Merry Christmas Eve from your local Buddhist columnist!

I’m down in Knoxville, Tennessee with my sister and her family. This week I appeared on my niece, Skylar’s YouTube show. Check it out:




Also check out my blog for the outtake version.

Tonight children all over the world go to sleep believing a mysterious man will break into their house late at night to leave them fabulous gifts. My niece is 11 and gave up on Santa Claus a few years ago. But she has some friends her age who, she says, still believe or at least pretend to believe to please their parents. I gave up on Santa when I was about seven, but my sister was two years younger so I made-believe I believed a bit longer. But I think most kids have outgrown the Santa myth by first or second grade.

For kids raised in religious families, the time you stop believing in Santa (or Hanukkah Harry or Kris Kwanza or whoever you choose) is often highly traumatic. I mean if Santa, Rudolph and the toy making elves aren’t real, what about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Even though my own family was not religious, I can clearly recall going through this dilemma in my childhood. For friends of mine who grew up in more religious households the realization that Santa was made-up triggered a massive crisis of faith from which some of them still haven’t recovered.

Faith is a tricky subject. While some Christians try to pass amendments recognizing Christmas, other Christians don't even have faith in Christmas. When faith means believing in the literal reality of things you cannot see, hear or touch you’re bound to run into trouble. In that very narrow sense of faith, faith in the reality of Santa’s Workshop in the North Pole and faith in the reality of Heaven and its Angels on High are precisely the same. They are both objects of the mind and, as such, both equally insubstantial and unreal. There is no more reason for a rational person to believe any more in one than the other.

This is why faith often turns people into psychopaths. It’s very hard to maintain the façade of believing in something you know deep down is just a figment of your imagination. In order to try and destroy your perfectly reasonable doubts you have to resort to all kinds of crazy shit. You might even fly a couple of airplanes into some big buildings just to prove to everyone you really believe in some bizarre fantasy although you know perfectly well you don’t.

People who come to Buddhism trying to escape from that kind of faith into something more sensible are often shocked when they hear Buddhists talk about faith. In fact a lot of Buddhists avoid talking about faith to those unfamiliar with the Buddhist take on the subject for fear of scaring them off. This sometimes leads people to feel they’ve been duped when they finally hear their teachers mention the subject a couple of years into the practice.

But faith and belief are important aspects of Buddhism. Human beings need faith and belief. This is one of the many reasons atheism is such an unsatisfactory alternative to religion. When we try to completely give up on faith and belief we feel empty and discontented. Like that poster on Agent Mulder’s wall says, we all want to believe. And like Agent Mulder, when traditional religions fail we’ll turn to UFOs, or Comet Hale-Bopp, or the The Dear Leader, or just about any whacky thing just to satisfy the very deep desire we all have to have faith in something.

To be sure, a lot of what falls under the heading of faith in what passes for Buddhism these days is little more than the substitution of one fantasy for another. Even the faith in “Enlightenment experiences” professed by some mutant strains of Zen Buddhism is just another fantasy. For my man, Dogen, though, faith was never directed at any object of mind. Faith was a matter of practice. You could have faith in the practice of zazen because you could actually enter into the practice yourself at any time. It’s not necessary to hang on to any belief in things unseen or far away. As your practice deepens, your real experience of the object of your faith grows. You come to see that the image of reality you’ve been fed by your parents, teachers, and religious leaders is utterly mistaken.

Tim McCarthy, my first Zen teacher, always liked to say that to practice Zazen you need an equal amount of doubt and faith. Without some kind of faith it’s just too damned hard even to sit yourself down on the cushion and do the practice. But without an equal amount of doubt, you’re far too likely to fly off into some kind of fantasy about the practice. The mistake that religions all make is to try to promote faith exclusively and kill all doubt. That just makes people crazy.

As far as Santa Claus is concerned, I’ve gone from not believing in him to having complete faith that he really exists. This comes from the explanation I heard my sister give Skylar about her take on Santa. Santa, she said, is just a name for the spirit of free giving that exists in all of us. The image of Santa as a fat man in a red suit is just an image we’ve created to express that spirit of free giving.

When we look at it that way, Santa is real and the Easter Bunny is real and Hanukkah Harry is real, and so too are Jesus and Heaven and Muhammed and all the rest. Even Buddha is real.

Me, I hope Santa brings me a copy of that new KISS DVD.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. 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.

Did I tell you I got a MySpace page? Well I do. I resisted it for a long time. But it’s actually kind of fun.

Anyway, here’s a question I got from one of the people who reads my stuff there:

What do you do when you treat others in a caring, giving, compassionate way...always thinking of others, But it is never appreciated and you are treated really shitty?

