties and seventies through ingesting large amounts of psychedelic substances. Some seem to have moved on to other things. Some have given up the drugs as their main form of exploration and now just smoke a little weed to get mellow. Others are still pretty deeply committed to so-called "entheogens" as a means of accessing so-called "higher states of consciousness."

Anyone who has read my book Hardcore Zen or, indeed, spent much time reading this blog knows already that I am not a great champion of the use of drugs as a means of spiritual advancement. I don't feel bad about not being a convenient go-to guy for encouragement to pollute the body/mind with toxic substances in order to achieve great awakenings at a cheap price. There are already plenty of people out there who advocate that.

While I was at Starwood, I was getting mightily annoyed by all the people out there who were deluding themselves and others into believing that a cheap dose of acid, 'shrooms, peyote, "molly" or whatever was going to get them to a higher spiritual plane. So I logged on to facebook and I wrote:

Drug users annoy the fuck out of me. Losers.

This received 49 "like" votes and has so far gathered 96 comments, the most recent of which showed up just six hours ago even though the status update appeared around 36 hours ago (if my barely adequate math skills are correct). I have no reason to believe the comments have stopped completely yet.

This is how I felt at midnight after spending several hours around some really energetic, intelligent, creative and fun kids who were loading themselves to the gills on psychoactive substances. Many of these substances appear to have been provided by older folks in the community who believed they were helping these young folks explore the frontiers of human consciousness or some such thing. Again, this is just my "eyeball" observation and is not based on in-depth research into the source of the drugs they were using. It was certainly clear that some of the older folks were very much encouraging this behavior even if they were not directly contributing to it.

These young stoned kids were really nice people, by the way. They went out of their way to generously provide free food for anyone who showed up at their campsite. And their food was way better than the overpriced stuff down at the main cafe on site. So I ate a lot of it.

I found myself becoming extremely fond of these folks. They were definitely a lot more fun to hang around with than just about anyone else at Starwood. They seemed to be asking questions rather than trying to revisit their glory days or wallow in a sea of bad cliches and dull role-playing games.

And yet they were destroying the very things that made them like that by numbing themselves to the real world with dangerous drugs. Moreover the very people who should have known better and should have been guiding them away from that kind of behavior were, instead, encouraging it.

I am not a fan of drugs. Never will be. And that makes some people really mad. I'm guessing these people feel like if they could convert me to their way of thinking it would be a double delicious coup. Getting someone like me to say drugs were The Way would count way more than getting Terrance McKenna to say it for the 30,000th time. But it's not going to happen.

At the same time, I am a huge, huge fan of much of the drug-influenced art, music and writing of the sixties and seventies. While I was at that campsite I sat and read most of the book The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass, later of Be Here Now fame). It's a book about the authors' deeply mistaken reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a guide for the drug taking experience. It is also the inspiration for The Beatles marvelous song Tomorrow Never Knows.

It's a pretty cool book. I even went on-line and ordered a copy for myself. The fact that it's dead wrong doesn't make it any less cool. But, folks, that book is as old as I am. We're both copyrighted the same year! The brave new world Leary and Alpert envisioned would come about in the 21st century (aka now) when everybody tuned in, turned on and dropped out never happened.

Drugs did not make everybody become beautiful and loving and spiritual aware. Instead they led to death and crime and waste. Lots of my friends were bright young consciousness explorers when they were the age these kids I hung out with are now. Some cleaned up, some became waste cases, a few are dead.

It was one thing to believe in 1964 that a brave new tripped out age was about to dawn. It's quite another to still believe that now, having seen what the last 47 years have shown us about where that path leads.

If you want some examples, how about Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Syd Barrett, John Entwistle, Kurt Cobain... Do I really need to get so cliched with this? Come on now.

A number of people on my Facebook page took me to task for what they saw as a violation of "Right Speech." Listen. Right Speech isn't about being meek and mild and only telling people what they want to hear. Right Speech is saying what needs saying when it needs saying. Any speech that supports the use of drugs as a means to really get to know yourself is bullshit. Speech that softens the real hit some people need to get that message is useless.

You can comment all you want, but you won't change my mind about drugs. You will always and forever be wrong if you try to equate true spirituality with frying your brain on chemicals (even if they grow inside cacti and fungi). Put it this way, if you want me to say drugs are cool, you're gonna lose. And what would that make you?

