I went and got hugged by Amma, India’s world-famous hugging saint, when she was in Los Angeles last month. She shoved my head into her fluffy right boob and whispered something that sounded like “Magilla, Magilla, Magilla, Magilla,” into my ear. Or maybe it was “Medula, Medula, Medula, Medula.” It was hard to tell.

Her hot breath was kind of a turn-on. I didn’t expect that. But I have kind of a weakness for women whispering in my ear. Then she mashed a Hershey’s Kiss into my hand, after which two of her people grabbed me from behind, kind of spun me around and sent me off into the crowd.

It took me a while to get the whole “hug and kiss” pun.

I felt a little dizzy as they shoved me out of the way to make room for the next customer. Was that the shaktipat everybody was getting so excited about? Shaktipat is supposed to be a direct transference of spiritual energy from an enlightened being. It felt to me more like that druggy, disorientated sensation you have when you get off a rollercoaster or when you take a hardy toke of some very good weed.

In case you don’t know, Amma is a cute, short, chubby Indian lady who a lot of people believe is an Enlightened Being. She was born in 1953 in a tiny fishing village in South India. During her childhood, they say, she spent much of her time absorbed in a deep meditative state of Samadhi. By the time she was 21 she’d begun to attract followers. In the early '80s she consolidated this following into an ashram and began traveling the world offering darshan, a Sanskrit word meaning “encounter with a saintly person,” to spiritual seekers around the world.

There’s a lot to like about Amma. So I’m going to start by saying some of that, because I know that no matter what I do people are gonna say this article trashes poor sweet Amma. But she seems like a genuinely decent person and I’m sure her charitable work does a lot of people a lot of good. She’s not a hate monger. She doesn’t put down anyone regardless of race, creed or religion. She seems to be a very nice lady who wants to do some good in the world. Her charities run educational programs, distribute free food, run hospitals and hospices, build free homes for the poor and provide lifetime stipends for mentally and physically challenged adults. It is all wonderful stuff.

What worried me was what surrounded all of this niceness and how some of it wasn't really all that nice.

The set up has been psychologically and theatrically designed for the maximum build-up just before you get the big pay off. When you arrive at the Radisson Hotel near LAX you take a number. Or in my case, you arrive really late after taking your friend to the airport and you get a little pink card. After Amma gets through hugging all the people with numbers, if she’s still up to hugging some more, they allow the folks with the pink cards to get a number.

The second floor of the hotel has been re-imagined as a spiritual wonderland, sort of a Hindu themed fairground complete with uniformed Mousekateers to guide you through. After you get your number you stand in a long line, drawing slowly ever nearer to the saint herself. “Have your ticket visible,” I was told several times. Can’t have any line jumpers! And you’d be amazed how many of these “spiritual seekers” will elbow the next guy out of the way to get their shaktipat first.

As you get closer you see that Amma is surrounded by concentric circles of ever more devoted disciples. There are three or four guys right next to her watching her the way a dog watches its master as she speaks what I assume are beautiful spiritual messages to them, to which they dare not reply or in any way engage in conversation with someone so divine. After that are rings of worshippers swooning just to be in the Amma’s presence. When they remove Amma’s chair many of these will run up to lay prostrate and kiss the ground upon which it had sat.

As you move closer to Amma you gradually surrender more and more of your own will. First your shoes come off. Then you’re directed in a line by authoritative people who instruct you to move from chair to chair. Then you are pushed into a kneeling position such that you are crawling for the last ten feet or so. Then they remove your jewelry and glasses and wipe off your face like you’re a three year old child. Finally you are pushed powerlessly into Amma’s -- they call her “Mother” -- waiting embrace.

The stage is set up with Hollywood style lighting full of vibrant orange, pink and gold. On the wall is a ten-foot high photo of Amma with a half dozen spotlights trained upon her face to make it glow even more ethereally, just in case you forgot what she looks like. Backlit streamers and flags hang all around the Radisson Hotel’s conference room to create the image of a blissful Hindu heaven. The color scheme seems intended to generate a feeling of womblike security. The scent of incense and perfume hangs heavy in the air.

Beyond the inner circle is the marketplace. Here you can buy Amma jewelry, Amma T-shirts, Amma bumper stickers, Amma dolls, Amma coffee mugs, Amma iPods pre-filled with MP3’s of Amma singing and a whole range of other such goodies and trinkets. On the walls are advertisements for other spiritual healers personally endorsed by Amma, such as Dr. Weng’s acupuncture, Effective Vedic Astrology, Banyan Botanicals and much, much more. If that’s not enough for you, you can buy all sorts of items personally used by Amma including discarded clothing, chairs, rugs, and even Amma’s Lexus. The poster for this last item helpfully includes the car’s current Blue Book value ($8000) and its starting bid ($12,000). And don’t forget the food! Delicious vegetarian cuisine at reasonable prices. This last, I did not pass up.

Amma is a registered trademark. None of the licensed items on offer fail to put that little circled “R” next to her name, lest she lose her claim. I know how this works. I used to be in charge of this kind of stuff for a Japanese company that made a superhero show and we did exactly the same thing. She’s got a cute little logo too, just like we did. Branding is everything! I’ll bet you dollars to donuts she goes after bootleg Amma merch just like we went after bootleg Ultraman merch.

Later on, after my hug, I got to witness some of Amma’s teaching. She’s not bad. In fact she and her opening act, a bearded swami whose name I’ve forgotten, are fairly accomplished stand-up comics. That was something I didn’t expect. The jokes were pretty corny, but not too worn out. There was one about a guy who walks into a bar and throws his drink at the bartender. Before the bartender can get mad, the guy starts weeping. He tells the bartender he can’t help himself, it’s a compulsion. The bartender recommends a shrink. The guy goes and then returns six months later whereupon he again throws his drink at the bartender. The bartender says that the shrink doesn’t seem to have helped. The guy says, “No. He helped a lot. I still have the compulsion but now I don’t feel guilty about it!” The crowd laughs, the spiritual significance of the joke is explained and everybody sighs deeply in unison at the beauty of the great teacher’s great teaching.

And just what is Amma’s message to the world? Here are a few quotes from the free pamphlet (chock full of advertisements) given out to all comers; “God-realization is nothing but the ability and expansiveness of the heart to love everything equally,” and “Love is what fills life constantly with newness,” “Try to cultivate a heart that never harms any being in thought, word or deed.” That sort of thing.

We are also told in the pamphlet, “To love is Mother’s (Amma’s) nature, to serve is her nature,” and assured that, “As far as Mother is concerned, everyone is her child.” “There is nothing preplanned about Amma’s mission,” the pamphlet tells us, “All her projects have been spontaneously compassionate responses to the sorrow and suffering she sees around her.”

And yet, and yet, and yet… for all the charitable work and messages of kindness and generosity there is something deeply disturbing about the whole circus that surrounds all of this admittedly admirable work.

Maybe it’s because it is such a circus. Why do we need to driven nearly to a frenzy with spiritual madness before we can be coerced into contributing to a good cause?

What’s wrong with worshipping Amma, after all? She seems nice enough. So what’s the problem?

The scariest part of the whole thing to me was the men standing around her transfixed just like dogs ready to obey their master. The expressions on their faces were just like the expressions you see on a Doberman waiting for its master to say “fetch” or “kill.” A dog is only as good as its master. If the master tells the dog to fetch the paper, it fetches the paper. If the master tells the dog to maul the black man who just moved in next door, it mauls the black man. The dog’s only criteria is pleasing its master. It has no will or moral center of its own. Blind obedience is never a good thing, even when it’s directed at a supposedly “good” person.

What happens when these folks who’ve learned only obedience get tired of Amma? They have learned only obedience. Who will they obey next?

We need personal responsibility. This is truer now than it ever has been in history. We now have access as individuals to unprecedented power. This was brought home clearly by the events of September 11, 2001. A handful of people were able to cause a level of destruction and havoc that had previously taken the efforts of an entire nation. And things have only become more dangerous since then.

It’s never a good thing to give up your personal power. You need your personal power in order to take personal responsibility.

Maybe Amma delivers pure love. That’s what her press agent says, anyway. Still, I’m not sure pure love is what we need either. I think what’s truly needed is a balance of love and hate. By “hate” I’m not talking about the kind of hate that manifests as crimes against people of other races and that kind of thing. Hate is something much deeper and more profound.

There are two sides to the Universe. Spiritual people always talk about oneness, about dissolving into the embrace of Universal love. But that’s only one side of reality. The other side is hate, separation, aloneness. Both are real. When love and hate are balanced there is compassion and wisdom. Love alone is beautiful but powerless. Hate alone is powerful, but too dangerous.

It’s as bad to deny hate is as it is to deny love. When we acknowledge our separation we can act in unity with each other. When we lose our sense of separation we lose our effectiveness as individuals.

The two sides of our being are not mutually exclusive. It’s not that we have to give up our existence as individuals to merge into the warm embrace of all-encompassing Oneness. Our essential Oneness and our essential separation are manifestations of the same thing, which is neither oneness nor separation.

There are no words for this because the function of words is to divide and categorize. But reality as it is defies all categories. Even something as obvious as saying love is better than hate is an attempt to pin down and define that which is beyond definition.

We must act with compassion if we want to create a peaceful world. That’s true. But compassion is also beyond love and hate. Compassion is a spontaneous response to what needs to be done right here and right now.

I don’t detest Amma any more than I detest Phish or The Grateful Dead or anyone else who offers an evening of escapist entertainment based upon that heady feeling of warmth and community that can be created in an environment specifically designed to amplify those feelings while pushing all the other stuff to one side. I had fun and I would go again. The food was delicious too. I am overwhelmed by my own good fortune to have friends as wonderful as Aspen, Sawa and Tenaya who accompanied me and tolerated my annoyance at much of what went on at the event. I am overjoyed to live in a world enough at-peace that something like the Amma experience is allowed to happen.

What I question is when such experiences are offered up as if they provide some kind of Ultimate Answer to the world’s woes. If we don’t acknowledge and understand our own hate we can’t effectively deal with the problems that hate creates in our world. Warm smiles and hugs don’t fix everything and, sadly, they never will.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Brad Warner's endless tour continues soon and he may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

The answer to the question "who would Buddha fuck?" is that he wouldn’t. He left his wife to pursue the deeper Truth of the Universe. Later on she dropped whatever grudge she must have had and became a Buddhist nun. But as far as we know they did not get back together as husband and wife again even after she joined the order.

But, y’see, before Buddha became Buddha he got more ass than a toilet seat. Compared to the founders of most major religions Buddha was the Gene Simmons of the spiritual scene. One of the randiest saviors this planet has ever produced!

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, was born into a royal family and reportedly had quite a harem in his youth. His dad, the king, had a special “chamber of love” built for the boy where the raunchy little tyke spent his days partaking in all kinds of debauchery. According to Lust for Enlightenment by John Stevens, the ever horny prince availed himself of pleasure girls adept at such skills as “war of the tongues,” “kissing the stalk,” “sucking a mango,” “opening the blossom,” as well as sex positions known as "the union of cats," "the pressing of an elephant," "bee buzzing over honey" and, best of all, "the union of three." Sometimes the girls teamed up to perform the yogini chakra in which the salivating Siddhartha made love simultaneously with three, five, seven or nine partners.

Suffice it to say, by the time Buddha gave up sex he’d tried pretty much everything there was to try.

The first Buddhist monks attempted to emulate Buddha’s later life in terms of sex, meaning they usually became celibate.

Later on other Buddhists in the Tantric tradition took a completely different outlook, turning to Buddha's earlier life and trying to make sex into a meditative practice. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia*, “When enacted as enjoined by the tantras, the (sexual) ritual culminates in a sublime experience of infinite awareness, by both participants.” Uh huh. I’m sure it does. I have a couch right over here where we can try it out if you like…

In Zen practice we strive for the balanced state that Dogen called, “Dropping off both body and mind.” People come to this state of balance in a variety of ways. One of the reasons sex is so appealing is that for many people the only time they truly drop off body and mind and enter fully into the present moment is while fucking.

