Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: The Porno Buddhist

It has recently been brought to my attention that I am now apparently known in Buddhist circles as the “Porno Buddhist.” This, it seems, is a source of great humor as well since, I am told, these Buddhists enjoy laughing at me. And how, you might ask, did I come across this information? It’s a bit of a long story. But you might enjoy it.

Traditionally a Buddhist teacher, when he gets older, will appoint a successor. This has been going on since Buddha’s day. Generally speaking, a Buddhist teacher might ordain a number of students and even give what they call “Dharma Transmission” to several of them. Dharma Transmission is a little hard to explain. But it means that, in your teacher’s eyes, you’ve gone a bit beyond being a run of the mill monk and have an extra special understanding that the teacher recognizes. There are other reasons transmission is given. But that’s all beside the point. Though a teacher may give any number of these ordinations and transmissions, traditionally he or she will only appoint one successor.

Recently my teacher, Gudo Nishijima, decided to appoint me as his successor. That might sound pretty cool. But actually it made me feel kind of weird and apprehensive. See cuz I’ve seen the way these things work. As soon as the teacher appoints a successor, the other people who think that they should have been the successor get all mad about it. And, of course, things get more complicated if the teacher dies before announcing his or her decision. Luckily my teacher is at least still very much alive and well.

This stuff is certainly not unique to Buddhism. But it’s highly disappointing to find that it exists just as much within communities who call themselves Buddhists as it does anywhere else. You’d expect better. I expect better. This kind of behavior is non-Buddhism plain and simple. But in the real world, this is how things go.

So I hemmed and hawed some about accepting the appointment because I didn’t know if I wanted to face the inevitable onslaught. But I decided that it was better to just get it over with. So I told Nishijima Roshi it was fine if he wanted to make the news public.

As soon as the announcement was made people started bitching about it. I touched on this a little in this article. But rather than dissipating quickly as I’d hoped, the shit just keeps getting flung into the fan. The most recent thing has been the announcement that I am the Porno Buddhist. I assume that’s because I write these columns for you nice people at Suicide Girls.

Now I don’t want to present myself as poor little innocent Bradley just minding his own business and everybody gets mad at me for no reason. I knew that when I chose to write for Suicide Girls, this kind of stuff was going to come up. But I will say that I did not expect it from people who used to present themselves as my friends. That’s pretty sad. Plus I really do expect better of people who call themselves Buddhists. Anyway, they are all off my Christmas card list, you better believe that!

And I should also point out that this is not at all unique to the lineage I belong to. In fact, I'd say, as these things go we're dealing with it better than a lot of others. Way better. At least so far. Most of the time these things are carefully hidden from the public and they can be far more brutal.

Be that as it may, I want to address my role as the Porno Buddhist. When this accusation was made, my teacher recommended my “friends” to study a chapter in Dogen’s Shobogenzo called “Flowers in Space.” It’s like the old Muppet Show skit “Pigs in Space,” only with flowers instead of pigs. He said it related well to the Buddhist attitude toward regulating sexual desire.

I won’t try and get into the whole chapter here. You can go buy volume three of Shobogenzo at Amazon.com if you want to read it all. There’s one line in particular that Dogen quotes from an old Chinese Zen Master. It goes like this:

By eliminating disturbances we redouble the disease.

Dogen explains this by saying: “We have not been free of disease hitherto; we have had the Buddha bug and the patriarch bug. Intellectual excluding now adds to the disease and augments the disease. The very moment itself of eliminating is inevitably disturbance. They are simultaneous and are beyond simultaneousness. Disturbances always include the fact of [trying to] eliminate them.”

We all have sexual desires. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. We need to have sexual desire to survive as a species. Neither Dogen nor Buddha himself would have even been born were it not for their parents’ sexual desires. If you want to believe your Savior was born without someone having had sex first, go ahead. Anyway, the line above doesn’t even specifically relate to sexual desire but to the more general concept of disturbance.

Lots of people try to establish some kind of spiritual purity. In order to do so they often try as hard as they can to eliminate anything that might disturb that purity. But Dogen says that, “excluding adds to the disease and augments the disease.” Furthermore he says that, “the very moment itself of eliminating is inevitably disturbance.” There is only one reason we call something a disturbance, because we wish it wasn’t there. “Disturbances always include the fact of trying to eliminate them.” Ain’t it the truth!

This is the real key to understanding the Buddhist way. Buddhist practice seeks to expose everything. That is what we’re doing when sitting Zazen. It may look like nothing. But we are exposing ourselves to ourselves. Lots of us who do this don’t like what we see. But we persevere until every rock is unturned and every squishy ugly little bug underneath has seen the light of day.

In our contemporary world, no one can hope to avoid being bombarded by images of objects of desire. For those of you reading this, such images are available 24 hours a day at the touch of a button -- even quicker if you’re a subscriber! How do we live in such a world?

This is a vital question. But like all the most vital questions it’s not one that I or anybody else can answer for you. You have to discover your own way. The only thing I can offer is the advice that you have to constantly seek balance. When things are too exciting, that’s a problem. Every high has a corresponding low that goes with it. You don’t believe that, I bet. Most of us don’t. We think we’ll someday find the high that lasts forever. I can’t stop you from trying. But I can say without question that it doesn’t exist. It is not in the nature of things for such a high to exist anywhere.

Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. But they’re looking in the wrong place. They think the disturbance comes from outside of themselves. I guess my Dharma Brothers think that what disturbs them is located over there in an apartment in West Hollywood dressed in golden robes and waving a stick while surrounded by plastic monster toys and dozens of luscious Suicide Girls (oh how I wish!). But I have my doubts. Whenever I looked carefully at the things that disturbed me most deeply I never found them outside. They were always right here. And that’s where they’ll always be found.

*****

I’ll be doing a talk and book signing on Thursday August 9, 2007 at the Many Paths Bookstore in North Hollywood.

Then I’ll be in New York City August 26-28 at the following locations:

• Sunday August 26, 2007- 7 PM at Bluestockings Radical Books on the Lower East Side
• August 27, 2007 at 7 PM at The Interdepedence Project at Lila Center 302 Bowery at Houston (this will be the most like a formal lecture among all the NYC appearances)
• August 28, 2007 at 7:30 PM Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village

Then I’ll be in Montreal on August 30, 2007 at 7 PM at McGill University’s Education/Counselling Psychology Department 3700 Rue McTavish Room 233

All of the above events are open to the public. So y’all come out now!

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. This is open to anyone who wants to show up.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/culture/22039/Brad-Warners-Hardcore-Zen-The-Porno-Buddhist/