The Difference Between Zen and Therapy?

2011-07-05T08:23:00.001-07:00

I present to you the very first published photo of all four original members of Zero Defex together for the first time since nineteen hundred and (mumbles indistinctly)! Left to right are Mickey X-Nelson, Brad No Sweat, Jimi Imij and Tommy Strange.

Purists may ask where are Johnny Phlegm, Frank N. File and Alan X-Nelson. But the band's first three bass players each lasted a mere couple of weeks, while I was in for the long haul right up till the end. Or at least the first end of the band. So go suck a grape.

This was taken at X-Day 14 down in Southern Ohio where we played last night. I am heading back down to the same campgrounds later today. Tomorrow and Thursday I will lead workshops at Starwood, a big pagan festival down there in the woods at Wisteria campgrounds. I'm pretty sure you can still get a spot there. Click here for details. Cuz I don't really know. The workshops are at 10 am both days.

On the way driving back up to Akron a friend who was riding with me asked that perennial question, "What's the difference between a Zen teacher and a therapist?"

This has come up a number of times since I spoke at Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York where, some (but not me) say I was psychoanalyzed on stage. I've answered in a few really complicated ways. But there in the car I came up with the real answer spontaneously.

A Zen teacher teaches Zen.

The relationship between a Zen teacher and his/her "student" is based on their mutual practice of zazen. If you're not practicing zazen... well, you can ask a Zen teacher whatever you want and either place value on her answers or disregard them. But you won't really understand her answers until you start practicing yourself.

My friend asked if I give people advice about how to live, as a therapist does. I thought hard about the many private interviews I've had with practitioners and I couldn't come up with a single instance where I advised anyone about how to live. Nor can I recall ever being advised how to live by my teachers or any other Zen teacher I've done an interview with. In fact they've all avoided giving such advice even when I clearly and unambiguously asked for it.

I talk to people about their Zen practice, about the things that come up during practice, about how to respond and deal with this stuff. In my case I usually respond by explaining how I've dealt with my practice issues. I don't ever tell people to do it my way because my way is not right for them.

So there you go. The difference between Zen and therapy is Zen.

Starwood, X-Day

2011-07-02T08:21:00.001-07:00

First a couple announcement/corrections.

July 3, 2011 (Sunday) at 11-something p.m. ZERO DEFEX will play at X-Day 14 at the Wisteria Campground near Athens, Ohio

July 6 & 7, 2011 (Wed & Thu) I will be speaking and leading workshops at Starwood, also at the Wisteria Campground

I believe these are both listed wrong on my Book Tour Page. Unfortunately the files with which I created that page are now lost. So I'll have to recreate the entire page from scratch to correct anything on it. I'll get to that...

Both of these events are far out of the range of the kinds of events either I or the band usually do. We're not really hippie-in-the-woods kind of people. So I'm a little nervous as to how they'll turn out. Does a bear poop in the woods? Yes. But I do not usually poop in the woods.

Apparently people often go to these things "sky clad." I will not be sky clad. I'm not sure how much I want to see sky clad hippies with beer guts boppin' around at the drum circle. But I guess I'm gonna see a lot of that.

X-Day (but not Starwood) is a festival run by the Church of the Subgenius. The Church of the Subgenius is a brilliant parody of cults and organized religions that is always tottering on the edge of becoming either a cult or an organized religion itself. Each year the leader of the church predicts that aliens will descend in a fleet of UFOs to pick up the members of the church and blast everyone else in the world to smithereens. Each year the members meet to await the saucers. Each year the saucers fail to arrive. And each year the leader of the church makes a new excuse as to why it didn't happen this year and promises that next year the aliens will come for sure.

I'm a great believer in robbing bad things of their power by making fun of them. So I'm all for the Church of the Subgenius. For all their lunacy, some of the philosophy in their books is pretty deep. And some is just goofball nonsense.

Last night Zero Defex played at Thursday's Lounge in Akron. In attendance was our original guitarist Tommy Strange. He said we played too fast.

The truth is a lie!!!

WHY I MATTER

2011-06-28T06:48:00.000-07:00

Two articles about me have come to my attention recently. They are:

Why Brad Warner Matters

and

Brad Warner Vs. The Maha Teachers

It's weird to read about yourself. You quickly realize that the "Brad Warner" people write about is not the same guy who does my laundry, stands in line at the DMV for my plates, and eats alone with me at a Taco Bell somewhere off Interstate 35. The "Brad Warner" they write about is some kind of abstraction created by the writers themselves. I have only minimal control over this "Brad Warner."