Yet, in spite of what the Tantrics say, I remain unconvinced that sex is a viable path to the Absolute. It’s just too easy to abuse and it’s too potentially emotionally charged of an activity for most people to maintain equilibrium while engaged in it

In medieval Japan a Zen monk named Ikkyu celebrated his own sexual escapades -- which, by the way, he never equated with his Zen practice -- in a series of poems dedicated to bar girls and prostitutes. My favorite goes like this,

He also said of fair Mori, “She is a master of love play. When my jade stalk wilts she can make it sprout.” Yay-yah!

There is clearly no single unified line of thinking when it comes to whether or not Buddhists should fuck. But Puritanism was never part of the Buddhist tradition. Even where celibacy is practiced it is only required of the clergy. There has never been a Buddhist-led movement to suppress sexuality among the general population.

As far as lay people were concerned, Buddha only said that a lay Buddhist man should, "avoid unlawful sexual intercourse. He (should have) no intercourse with girls who are still under the protection of father or mother, brother, sister, or relative; nor with married women, nor female convicts; nor lastly with betrothed girls." We can assume the same advice in modified form was expected to be adhered to by women.

We don’t live in ancient India or medieval Japan, and most of us are not Buddhist monks. But a lot of young people in the West these days are interested in Buddhism. And they’re interested in fucking.

And while ancient Buddhist texts may be able to tell us how the folks who composed them dealt with sex and marriage, they don’t really address the subject of dating at all, since it’s a very modern concept.

I joined one of the Buddhist dating services on the Internet recently, to see what might be going on in there. I’d seen the ads these guys placed in the Buddhist rags with an appealing young couple meditating back to back and thought they were hilarious. I didn’t get too far, though. The “free” site asked me to pay $15 if I wanted to send a message to any of its members. But what I found in my brief excursion was pretty dire.

For starters, it looks like most of the Southern California based women on the site identify their religion not as Buddhism, but as Scientology. I found that a little surprising. Scientologist or not, most of the folks there are looking for the elusive “soul mate.” It’s just such a sad place to visit. So many people wanting something so desperately that even if that something should cross their path they wouldn’t recognize it since they’re so blinded by wanting it. They get so into the mindset of looking for their ideal that the real world becomes a mere shadow.

As Mr. Spock said, “Sometimes having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”

A lot of the pain we face in life comes down to wanting what we don’t have. Maybe even all of it. Wanting is a function of thought. It’s disconnected from reality. It involves imagining a situation that would be better than the one you have right now and lamenting your current situation for not being like the thing you’ve imagined. Dating sucks**, generally, because we’ve been steeped in a culture that celebrates romantic love as the ultimate pleasure, yet in reality romantic love is an elusive thing that, even when actually experienced, has a lot of aspects that are not anything close to ultimate pleasure.

Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, only once gave dating advice. He said, “It’s all right to have as many sex partners as you like, as long as you can remember all of their names.” I think that’s an interesting piece of advice.

He said this at a talk in San Francisco in the late Sixties when free love was all the rage. He knew his audience were not going to turn to celibacy or even get married as Suzuki had three times. And anyhow, he didn’t think it was crucial that they did. But he did think it was crucial that they entered into each relationship with full conscious awareness.

I don’t like to use the word “mindfulness” to describe this kind of awareness because it has been driven into the ground through overuse by people who have no clue what mindfulness means. It does not mean, “thinking about stuff a whole lot.” It means paying full attention with body and mind. It has nothing at all to do with thought. Thought is only an infinitesimally tiny part of what we mean by the word “mind” in Buddhist philosophy.

Casual sex is not the Buddhist way. Which is not to say that sex has to always be a heavy activity fraught with meaning. But it does mean that sex ought to be handled with care. It has a deeper meaning, whether we’re aware of it or not.

A woman told me recently that when a man penetrates her physically she feels like she takes on his karma. That’s not exactly how I’d have stated it. But I believe what she said is true. And the same goes for a man, who also draws energy and karma from his partner. The identical sort of interaction happens between same-sex couples and in multi-partner situations as well, of course. This sort of thing should not be approached casually.

We’ve come too far culturally and historically to need to be very concerned with who the Buddha would fuck. Yet Buddhist philosophy and practice has a lot to tell us about how we can conduct our own sex lives in a conscious and careful manner.

By the way, uh, unicorns!

* This is sarcasm.
** This I know very well, right now.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

As you read this I will be winding up the first part of an extensive international tour to promote my latest book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. I have a small break now before a short hop to New Mexico and then the madness all starts again in August when I go to Finland and Germany.

Whenever I give a talk I’m always in a hurry to get to the Q&A section. That’s where the real action is as far as I’m concerned. At several of my stops on the current tour people have asked me whether I’ve had the experience of satori and, if so, what it was like.

The word satori means “awakening to one’s true nature.” According to most of the earliest English-language books on Zen, including the works of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, satori is the goal of Zen practice. I happen to come from a tradition that looks upon satori in a completely different way. But even in my tradition, there is the idea that if you do your Zen practice long enough and sincerely enough, there will come a time when the true nature of yourself and the universe becomes clear.

But asking someone else about their satori is a little bit like the guy in the Monty Python “Nudge Nudge” skit who keeps pestering a stranger about his sex life then finishes by asking, “Have you ever slept with a lady? What’s it like?”

Like sex, satori is something that can’t really be explained. Also, just like sex, it’s very easy to make others believe you’ve had an experience that you really haven’t. There’s enough literature out there these days that anyone who wants to could cobble together a pretty convincing satori experience story without even having done a single period of zazen. Plus, again like sex, there’s a huge market for stories of satori experiences among those who want to try and live vicariously through others, leading to the development of a very popular and lucrative field of literature we could call “sa+0ri pr0n.”

I’m not a big fan of this kind of literature, though I feel I may have inadvertently produced some of it myself. A lot of the readers and reviewers of my first book, Hardcore Zen seized on an incident that happens about 2/3 of the way through, in which I described the experience of understanding that occurred one day while I was walking along the banks of a river on my way to work. Sometimes people ask about this and their questions get so garbled I can barely make sense of them. One guy in Detroit a few years back asked about the incident in my book where I saw an apparition beside a lake. I can only assume he must have been talking about that part of the book. Unless he was talking about someone else’s book entirely!

Zen literature is full of expressions of the state I was trying to address with that passage in Hardcore Zen. Sometimes it’s described as “seeing your own face as it was before your parents were born.” My first teacher, Tim McCarthy, said, “It’s more you than you could ever be.” Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who ordained me, said, “My personality extends throughout the universe.” Just the other day in Saskatoon a guy told me about how depressed he’d been when he found out God didn’t exist. I told him God exists and that I can no longer doubt it at all.

These explanations really don’t help much, though. “Seeing your face before your parents were born” sounds like a description of reincarnation. “It’s more you than you” just sounds weird. “My personality extends throughout the universe” sounds like the ultimate ego trip. And how many other worthless assholes claim they know for certain God exists? They usually end up causing major catastrophes. There are a million other expressions of the same thing out there, all equally useless.

Yet one facet of my experience that day by the river was that all of these expressions were not useless at all. In fact they began on that day to make perfect sense. I don’t expect you to believe that. In fact I wouldn’t even want you to believe that. You really shouldn’t. Don’t. Please.

You’ve got to be very careful about people who tell you about their amazing spiritual experiences. They’re usually trying to sell you something. I know of one guy who asks $50,000 to give you a satori experience. And I’m trying to sell books. I won’t lie to you about that. Not necessarily by talking about that experience. But it’s part of it. But I do want to make it clear that I am not trying to get followers. Followers are a pain in the ass. They’re the ultimate stalkers. I have nothing but contempt for followers, especially if they’re mine.

When the folks who tell you about their amazing spiritual experiences aren’t trying to sell it to you they’re usually trying to get you to validate their experiences. They’re not sure if their enlightenment was real or not, but if someone else has believes in it they might be able to believe in it themselves.

But then on the other hand I know why a lot of people ask me about whether or not I’ve had satori. Here I am telling them it takes years of hard slog for zazen to start really working. They don’t want to waste their lives on boring Zen practice unless there’s gonna be some kind of pay off. They want to know what that pay off is supposed to be like so they can decide if it’s worth the trouble.

If that’s your view I can tell you right now it’s not worth the trouble. You might as well do something fun instead. The only way you’re ever going to have what it takes to pursue Zen practice is when you’ve exhausted every other option, when there’s nothing left for you but to dive right into the truth itself no matter what it costs you. Because it will cost you dearly. It will cost you your soul.

Still, when I started out with this stuff I found some sa+0ri pr0n inspirational. From time to time, the hope that I might one day have an experience like that myself kept me from giving up, just like my hope that I might one day have a 3-way myself kept me reading Penthouse Forum. That very same hope for satori someday also made me lose faith in Zen entirely a number of times when I realized it wasn’t happening, the same way I finally stopped reading Penthouse Forum. (Y’know, someone at SG should start and “SG Forum” group. I’d read that.)

So I don’t really know whether it benefits anyone to give them my own Penthouse Forum-style tale of satori or not. Plus there’s a sense in which mentioning these things at all is seen as bragging, like only people on a highly elevated spiritual plane or some such shit can have them. But the fact is that satori is available to anyone serious enough to work at it. It is your birthright. It is the underlying core of your real experience this very moment.

The best I can say about what happened to me on that day I wrote about in my first book is that I went in a moment from seeing myself as a guy walking to work to seeing myself as a concrete expression of the will of the universe. And it was not an intellectual experience. It was pure body knowledge, the same way reading about a 3-way in Penthouse Forum is totally different from actually having one on a Saturday afternoon in your own bedroom with two very close and beautiful friends.

Looking at the sky was exactly like looking into a mirror. Same with anything I turned my attention to. Yet, although I’d never felt that way before, it didn’t feel like anything new. It was like this had been the way things were all along and my other way of thinking had just been a temporary obstruction. It was like recognizing the mind that I’d been born with.

But most people who believe in satori or various other kinds of “enlightenment experiences” think that these experiences will be the ultimate fix-it-all. They want the experience because they imagine it will instantaneously wipe away every pain, fear and difficulty they have in life and they will exist forever in a state of permanent bliss and happiness. They think it will end suffering. It doesn’t.

In fact in my case it didn’t really fix much of anything. OK. A few nagging fears that had dogged me for ages were gone. I’m no longer afraid I’m going to die someday. That doesn’t mean I don’t fear death at all. It’s just that I don’t fear it as death. I don’t worry that one day I’m going to disappear. I can’t disappear. Neither can you or anyone else. Yet you’re not going to live forever either. You’re gonna be dead as a doornail someday and ain’t nothin’ gonna bring you back. You won’t get reincarnated either.

I still have all of the residual karma I had before that day. I am exactly the same person as I was. As Dogen put it, “Realization doesn’t break the individual any more that the reflection of the sky in a dewdrop breaks the dewdrop.” You still gotta deal. Yet you deal from a new standpoint. You deal with life knowing now what you’re dealing with and who is dealing with it.

I’ll say it again; none of the foregoing is intended to impress you or to make you believe what I say. I honestly couldn’t give two shits who it impressed or who believed it. In fact if you do believe it I’m likely to regard you as kind of a sap. But the fact of having been asked about it so many times on this tour lets me know there are people out there who are curious about these things and I’d like to try and give a realistic answer. This, I think, is very important because there are so many bullshit answers to that question and a whole lot of people believe them. I believed a lot of that bullshit myself and it did me a lot of harm.

So take from this article whatever you want. Argue about it in the comments section if you feel so inclined. Enjoy yourself. Be happy.



Brad Warner is ON TOUR RIGHT NOW and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Brad is currently looking for women to help him “do research” for his upcoming book about sex and Zen. He can be contacted directly for an appointment through this website!

A guy I know wrote me the following question:

Zazen is the type of meditation I teach. I use the word meditation here a bit loosely since zazen differs greatly from most other activities that fall under that heading. Unlike most forms of meditation, zazen is completely non-directed and has no goal. This is the key to its tremendous power. To see SuicideGirl LizaRose demonstrating how it's done go here. For more info see my book Hardcore Zen.There must be a zillion on-line sources of info on it as well.

The subject of Zen practice (aka zazen) for survivors of trauma has been much on my mind of late. I’ve tried several times to write something intelligent about it. But since I’m not a survivor of trauma myself -- other than life’s usual traumas that we all have -- I sometimes feel it’s not my place to say. I have known people who are both childhood sex abuse survivors and dedicated Zen practitioners. I hope one day one of them will write about this subject. But until then, I’ll take a shot. Much of what I want to say is based on what I’ve observed in them. But whether they involve childhood sexual abuse or not, traumas of all kinds are serious business and probably share much in common.

