A reader wrote me this week to ask:

I expected a lot of this kind of reaction when I started writing here. But so far, I haven’t really received much. One guy compared my writing for SuicideGirls to what it would’ve been like if Shunryu Suzuki wrote for Hustler in the Seventies. I think that’s kind of stretching things. But since there might be others of you thinking the same thing, although perhaps with not quite so much drama (“I don't understand how you came to this”? Dude, do some zazen, relax…), I thought I’d go ahead and answer.

When Helen from SuicideGirls first asked me to write for the website I was surprised. I thought SG was just tattoos and boobies. I didn’t know there were articles on it at all. But when I checked it out I thought, OK, I can write for this. I was a little worried, however. But not because there are photos of naked girls on the site. I was worried I might not be allowed to say what I wanted to. I’ve had problems before with people who asked me to write for them then demanded significant changes to match their view of what they thought a Buddhist teacher ought to say. When I first started out writing professionally (i.e. writing and getting paid for it, another thing some folks seem to have trouble with), I compromised to a certain extent. I made up my mind that I would never allow anything I absolutely did not agree with to be published under my name. However, if I couldn’t get an editor to understand what I wanted to say about a particular topic, I would leave that topic unaddressed. As a result, when I look back at some of this writing it seems pretty marshmallow-y to me — sweet and sticky and pleasant to taste, but lacking any real nutritional value. I spoke to Helen at length about this and I felt I would not have any real problems with censorship here, so I agreed.

As for SG getting rich pandering to base desires, lotsa people get rich pandering to base desires. And lots of us wouldn’t have jobs at all if it weren’t for them. When something sells, it indicates a need for human beings to explore that particular aspect of their collective consciousness. I have a lot more problems with some of the base desires I see being pandered to in Buddhist publications than the ones pandered to here. When I see ads for instant enlightenment seminars and meditation machines, I wonder if everything I say about Buddhism will be taken as an endorsement of that kind of garbage. At least here I can be reasonably certain most readers don’t think I’m pushing naked boobies — not that I have any problem with naked boobies. It’s just that there’s no instant association with the rest of what SG sells the way there is with any of the scams that choose to call themselves “Buddhism.” (Which is not to say that all or even most of what goes by the name Buddhism is a scam. But scams do exist.)

Am I “endorsing Internet porn through Zen” or “justifying many a lonely night in front of a computer screen?” Seriously, I have no idea what that even means. If anyone is waiting for justification from me in order to masturbate, I just don’t get that at all. I asked my teacher what he thought of my writing for SG and he said, “I think that it is very good decision for you to accept such a job. I do not find any kind of moral problem in them (the pictures on SG), however, I found only whether they are beautiful, or not. I think that we are usually influenced by old-fashioned religious criteria, but on the basis of Buddhism, there seems to exist a kind of criterion that what is moral is always beautiful, and what is beautiful is usually moral. Even though my idea is not so affirmative to me yet, I think that there are some kind of criteria to identify morals and beauty in Buddhism.” Depictions of naked women have been a part of human artistic expression — including Buddhist art — as long as humans have been expressing themselves artistically. Deal with it, already.

American society is still strongly influenced by Puritan ideas of morality. When Buddhism was first introduced to this country, it was interpreted through these ideas. A long-standing misunderstanding of Buddhism has it that Buddha’s formula for achieving peace of mind was through the destruction of all desire. For people raised in a Christian society the worst of all desires is the desire to get one’s rocks off. When you examine it clearly, though, the idea that you should destroy all desire is absurd. You can’t even survive without the desire for food, water and air. The human race wouldn’t exist at all without the desire for sex. But this hasn’t stopped lots of people from engaging in a futile struggle to produce some magically altered mental state in which they want for nothing. It ain’t gonna happen. The real trick is to see all of your thoughts — desire just being one type of thought — for what they really are. How about your desire for a Buddhist teacher that doesn’t write articles for soft porn websites? Where does that come from?

I feel really good about writing for SG because it makes it possible for me to be more what I think a Buddhist teacher ought to be. See, I’m the kind of person who wants to do the opposite of whatever most other people are doing in a given situation. Even when I played hardcore punk I refused to cut my hair because I liked seeing how supposedly “non-conformist” punks got so upset at somebody who didn’t conform to their society. If I’m in a room full of pompous wanna-be Buddhists all trying to be pure of heart and mind, I just want to rip my clothes off, plug my Stratocaster into a stack of Marshalls and blow their fake-ass beatific smiles off their faces. All that soft soap lovey dovey good vibes shit makes me gag. But when I’m here with all the punk rock nutcases I get to be the guy who advocates quiet and equilibrium. Cool.

I’ve long felt that the reason Buddhism has been relegated to the junk heap of hippy philosophies that didn’t work in the Sixties so why bother with them now is because it’s been presented so exceedingly poorly, mainly by people who don’t have a clue what it is anyway. It’s not about some kind of mystical serenity available only to those rare beings among us who have freed themselves from their base desires. Buddhism is for everyone. It’s for what you are and who you are right now, warts and tattoos and naked pictures saved on your hard drive for those lonely nights and all.

Note: Thanks for all of the nice comments on last week's entry. I have a Suicide Girls blog that I'm using sort of like footnotes to these articles if you want to check that out too.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming 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.