The fact that I have such little control over "Brad Warner" is the cause of a lot of grief for this Brad Warner. People are constantly nagging me to make that "Brad Warner" more like they think he ought to be. But I can't even make that "Brad Warner" more like what I think he ought to be! I've even seen photos of Noah Levine labeled as "Brad Warner," to give you an idea how little control I have over that "Brad Warner" guy.* Grrr...

Take the those weirdos who chose to write obscene emails to Barry Magid after they read the post I put up a few weeks back. Please! I still don't understand why anyone would do that. It makes no sense at all. Were they trying to be like me? If so, they weren't being like me at all. But possibly they were acting like the "Brad Warner" they had created for themselves. Or, quite possibly, they were people who don't like what I do, who chose to pose as my fans to try and make me look bad. God only knows. I certainly do not.

People constantly demand that I take responsibility for this stuff. But I really can't. It's like saying The Beatles shouldn't have made the White Album because it inspired Charles Manson to kill Sharon Tate. You cannot control the bizarre ways people take what you do. You have a responsibility to present yourself honestly. After that, there's not much else you can do. I'm sorry. There really just is not. I've tried.

In any case, about these new articles. Why Brad Warner Matters is the view of one person schooled in Tibetan Buddhism as to why the "Brad Warner" he has invented for himself matters. It's nice to read what he says. But at the same time, slightly embarrassing to read the quotes he pulls from my books. They're all real quotes. But they certainly aren't the ones I would pull out myself to express what I feel are the core things I wanted to get across in those books. Interesting.

My favorite part of this article is the final line, "I invite you to be like yourself."

The other article, Brad Warner Vs. The Maha Teachers, is about the recent piece I put up regarding the Garrison Institute's Maha Teacher Council.

The most interesting part of this article is not in the article itself but in one of the links it presents to another article by the same writer. This other article is called "Nice" Buddhism. It puts forth the idea that what is being called "Buddhism" in mainstream America these days isn't really Buddhism at all. It's a Buddhist-influenced form of progressive Christianity.

I have long believed this was true. My teacher, Nishijima Roshi, noticed it even more keenly than I did. He used to often lament that what certain Buddhist teachers propagate is not Buddhism at all but a kind of Christianity.

The author likens contemporary American Buddhism to post-hippie politically correct "nice" Christianity. This "Buddhism" ignores the difficult parts of Buddhism and shoehorns the rest into the accepted norms of polite, feel-good Christianity -- but without all that messy Jesus stuff either. So it's neither good Buddhism nor good Christianity, but something that's not quite either one, and above all absolutely inoffensive.

Both of these articles cite my book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. The "Brad Warner" people invent as a result of reading that book causes lots of trouble for me. But I think it was really a necessary book.

A couple of points the guy who wrote about "Brad Warner" in Brad Warner Vs The Maha Teachers need qualifying.

He writes, "He has no organization, so he can’t be dismissed as a cult leader." I do have some kind of organization. But it's so disorganized it hardly qualifies. It's true I don't currently have anyone working with me. I read all my own emails, I write all the replies myself, I book all my own speaking events, I don't have a temple of any kind, etc. But some folks out in California are working on setting up a non-profit religious corporation (or whatever you call it) with me as the leader. So maybe I'll develop that into a cult one of these days. (cue laugh track)

He also writes, "He does not charge for teaching, so he can’t be dismissed as a spiritual entrepreneur." This is a tricky point. I do very happily charge for speaking events. That's a perfectly legitimate way for an author to earn a living. I also accept dana (donations) when I speak at Zen centers and lead retreats. I really couldn't do these talks and lead these retreats any other way.

I try to leave monetary considerations out of actual Buddhist teaching as much as possible. That's not because I am so pure and holy. It's because I think that once money gets involved it changes things so radically that Buddhist teaching can't happen. I almost feel like if I could charge money for teaching and still teach I'd probably do it. It's fucking hard work.

Someone asked recently what the difference between Buddhist teaching and therapy is. I said some stuff about the way therapists try to make a person fit in with society, while Buddhists see the value of being able to deal with society. But we question its core values and don't really try to make people fit society's warped mold, only deal with it.