Compassion is a big buzzword among Buddhists in America. Everybody’s all like, “Compassion, compassion, compassion….” It’s so fucking annoying I just want to slap them. Be compassionate to me and shut the fuck up about compassion, why don’t you? Why doesn’t anybody ask me about fun stuff like that mummified dinosaur they just found? I shoulda become a paleontologist like I wanted to when I was six instead of a fucking Buddhist monk.

Sorry. Where was I? Oh. Compassion. OK. Compassion is funny stuff. It’s very important to be compassionate. But at the same time you can’t try to be compassionate. Cuz when you try to be compassionate you just screw everything up. Real compassion doesn’t have anything at all to do with your attempts to be compassionate.

Dogen said that compassion is like a hand reaching back to adjust a pillow in the night. That is an example of perfectly selfless and compassionate action. A problem arises and you fix it without ever even being aware of having done anything at all. It doesn’t matter that the person who performs the action and the person who receives its benefit are the same.

The problem for my MySpace friend was that she was trying real hard to be compassionate and that she expected some kind of reward as a result. It’s not necessary to worry too much about the results of what you do. And don't worry too much about deliberately trying to be caring, giving and compassionate. Sometimes when you try too hard at that, you end up doing more than what's actually necessary. Sometimes it's OK to let people suffer a bit. Sometimes it's what they need to go thru and if you interfere with that you're not really helping.

When you see someone suffering it’s sometimes really hard to accept that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Of course I’m not talking here about a situation like if you’re driving through the desert and you come across a Volkswagen bug on its back on fire with twelve screaming orphans inside. You don’t just drive by that and go, “I guess they need to suffer.”

The problem is when you react to every problem you come across the way you’d react to seeing twelve screaming orphans in a burning VW bug. You feel like, “Oh my God! I need to go fix that NOW!” And you end up just being an interfering busybody and making everybody resent you for it.

I see people who are into Buddhism getting into this kind of stuff all the time. They hear that the Bodhisattva vow says, “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.” And they think they gotta run around pretending to be Wonder Woman or something just saving everybody from everything. It doesn’t work like that. Wonder Woman is a cartoon character. You aren’t.

So how do you know when what you’re feeling is real compassion and when it’s just the desire to meddle in things that don’t need your meddling in them? The only way is to cultivate the same state of mind you have when you’re reaching back to adjust a pillow in the night. You have to be very, very quiet and listen to your intuition.

Real compassion is never emotional. It’s not the kind of messy, fuzzy wuzzy feeling like you get from watching this video:



God that kitty cat is so fucking cute and precious I wanna go to Japan and just crush the life out of him with my bare hands!!!

Sorry. Where was I again?

Oh yeah. True compassion is never that heated feeling of “I gotta fix that!” It’s very spontaneous and clear. Sometimes it’s not what you think of as being nice either. Sometimes real compassionate action looks like just the opposite.

This time of year we’re all spending way too much time with our families. Often the most difficult relationships we have are the ones that are closest. It’s sometimes nigh on impossible to know how to be truly compassionate towards your no-good alcoholic dad or your conniving manipulative mom or your slutty sister or your bonehead brother. We all get into these family get-together situations and think we’re the only sane person in the room. It’s sobering to remember that every single person there is thinking the same thing about him or herself too.

With families the problems are compounded because everyone seems to be needing, expecting, even demanding that you act in whatever way they expect a compassionate and caring person to act. This is especially true if they know you’re a Buddhist and they’ve seen Richard Gere or Lisa Simpson or somebody say something about Buddhism on TV once and figure they therefore know all there is to know about how Buddhists are supposed to behave. But most times they’re dead wrong. Most people don’t have the slightest clue what real compassion is.

The best thing to do is to act carefully without too much haste or urgency and without any expectation of reward or even recognition. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me intellectually, but I’ve noticed that the Universe has a way of working things out. Even if your mom is too bombed on prescription painkillers to notice all the things you did to keep her house from going to hell the week you were there, someone, somewhere, someday will notice and things will balance themselves. It takes a bit of faith to be able to let go and fall backwards into this. But if you do it just seems to work out. It’s useless to speculate why.

Real compassion isn’t about trying to be compassionate. Real caring isn’t about attempting to measure up to some phony image of what a caring person is supposed to look like. Real giving isn’t about handing over everything you have just so everyone knows how giving you can be. Just be very, very quiet and see what needs doing then do it and be finished with it.

And the next time you see me, don’t ask me about compassion. Ask me about the new KISS DVD instead. That’s true compassion.

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.