It’s a fact that zazen brings stuff up. No matter what kind of stuff you have locked away in your mind and body it's going to come out during sitting. It’s also true that zazen is different from other forms of meditation (if zazen is even a form of meditation) in that it is not directed at any ideal condition. In zazen you allow whatever comes up to just come up as it will, rather than attempting to move the mind toward a specific desired state as most forms of meditation do. This means that trauma survivors may be more likely to face repressed memories and suchlike while doing zazen than while doing other forms of meditation.

I don't think it's truly dangerous for trauma survivors to do zazen. But they have to be careful. Of course, anyone should exercise caution while doing the practice. But survivors of trauma need to be possibly even more careful. A practice that's very much focused on having an "Enlightenment experience" quickly is more likely to bring this stuff to the surface before you’re ready for it. This is yet another reason why crap like Big Mind® is so incredibly heinous and irresponsible. A pox upon them and their putrid ilk!

But here’s what a trauma survivor might expect to encounter in traditional Zen practice. Most of this is also applicable to anyone who practices zazen, trauma survivor or not. There’s not a single person in the world who doesn’t have some stuff they don’t acknowledge buried below the surface.

On the most superficial level zazen will bring up memories. At first these will be familiar memories. Meaning they won't be particularly surprising, just stuff you haven't thought of in a long time. For a trauma survivor, this can mean you start recalling things that are painful and that you have avoided thinking about, but which you are basically aware of. The reaction to this runs along the lines of the response you'd have to it even if you weren't sitting zazen. But sitting tends to intensify emotions. You might start crying or having other similar responses. This can be a bit embarrassing in a crowded zendo. But you should know that you are not alone in having feelings like this.

On the next level zazen can bring up things you have deliberately repressed and forced yourself to forget. At this level the memories can be surprising since you might start recalling things you were not consciously aware had happened. You may even be unsure if they're true memories or not. Indeed some may not be true at all. That’s important. Just because you remember something doesn’t mean it actually happened. These memories might make you confused, angry, etc. Again, the fact of sitting zazen can intensify this more than if it had come up in a "normal" day.

As you continue to practice you get to stuff that is hard to even recognize as memory. You may get strange impressions of vague things or just bare emotions devoid of any particular context. These are harder to deal with because they're impossible to figure out. You’re better off not to even try to figure this stuff out because that just builds up more thought and emotion on top of what you’ve already got to deal with. Acknowledge it and, as much as possible, try to just let it be. It will pass.

Sometimes -- even when they try not to -- practitioners will assign these emotions to events and people inappropriately. People who experience this kind of thing and don't understand the source of it (and no one could possibly understand the source of it) may blame it on their teachers or on other people practicing. It is often the difficult duty of a Zen teacher to bear the brunt of some of this misdirected stuff. So be kind to us, please! Or practitioners may blame themselves or have a whole lot of different responses. Don’t worry about your responses either. Let them go.

I should point out here that it generally takes months or years to get to this level. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to encounter in your first zazen class. What you generally encounter in your first few times doing zazen is utter boredom!

So what do you do if this happens? By the time you get down to the more difficult strata of buried stuff you will probably already have developed a relationship with a teacher. If you have a teacher it's good to discuss it with her or him. That’s what they’re there for. As long time practitioners you can be certain they have experienced this themselves. Remember that most of us in the Zen teaching game came into it because we had our own very serious stuff to deal with. Since they have watched their own stuff come up in a similar matter, your teacher should be able, at the very least, to tell you how they dealt with it. They can also assure you you're not going crazy and so on.

Whether or not any of this comes up in this way depends largely on the practitioner. If you're very gung-ho and in a big hurry to reach some rarified state of consciousness or -- God forbid! -- Enlightenment, you're more likely to encounter this kind of thing faster. If your practice is more gentle and unhurried, you're less likely to. If it does come up, you’ll already have some grounding that will allow you to handle it. So I would suggest taking it slow and easy. Just enjoy sitting zazen for its own sake and don't try to get anywhere with it. If you do it that way, the stuff that comes up will come up in smaller portions over time and won’t confront you before you're ready to deal with it.

In spite of all the foregoing cautionary material, I still believe zazen can be a very good thing for survivors of traumatic experiences. Maybe even the best thing. It can put you directly in contact with the source of the trauma itself. By slowly and carefully removing the psychological barriers you’ve erected to protect yourself from these memories you can finally become aware that the memories themselves are just thoughts in your head. No matter what the content of your thoughts are, they are all just thoughts. This is easy to say but very difficult to truly understand because we’ve been taught since birth to believe in our own thoughts.

Once you’ve seen what these thoughts and memories truly are, you will come to see that they have far less power than you imagined they did. And once you’ve seen how powerless all thoughts really are, you can then transcend these memories and the detrimental effects they’ve had upon you. The key is to see what's going on right now, rather than trying to see into the past through memory or into the future through thought.

This is all more complex and involved than I can possibly get into here. But these are the basic things to look out for.

Brad Warner is ON TOUR RIGHT NOW and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

I was very pleasantly surprised to see R. Elisabeth Cornwell’s articles The Evolution of Religion and Why Women Are Bound to Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective in these pages recently. Could Suicide Girls become a journal of serious discourse on religious matters? Incredible. And to think there are a bunch of “Buddhists” out there who say I shouldn’t be writing here.

You can’t argue with Cornwell’s thesis in her latest piece that women have generally been extremely poorly treated by religion and yet continue nonetheless to propagate the very beliefs responsible for their often sorry position in society. You hear a lot of talk about primitive matriarchal religions that treated women well. But most of those religions are so ancient and so thoroughly dead that what we can say about them is mainly conjecture. The powerful patriarchal religions of the modern world have mostly treated women like shit.

Except for Buddhism.

You knew I’d say that, didn’t you? But it happens to be true. Historically Buddhism has been much better to women than any of the other major religions*. To be sure, there are examples of times when certain Buddhists have treated women just as badly as any other religion. But in doing so these Buddhists have gone against the explicit directions of the founder of their faith.

Buddha’s first order of monks was an all-boys club with a big “No Girls Allowed” sign on the door. But there was a group of women, including Buddha’s step-mom (his mom had died giving birth to him and he was raised by an aunt) and the wife he ditched when he first went on his quest for the truth**, who hung out with the monks, listened to Buddha’s lectures and practiced the meditation he taught. One day Buddha’s step-mom went to Buddha on behalf of these women and asked that they be admitted to the order. Buddha said, “Forget it.”

But a little while later, Buddha’s right hand man Ananda asked Buddha, “Are women less intelligent than men?” Buddha said no, women were just as intelligent as men. Ananda said, “Are women less capable of reaching enlightenment than men?” Buddha said no, women were just as capable as men of reaching enlightenment. Having thus backed him into a corner Ananda went for the kill and asked, “Then why don’t you admit them into the order?”

Buddha had to admit that his initial decision had been wrong. So he opened the order to women. But he was a realist. He knew India in his time was a male-dominated society and would look very much askance at a religious order that admitted women. Plenty of people were already bitching at him for a lot of the radical stuff he’d done. So he made up a list of rules women had to follow that were much stricter than the ones men had to observe and he separated the boys from the girls into different monasteries. He also predicted the order would eventually fail because of this decision. He was wrong there.

Once Buddha was dead, though, less sexually liberated men took control of the order. After a while some male monks developed a stupidly superior attitude that led a lot of them to take ridiculous vows such as that they would never touch a woman or speak to one, some even vowed never to so much as look at a woman. The founder of the Buddhist order in which I was ordained, Dogen Zenji, called bullshit on that.

Dogen wrote a piece called “Prostrating to The Attainment of the Marrow” (Raihai Tokuzui in Japanese). You can read it in volume one of his masterwork, Shobogenzo.

Dogen says, “nowadays (nowadays, in this case, being the year 1240) extremely stupid people look at women without having corrected the prejudice that women are objects of sexual greed. Disciples of the Buddha must not be like this. If whatever may become the object of sexual greed is to be hated, do not all men deserve to be hated too? As regards the causes and conditions of becoming tainted, a man can be the object, a woman can be the object, what is neither man nor woman can be the object, and dreams and fantasies, flowers in space, can also be the object. There have been impure acts done with a reflection on water as an object, and there have been impure acts done with the sun in the sky as an object.”

I can vouch for that last bit. I used to work in a group home for mentally handicapped adults. We had one guy there who had a thing for shoes. You didn’t dare take yours off when he was around lest you find a sticky present inside when you put them back on! Dogen says, “if we hate whatever might become the object of sexual greed, all men and women will hate each other, and we will never have any chance to attain salvation.”

I always think of this when I hear people talking about the supposedly great virtue in the way some religions force women to cover their bodies lest men become sexually greedy. If we follow that logic then an oil magnate who owns a flashy Cadillac ought to drive around with it covered in a burlap sack to keep those who can’t afford such cars from suffering the sin of envy. We’ve all got our own specific objects of greed and it’s up to us to deal with that ourselves. It’s not up to other people to shield us from temptation.

Dogen goes on to say, “Even in China, there was a stupid monk who made the following vow: ‘Through every life, in every age, I shall never look at a woman.’ Upon what morality is this vow based? What wrong is there in a woman? What virtue is there in a man? Among bad people there are men who are bad people. Among good people there are women who are good people.”

He cites numerous famous female Buddhist masters whose understanding far surpassed most men, saying that a guy who took a vow like this would never get a chance to learn from them. He then derides the then-current Japanese custom of not allowing women to visit certain temples.

To get back to what Cornwell wrote, in her article on women and religion she says, “In order for women to abandon religion and its securities, there needs to be something tangible to replace the support that it offers.” This is truer than I think even she realizes.

One of the greatest marks of Buddha as a real man of genius was that he didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. He realized religion and spirituality were pretty fucked up. But he also understood the very important role they play in human society. As Cornwell points out in her article on the evolution of religion, religion serves a need much, much deeper than anything the intellect can ever hope to reach.

This is why atheism, as rational and sensible as it is, will never be an adequate substitute for religion. It’s like trying to substitute actual eating with a superbly argued essay on food. It’s an intellect-based solution for a problem that has nothing at all to do with the intellect.

Buddhism did away with deities and belief systems, but did not do away with ritual and practice. Buddhist temples, though they aren’t strictly speaking “religious temples,”*** look like religious temples and the things you do in Buddhist temples seem like the same things you do in religious temples. You chant, you prostrate yourself in front of statues, there are people in funny clothes inside, there are rules to be followed, there is a community of fellow adherents, and all the rest. Thus the deep need we all feel to belong to that kind of an institution is satisfied. Yet there is no pretense that some big guy with a beard who lives up in the sky will smite you if you fail to do these things or reward you if you get all the steps just right. It’s all up to you.

I know I sound like a shill for Buddhism here. But I’m not really interested in converting anyone. If you can find another philosophy that does all these things, by all means go for it. Or if Buddhism’s just not for you, that’s fine too. No skin off my ass either way.

Although technically I am a Buddhist monk, I’m also a bit of a reluctant Buddhist. I’m a Buddhist because I have to admit that Buddhism really is the best thing on offer. I tried the rest and went with the best. But I don’t really self-identify as “a Buddhist” unless I’m specifically called upon to do so (such as when I’m asked to write a column about Buddhism for a pin-up website).

Still, I think in its attitude towards women and in its immensely practical attitude towards religion itself, Buddhism hasn’t been bested yet. Maybe someday. But not yet.



*Actually I don’t consider Buddhism to be a religion at all. But for the purposes of this article I’m treating it as one. It’s not a religion in the sense that it doesn’t have a deity and it isn’t based on spirituality. It is a religion in terms of its age, its function in society and its number of adherents. This subject is much too deep to get into in a footnote, though!

**Yes it's true, Buddha left his wife. But he didn't exactly dump her in a roach infested tenement with four screaming babies. Buddha was a prince at the time and knew his wife would be very well cared for when he was gone. There was a tradition in India of householders leaving home on spiritual quests and there were, and still are, customs and legal regulations in place to deal with such cases. And please note that later on his wife too entered the Buddhist order. Again, this is way too big for a footnote!

