NEWS: Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: I'm Not Like Everybody Else (sorry)

CULTURE: Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: I'm Not Like Everybody Else (sorry)

Some idea of perfection, or some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way for us. Each one of us must make his or her own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try and understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you. To be independent in this true sense, we have to forget everything which we have in our mind and discover something quite new and different moment after moment. This is how we live in this world.

-- Shunryu Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

That statement is one of the most truly punk rock things I’ve ever come across. The first time I read it 0DFx, the hardcore band I played bass in, had just broken up. The hardcore punk scene I’d been part of for the last couple years was turning to shit. We’d started off rejecting society and almost immediately set about creating our own miniature version of the very society we rejected -- only ours had cooler clothes and better music. I thought punk rock was about independence, but very few people within the movement were interested in real independence. They were just interested in the appearance of independence.

I thought Buddhism was the way of true independence. But I’m starting to wonder how many of the folks out there who label themselves as Buddhists are any more interested in true independence than the hardcore punks who only cared about looking scary.

My Wikipedia page was vandalized a couple weeks ago. I never actually saw the vandalized version myself. It was repaired before I got there. Them Wikipedia nerds are pretty quick. But it was vandalized by some so-called Buddhist who wanted to let the world know I was actually a big phony because I didn’t adhere to his standards of what Buddhist teachers ought to be like. It boggles the mind what people will waste their time doing…

Apparently much of the controversy about me in the Buddhist community relates to this video I posted of a precepts ceremony I performed for my friend Ren Kuroda last month. A precepts ceremony is where someone takes a public vow to uphold the ten Buddhist precepts, which are:

1) Don’t kill 2) Don’t steal 3) Don’t desire too much 4) Don’t lie 5) Don’t live by selling liquor* 6) Don’t discuss the failures of Buddhist monks and laypeople 7) Don’t praise yourself and berate others 8) Don’t be covetous 9) Don’t become angry and 10) Don’t abuse the Three Supreme Values; Buddha, Dharma (Buddhist teachings) and Sangha (the Buddhist community)

Apparently some Buddhists were aghast that I performed the ceremony while reading the instructions out of a book. Look. I don’t even like these ceremonies. You think I’m gonna waste my days and nights memorizing that shit? As if! I didn’t start practicing Buddhism because I wanted to be able to perform note-perfect renditions of ancient rituals. That’s not what it’s about. The ceremonies have some value. But you do them and get back to the real work.

The folks who don’t like the way I do ceremonies also do not like my “potty mouth,” and the fact that I’ve sometimes criticized stuff like Big Mind™ and the Holosync™ which are promoted as Buddhist practice but really are not. This, they say, breaks precepts number six and seven. I should therefore be quiet about the scams and let people get cheated. And, of course, they don’t like the fact that I write about Buddhism for you nice people here at Suicide Girls.

Whatever.

I’m not saying this stuff just to gripe about my own situation. Well maybe I am a little. I seem to do that a lot. But it’s actually bigger than that, I think. It’s not just me. All of us encounter pressure to conform to other people’s standards of how we should behave, how we should look, and even how we should think. We are social creatures. So it’s important to behave in ways that are acceptable in the society we live in.

But we’re very lucky to be living in a society that’s pretty advanced and liberal in its ability to tolerate diversity. We’re not quite where we need to be just yet. But we’ve made some significant strides very quickly. When I was at Wadsworth High School in Wadsworth, Ohio in the beginning of the Eighties I got threatened by the jocks because I had a mullet. A mullet for Christ’s sake! Things have gotten much better.

Even in this very progressive society we still get pressure to be like everybody else. The problem is that this very notion that there even is a “like everybody else” to be is a lie. No one is like everybody else. Even the most conformist among us can’t ever truly conform except in a very superficial way. It’s our nature to be independent. The attempt to conform to some illusory notion of normality is just the denial of what we actually are.

But it’s not that easy to come to truly know what you really are and to accept that. Maybe you think you already do. But I’d bet dollars to donuts you don’t. It takes a lot more than just getting a really rad tattoo or dying your hair chartreuse. There are scads of things about yourself that you don’t want to face. In my own case much of what I didn’t want to face had to do with how many ways I was exactly like everyone else, especially the ways in which I was exactly like all the “normal” douche bags** I spent most of my life seething with hatred at.

