Good stuff, it seems you kind of drift between worlds in the sense you follow the precepts, but sometime step around them, youre human and you admit it.

keep on keepin' on

Word.

It's interesting - your Zen precepts are a combination of the Bodhisattva vows, the ten virtuous deeds and the lifetime lay precepts from my own tradition.

In reference to praising yourself and criticizing others, our commentary on that is that in order to commit a root downfall of that vow, meaning that you lose your vows, you have to be doing it with the motivation to raise yourself above another teacher - to take away their students, for personal gain.

You commit a secondary downfall (meaning that you do not lose your vows, but you do damage them) when you do it out of a feeling of pride or anger. You do not commit a downfall at all when you do it out of a sincere motivation to correct them.

I've never gotten vows from a Lama where they didn't read them. My Tibetan Lama, Sermey Khensur Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin, read them off of pechas, which are sheets of block-printed paper on which all traditional tibetan scriptures are printed. My American Lama read them off of the screen of his laptop.

The experience of my Lama reciting the vow ceremony off of the screen of his laptop was profoundly moving. Not because of the laptop screen, mind you, but because of the personal advice he gave before the ceremony started, and because of the ceremony itself. The laptop was just a prop - it didn't have any effect on how I felt about the ceremony other than that, as a geek, I thought it was kind of cool.

So for what it's worth, unfortunately when you read the vow ceremony out of a book, you are not striking out on your own. I don't think you need to feel bad, though - it's true that we each find our own way on the path to freedom, but that doesn't mean that we never walk in each others' footsteps!

Good read. Thanks for the future thoughts.

I often find your articles here (and on your blog) thought provoking and always worth my time. But this particular article strikes me because of personal experiences I had being shunned by the buddhist tradition I was raised with. WIthout disclosing the gory details, my journay away from this "organization" and into a more valuable pursuit of Buddhism began when I started questioning the value placed on the "how" of certain ceremonies versus the seemingly ignored "why's" of those ceremonies. I immediately was pulled aside and reminded that because I was young (15 at the time) I didn't understand that performing the ceremonies correctly showed "the Buddha" that we were trying faithfully to achieve enlightenment, and that questioning the purpose of the ceremony itself was pointless. This sent up a huge red flag for me, since my understanding of Buddhism (which I initially had gained because of this organization) was that rote performance of dogmatic rituals didn't actually lead you anywhere. You had to understand, and LIVE, Buddhist principles. Just performing the ceremonies because you'd been told to seemed to contradict Buddhism. Of course, I was just a kid, right?

Anyway, I've been reading your stuff for awhile, and wanted to say thanks for your continued efforts to teach; even those of us who've never met you get value from your work.

I don't know a lot about Buddhism, but it seems to me that any religion, philosophy, or whatever, that deals with self-awareness and self-understanding shouldn't put a whole lot of value into rituals that were developed by other people thousands of years ago.

Those hardcore, by-the-book Buddhists who value the mechanics of the ritual over the experience probably share many personality traits with hardcore, judgemental Christians.

The thing about 6 & 7 is you can't point out someone is breaking them WITHOUT BREAKING THEM.

Self awareness you appear to have in spades....the persons who defaced your wikipedia entry were not acting it appears from a place of self awareness but from a place of Dogma...so often the beliefs can get in the way of the truth...which is of course that the Buddha sucks

Once again, the fear of the "different" is always something that gets people's cockles out of whack. The Zen tradition often embraces "diversity", then spends scads of energy trying to get you to do things in a given, rigid way, and Suzuki-roshi kicked ass at breaking that down. Often, that "rigid way" is there to help calm the mind, or draw it away from itself, and that obviously can be an aide. But it (this rigid interpretation of Buddhism/Zen) is not--nor can it ever be--all things to all people, and the obvious analogy here is that all things that are so rigid have a nasty habit of breaking. That's why--to many practitioners--the most important dictate the Buddha laid out there about the practice is; try it and see for yourself. He never said "do it this way", because saying so isn't really the middle way...

And people who are more Buddhist-than-thou and hack Wiki's to save the world from renegade roshi's?

Weak...

Gasho, Brad-san...

This morning I was reading the Wikipedia article on fundamentalism, which quotes the Dalai Lama as saying there are fundamentalist Buddhists. At first I was thinking of these people with their unquestioning adherence to the rituals as Zen fundamentalists. But the Wikipedia article puts forth the definition of fundamentalism as trying to return to the fundamentals of a religion. To me the fundamental of Zen is meditation. As I understand it, that's what Zen literally means. So it seems to me the Zen fundamentalists should be off in a corner, staring at the wall.

At my Zendo we've got rituals, and the teacher is kind of hardcore about them. But there's no sense that you can't question them. In fact, my teacher recently changed a bunch of them around. And she's always willing to talk about them, and why she does things the way she does. Which mostly boils down to helping us meditate.

What is your opinion of the books written by Lama Suya Das? Awakening the Buddha Within for example.

I wonder if these are the same people who vandalized Ian McKay's Wikipedia entry last week. (He was allegedly hit by a car and died)

I smell a punk rock conspiracy.

First of all, Big Ups for starting off the piece with a quote from ZMBM, you can't go wrong there, it only bodes well for the rest of what you're about to say.

Secondly, I'm the worst Zen Buddhist of all, and I always will be, and you know what, I take pride in that fact. I can't do Zazen worth a damn, I tend to smoke cigarettes from time to time, and I still haven't faced those parts of myself that I know are truly scary and repulsive. But you know what? I consider the fact that I know that I am truly as base and repulsive as the rest of us to be my best virtue, not to break a precept here.

After reading Zen Mind, I almost felt like even though I may not ever go on a retreat or get down a regular schedule of Zazen, I can learn to live HERE and NOW, and when I do that, there is no other person to criticize, there is no me to do the criticizing, there is only THIS, HERE. But, I could be wrong, and I'm just going down the wrong path. But you know what, it's mine, and so long as I focus on the steps I'm taking and not the ones I have taken or will take, I think that's not too bad.

In the meantime, swearing is liberation, and there's nothing wrong with anger itself, only angry actions. Keep up the good work Brad Roshi.

I'd argue that you can (make progress in trying to) know yourself by getting a rad tattoo. You just have to get one that confronts something major about you, that forces you to do some true introspection while you're grimacing through the pain of getting a needle dragged through your skin.

Great article as always, I'm always finding that this column works as an excellent counterpart to your book (Sit Down and Shut Up!, I haven't read Hardcore Zen) as a way of expanding on and clarifying the thesis. Boo to wikipedia vandals!

None of your actions would affect a true Buddhist.

In time those that have criticized you will reach a point on their path where they understand you and will smile to themselves.

haha, amen.