NEWS: Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Santa Claus Died for Your Sins

CULTURE: Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Santa Claus Died for Your Sins

Merry Christmas Eve from your local Buddhist columnist!

I’m down in Knoxville, Tennessee with my sister and her family. This week I appeared on my niece, Skylar’s YouTube show. Check it out:




Also check out my blog for the outtake version.

Tonight children all over the world go to sleep believing a mysterious man will break into their house late at night to leave them fabulous gifts. My niece is 11 and gave up on Santa Claus a few years ago. But she has some friends her age who, she says, still believe or at least pretend to believe to please their parents. I gave up on Santa when I was about seven, but my sister was two years younger so I made-believe I believed a bit longer. But I think most kids have outgrown the Santa myth by first or second grade.

For kids raised in religious families, the time you stop believing in Santa (or Hanukkah Harry or Kris Kwanza or whoever you choose) is often highly traumatic. I mean if Santa, Rudolph and the toy making elves aren’t real, what about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Even though my own family was not religious, I can clearly recall going through this dilemma in my childhood. For friends of mine who grew up in more religious households the realization that Santa was made-up triggered a massive crisis of faith from which some of them still haven’t recovered.

Faith is a tricky subject. While some Christians try to pass amendments recognizing Christmas, other Christians don't even have faith in Christmas. When faith means believing in the literal reality of things you cannot see, hear or touch you’re bound to run into trouble. In that very narrow sense of faith, faith in the reality of Santa’s Workshop in the North Pole and faith in the reality of Heaven and its Angels on High are precisely the same. They are both objects of the mind and, as such, both equally insubstantial and unreal. There is no more reason for a rational person to believe any more in one than the other.

This is why faith often turns people into psychopaths. It’s very hard to maintain the façade of believing in something you know deep down is just a figment of your imagination. In order to try and destroy your perfectly reasonable doubts you have to resort to all kinds of crazy shit. You might even fly a couple of airplanes into some big buildings just to prove to everyone you really believe in some bizarre fantasy although you know perfectly well you don’t.

People who come to Buddhism trying to escape from that kind of faith into something more sensible are often shocked when they hear Buddhists talk about faith. In fact a lot of Buddhists avoid talking about faith to those unfamiliar with the Buddhist take on the subject for fear of scaring them off. This sometimes leads people to feel they’ve been duped when they finally hear their teachers mention the subject a couple of years into the practice.

But faith and belief are important aspects of Buddhism. Human beings need faith and belief. This is one of the many reasons atheism is such an unsatisfactory alternative to religion. When we try to completely give up on faith and belief we feel empty and discontented. Like that poster on Agent Mulder’s wall says, we all want to believe. And like Agent Mulder, when traditional religions fail we’ll turn to UFOs, or Comet Hale-Bopp, or the The Dear Leader, or just about any whacky thing just to satisfy the very deep desire we all have to have faith in something.

To be sure, a lot of what falls under the heading of faith in what passes for Buddhism these days is little more than the substitution of one fantasy for another. Even the faith in “Enlightenment experiences” professed by some mutant strains of Zen Buddhism is just another fantasy. For my man, Dogen, though, faith was never directed at any object of mind. Faith was a matter of practice. You could have faith in the practice of zazen because you could actually enter into the practice yourself at any time. It’s not necessary to hang on to any belief in things unseen or far away. As your practice deepens, your real experience of the object of your faith grows. You come to see that the image of reality you’ve been fed by your parents, teachers, and religious leaders is utterly mistaken.

Tim McCarthy, my first Zen teacher, always liked to say that to practice Zazen you need an equal amount of doubt and faith. Without some kind of faith it’s just too damned hard even to sit yourself down on the cushion and do the practice. But without an equal amount of doubt, you’re far too likely to fly off into some kind of fantasy about the practice. The mistake that religions all make is to try to promote faith exclusively and kill all doubt. That just makes people crazy.