But really, the biggest difference between therapy and Buddhist teaching is that therapists charge for their work. And they should. I wouldn't do that job for free! But this creates certain expectations. When you pay for a service you have a right to demand results. If people start feeling they have the right to demand results from Buddhist teachers, Buddhist teachers can't do their work.

Yet Buddhist teachers have bills to pay just like everyone else. It's hard to figure out where to draw the line. I have not succeeded in finding that just perfect spot to make the division between what I do as a writer/lecturer and what I do as a Buddhist teacher yet. I probably never will. And so the question of whether or not I "charge for teaching" is and will probably always be arguable. Ah well.

Anyway, nice articles.

*The photo of Heaven's Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite on the top of this article is one of several oddities that came up on a Google image search of "Brad Warner."

Talk At Ordinary Mind Zendo

2011-06-23T07:05:00.001-07:00

It's my mom's birthday. So here's a photo of her and me in Nairobi, Kenya on some Christmas in the 70s. Happy Birthday mom, wherever you are!

And before you go making up your own versions of what transpired last Saturday at Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York, please have a listen to the recording of the talk.

For those who may not be seeing that link, here's the URL:

http://hardcorezen.libsyn.com/transference-transmission-adolescence-adulthood-life-and-death

It will also appear shortly on iTunes. Search for Hardcore Zen Podcast. The title will be something like "Transference, Transmission, Adolescence, Adulthood, Life and Death." Last I checked (11 AM EST 6/23/11) it wasn't up yet. But it'll be there soon enough.

By the way, I got a very nice email from Mr Magid explaining his side of what happened. I think I didn't quite grasp how people were feeling about Joko Beck's death. You'll hear that I faltered badly in my attempt at saying something about it at the beginning of the talk. Having botched this, I decided to change gears and go right into what I'd prepared. The talk had been advertised as being about my new book Sex, Sin And Zen. So that's the talk I gave.

In any case, as I said before, I enjoyed this talk. I thought it went really well. Honestly.

And Barry Magid said he got some obscene emails from people who saw this blog. STOP THAT SHIT. Seriously. That's not nice.

Being Grown Up & Europe Tour

2011-06-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

First & most importantly: If you have communicated with me by email regarding my upcoming tour of Europe or any other upcoming talks (see this link for details) please write me again. I lost ALL of the emails regarding this tour (as well as hundreds of other emails) when my computer was being worked on at the Apple Store in Summit Mall, Akron, Ohio. Thanks!

Next up, I've been monitoring the comments left about my previous post. It's fascinating. Lots of people seem to believe the post was an effort to enact some kind of revenge upon Barry Magid and the Ordinary Mind Zendo.

In fact, I do not feel vengeful at all. I kind of enjoyed the talk in a perverse way. No. Scratch "kind of." I very much did enjoy it. It was fun. I'm not angry at all. I'm mostly just confused.

There were a few people who took the opportunity to trash talk Mr Magid and his group. Since I don't censor those who trash talk me (and there are always plenty) I don't censor those who trash talk anyone else. But please don't read my not censoring them as some kind of expression of support on my part. I do not censor anyone. I really don't know what to think of the whole thing. People are mysterious. Most people's actions make no sense to me. This talk was just another in a long list of things I've participated in that I couldn't understand.

I thought the email I published was interesting. The writer's opinions seem to match those of the two people from the film crew who are doing a documentary about me who were also there. These film crew people had never seen me speak anywhere before and had never read any of my books. They also suspected the event had been set up as a way for the Mr Magid to attack me in public.

At the time I didn't feel I was being attacked or set up. Not exactly. I felt like I was being challenged by the woman who raised the question about "transference." I felt that Mr Magid's question about my "acting like a perpetual adolescent and refusing to become an adult" was extraordinarily rude. It would have been rude coming from anyone. But it was especially so coming from the leader of the community who invited me to speak.

This did not make me angry, just confused. Why would someone behave that way? It was weird. I still don't know. I've written to Mr Magid. Maybe he'll tell me. Maybe he won't. Maybe even if he tells me I still won't understand. Who knows? And, really, who cares?

In any case, I would like to speak to the matter of "acting like a perpetual adolescent and refusing to become an adult." Some of this will be what I said last Saturday. Some will not.