***See first footnote.

For further reading check out this page on the history of women in Buddhism.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and his latest, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

My new book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate is out now. The nice folks at Borders put an excerpt from the book on-line and you can read it by clicking HERE. I’ll be touring extensively to promote it this year, see below for a link to a list of dates.

I want to talk a little about the book. Not just to promote it (though I won’t deny I’m doing that), but because I wrote it to address a topic I think is really important. And that is, why we can’t seem to accept good spiritual advice unless it comes from Superman. I already ranted in my last column about how Buddhism isn’t spirituality. But here I’m using the word “spiritual” just to refer to that area of life that addresses the deep questions about the nature of things. It’s convenient shorthand. But everything I said last time still stands.

ANYWAY, there’s a long-standing notion that runs through a wide variety of religious traditions that people won’t listen to good spiritual advice unless the source of that advice possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men (and women, of course, but I’m quoting the intro to the old Superman TV show, which was very sexist). Thus it is not enough that Jesus said to love your enemies and advised that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. In order for anyone to accept that good stuff, the folks who spread his message thought we also needed to believe that Jesus had magic powers. I mean, why should we bother treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves unless the guy who said we should could change water into wine? D’uh.

This line of thinking runs through all the world’s great and not-so-great spiritual traditions. Buddhists are not any more immune to it than anybody else. There are hordes of stories of Buddha’s miracles and even of his virgin birth. The only real difference with Buddhists is that, by and large, they don’t tend to give a whole lot of importance to whether or not you believe those stories. In fact several major Buddhist lineages discount them entirely. But that doesn’t mean a lot of other Buddhists don’t believe them or even that for plenty of Buddhists those stories aren’t crucial.

The notion that for a spiritual teacher to be believed he or she must appear to be superhuman still carries a lot of weight even today. Of course, nowadays we’re less likely to believe our contemporary spiritual teachers can really do magic tricks -- though lots of people still fall for the sleight of hand of Eastern fakirs and Western faith healers. Sophisticated, worldly urban types tend to expect their miracles to be a bit more subtle than walking on water or turning into fire-spitting whirly-gigs as the Buddha is reported to have done. But we still expect miracles.

Sometimes we like our guys to be Great Ancient Masters reincarnated right in Beverly Hills or possess psychic abilities and beatific vision. And even when we’re not after those sorts of blatant conjuring acts we still look for people who conform to our image of spiritual purity. Those who are spiritually pure shouldn’t be like ordinary people. They need to be perpetually serene and unaffected, liberated from bodily desires and distress. When we find out that they’re people just like the rest of us we’re liable to rebel and turn upon them viciously. The mechanism by which this happens in Zen is well documented in books like Shoes Outside the Door and The Great Failure. Neither Richard Baker, subject of Shoes Outside the Door nor Dainin Katagiri, the subject of The Great Failure, ever claimed to be spiritual Supermen, but that didn’t stop certain of their followers from reacting with anger, distress and even grief when it was revealed they were not.

Of course someone who advocates a meditative practice ought to show signs of that meditative practice having had some good effects on their own lives. That’s perfectly reasonable to expect. What’s not perfectly reasonable to expect is that those good effects should manifest in precisely the manner we imagine they ought to. We can never know what these people would have been like if they hadn’t done their practice. Furthermore it’s not how meditative practice has affected your teacher that’s important. It’s only how meditative practice affects you that matters. And you are the only one who will ever see the full extent of that.

ANYWAY, the reason I wrote Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate was, in part, to try and kill the notion of the spiritual Superman for good and all. The only way I felt I could do that effectively was to character assassinate a specific Eastern spiritual teacher. Since I come from a tradition that believes you don’t find the really important truths by looking outward but by looking inward, it wasn’t good enough for me to do what the authors of the books I mentioned above did and pick out someone else as my target. The teacher whose reputation I was to trash had to be me. Admittedly, I’m not a really good example because so few people actually believe that I am any kind of Great Enlightened Being. Those that do are mostly a couple fries short of a Happy Meal.

Still, since I’ve started becoming more popular I’ve seen people react to me in ways that are a little scary. I’ve only been recognized on the street by random strangers a couple of times. But these days when I walk into a meditation center where they know my work, people’s eyes light up in a freaky way and some even seem to cower when I try to speak to them. To these folks I am no ordinary person. I find that kind of reaction difficult to deal with. Some people are starting to react to me in ways that only make sense if they have begun to project something ethereal upon the image they carry of me in their minds. They expect things of me that they would never expect of each other. And that’s unfair.

I didn’t really want to write this book. It’s hard work exposing your worst side to public scorn and ridicule. This book was physically painful to write. I had at least half dozen other ideas for a third book that would have been a breeze to write and would have been more commercially bankable. But this book screamed at me to get it done until I had no choice but to obey.

There was something very deep that could only be got to by digging around in my own guts. In doing so I discovered that even the tawdriest portions of my life are not all ugliness and horror. In fact, much to my surprise I found very little of that. There’s a kind of beauty to the truth that transcends whether or not you find that truth to be pleasant or objectionable. Plus there’s some jokes in the book too.

I wanted to write a book that told the truth about teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions. Because there are still a lot of illusions out there about those of us in this game. The public has been conditioned by the media to believe that teachers in Eastern traditions aren’t like our garden-variety preachers, priests, imams and rabbis. Yogis, Gurus and Zen Masters, we’re told, have this special something called “Enlightenment” that makes them transcend the world of ordinary humans. You can make very good money exploiting that twaddle. There’s even one so-called “Roshi” (i.e. Zen Master) who sells gullible rich people five days in his godlike presence for $50,000 on the grounds that by being in proximity to him they just might get some of this Enlightenment thing for themselves. It won’t happen, so you might as well give the money to me instead!

But just because no spiritual teacher is Superman doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot through the practice of meditation. I happen to believe zazen is the only way humanity has to get out of the mess it’s in. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t bother shouting about it.

In this media saturated age where every person’s sleeziest action is captured on digital video and put up on YouTube for all to see two hours later, there is nowhere left for spiritual Supermen to hide the pulleys and wires that enable them to do their magic tricks. It has become urgent that we kill the idea of the spiritual Superman and start looking at how we can accept good spiritual advice even from people who burp and fart and -- oh my god! -- fuck just like we do. If we can’t do that there won’t be any way we can accept good spiritual advice from anybody.


Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and his latest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

On November 28th, His Holiness the Dalai Lama* made news by saying celibacy is good. Must’ve been a slow news day.

What he actually said -- in English without a translator, hence the cutely weird grammar -- was, “Sexual pleasure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication. Naturally as a human being ... some kind of desire for sex comes, but then you use human intelligence to make comprehension that those couples always full of trouble. And in some cases there is suicide, murder cases." As for celibacy he said, "we miss something, but at the same time, compare whole life, it's better, more independence, more freedom. Too much attachment towards your children, towards your partner (is) one of the obstacle or hindrance of peace of mind."

He’s correct, of course. Sex is complicated. Abstaining from it relieves you of those complications. Since having sex isn’t strictly a necessity -- meaning you, as an individual, can live without it -- it makes perfect rational sense to simply drop it.

If only things were that easy! But sex is such a very knotty subject in so many ways. Religions always try to come up with a single formula for dealing with sex that will work for all people in all situations -- from holy matrimony to pious abstinence. The Hare Krishnas, to cite just one example, try to mix the two, allowing sex but only for procreation of Krishna conscious children and only after the couple chants for a few hours first to insure the dirty deed is sufficiently pure. I don’t see that ever becoming a widespread practice. In any case, no one will ever come up with a single formula for dealing with sex that will satisfy everybody.

I’ve written a lot in these pages about the Buddhist precept that says, “Do not misuse sexuality.” My teacher rephrases this one as, “Do not desire too much.” Bodhidharma, the fifth century Buddhist monk traditionally cited as the founder of the Zen school said, “There is nothing to grasp. Not giving rise to attachment is the precept of not misusing sexuality.”

The precept is deliberately vague. The people who created it had already seen the damage done by religious leaders who tried to create hard and fast** rules for sexual behavior that could be applied universally. So they simply acknowledged that sexuality could be misused, that its misuse leads to trouble and that Buddhist practitioners would be better off if they vowed not to misuse it. Just what that constituted misuse was left up to individual interpretation.

Or not. Even Buddhists sometimes aren’t as smart as they ought to be. There was an early school of Buddhism that tried to work out exactly what did and did not constitute misuse of sexuality. They made up a huge and detailed list of rules. My favorite one says that it’s not misuse of sexuality if a woman has sex with a monk while he’s sleeping and he doesn’t realize what’s going on. You just know there’s a story behind that one! I’m sure some douchebag priest used that as an excuse -- I was asleep the whole time! I swear! -- and it made its way into the books.

Celibacy would seem like the ultimate solution. You can’t possibly misuse sexuality if you never have sex. Or can you? My first Zen teacher once told me he thought that sometimes the best way to avoid misusing sexuality is to fuck. There may be occasions when a quick roll in the hay is the best and most expedient way to avoid causing bigger problems. I think about this every time I hear about yet another supposedly celibate religious figure getting caught diddling a choirboy. It seems pretty likely to me that if some of those guys just got it on with some willing lass of an appropriate age, or maybe one of their fellow clergymen if they were so inclined, one less child would be traumatized for life.

What about true celibacy, then? What about someone who doesn’t just say they don’t have sex but who really and truly does not have sex of any kind -- even masturbation was forbidden in those early Buddhist sects I mentioned. Good for them, I say. If they can manage it. I don’t think I could, personally. My head would get so filled up with thoughts of hot pink pussy I’d be a menace to society. If you get so sex obsessed you can’t think straight, what good are you to anyone? Still maybe there are people who aren’t like that, and if there are I say go for it. But I doubt anyone with that much self-control needs my permission or even cares about my opinion anyway.

On the other side of celibacy you’ve got stuff like polyamory. Polyamaory, to me, sounds like a recipe for a stressed out life -- and just because somebody represses their stress so well they’re unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Believe me, I personally would love it if this were not the case. Are you kidding? If I thought I could just boink whoever I wanted whenever I pleased and everybody would be cool about it I’d be out there by the Jacuzzi in a black latex Speedo and leather chaps right now.

Sadly I can’t accept such fantasies. To me, sex without entanglements is like the Loch Ness Monster. It would be really cool if it existed. And every once in a while you get tantalizing hints that it might. But whenever you examine the evidence objectively it falls to pieces.

Sex creates attachment. There’s no two ways about it. This doesn’t mean sex is bad. Attachments are just part of life. Just because some bearded doofus you saw walking around at Burning Man wearing a bathrobe said that Buddhism was all about getting rid of attachments doesn’t mean it’s true. Sure, the fewer strong attachments you have, the easier life is. But none of us can go through life without any attachments at all. In any case, you’re always going to form some level of attachment to anyone you share bodily fluids with. And just because you think you’re so cool that you won’t get any ideas of commitment or betrayal or jealousy or any of the rest of that stuff doesn’t mean your partner(s) won’t. Or even that you won’t. This stuff happens at a level far deeper than conscious thought can reach. It’s a very sticky proposition in more ways than one.

Still, I have no interest at all in trying to convince anyone to live the way I think is best. What you do is your own business. I’ve got no moral problems at all with what anyone does in their bedrooms -- or kitchens or back alleys or wherever.

Yet to some extent the way other people conduct their sex lives does affect me. It affects all of us. The fewer people there are running around all stressed out about their sex lives the better things are for everyone. They won’t be so busy figuring out their social calendar that they crash their cars into the guardrails and stop up traffic for hours. They won’t be so sexually repressed that they attack hotels in Mumbai. Stuff like that. So to that extent I’d like to see more people paying more attention to how they manage themselves sexually. Then when they interact with me they’ll be a little more chilled out.

I suspect this is at the root of all religious restrictions about sex all over the world. Ancient people were just looking for ways to manage this new thing they were developing called “society.” They knew sexual interaction created complications. The day after caveman Og did the nasty with caveman Ugum’s woman they started throwing rocks at each other and all hell broke lose in the village. Something needed to be done so the chief made a rule. All the moralizing and threats of burning in Hell just got tacked on later as extra incentive for the more suggestible to do what seemed more likely to keep things civilized.