As far as Santa Claus is concerned, I’ve gone from not believing in him to having complete faith that he really exists. This comes from the explanation I heard my sister give Skylar about her take on Santa. Santa, she said, is just a name for the spirit of free giving that exists in all of us. The image of Santa as a fat man in a red suit is just an image we’ve created to express that spirit of free giving.

When we look at it that way, Santa is real and the Easter Bunny is real and Hanukkah Harry is real, and so too are Jesus and Heaven and Muhammed and all the rest. Even Buddha is real.

Me, I hope Santa brings me a copy of that new KISS DVD.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. 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.

Neat!

hmmm. some food for thought.
personally, i NEVER believed in ... well anything. and it hasnt been such a bad life. ok, love or something. certainly art. i believe in some things. i believe drugs should be legal. but these are real things. santa claus, god, the rest of it.,.., ive just never had it, or needed it.

i am buddhist too, by the way. _and_ atheist, imaginet that. its not unsatisfactory, its GREAT! for all the reasons you said yourself. and more.
i dont feel empty and discontented , thank you very much. Indeed, it is Zen that has taught me the most about this and to feel clear in mind about this.
by the way, i mean, i didnt write a book about zen, but id always heard and thought that Buddhists as a general rule dont believe in god. certainly most of the ones i know dont.

well, gasho, and thank you for your words.

Wow.

There is no such thing as Hannukkah Harry in the Jewish religion or any of the American reform adaptations - or any of its cultural folklore.

It is a recent term that extended from a sketch comedy skit on a television program that seems to be becoming adapted by those that try to make parallels between religions to justify their own ignorance - (and its also quite funny).

In fact, in reality, Hannukkah is not a holy holiday, as Christmas is, but it is celebration a of a historical biblical event - an event ironically founded in a true test of faith - the whole one day of candle oil lasting for 8 days thing while the persecuted waited out the war to rededicate the temple.

Other than that offensive attempt at comedy - good article.

Dude, watching you in the skit made me realize how much of a dumbass you are, like me. I don't think you belong on the pedestal which is good news for both of us
Make more dumb movies.

Believing is clinging to an idea and is actually a mistrust of something you sure about whereas faith is having doubt when your not sure.

Peaceout to everyone.

You let me down dude!!

I totally thought this article was going to have some mention of the Canadian guy who crucified a life-size Santa on his lawn.

I found out about it watching CNN.

I think you make an important point here on the difference between arbitrary faith and common-sense faith, the latter being what I would consider 'Buddhist faith'.
To me, faith does not contain superstition, and it's scary sometimes to find so many people than believe all forms of religion place such 'faith' in such high regard.

As you point out, having faith that zazen works is not unlike having faith that when you drop a rubber ball 99 times, its going to bounce the 100th time too.
It works, so you use it, and you know it works cos you try it and it does.
Now that's a faith that makes sense!

you know, I have no recollection of the moment at which I ceased believing in Santa Claus. I have no recollection of when my son ceased believing in Santa Claus. We both still believe in God, however. I guess it's not as traumatic as you want it to be.

as for "faith breeds psychopaths", that is just bad pop psychology.

you seem to have a lack of faith in the resiliency of the human psyche. How easily you bat around phrases like 'massive crisis' and 'faith turns people into psychopaths. And to claim that buddhism is somehow above spooky myth, ritual and language is horseshit. I mean, I love a good Chod as much as anyone. I have no problem with having butter replicas of my body being fed to hungry ghosts in order to speed my journey, but lets call a spade a spade. Every religion is going to have elements that serve the consciousness off the masses, and elements that serve the serious practitioners.

"...atheism is such an unsatisfactory alternative to religion. When we try to completely give up on faith and belief we feel empty and discontented."