This is actually something I've heard before. In fact, I hear it quite often. I have put some thought into the matter and have decided that I do not, in fact, act like a perpetual adolescent and refuse to become an adult.

Yet there are times I wonder if it's true. I wonder if I really have somehow failed to become an adult. But then I have to write a check to my insurance company, file my taxes, take out my trash, plan a speaking tour of Europe, deal with divorce-related matters, fix my car, etc., etc., etc. I left my parents' house when I was 18 years old and have been living on my own ever since. I have actually managed to become an adult quite nicely, thank you very much for your concern.

I think this relates to something that happened to me a few years ago when I first started teaching Zen. One of the older guys in Nishijima Roshi's group took me aside and said he thought I did not take Zen very seriously. He found my attitude too light-hearted for his liking. He said that, for him, Zen was "a matter of life and death."

At the time all I could do was sort of wimper in response. This was someone I respected, someone I thought of as a friend. His tone was extremely angry. It made me sad. It made me confused.

But then I thought, fuck you. Fuck you. This is not an angry "fuck you," by the way, for those of you unfamiliar with uses of this phrase other than to express anger. It is a way of expressing that what someone has said about you is entirely wrong.

I do take Zen very seriously. It is the most serious thing in my life. And my attitude is a manifestation of just how seriously I take it.

I realized during my teenage years that my life might get cut short very quickly by a really nasty disease that ran in my family. At that point it became urgent for me to find out what life was really about. I jumped into my Zen training with an almost desperate sense of urgency and seriousness.

I have one life and one life only. I refuse to waste it. I don't care if the way I choose to live does not measure up to the way you imagine I ought to live. I don't have the time to waste on caring about that kind of trivia.

To me, what Buddha was really looking for was a way to live a life that doesn't suck. Hedonism didn't work because hedonism sucked. It looked like fun, but it really wasn't. Austerity sucked too. It provided a kind of high, but that high didn't make him happy. Instead he found the Middle Way between the two.

Buddha was not looking for a way to make all of us clones of whoever comes along claiming to be the manifestation of "adulthood." He was not looking for a way to make us all "serious" in the conventional sense. He wasn't an authoritarian leader looking for obedient followers. He was looking for a way to help people live a life that did not suck.

Buddhism is about enjoying your life. The goal of zazen practice, if there is one, is to learn how to enjoy living as thoroughly as you can. This is what I am working on. Nothing else. I am working on having as much fun while I'm here as I possibly can without hurting anyone or impeding their ability to have fun.

This is why I sit and stare at walls every day. No other reason.

And that's my bottom line.

Someone Else's Impressions of My Talk at Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York Last Weekend

2011-06-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

After my talk last weekend at Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York, I posted my status on Facebook as :"Weirdest. Zen talk. Ever." Lots of people asked what that meant. I was considering writing up my impressions of the event. But before I even got started I received an email from a guy who had been there. He attached an email he sent to some of his friends about the event. I asked if I could reproduce it on this blog. He said OK as long as I kept him anonymous.

So here it is, one anonymous person's impressions of my talk at Ordinary Mind Zendo on Saturday June 18, 2011. Take it away anonymous:

...totally by coincidence i went to 'ordinary mind zendo' (nyc branch of joko's teachings) on saturday to hear brad warner talk about his new book 'sex, sin and zen.' the zendo is actually an upper west side apartment, very beautifully polished and japanified with a lovely enclosed garden patio.

there had been a funeral service in the morning before i got there and there was a table out in the garden with a lovely photo of joko beck and flowers, incense, etc. with the surrounding garden it reminded me of one of those grottos with shrines to the virgin mary. i read joko's books long ago when they first came out but i couldn't remember anything about them. i know she's much loved--er--she was much loved. brad warner didn't have much to say about her except that he had imagined her to be much younger--as had i, but i see by the wiki that she was in her 40's before she started doing zen.

i don't think i've gone to see a 'spiritual teacher' in years and years (and i exempt the dalai lama as more of an international monument like the eiffel tower where i think 'i live in an era where instead of climbing the mountains into secret tibet i can just buy a ticket to the beacon theater'); but i do go to hear authors read and there's a lot i've liked about brad warner's cheezy books. i also like that he's very outspoken about the big mind fraud and when there was a huge furor about genpo's sex life, brad said the sex was no big deal, that genpo was charging rich people $50,000 for 'big mind' training was the real scandal.