The Dalai Lama admits that abstaining from sex means missing out on certain aspects of life. He seems content in the idea that these things aren’t really worth much anyway. You might feel differently. Maybe it’s not just wild nights of unbridled passion you’re after. Maybe you want marriage and family and all that nice stuff. That’s fine. I’m not so sure the Dalai Lama’s solution is quite as neat as he thinks it is anyway. I’ve hung around enough monks to know that there are plenty of cases where all the emotional and attachment-related bullshit they escape by not having families just ends up getting transferred on to the surrogate family of fellow monks they live with. Like I said, there’s no easy answer to any of this that’ll work out for everybody every time.

Anyhow, in the end it doesn’t matter what the Dalai Lama thinks and it certainly matters even less what I think. It comes down to what’s most important for you. I would only say that I’ve found that what’s truly most important to most people is to live as stable a life as possible. If you understand that you want that, then sex has to be handled carefully. It pushes a whole lot of buttons, whether you want to admit it or not. Pay attention and be willing to accept things you don’t really want to accept. This is the advise I give myself all the time.

FOOTNOTES:
* Just FYI, the Dalai Lama doesn’t speak for, or even claim to speak for, all Buddhists. He’s the leader of one very specific sect of Tibetan Buddhism. I’ve never studied or practiced in that sect and know precious little about it.

** Heh-heh, I said “hard and fast.”

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the forthcoming Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

In his recent Suicide Girls column Richard Patrick talked about religious authority. He said, “Many years ago, peasants were stealing from each other and murderers were running rampant throughout the world. To deal with the mayhem, rulers came to the conclusion that putting the fear of God in the masses would keep them in line. Organized religion started as a way for those in power to get what they needed from the people.”

That’s pretty close. And it’s not entirely untrue. But there’s more to it than that. It wasn’t just that the rulers — the upper classes, the fat cats in power — who got together in a dark room somewhere, smoked some cigars and made a decision to create religion in order to control the rest of us. The development of religion was the work of the internal “ruler” we all carry with us wherever we go — that little voice in every one of us, whether peasant or king, that wants order and longs for control.

That internal ruler drives us to seek external rulers, to seek God outside of ourselves. We have rulers and authority figures because we want to be ruled. Religion is a product of something all human beings have in common — the desire to live in an orderly place. We cannot live together unless we have some sort of governor to keep the peace. Religion serves that purpose, among others.

Well, sometimes it serves that purpose, anyway. But, as we all know, religion often goes in terrible directions and becomes a force of destruction. It makes people fly planes into office buildings. It makes them vote against peoples’ rights to choose who they can marry. Governments and other institutions intended to maintain harmony and keep peace among groups of people living together also go wrong in similar ways.

If you think about it, it would seem that the governor we need to keep societal peace and order doesn’t really have to be an outside entity like a king or a pope or even God up in heaven. We all have the potential to govern ourselves. But human beings rarely live up to their own potential in any area. Why would we expect large groups of them to be able to live up to their potential not to be assholes to each other? This is why I love the idea of anarchy but would be the first person high tailing it as fast as he could out of any country that declared its intention to do away with its government and police force. We seek external power to govern us because we intuitively know our own shortcomings even if we won’t admit to them.

Unfortunately the real God, if he exists, isn’t available to rule us. Maybe he’s too intelligent to run for office. Or maybe he’s just got too much other stuff on his plate. In any case, we’re forced to seek a human substitute. In the old days we used to pretend the person we chose to rule us had a direct line to God and could tell us what he wanted us to do. Lots of people still believe that. But most of us don’t. In fact, I don’t even believe that most of the people who say they believe in humans who speak for God really believe it.

Belief in what people tell you God thinks is called “faith.” Dominance and submission play a big part in how faith works. We all have a side to our personality that longs to be submissive. Religion is a good outlet for this because it offers us a socially permissible way to be subs to the ultimate dom. Sometimes followers of religious authority figures are so into that submissive head-space of the worshipful servant they will believe and do absolutely anything just so long as it means they can keep their subservient position. It also means that they can keep deferring responsibility for their own conduct onto their master. This never works, by the way. No matter how hard you try and avoid it, the universe will always make you take responsibility for what you do. To say you’ve lost faith in your religion or its appointed spokesperson means you’re no longer able to be a submissive to them. Generally I count loss of faith as a positive thing.

Of course, personal responsibility is just one area that religion gets into. Religion goes beyond merely governing people and keeping the peace among them. It attempts to answer the deeper questions of what it means to be human, it tries to discover the origins of the universe itself. But we don’t need to look to anyone outside ourselves for these answers anymore than we need someone outside our selves to take responsibility for our actions. In fact, no one else’s answer to those deep questions will ever satisfy you. Just like its ultimately impossible to defer responsibility for the things you do, it’s also impossible to accept the “big answers” given to you by someone else.

Yet in the commonly accepted religious scheme of things we’re supposed to have faith in what our religious authorities tell us. And more than that, we’re supposed to have faith in our religious authorities themselves.

That kind of faith will always fail us, no matter how hard we try to make it work. Faith that is directed outward, away from ourselves is like a fire hose pointed away from the fire.

Of course, there are other meanings to the word faith and not everything people call faith is altogether negative. But when it comes to the subject of having faith in religious authority figures, you can always count me out.

When you feel disappointment in a person you deemed Great because she or he does not meet your expectations, this is a good thing. That kind of disappointment is a better teacher than the person you were looking to for answers. It points your faith back where it should be aimed, at yourself.

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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

This will be my last Suicide Girls posting before Americans will make their choice between shining, purest good and foulest, most vile evil.

Will we choose the candidate who supports needless death, war and bloodshed or the one who supports meekly kneeling before the terrorist hordes that seek to destroy our civilization?

Will we vote for the one who'll take a stand for making our environment clean and healthy for future generations or for the one who will build up our industries and get our economy back in order?

Will we elect the candidate who wants to murder innocent, unborn children or the one who will take away women's rights to choose and thereby create an overpopulated and impoverished world?

The choice this year is so black and white; the powers that be have even kindly given us color-coded candidates to help us choose. But could black be good and white evil?

Is anyone else as sick as I am of all the hype and rhetoric -- the way everything is presented as a choice between the rightest right and the wrongest wrong (as in the examples cited above)? And am I the only person in America who feels like he’s living in an episode of The Prisoner these days? Doesn’t all the stuff that’s going on in world politics and economics feel a little too perfect to anyone else -- like the whole thing has been carefully scripted? When the hostages were freed in Iran the day after Reagan took office it was eight years before anyone seemed to notice that was just a little too easy. Isn’t it funny how we got a full-on economic meltdown exactly a month before the elections?

I’m not one for conspiracy theories and I don’t have one to lay out for you here. I just think the whole thing reeks like a tub of rotten tuna. That’s all.

Even though a song by my band Zero Defex is being used by the Ralph Nader campaign in one of their official web commercials, I’m not the least bit excited by the elections. Politicians stir up our emotions, fire our imaginations, present enticing visions of hope and prosperity or conjure up fearful specters of war and slavery.

Politics take place in the realm of the human mind, where good and evil exist. Politicians are like stage magicians using sleight of hand to draw attention away from reality.

It’s none of my business who you vote for. I’m sure you agree with that. But I’ve been pretty horrified by what I’ve seen from a number of American Buddhist teachers who think it is their business. Way too many Buddhist teachers and Buddhist centers in this country think that Buddhism and liberal politics are one and the same. Four years ago when Dubya won a second term I was contacted about contributing to a book about “Buddhist reactions to the re-election.” Writers were invited to talk about feelings of loss, disenfranchisement, and powerlessness as if not a single Buddhist in the United States had supported the Bush campaign. I wanted to write about how amazing Bush was just to provide some balance. Trey Parker said the most punk rock thing you could do in LA was walk into a party and say, “I think George Bush is awesome!” Same in the world of American Buddhism. The book never came out. Good.

My own teacher’s teacher, Kodo Sawaki, said, “The right wing is completely wrong. The left wing is also completely wrong.”

He also said:

Listen. Voting is good. So get out there and vote. But watch your level of excitement about the process. Those highs and lows are damaging. For all the feelings of loss, disenfranchisement, and powerlessness the guys who wanted to make that book about Bush’s re-election felt, the world survived his second term more or less in tact. I may be too cynical about the whole thing, but I’ve always loved that joke where an Englishman tries to explain American politics to a fellow Englishman. “On the one hand they have the Republican party which is analogous to our Conservative party,” he says, “and on the other hand they have the Democratic party, which is analogous to our Conservative party.”

Perhaps the very slight differences between one candidate and another have some value. I would never say they didn’t. Just don’t get your panties in a bunch if your guy loses or celebrate the ultimate triumph of good over evil if he wins. I‘m sure all of you politicos reading this will say you already know that. But any scan of the TV when the results are announced will prove otherwise. All that elation and all that hopelessness ripple outward like a wave.

The balance that you retain or lose right now will ultimately have a far greater effect upon the world than who gets elected.


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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Back in March I wrote an article for this website in which I criticized one of the many scams out there masquerading as Buddhist practice. Last week my publishers found and pointed me to this massively delayed reaction to what I wrote. (My thanks to Waylon of Elephant magazine for writing the piece.)

I find this fascinating on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters I thought the videos by Genpo Roshi and Ken Wilber were hilarious. The Ken Wilber thing is especially priceless. With production values like a bad mid-morning chat show, Wilber’s sycophantic fawning over “enlightened being” Genpo with its fetid overtones of delighted self congratulation — after all, who but a fellow “enlightened being” could recognize one of his own — the Ken Wilber piece reminded me of one of those Sammy Maudlin sketches from SCTV. How do you say, "Isn't Genpo just about the most wonderful thing you’ve ever seen? He's such a deeply, deeply decent human being, which is harder than being enlightened, by the way" with a straight face?

Is this what Eastern spirituality has been reduced to in these latter days — pricey instant enlightenment schemes (Big Mind™ will cost you $150 a session) and sub par Las Vegas revue nonsense? Here’s my video response:



I count myself lucky that I came across Zen practice at a time when nobody wanted to know. In the early Eighties anything that smacked of "wisdom of the East" was relegated by the masses to the realm of played out hippy bullshit. Now it’s back and bigger than ever. But, as usual, the mainstream ignores real practice in favor of glittering garbage. The current interest in Buddhism is good news for me since I got a book deal out of it and a free subscription to Suicide Girls. But as a minor part of the media’s current fascination with all things mystical and Eastern, I often find myself placed not among fellow practitioners of the Buddhist way but among a crowd of media created spiritual superstars of dubious merit. As such I’ve found it necessary to keep putting out reminders that I really don’t have a clue what most of these whack-jobs are saying. It’s got to be difficult for serious people getting into Buddhism these days to weed the good stuff out from the charlatans in pretty robes. Good luck!

So how can someone recognize real Buddhism from the scams? Before I address that I’ll repeat what I said in that article back in March. The scam artists out there calling themselves Buddhist teachers are the exception, not the rule. Most folks in this business are not out to cheat or brainwash anyone. So in most cases it’s just a matter of finding a teacher whose style suits you. Although I should add that my own current teacher’s style did not suit me at all when I first started seeing him. Yet I saw the truth in what he said and did, so I stayed with him as much as it went against my personal tastes and preferences.

Also, I’ll say that the claim by Genpo’s spokesman that it violates the Buddhist precepts for me to call Genpo on his bullshit doesn’t hold water. Yes there is a Buddhist precept that says not to criticize Buddhist monks and laypeople. But this is being abused by scamsters who think that calling any old nonsense “Buddhism” relieves them of worries that their peers might openly disapprove of it. Sadly there seems to be great reluctance among Buddhists in general to speak out when Buddhism is slandered this way for fear of being accused of breaking the rules.

The scams are so see-through it always amazes me that anyone goes for them at all. But then again people really do send money to anonymous Nigerian bankers who contact them by random e-mails when they think it’ll net them millions of dollars without working for it. The spiritual scams work exactly the same way. They promise something for nothing and guarantee quick results. But spiritual practice is like learning to play a musical instrument. You’re going to suck the first time you pick up a guitar. Even Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix had to go through their suck-y period. It doesn’t work any other way and no technological advance will ever change that.

The Dharma does evolve in the sense that it adapts itself to different cultures and different times. But the essential process does not change because it cannot change. You can’t bend your leg around the back of your head after your very first Yoga class and you can’t get enlightened before lunch time.