You smug asshole. How dare you presume to know the inner lives of people who don't share your needs? Might it not have been better to say that when you tried completely to give up on faith, you felt empty? For those of us who feel no need for religious practice, life is filled with real, tangible things to experience and enjoy. We do not go through life "empty and disconnected", nor are we incapable of devotion to abstract ideas such as liberty, democracy etc. We don't have God-shaped holes in our hearts either (do evangelicals still use that line?) A life given to reason does not preclude fulfillment or peace of mind. There is transcendent joy and meaning to be found in the stuff of this world that religious people so disdain - in art, music, food, love, sex, drugs, poetry, chocolate cookies or whatever. The live, 3-D world we can touch with our 5 senses is quite enough; to paraphrase a line from Douglas Adams "isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are faeries at the bottom of it too?"

I realize that I'm unfairly conflating your spiritual practices with the dogma of people who do things like burn witches and fly planes into buildings, and that you probably didn't mean that remark to be as offensive as it was, and if your Way works for you then that's swell, but Jeezus, there's more than one Way.

Thanks for the fascinating link to the thing on Christians who don't believe in Xmas, btw, and Merry Christmas.




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If you lack belief in a god or gods, you are an atheist.

Welcome to the club. Name tags are on the table to your left.

Whaa?

Erm, dude... I'm glad you've found a faith that works for you and all, but does that mean that you can use your position of faith-based contentedness to talk down to others who don't fall in line with your own beliefs? Turn down the smugness and remember that faith is not one-size-fits-all.

Though I see the point, I don't really agree with this.
There are plenty of religions in the world which do not contain gods, (most forms of) Buddhism being of the greatest prominence.
Of course, there are 'religions' such as what we call 'Hinduism' in which we can percieve 'gods', but even here they are seen much more as psychological archetypes than actual, existing entities.
Although as personally I'd tick both the 'Buddhist' and 'Atheist' boxes on censues, I don't see the problem with being both at the same time.

If you disagree with what I said, you are disagreeing with the definition of atheism. Religion does not necessarily require theism. I understand Buddhists and others wanting to distance themselves from the "atheist" stigma, but that doesn't change what words mean.

i stopped believing when i was like 7 or 8, it was early morning and i heard people, my sisters and i all got up and catched my parents setting up the gifts, we all knew it somehow and it wasnt so traumatic but it does question your faith, i was a catholic then, it was around 13 i became agnostic

I think his point was that you have no reason to believe in one more than the other. Your God is pretty much just as unlikely as Santa Claus. You'll probably disagree, but that's your problem.



I have a great many reasons to believe in God over Santa Claus. Logical, rational reasons. Faith without reason is a superstition.

I find that Buddhdism, at its core, is a rejection of all that makes us human.

Wow. If I ever doubted that atheism was a religion, you guys have cleared that up forever. The atheists are reacting like a bunch of Muslims who just saw a cartoon with Mohamed in it! Scary.....

Buddhism is often cited as being atheistic. But I prefer to think of it as non-theistic. My teacher always says, "God is the universe, the universe is God." I can't believe in any God who exists outside of the universe, or in a God who created the universe. I don't believe in a God who can bend the rule of cause and effect. I don't believe in a God who can intervene in human affairs. But I do believe in God.

When Buddha was asked about God he either maintained silence or said, "The question doesn't fit the case."

If you're satisfied with atheism, good for you. But I stand by what I said. Atheism will never, ever work as a major human religion (and it is a religion). Nope. Not in a million, zillion years.

brad, sorry, but i dont think you're , open to what 6 of us have , more or less politely , offered you. stamping your feet and typing in BIG letters, wont make your wonderful religios ideas right , or best , for all of us. not in a zillion gillion years.

many people believe many things. or nothing at all. many of us dont need god or santa claus. get it?
"work as a major human religion" jeez is that weird. "work?!?!" man, you are smug.

slow down, maybe bow a few times or something. for a buddhist you sound awfully arogant.

im still trying to figure out what you mean by "athiesm will never work as a major human religion". you mean it wont save souls? cause i think thats not quite the idea... or "work" in the sense of feed the masses (opium)? or rank in the top ten?

hey, i like that- is it original?