Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Quentin Tarantino Embraces Buddhism?

Before I forget, for those of you who’ve bought my new book, Sit Down and Shut Up!, I found a mistake. Turn to page 74 and look at the bottom of the second complete paragraph. It says: "To really suppress anger, you have to suppress the urge to avoid the beautiful juiciness of it all." It's supposed to say, "...suppress the urge to enjoy the beautiful juiciness of it all." So go get your Bic and fix that. Thanks. Those of you who haven’t bought the book must do so right now. You will obey me. OBEY! OBEY!!

AND I'll be doing a talk and book signing on MAY 17th, 2007 at the BODHI TREE BOOKSTORE which is located in West Hollywood, California (click for directions) at 7:30 PM. So show up, dammit! A good time will be had by all.

I imagine most of you saw the news post by Psuedonymph this week about Quentin Tarantino. It seems that Quentin, being influenced by Uma Thurman’s dad Robert “Buddha Bob” Thurman, has embraced the philosophy of Buddhism and come to know the truth of his past lives — including former existences as a black slave and as Chinese and Japanese people. I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout Tarantino embracin’ no Buddhism. But I wouldn't mind embracing Uma Thurman.

When Psuedonymph called me up to ask what I thought of the story I said it sounded pretty dippy to me. I mean I love Tarantino as a writer and director. But as a Buddhist? I don’t think so…

Lots and lots and lots of people these days seem to think that all Buddhists believe in reincarnation. In fact, one of the main reasons for the popularity of Buddhism in America these days is because so many Americans think that Buddhism is the belief in reincarnation. So let me state this clearly and for the record I am a Buddhist teacher and I do not believe in reincarnation. In fact, you’ll find that a great number of Buddhists do not believe in reincarnation. Dogen, the founder of the sect I belong to, said, “Firewood, after becoming ash, does not again become firewood. Similarly, human beings, after death, do not live again.”

Dogen was highly critical of the belief in reincarnation, going so far as to say that people who claimed to be Buddhists and still espoused that belief weren’t really Buddhists at all. At the risk of offending Robert Thurman and thereby ending forever my chances to embrace Uma, I tend to concur. I think the belief in reincarnation is a complete distortion of everything the Buddha taught. It seems to have been shoe-horned into the philosophy at a later time by folks with misguided notions about popularizing it. In its most basic form Buddhism has nothing whatsoever to do with the belief in reincarnation.

Buddha had a completely different view of time from that of pretty much anybody else in his day. To him, the only real time is right now, this very moment. The past is just memory and the future is just a dream. In the moment when we’re alive, we’re alive. In the moment of death, we die. In truth, though, we are dying every single moment. You are not the same person you were when you read the first paragraph of this article. That person is dead and gone, never to return or be reincarnated. The only way you can have reincarnation is when you believe in linear time, when you believe that there is some immutable entity — your “self” or your “soul” — that stays the same while everything else around it changes. Buddha flatly denied that idea. It’s a shame to see those who call themselves his followers embracing it.

As soon as you start spinning off dreams about what might happen to you after you die or what you were before you were born you’ve completely left the realm of reality and entered the land of fantasy. In spite of Tarantino’s assertion that he has “just a feeling, a knowing” about his former life as Kunte Kinte’s bunkmate, nobody — and I mean nobody — knows their past lives. Hell, we don’t even know what we did at breakfast yesterday. You may have memories of this or that. But how reliable is your memory? Mine isn’t worth shit, I know that. Whether it’s a memory of a past life or a memory of a night out with Uma, all memory is just the action of the brain cells. It’s not reality. Only this moment is reality.

The whole past lives deal sucks most people right in and once you mention it they can’t seem to concentrate on anything else. Lost in dreams of glorious lives lived in former centuries they’ll never notice where they really are right now. I cannot seriously accept anyone as a Buddhist Master if they’re encouraging their followers to live in dreams and fantasies. Sorry everybody. But I can’t.

Look. Everyone is afraid to die. And we’d all like for some starry-eyed mystic in robes who seems to know things that are hidden from our view to come up and tell us not to worry, that we’re going to live forever. Starry-eyed guys in robes have made a damned good living selling that fantasy for thousands of years. But it’s all just smoke and mirrors. They don’t know anything you don’t know. Not a one of them.

So what happens after you die? Fuck if I know. I’m scheduled to go to Japan next week and I have no idea what’s gonna happen to me after I get there. I can plan for it. I can dream about it. I can even buy a bullet train ticket to Kyoto for the Tuesday after I arrive. But that doesn’t mean I know anything about what will really happen in my future. Being able to live with the unknown is the only way to live a truly happy life.

In the case of past and former lives — or Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (Limbo’s been abolished) if you prefer — there’s really no point at all in speculating. Even if it were true what good would it do you to know? So you were Napoleon? Now you’re waiting tables in Fresno. You’re much better off fawning over that guy in the nice suit so he’ll give you a good tip than getting so caught up in reliving the Italian campaign of 1796 that you forget to pour him some more coffee.

This is what counts, the life you’re living now. If anyone should know that it’s a guy like Quentin Tarantino. You don’t make a masterpiece like Kill Bill by worrying about what your soul was doing 400 years ago. You do it by paying attention to what’s going on right now. The ability to fantasize has some use when writing fiction or writing screenplays —I even use my own ability to fantasize when writing non-fiction like this. Buddhist literature is, in fact, full of made-up stories intended to illustrate a point. But even in these cases we can only use fantasy in a productive way when we understand the difference between our imaginations and what is actually real. The dream of the movie Kill Bill didn’t sell a bazillion tickets, as the millions of people who fantasize about making their masterpiece but never take any action towards realizing it can attest. The movie itself on 35mm celluloid is completely different from the dream. Reincarnation fantasies always blur the distinction between dreams and reality. They should be avoided.

So Quentin, if you ever really get interested in Buddhism, feel free to stop by my Saturday morning sittings in Santa Monica (see below). Or, better yet, just send Uma around for a private lesson…

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.

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