When Ken and Genpo claim you can realize your true nature in a couple of hours and then “flash on it” any time you please they’re just conning you so they can pay for better set decorations. It’s a fact that your true nature is present at every moment, that it’s the basis of your very existence. But the conditioning we’ve all laid over top of that is very heavy and cannot be resolved quickly. The language of Buddhism can be corrupted just as easily as anything else. Just because someone uses words like “true nature,” “realization” and “mindfulness” (Ugh! How I hate that word!) means nothing at all when the so-called “true nature” they point to is some dreamy, blissful state to be found in the far off reaches of the cosmic void.

There’s nothing to “flash on” anyway. Enlightenment isn’t some experience you have and then file away with all the other cool shit you’ve done in your life like the memory of a three-way with your sister’s best friend and your analyst. Enlightenment is a full time job. You can’t get through the layers of bullshit you’ve swallowed from society in mere minutes anymore than you can take off the pounds put on by a lifetime of Big Macs and Frosties after a quick jog around the block following which you reward yourself with another Big Mac. This stuff takes work and anyone who tells you it doesn’t is lying.

The good news is that you can get through a million plus years of human conditioning in a decade or so, which is really not so bad when you put it that way. Plus real meditative practice has beneficial effects as soon as you begin. Try some yourself. Here’s Suicide Girl LizaRose showing you how!


Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen column appears monthly on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more posts. Brad 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.

As Brad says in the video, you can order a copy of the new CD by his band Zero Defex (aka 0DFx) from CD Baby. Get yours now!

I got an e-mail recently and it said:

I get a lot of variations on this question of how to cultivate “non-attachment.” But I’m not really sure why. I never talk or write about cultivating non-attachment, and none of my teachers were particularly concerned with the matter. I suspect the reason I hear this so much is because in the West the words “Buddhism” and “Zen” have come to represent a gigantic blancmange of unrelated Eastern philosophies and religions. In some circles it’s seen as dangerous sectarianism even to suggest there may be essential and irreconcilable differences between the various teachings propounded by Yogis and Gurus and Eastern Meditation Masters of all shapes and sizes that have washed up on our shores over the past fifty years. But there are. And some of those ancient Eastern mystical teachings are very bad.

There is an idea within Zen Buddhist philosophy that’s sometimes expressed with the word “non-attachment.” But it has nothing to do with the weird belief that we should all be completely aloof from everything in life. Dogen, the 13th century monk who wrote extensively about Zen, talks some about not being attached to self and not being attached to views. But this is a completely different thing from cultivating an attitude where a person strives to be an island unto him or herself, loving nothing, caring about nothing and generally just not giving a shit about much at all.

The notion that we should cultivate such an attitude is extremely dangerous. It’s one of those beliefs that cult leaders use to dominate a community. We all form attachments to those close to us. When we’re told to cut ties with family and friends and with the mainstream society, we’ll naturally form ties with the community and its leader. That’s a very slippery slope. Even when the community and its leader start off relatively cool, that kind of power corrupts quickly and thoroughly.

The don’t-give-a-shit attitude cultivated by far too many who proudly label themselves Buddhists is one of those things that people who dislike Buddhism always use to trash it. And rightly so, because it’s a crap idea! Unfortunately for them, the idea isn’t Buddhism at all. It’s a kind of psychosis — what the psychiatric community calls sociopathy. That’s not what Buddhist practice is intended to bring about.

In fact, this bizarre idea of “non-attachment” runs completely counter to the Buddhist worldview. It’s utterly impossible for anyone ever to be unattached in that way. What we call self and what we call non-self are one and the same. Our real attachments to everyone and everything we encounter run so deep and strong we couldn’t possibly break them no matter how hard we tried. We are fundamentally attached to everything. And of course you’re going to form even deeper attachments to those people and things that are more closely related to you, like your family, friends and home. Don’t sweat it.

Non-attachment to self and views is something entirely different. It means not trying to force yourself to be one single solid unchangeable thing forever and ever world without end amen. What you call your “self” is constantly in a state of flux, mutating and metamorphosing at every moment. But most of us fight against that. We try to establish a fixed personality — a "self." We waste all kinds of energy defining and defending this fiction we’ve worked hard to create. Stop doing that and you’re free to use all that energy in far more constructive and beneficial ways. Personally, I don’t think the word “non-attachment” is a very good way of describing this so I don’t use it (FYI, even in the passages I referred to, Dogen never actually used the word “non-attachment” since he didn’t write in English).

As far as your attachment to the things you ought to be attached to is concerned, the worst that Buddhist practice is going to do is to make you a little less emotionally frantic about that stuff. When my mom died last year, I didn’t sit around all glassy eyed going, “I have no grief for, lo, I am not attached.” I cried. Hard. But at the same time I didn’t hang on to my grief as tightly as I might have.

Let’s take grief as a case in point that’s applicable to the rest of what we might call emotional attachments. The initial wave of grief you feel at the loss of someone you love just happens. No need to dwell on how or why. It’s just there. And you react; you cry or feel sullen or act in whatever way your cultural upbringing has conditioned you to respond. After that, though, is where things get complicated. The habit of latching onto emotions and incorporating them into the sense of self is so strong that we’ll grab on hard to even the most unpleasant feelings that come along. We hang on for dear life lest our sense of who we are should collapse if we let go. We very literally feel like we’ll die if we don’t. Habits like this have us abusing our bodies and minds in ways that lead to all kinds of trouble. But they’re not necessary. You won’t vanish if you stop reinforcing your image of who you are at every moment.

You can’t undo habits this deep instantly. You shouldn’t even try. But once you become aware of them you find that you always have a clear choice whether to respond habitually or not. Not responding habitually doesn’t mean you become cold, robotic and “non-attached” in the sense a lot of people seem to envision non-attachment. It just means you don’t push your body/mind more than it needs to be pushed.

You still love all the people you loved before. You may even hate the same people you hated before. Even hate doesn’t have to be a terrible thing when you don’t latch onto it and call it your self. It arises and fades away like any other emotion and there's no need to act upon it. But that’s a topic too big to go into here. In any case, the kind of “attachments” the guy who wrote me that letter remain fully intact. You still love your family and your friends and your kitty cat too.

So don’t get all attached to the idea of non-attachment. OK?

August 28-31 I’ll be at the Maezumi Institute Young Buddhists Retreat in Montague, Massachusetts. See you there.

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.

Often in my writing for SuicideGirls I’ve talked about girls, but I haven’t talked a lot about suicide. Last week a friend of mine attempted it, unsuccessfully, thank you Jesus. Twenty-five years ago another friend managed to do it successfully and I’m still bummed about that. When I lived in Chicago my band used to play at a place called Batteries, which was booked by Jim Ellison of the band Material Issue. I was pretty torn up when I found out he’d killed himself in 1996. They played their song "Valerie Loves Me" at a club I went to this week, which got me thinking even harder about suicide and its consequences. I’ve known a couple people, including an uncle and a co-worker, who managed to commit slow suicide by drinking themselves to death. And I myself have come pretty close to doing the deed, too.

We used to get into these long philosophical debates around the kitchen table of the punk house near Akron City Hospital, where nearly everyone on the scene seemed to hang out 24/7. In one debate almost everyone in the room agreed that suicide was a perfectly viable option and that it was up to the individual alone to decide whether to do it or not. I’m not sure I was the only one who disagreed. But I was certainly in the minority. I imagine a lot of “alternative” type people feel somewhat the same way as my friends did; that suicide is an acceptable option.

Intellectually, it’s easy to come up with a convincing argument that suicide is nobody’s business but that of the person who kills herself or himself. But in practical, real world terms, this is never the case. Suicide is devastating to everyone whose life a person touches. No matter how much of a loner you are, there are people who care about you and it’s never easy to deal with someone you care about killing themselves. In the case of my friend Iggy who hung himself in 1983, he seems to have been deliberately trying to hurt his girlfriend who’d recently dumped him. But she dumped him because it was the only way she could think of to make him deal with his alcoholism and general destructiveness. I don’t blame her. I would’ve done the same thing. What he did was incredibly nasty and mean. And I don’t think it really solved his problems.

Most religions forbid suicide and imagine horrible punishments awaiting in the next world for those who take their own lives. If you dug through the Buddhist literature I’m sure you could find some variation on this. There must be a sutra or vinaya text somewhere saying what kind of future incarnation awaits those who commit suicide. But I don’t know about it since I’m a pretty lousy Buddhist scholar. This in itself says something, though. Because even if such a text does exist, it’s not greatly emphasized. There are a number of scholarly articles on the Internet about the matter. Here’s one. Here’s another. And here’s one more.

The Vietnamese Buddhists who set fire to themselves to protest the Viet Nam War are well known. For a while there that seemed like one of the most enduring images the general public in the West had of Buddhism. People on this side of the planet had already been taught by their early scholars that Buddhism was a Nihilistic religion filled with talk of suffering and emptiness. So it probably came as no great surprise to hear about Buddhists offing themselves. Buddhism isn’t nihilistic, though. And I don’t think those guys did anyone very much good by going up in flames.

In any case, I’m not terribly concerned with scholarly research or mass opinions. I scanned through those articles I linked to, but I really didn’t read them in depth. It’s interesting to know the history, but not really necessary. Buddhism, as far as I’m concerned, is more about our own experiences than about received wisdom from others. My own experience tells me that suicide is not really a viable option. It ultimately cannot possibly solve the problems it’s intended to solve and it causes a whole lot of unnecessary suffering and grief.

People kill themselves to put an end to their suffering. Ian Curtis did it to end his suffering over his marriage and finances. Pete Ham killed himself because he was suffering over the fate of Badfinger, the world’s greatest power pop band. Kurt Cobain killed himself to end his suffering from all those stomach aches. Of course these are all over-simplifications. But it’s clear that all of these people, as well as anyone else who has ever taken their own lives, did so because they saw it as a way out of suffering. It’s certainly not something you do just for the hell of it.

But the idea that committing suicide will end your suffering comes from the belief that you and the world in which you live are two different things. You believe that you can leave this world and thereby leave suffering behind. But my own sense after years of zazen practice is that this is not true. I’ve spent a long time watching the boundary line between what I call “me” and what I call the rest of the world blur and fade. I’m no longer certain at all where the dividing line is. I’m beginning to even suspect that that guy Buddha may have been right when he said it doesn’t exist at all. In fact I’ve had a few times when this apparently nonsensical notion has come up and bit me on the ass in ways I cannot possibly deny.

So what I’m saying here goes a little further than just the old “the show must go on” type thing, where people say you have a responsibility to your friends and family not to go off and shoot your brains out in the greenhouse. You also have a responsibility to yourself and even to the universe as a whole not to do that. Even if committing suicide solves the immediate problem by ending a poor relationship or making it so your stomach doesn’t hurt anymore, the suffering you thought was yours alone spreads out like a wave to those parts of the universe you’ve been taught to think of as separate from you. It’s impossible for me to believe that even the person who dies does not, in some way, continue to suffer just as greatly after suicide as before. I no longer believe it’s possible to leave this world. And that’s as far as I want to speculate about that. Anything I might say about the mechanism involved in how this happens would just be a load of stinky brain farts. Still, I have a very deep and unshakable feeling that this is true.

Anyway, please forgive the grimness of this little piece. What my friend did last week got me thinking hard about the matter. So SuicideGirls readers, don’t kill yourselves! Life is beautiful, so why not eat health foods instead?*


*This title of this article comes from a punk rock compilation album put out around 1979-80 by New Underground Records. The Descendents and Red Cross are featured. I’d love to find a copy of this or its sequel Life Is Beautiful So Why Not Eat Health Foods.



Brad Warner will be at the Young Buddhists Retreat in Montague, MA from August 28-31.

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.

You can buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex (0DFx) at CD Baby.

So I’m sitting cross-legged in the meditation hall at the San Francisco Zen Center a couple days ago. Incense wafts through the air, bells are rung, ancient chants are intoned, and then profound silence descends. The assembled monks embark on their meditative journeys to the centers of their minds. All at once a thought bubbles up to the surface of my consciousness, like an arrow piercing the cold emptiness of the pre-dawn air.

I am soooo over this shit.