Because there’s so much about you that you aren’t ready to accept right now it’s good to move slowly into this stuff. If you go too fast the shock can be too much to take. When you do a practice like zazen you’ll discover aspects about yourself that are truly disturbing -- no matter how cool and unsettling a person you might think you are. You can only recognize that which you think is the worst in human nature because it’s part of you.

Still it’s a worthwhile pursuit. Because when you’ve learned to accept what you are then you can manifest what you are in a way that truly benefits you and truly benefits everyone you come in contact with. And that’s good for all of us. That’s the way you can save the world.

And stop it with trashing peoples’ Wikipedia entries, OK? That’s just stupid***.

* Liquor? Didn’t even know her!

** Apologies for breaking precept #7 just then.

*** And again there.

I’ll be speaking at the Akron Public Library on November 7th (Wednesday) at 7 PM. Be there or be (Highland) Square!

Then come watch my movie Cleveland’s Screaming! on November 9th at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland along with a live performance by 0DFx as well as CD Truth, Cheap Tragedies and This Moment in Black History.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Good stuff, it seems you kind of drift between worlds in the sense you follow the precepts, but sometime step around them, youre human and you admit it.

keep on keepin' on

Word.

It's interesting - your Zen precepts are a combination of the Bodhisattva vows, the ten virtuous deeds and the lifetime lay precepts from my own tradition.

In reference to praising yourself and criticizing others, our commentary on that is that in order to commit a root downfall of that vow, meaning that you lose your vows, you have to be doing it with the motivation to raise yourself above another teacher - to take away their students, for personal gain.

You commit a secondary downfall (meaning that you do not lose your vows, but you do damage them) when you do it out of a feeling of pride or anger. You do not commit a downfall at all when you do it out of a sincere motivation to correct them.

I've never gotten vows from a Lama where they didn't read them. My Tibetan Lama, Sermey Khensur Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin, read them off of pechas, which are sheets of block-printed paper on which all traditional tibetan scriptures are printed. My American Lama read them off of the screen of his laptop.

The experience of my Lama reciting the vow ceremony off of the screen of his laptop was profoundly moving. Not because of the laptop screen, mind you, but because of the personal advice he gave before the ceremony started, and because of the ceremony itself. The laptop was just a prop - it didn't have any effect on how I felt about the ceremony other than that, as a geek, I thought it was kind of cool.

So for what it's worth, unfortunately when you read the vow ceremony out of a book, you are not striking out on your own. I don't think you need to feel bad, though - it's true that we each find our own way on the path to freedom, but that doesn't mean that we never walk in each others' footsteps!

Good read. Thanks for the future thoughts.

I often find your articles here (and on your blog) thought provoking and always worth my time. But this particular article strikes me because of personal experiences I had being shunned by the buddhist tradition I was raised with. WIthout disclosing the gory details, my journay away from this "organization" and into a more valuable pursuit of Buddhism began when I started questioning the value placed on the "how" of certain ceremonies versus the seemingly ignored "why's" of those ceremonies. I immediately was pulled aside and reminded that because I was young (15 at the time) I didn't understand that performing the ceremonies correctly showed "the Buddha" that we were trying faithfully to achieve enlightenment, and that questioning the purpose of the ceremony itself was pointless. This sent up a huge red flag for me, since my understanding of Buddhism (which I initially had gained because of this organization) was that rote performance of dogmatic rituals didn't actually lead you anywhere. You had to understand, and LIVE, Buddhist principles. Just performing the ceremonies because you'd been told to seemed to contradict Buddhism. Of course, I was just a kid, right?

Anyway, I've been reading your stuff for awhile, and wanted to say thanks for your continued efforts to teach; even those of us who've never met you get value from your work.

I don't know a lot about Buddhism, but it seems to me that any religion, philosophy, or whatever, that deals with self-awareness and self-understanding shouldn't put a whole lot of value into rituals that were developed by other people thousands of years ago.

Those hardcore, by-the-book Buddhists who value the mechanics of the ritual over the experience probably share many personality traits with hardcore, judgemental Christians.

The thing about 6 & 7 is you can't point out someone is breaking them WITHOUT BREAKING THEM.

