Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: What If We Give It Away?

Before I start, I just wanted to let everyone know my new book, Sit Down and Shut Up! has begun shipping! You can already get it on-line and it should be turning up at your local bookshops any day now. Get yours today. It's got a bitchen cover!

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I’ve been spending the week at my dad’s place north of Dallas helping him clear out his garage and some of his closets. Now that my mom is gone (see my trilogy of articles — 1, 2, 3 — about this from earlier this year) he figures there’s nothing keeping him in Dallas.

In the process of clearing his stuff out, I discovered a lot of my own stuff that I’d left at their place for ages. The main bulk of this was about three or four crates of vintage records. I used to be a pretty big record collector. And when I say “pretty big” I mean “certifiably insane.” I think I had around 30 or more crates full of records at the height of my mania. It was a massive burden to cart around every time I moved.

These four crates were now all that was left of a once mighty empire. Many had been sold or given away. A large number had been stolen outright during a breakup with a girlfriend. What was left now were just the items I couldn’t bear to part with when I moved to Japan in 1993. There was some pretty amazing stuff in there, too. A mono Sgt. Pepper with the inner sleeve still in tact, a Syd Barrett bootleg with a cover by Robyn Hitchcock, a bunch of extremely rare releases on the Beatles' Apple label, a few things that were not terrifically collectible but had lots of sentimental value. And now they all had to go. I wasn’t about to try and drag four crates of records back with me to Los Angeles. So I bit the bullet, packed them all in my dad’s van and took them to the local Half Price Books and Records where I got waaaaaaaayyyyyy less than half the price I’d paid for them.

I have a great admiration for the proverbial Zen monk who owns nothing but his robes, his begging bowl and his zafu. To me, this seems like a sensible lifestyle, closer to our natural situation. Conversely I have nothing but pity for the flamboyantly rich that make up much of the population where I live now in Los Angeles. I don’t envy their silly cars and their pretty pink houses and their gaudy jewelry, although I gather that I’m expected to. For all the shiny objects they own they always look so very sad. It must be hard to have to stress out all the time about status and property.

On the other hand, I’m certainly far from being a monk with just a robe to my name. I got stuff — pawn shop guitars, Godzilla toys, a collection of old dinosaur books. I go through my junk periodically and purge the things I no longer care about. My curse is that over the years I’ve gotten a whole lot better at sniffing out really cool things that I’ll never be able to find again, which makes the purges a lot harder and less thorough. But whenever I look over the stuff I got I can’t help thinking what a mess it’ll be for whoever has to get rid of it after I die. I hope they get a better price for it than I did for those records.

But the proverbial monk with nothing but a robe is largely a thing of the past. I’ve come across a few people who’ve tried to create modern day variations. But I’m largely unimpressed. One guy I saw followed the ancient Buddhist custom of never handling money. Only all this really meant was that he never picked up the check. I watched him stick a group of his students for a smack-up Indian meal on their dime (our dime, actually, since I stupidly gave a donation) while regaling them with tales of skydiving lessons and expensive sea cruises. All of this extravagance was paid for by their loving dana donations, which he, of course, never deigned to touch with his pure Buddhist Master hands. “For too long it’s been thought that the Buddha’s path is an inward journey. But it can be an outward journey as well,” he chuckled, his eyes gleaming with Enlightenment. You’re laughing. But you should’ve been there. This guy’s followers were lapping it up like manna from Nirvana.

I have met a couple monks who, unlike that guy, were actually serious about the whole no possessions thing. One guy made his entire living through begging at train stations. This is a common sight in Japan. But once my teacher told me, “I never give money to those people because I don’t know what they really use it for.” In both the cases I observed of this, though, the monks in question gave up after a short time and took on real jobs.

It’s nearly impossible these days to be seen as much more than a freeloader if you try to live that way. I’m also completely unimpressed by the recent trend of American Buddhist practitioners to do what they call “Plunge Experiences.” This is where they go out and pretend to be homeless people for a few nights to try and bring about some kind of far out experience. Whatever. You won’t catch me wasting time on anything like that.

For people who are really serious about Buddhist practice the contemporary world presents something of a dilemma. We can’t fall back on repeating the ways of the past the way many religions do. In fact, aping what our ancestors did is counter to the very fundamental spirit of Buddhism. What to do then?

It strikes me that the answer is to apply the idea of the Middle Way. A lifestyle of excess is obviously unhealthy, while a lifestyle of having nothing but our robes and begging bowls may not be practical anymore — though, certainly, if you could actually do it, that would be nice. But I don’t and neither have my teachers. Living in a capitalist society requires that we participate in the economic life of the society to some degree. Besides that, if Buddhist practitioners are perceived as a bunch of freeloaders living off the rest of society, that doesn’t do us any good at all.

We need to be careful not to desire too much, not to take more than we need or can use. We need to live sensibly within our means and to support the society we live in by contributing to its health and wellbeing. This will mean something a little different to each person, and that’s fine.

It’s a beautiful romantic notion to dream of being absolutely free from all possessions. But few among us can really do it. And I don’t see any compelling reason why more of us should. Just be sensible. Find the Middle Way in everything you do.

By the way, about that rare Syd Barrett bootleg? I put it in a box and sent it back to my apartment in L.A. along with a few other records and books — including a tattered copy of the brilliant, but long out-of-print Horrors from Screen to Scream. So sue me.

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.