brad is in his mid 40's but looks like he's in his 30's. he was wearing a black tee shirt with "shoplifting from american apparel" printed in white on the front. it turns out that's the name of a novel and he's acting in a movie being made from it.

i would say this was a case of the guy being exactly like the author--he's not real charismatic, he makes terrible puns and giggles at them, he's confessional to a fault; his views are clear and consistent. he lived in japan for 11 years and is Nishijima Roshi's chosen dharma heir--he's studied dogen and is steeped in the zen culture--but his affect is as if someone selected a guy out of a crowd at random and dubbed him a zen master. i suppose this could be seen as a cultivated act, but my impression is it's quite genuine. he read a little bit from the book and tried to engage the group in conversation.

i would like to live in that beautiful polished apartment, but my impressions of the group weren't so great. i arrived at 11:40, as told, for a noon talk. when i stepped in nobody said anything to me, i said hello to a few people and they ignored me. everyone was sitting on zafus chatting, and all the spaces were taken, so i finally just stood in one place. after about 10 minutes a nice guy introduced himself and showed me a place to sit, but soon after i sat down a woman came and said that was her place. brad apologized for missing the morning zazen. barry magrid (psychoanalyst and zen teacher who heads up the zendo) said, 'with that shirt we would have thrown you out. it's inappropriate for a funeral.' if he was joking, it didn't come across that way and nobody laughed.

brad did his reading and talked a little--his theme had to do with sex and authority and how the zen teacher's practice is to deny and undercut his own authority and the student's desire to have an authority (pretty standard zenspeak i'd say)--and then opened the floor for questions. a woman announced that she was a psychotherapist and reminded brad that barry magrid was also a psychotherapist (brad winced and said something about being very afraid). she started talking about--actually said, "we call it 'the tranference'"-- and how painful to her brad's 'glib tone' was because he wasn't taking seriously the transference relationship.

i think i mentioned to you recently the wittgenstein workbook question, 'does the fact that someone feels strongly about something make it more likely to be true?' i was sitting a couple of feet away from brad and i felt the attack vibrations: 'i'm in pain so you must be wrong' kind of force. she contrasted his attitude with her own, which was to take her work very seriously. brad said that he was basically trying to give an entertaining talk; that his zen teaching would take place one-on-one or in a small group where he knew people well. then the other psychotherapist--barry magrid--said, 'do you think that unresolved problems in your childhood might have something to do with your acting like a perpetual adolescent and refusing to become an adult?' so, i thought, the head of the zendo had said two things to his guest speaker and they were both public insults.

in zen circles brad warner is pretty famous and it seems to me that barry magrid would have known what he was getting. was the invitation to speak an opportunity for him to put brad down? that's what it seemed like to me. it would have been more honest to invite him to a debate. i felt that he was put on the defensive and was a little shaky because of it--but perhaps it's typical experience for him. there's endless talk in some zen places about how wild and iconoclastic zen is, but the tiniest departure from conservative behavior is greeted with gasps and condemnation.

someone asked brad 'why do you teach?' and after saying he didn't know a few times he basically boiled it down to that his teacher had asked him to (and sort of tricked him into it) and that he needed a job and thought he could maybe get by giving talks and writing books (he also has a punk band but i get the impression it's not a money-maker). this seemed pretty honest to me. i also feel like most (not all) of the problems about zen and authority and sex would be cleared up by eliminating the job of teacher. then meditation would be communicated like sewing or carpentry--but, of course, this is idealism on my part and, anyway, i'm sure there are institutes of sewing and carpentry where authority rages.

i can't resist the urge to pick up on one other thing he talked about briefly which is the organization of the "zen community." i wanted to draw the parallel to yoga. 30 years ago (or so) the American yogis started campaigning for certification. the Indian yogis weren't really into it. they had the long tradition of a teacher deciding when a student was ready to teach, and a sort of freewheeling mode without any central organization. iyengar, one of the biggest of the Indian teachers--said if person practiced ten postures they could teach ten postures. but there is no money in that, and the Americans kept pressuring their teachers, saying there had to be "standards." nowadays of course yoga is a completely bogus practice that has nothing to do with it's aims or origins, but everybody is certified. i hope brad will keep up his protest.