God how I fucking hate it. After 25 years of doing this stupid crap, stick a fork in me, I am done. When I was a youngster the mere idea of sitting in a temple with a group of dedicated monks all pursuing the sacred Dharma gave me an iron-hard boner you could have sliced pound cake with. How I longed for that serenity, that peace. How I fantasized of ascending to the heights of Supreme, Unsurpassed, Perfect Enlightenment. How I dreamed of the day I might be in the very spot I’m in right now, living the life of a wandering monk, flitting here and there from temple to temple absorbing the words of the wise and dispensing my own wisdom to those new to the Way, spending my days deepening my practice.

But god-dammit I’d rather be at Amoeba Records right now. It’s just up Haight Street. I could be there in 20 minutes. I think that new Om record must be out by now, the one they recorded live in Jerusalem. Maybe even that new Robyn Hitchcock boxed set. But noooooo. I not only signed up for this shit, I signed up to do a five-day long zazen intensive at the Berkeley Zen Center right afterwards, followed immediately by two weeks cloistered at Tassajara monastery deep in the mountains of Carmel Valley — where there are no record stores at all. Fuck. What in God’s name was I thinking?

One of the greatest things about Zen practice is that it’s incredibly portable. You don’t need anything special. You don’t need a temple or monastery. You don’t need to memorize any chants or read any books. You don’t need a congregation. Zen goes anywhere you go. You can do your sitting on a rolled up towel in your dorm room, which is how I started.

But human beings like to do things together. We’re social creatures. And so a monastic tradition also developed within Buddhism. A lotta folks think that if you’re not hip to the monastery thang you ain’t no Buddhist. They’re wrong. Shakyamuni himself did not come to his understanding as a member of any religious order, and there is a laundry list as long as your arm of other great teachers who either shunned monastic life, or came to monastic life after establishing the Way on their own, or who did a bit of the monastic stuff when it was necessary but largely stayed away from it. The non-monastic tradition in Buddhism is just as vital as the monastic one.

But the pull towards making Buddhism a social thing, and only a social thing, is strong. In America, we seem dead set on turning Buddhism into a string of socially agreed upon clichés and buzzwords.

A couple weeks ago or so I put a post up on my blog in which I moaned about some of the buzzwords and neo-traditions that have become au currant among American Buddhists these days. One was that dependable puppy dog of a word, “mindfulness.” Christ I hate that word. The word seems to indicate some vague state of thinking hard about what you’re doing. And I know we’re all taught that we should think about what we’re doing. But that’s not the Buddhist approach. Do what you’re doing. When thinking becomes a distraction, stop thinking and get back to doing. I’m also sick to death of hearing hipster Buddha dudes use the word “skillful” to describe things they like and “unskillful” to describe things they don’t. It’s a total misuse of the old Buddhist idea of upaya, or “skillful means,” by which ancient Buddhist teachers are said to have taught in unorthodox ways. These days it just means whatever’s under discussion didn’t rub the guy who called it “skillful” the wrong way. I’m also fed up with the concept of the “dharma talk,” which has come to mean something like, “guys in funny robes using buzzwords like ‘mindfulness’ and ‘skillful’ to lull people who think of themselves as ‘spiritually minded’ to sleep.” I’m tired of watching entire audiences nod out like opium addicts while smiling knowingly whenever a favorite word or phrase floats through the haze.

Whatever. Anyway, after I said this stuff a whole buncha folks got really mad about it. Fine. Be as mad as you want. I, myself, am not the least bit angry about this. I was just fed up with it and continue to be fed up with it.

Back when I was first in punk rock, the thing that irked me the most, and finally drove me out of punk rock altogether, was the fact that the philosophy we espoused was all about questioning things. And yet you were not allowed to question punk rock itself. It was great to question Reagan and nuclear proliferation and the cops and school. But if you started asking things like, why do we all have to wear leather jackets, or why can't we have vocal harmonies in some of the songs, or why can't I grow my hair long if I want, that was taboo.

American Buddhism as it stands today is pretty much the same way. Buddhism isn't that way. But the stuff that lotsa people call "Buddhism" is. It's a subtle distinction, I know. But an important one.

So when I started calling bullshit on the idea of mindfulness, and skillfulness and "Dharma talks," the reaction was almost identical to what used to happen when I'd go on stage at hardcore shows in the early '80s with long hair and bell-bottoms. You can't do that! We can challenge everything in the world, but don't you dare challenge us!

If Buddhism can’t be challenged it isn’t Buddhism anymore.

We're all looking for a place to settle. We want stability. We want something dependable. Buddhism is all about addressing that very issue. It aims for the ultimate stable resting place. But Buddhism takes things in a very different direction from our habitual way of dealing with our longing for stability. Religions and subculture movements like punk rock want to reduce things to formulas. Believe that Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God and you're all right. But the words "Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God" mean something absolutely different to each individual who uses them. Words such as “mindfulness” and the like take on all kinds of different meanings when they reach the mass culture. And when they stop meaning anything useful it’s time to retire them.

This is hard for lots of folks to get a grip on. They want Buddhism to be like a bumper sticker, “Buddha said it, I believe it and that settles it.” But that’s not the Buddhist way.

At any rate I’m totally over all that stuff big time. And yet, by the time you read this I’ll be finishing up one retreat and heading off to another — being all “mindful” and listening to skillfully delivered Dharma talks.

Sometimes even when you’re over stuff you still gotta do it anyway. Sometimes you gotta do it especially when you’re over it.

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.

The new CD by Zero Defex, with Brad on bass, is available now from CD Baby. Get yours today!

Here’s an e-mail I got recently:

Elizabeth,

I’ve received a lot of e-mails along these lines. But as for my writing giving people “new to Zen the idea impression that they can be totally into porn and still practice Zen consistently,” I don’t know if I’m giving that impression or not. I’m not trying to. And I also don’t know whether someone actually could be deeply into porn and yet practice Zen consistently. Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly a lot of people who consider themselves not to be new to Zen think a person can’t be into porn and practice Zen, and they are happy to point this out to me and to their own flocks of followers.

In the end, though, I can’t be too worried about people misinterpreting my writings as a call to gorge themselves on smut. The moment you say anything publicly, someone will completely misconstrue it and then blame you for having told them to do whatever it is that gets them in trouble. This goes for anything you say about any subject in any tone of voice or with any string of words in any language. Communication is tough. But for what it’s worth, I tend to doubt that you can be a total porn glutton and be able to keep a very good Zen practice going. Any kind of obsession is going to get in the way of practice, whether it’s an obsession with porn or with food or even with Buddhism itself. But with consistent and, more importantly, constant practice these kinds of obsessions tend to work themselves out anyway.

As for porn stoking desires that cannot and probably should not be fulfilled, that is certainly true. But pornographers are rank amateurs compared to the folks who make TV shows and commercials when it comes to stoking desires that can’t and probably shouldn’t be fulfilled. Pornographers just flash you some tits (or cock or whatever) and, if you’re in the mood, you take the bait and enjoy the images until such time as you’ve, um, come to desire them less. The folks who make TV shows and commercials know how to get you wanting the stuff they’re selling any time you switch the idiot box on. TV shows have millions of people convinced that if they aren’t living the kind of lives they see on screen something must be terribly wrong. At least most consumers of porn don’t generally feel unfulfilled if their real lives aren’t like an X-rated video. Again, I’m not denying porn does stoke desires (and gives you desire to stroke — haw!), but I think there are much greater dangers in the mainstream media.

Also, maybe my own approach to porn is not like other people’s. I don’t know. Because for me, when I look at, say, one of my fave Suicide Girls’ photo shoots, I don’t ever think, “Damn! If only I could fuck her I’d be fulfilled!” I know I’m not likely to ever get my mitts on — fill in your own fave SG’s name here (I don’t want to get myself in trouble) —‘s shapely ass. And that’s fine. I can still enjoy pictures of it. I’m not so sure every guy feels that way, though. Some may mistakenly believe they’d be better off if they could have real, rather than virtual sex with the girls whose photos they look at, and they may suffer for having such delusions. But you know what? People have lots of delusions. Most of them cause far more suffering than that one.

Another thing is that although the sex portrayed in porn is totally unrealistic, ironically enough people’s attitudes toward sex seem to be far more realistic and healthier in cultures that allow porn than in cultures that suppress it. In societies where porn is allowed there is greater equality for women, lower incidences of institutionalized sexual violence, a greater tolerance for those of non-standard sexual orientation and so on. It seems to me that open access to pornography plays some role in this process. So I think we should never try to suppress pornography.

Through my work with SuicideGirls I’ve become acquainted with people in the sex industry. People used to ask me, “What if it were your daughter/wife/girlfriend in those pictures???” My answer in the past was that it wasn’t any of those people, so I couldn’t say. But these days some of the women on SuicideGirls are friends of mine, as are some other people in the sex trade. And while SuicideGirls isn’t really porn by today’s standards, it’s certainly erotic nudity. I admit I sometimes get a funny feeling when I see someone I know naked on the Internet. And not just “that kind” of a funny feeling either. I find myself worrying about them and how their decision to “go pink” might affect their lives. But their decision to pose is their own, not mine. So it’s really none of my business. I agree with my 87-year-old Zen teacher who said, upon looking at this site, that the photos were beautiful and that beauty is an expression of truth.

Still, there are difficulties that come with posing naked in public. I always hope that my friends who do that kind of work can handle the inevitable pressures that come with it. It shouldn’t be taken lightly. I think that a lot of people who produce pornography encourage their models to think of it as no big deal and a lot of those models find themselves in a very bad way when they discover that some people do consider it a very big deal indeed. It’s hard for me to look at any piece of pornography these days in a detached way without considering the lives of the people I’m seeing. As such I find it difficult personally to look at most porn anymore.

But that’s my own individual take on it. I don’t know if it’s necessarily “right,” nor would I want to try and somehow universally mandate that attitude even if I could. Still, you’re correct. Buddhism is not an “anything goes” philosophy. Yet it’s not as if there is or ever could be a list of rules that would apply to everyone in every situation for all time. We, as Buddhists, take a vow not to misuse sexuality. My own teacher has re-worded this vow as, “Do not desire too much.” The great ancient teacher Bodhidharma said, “Not giving rise to attachment is the precept of not misusing sexuality.” Sex is just one of the areas where we need to take great care. Sure sex is an important area and special attention needs to be paid. But if you’re too God damned horny to think straight then perhaps the best way to avoid misusing sex is to log on to SuicideGirls, masturbate furiously, be done with it, and then go out into the world more mellow, less sex crazed and less likely to misuse sex in a far more damaging way.

Desiring less is the goal of Zen practice, but achieving some mythical state of desirelessness is not. Ain’t no such thang! No one is ever free from all desire. But through our practice our desires gradually become less compelling. We also start to see the consequences of those desires and we start to avoid fulfilling those desires that cause us problems. The desire for sex is a very basic human condition. Without that desire none of us would be alive at all. Pornography has been with us since human beings first learned to communicate their desires to each other through art and through language. It’s not going away. In fact we can expect it to become more and more open in the future. As Zen practitioners we need to learn to live in a world in which pornography is open and available. Whether we consume it or not is up to each individual. It’s certainly not up to me to decide for anyone.

(Sorry this article was way too long, the next one will be shorter, I promise)

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.

Brad plays bass and sings on the new Zero Defex CD available now from CD Baby or get a copy personally autographed by Brad on eBay right here!

I just spent two weeks in a meditation center up in the mountains. Everywhere you went there were wooden boards that said:

Listen up!
Great is the matter of birth and death
Lost time will not be found again
Do not waste your life!

In Zen temples they have a chant they do just before they clean the place up, part of which goes, “When this day is gone, your life thereby decreases.”

The day I got back from the retreat center I found myself sitting at a swanky-ass restaurant in Beverley Hills, talking to a couple high-powered movie business execs about a film project some folks I freelance for are trying to get off the ground. These guys had that manic, sun-drenched energy you find in Hollywood types. It was hard to tell if they were on coke or if they’re just super high-strung people. They’re young guys. They’re always young guys. You can’t sustain that kind of energy long before you burn out. They’ll char those bright young lights to a deep brown dead crisp making our movie. They’ve got big ambitions. Big, big, BIG.