Self awareness you appear to have in spades....the persons who defaced your wikipedia entry were not acting it appears from a place of self awareness but from a place of Dogma...so often the beliefs can get in the way of the truth...which is of course that the Buddha sucks

Once again, the fear of the "different" is always something that gets people's cockles out of whack. The Zen tradition often embraces "diversity", then spends scads of energy trying to get you to do things in a given, rigid way, and Suzuki-roshi kicked ass at breaking that down. Often, that "rigid way" is there to help calm the mind, or draw it away from itself, and that obviously can be an aide. But it (this rigid interpretation of Buddhism/Zen) is not--nor can it ever be--all things to all people, and the obvious analogy here is that all things that are so rigid have a nasty habit of breaking. That's why--to many practitioners--the most important dictate the Buddha laid out there about the practice is; try it and see for yourself. He never said "do it this way", because saying so isn't really the middle way...

And people who are more Buddhist-than-thou and hack Wiki's to save the world from renegade roshi's?

Weak...

Gasho, Brad-san...

This morning I was reading the Wikipedia article on fundamentalism, which quotes the Dalai Lama as saying there are fundamentalist Buddhists. At first I was thinking of these people with their unquestioning adherence to the rituals as Zen fundamentalists. But the Wikipedia article puts forth the definition of fundamentalism as trying to return to the fundamentals of a religion. To me the fundamental of Zen is meditation. As I understand it, that's what Zen literally means. So it seems to me the Zen fundamentalists should be off in a corner, staring at the wall.

At my Zendo we've got rituals, and the teacher is kind of hardcore about them. But there's no sense that you can't question them. In fact, my teacher recently changed a bunch of them around. And she's always willing to talk about them, and why she does things the way she does. Which mostly boils down to helping us meditate.

What is your opinion of the books written by Lama Suya Das? Awakening the Buddha Within for example.

I wonder if these are the same people who vandalized Ian McKay's Wikipedia entry last week. (He was allegedly hit by a car and died)

I smell a punk rock conspiracy.

First of all, Big Ups for starting off the piece with a quote from ZMBM, you can't go wrong there, it only bodes well for the rest of what you're about to say.

Secondly, I'm the worst Zen Buddhist of all, and I always will be, and you know what, I take pride in that fact. I can't do Zazen worth a damn, I tend to smoke cigarettes from time to time, and I still haven't faced those parts of myself that I know are truly scary and repulsive. But you know what? I consider the fact that I know that I am truly as base and repulsive as the rest of us to be my best virtue, not to break a precept here.

After reading Zen Mind, I almost felt like even though I may not ever go on a retreat or get down a regular schedule of Zazen, I can learn to live HERE and NOW, and when I do that, there is no other person to criticize, there is no me to do the criticizing, there is only THIS, HERE. But, I could be wrong, and I'm just going down the wrong path. But you know what, it's mine, and so long as I focus on the steps I'm taking and not the ones I have taken or will take, I think that's not too bad.

In the meantime, swearing is liberation, and there's nothing wrong with anger itself, only angry actions. Keep up the good work Brad Roshi.

I'd argue that you can (make progress in trying to) know yourself by getting a rad tattoo. You just have to get one that confronts something major about you, that forces you to do some true introspection while you're grimacing through the pain of getting a needle dragged through your skin.

Great article as always, I'm always finding that this column works as an excellent counterpart to your book (Sit Down and Shut Up!, I haven't read Hardcore Zen) as a way of expanding on and clarifying the thesis. Boo to wikipedia vandals!

None of your actions would affect a true Buddhist.

In time those that have criticized you will reach a point on their path where they understand you and will smile to themselves.

haha, amen.

Thank you.

I am new to Buddhism. I feel like I've put my big toe in a big pool. However, the the books and bits and pieces of read feel very much at home to me because alot of the principles (for lack of a better word in my ignorance) I already feel at home in.
Before I even knew what Buddhism was, I believed that no matter how you slice it, it comes down to respect. You can be angry at the person, hate what they are doing and want to scream at them but in the end it comes down to you treating them with respect. Respect even if you have to rip them a new one. When you strip away all the cultural excuses, crap and ideas we put on top, it comes down to respect.

Teachers, bosses, leaders, especially good ones, when we put ourselves out there, there will always be those who perceive that we are putting ourselves outside or above others. Good teachers, bosses and leaders are only putting themselves out there.

Enlightening and refreshing....keep up the great work here.