Young movie-biz dudes have no hope of ever understanding how they’re wasting their lives. Society will provide them with all kinds of rewards for wasting their own time and ours. They’ll have money, power, sex, cars, everything a person can possibly desire. They’ll never even imagine that instead of owning some tawdry little piece of the world, the whole universe from beginning to end could be theirs — that the whole universe already is theirs. As they drive down Santa Monica Boulevard blasting bad hip-hop hits from their shiny, silver Beamer convertibles with their vanity plates they’ll never know that there are guys trudging through the gutters outside their mansions in tattered shoes who own them and everything they imagine they possess.

Right now I'm sitting where I can hear a spiritual master talking spiritual stuff to a lot of spiritual people. He’s bullshitting them. He hasn’t got a clue in the world. But he lulls them to half-sleep with a honey soaked voice and tells them that half-sleep is the Highest Enlightenment. So it goes.

“Boys be ambitious!” said William S. Clark when he left Japan after spending the last few years of the 19th century educating its children in Western ways. Everybody in Japan knows the phrase by heart. Ambition drives Japanese waste and Hollywood waste.

There’s ambition in Zen centers in the mountains too, and in Zen centers in the cities and suburbs. Not so much ambition for money, though that does exist in some; ambition for spiritual accomplishment, ambition for spiritual fame, ambition for the ubiquitous “spiritual merit” practitioners are primed to pile up. You can see it in the eyes of the young studs who’ve been devoting themselves to the rigors of practice intensives in the hopes of rising up the ladder to positions of power within the organization. You can hear it in the mellifluous tones of the wanna-be Zen Masters who pontificate on the finer points of the dharma to those they consider their spiritual inferiors, hoping that one day when they’re dead, gone and buried their names too will be etched in the list the Great Eternal Masters. It rides the wind in envy-drenched whispers when someone passes by in a coveted brown or orange or ochre robe indicating they’ve received the ultimate promotion the bosses of the sect have on offer. Anyone impressed by the color of a glorified bathrobe deserves whatever they get, if you ask me.

And yet retreat centers in the mountains are still better places to practice not wasting your life than swanky-ass restaurants in Beverly Hills. Most of us need some time away from society before we can see how truly fucked over we’ve been. Sure we know that society is shit. But we still cling to the notion that we ourselves are somehow above it, what with our rebel haircuts and tattoos, and all that metal stuck through our bodily extremities. We aren’t like those saps.

Sorry. But you’re not only like those saps, you’re exactly like them. Not a centimeter of separation. Too bad, huh?

You don’t think so? That’s only because you’ve never really taken a look.

When today is gone you’ll be one day closer to death. So what are you doing right now? Turn off your computer and go outside, for God’s sake. There’s nothing in that shiny little box of delights on your lap that’s going to do you any good at all. Not my bullshit, that’s for sure. (Hey, clever kids! Quote that line in your sarcastic comments!)

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.

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

April 23rd at Malaprop’s Book Store in Asheville, North Carolina. Probably 7 PM-ish. Call for details.

April 25 - 27 leading a retreat at Southern Dharma Retreat Center in North Carolina.

April 29th at 7 PM, talk at Warren Wilson College’s Buddhist Studies Group.

May 3rd my band 0DFx will play at Pat’s in the Flats in Cleveland with This Moment in Black History and on May 4th, 0DFx will play at the Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio in commemoration of the 38th anniversary of the infamous shootings by the National Guard

Saturday May 10th at 7 PM at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Ohio’s Tremont neighborhood.

On May 17th and 18th leading a 2-day retreat at the Milwaukee Zen Center.

I'll be one of the teachers at this year's Great Sky Zen Sesshin August 9-16. Check out their webpage for details.

The annual Dogen Sangha retreat in Shizuoka, Japan will be September 20-23.

I’d like to offer something to help you
But in the Zen school we don't have a single thing.
- Zen Master Ikkyu (1394 – 1481)

Ikkyu is one of my favorite Zen teachers, even though he was part of the Rinzai lineage, the bitter rivals of the Soto lineage in which I studied. After all, Ikkyu is one of the few Zen Masters to write erotic poetry. As the resident Zen columnist for a porn website, this is something I can relate to.

I love this little couplet because it expresses the Zen attitude very precisely. We really would like to help you. But we have nothing to offer. Zen is very much a D.I.Y. philosophy. It’s up to each individual to work out his or her own way. Even so, there are standards and there are training centers. As you’d probably expect, though, each of these centers teaches Zen in its own unique way. I get about 2 or 3 e-mails each week asking me where the writer can go to study Zen, in spite of my having a notice in my F.A.Q. saying I don’t really know. So I figured this month I’d write about the few of the places I do know about and my own subjective impressions of each. But before I go on, I should mention that, whenever someone asked him this question, my main teacher Gudo Nishijima always said, “Everybody should study Zen only with me!”

KENT ZENDO
Kent, Ohio
This is where I first trained in Zen a bazillion years ago. Tim McCarthy, the resident teacher, has been one of my best friends for over 25 years. These days Tim usually teaches at Kent State University rather than at the zendo itself, so it’s best to check the website for the location and schedule. Be sure to stay for the “green stuff” (Indian food) after the sittings.

SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER
San Francisco, California
This is the largest and most well-established Zen Center in the United States, founded in the early Sixties by Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind. The upside of this is that it is a very stable organization. They have a large and thoroughly trained staff of Zen teachers, regular practice periods, retreat centers, big bells and statues, and you can even get a delicious monk-cooked meal for a small donation on Friday nights. The downside is that the bigness of the organization can make a person feel a bit lost. Even so, I would never hesitate to recommend SFZC or any of its affiliate temples or retreat centers to anyone seeking to experience authentic Zen practice and training in the USA. The Berkeley Zen Center is in the same lineage and is also very nice but a lot smaller and more intimate.

TASSAJARA
Carmel Valley, California
Though Tassajara is one of SFZC’s retreat centers I’m giving it its own paragraph because it’s such a unique place. Located deep in the mountains of Northern California, inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t really want to be there, Tassajara is truly a retreat center. You can go there as a full-blown Zen student and live life pretty much as Dogen’s monks did 800 years ago, or as a work practice student in which you work and follow a light Zen practice schedule in exchange for room and board, or even just hang out in the hot springs as a paying guest with the option of doing some Zazen or not. I’ll be spending two weeks up there in early April and another two weeks in July as a work practice student, not to teach or anything, but just cuz I like the place a whole lot.

MILWAUKEE ZEN CENTER
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
If I were just thirty years older I’d probably ask Rev. Tonen O’Connor, who runs this place, to marry me. As it is she is one of my best and most valued friends in the Zen business. Her Zen center is located in a gigantic old house near the shores of Lake Michigan and offers all any cheese-head could ask for in terms of Zen training. I’ve only been there once and it’s still one of my favorite places in the world.

CEDAR RAPIDS ZEN CENTER
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
I’ve never actually been here. But their resident teacher Rev. Zuiko Redding is one of the most truly awesome people in Zen. She gave me the belt I wear on my robes today, she made it herself in fact. I was so touched I almost cried. I helped her chase wasps out of her room at the Great Sky Sesshin (see below) last year.

GREAT SKY SESSHIN
Hokyoji Monastery, Southern Minnesota
This one isn’t a full-time Zen center, but an annual retreat open to anyone who wants to sign up, though the space is limited. Tonen from Milwaukee Zen Center runs this and Zuiko from Cedar Rapids is one of the regular teachers. It’s seven days of late Summer Zazen (Aug. 9-16) from 5 AM to 9 PM in the wilds of Minnesota. There are six, count ‘em 6, teachers so you get a wide range of practice styles. They were even nutty enough to invite me to teach there last year and I’ll be there again this year. Go to Great Sky this year instead of Burning Man if you’d rather experience some real practice instead of just pretending to be all spiritual until the ‘shrooms wear off. (You know I just said that to piss you off, so why are you in such a hurry to post that nasty comment?)

CLOUDS IN WATER ZEN CENTER
St. Paul, Minnesota
This is one of several Zen centers in the Twin Cities area founded by Dainin Katagiri Roshi, author of Returning To Silence and Each Moment Is The Universe, and one of Shunryu Suzuki’s assistants at SFZC back in the day. Although it’s located in a disused warehouse in St. Paul, once you step inside it feels like a real Zen temple. I got invited here a couple years back when they were looking for a new “guiding teacher” after having given their former leader the boot. It was a really nice place.

STILL POINT ZEN BUDDHIST ABBEY
Detroit, Michigan
This is the most punk rock Zen center I’ve ever visited. It’s located in an area of Detroit once so seedy they had to repair bullet holes in the walls when they moved in. The neighborhood has improved since then, but it’s still a little sketchy. Even so, I love this place. They’re part of the Korean Zen tradition, so in addition to zazen practice these guys do a massive 108 full prostrations every single morning. These are optional to newcomers. But if you choose to join in, you’ll get a cardio work-out along with your zazen. Ask Koho Vince Anila, who runs the joint, about Johnny Sokko’s Flying Robot and you’ll have a friend for life. They also have an affiliated center in Ann Arbor, home of Iggy and the MC5!

SITTING FROG ZEN SANGHA
Phoenix, Arizona
I’ve never been here either, but Rev. Dogo Barry Graham, its founder, has been a penpal (e-mail pal?) for several years and we hung out when I visited the Arizona Zen Buddhist Society a while back. Barry maintains a very cool blog too. He tells really good dirty jokes.

ATLANTA SOTO ZEN CENTER
Atlanta, Georgia
This place is soooo cute you could just die! They’re located in a down-on-its-luck industrial park on the edge of Atlanta where you’d never imagine a Zen center could possibly exist. But it’s there! They offer regular sittings as well as monk training in the tradition of Soyu Matsuoka Roshi, one of the lesser-known pioneers of Soto style Zen Buddhism in America. When I visited, Taiun Michael Elliston, who runs the place, also took me out to Soul Vegetarian, to eat the best vegetarian soul food in the world, so the center gets extra points for that!

NASHVILLE ZEN CENTER
Nashville, Tennessee
When I led a retreat at their retreat center way out in the backwoods of Tennessee I was sure somebody was gonna take a shot a the "feller in the dress" (me in robes) or at least try and make me squeal like a pig. But I made it through just fine. In reality they're lovely and sincere people and the countryside around Nashville only looks like the woods in Deliverance. I'm just full of big city Northern prejudice and so are you if you think real Zen practice can't be found pretty much everywhere if you just look for it.

Also last, but not least, if you’re in Southern California you can come sit with me just about every Saturday morning at the Hill Street Center. All the links are contained in the little italicized statement below.

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.

I met a stripper with a Three Stooges tattoo the other night at a bar called Tigress. She bitch slapped one of my companions hard while she gave her a ferocious lap dance. Threatened my balls with spike heeled platform shoes. Hissed in my face that she was into edgeplay. She said she got giant fish hooks stuck through her back with which they hung her bleeding body from the ceiling till her screams careened off the hard brick dungeon walls. Said they pierced her labia with five-inch needles. She worked for Lloyd Kaufman at Troma Films for years. I’ve heard what that’s like. The lady could take some pain.

Edgeplay. There’s a word I hadn’t heard before. Playing on the edge. Risking injury or even death for the sake of a thrill, a charge, an orgasm that will finally live up to all the lies they tell you about orgasms, a white hot bone rattling explosion of raw nerve endings that’ll blot out forever all the darkness at the center of your heart…

Look. We all do what we do to find our way in this wacky old world, to satisfy what we think needs satisfying, to make some money. It’s not my business to pass judgment on how she felt she needed to live her life. I’m glad there are people like her around. It keeps things interesting.

But you want edgeplay? I got edgeplay for you.

Zazen is edgeplay with your immortal soul. Zazen is edgeplay with God.

The atheists got all bent out of shape a few weeks ago when I suggested they were full of shit. What do you know about atheism? You sit there, stock still without even a dominatrix to torment you and thus distract you from what’s real. You spend a few years right there, nose to nose with yourself. Then you can come back and talk to me about whether God exists or not. Until that day you haven’t earned the right to tell me shit about God. So fuck off with all your oh so well thought out words and words and words and words. Atheists are full of shit.

There is no God and He is your creator.

If you want your meditation gentle and sweet, with a soothing, stilling voice to ease you through, stay away from Zen. But if you’re into real edgeplay stop by my place some Saturday morning and I’ll show you how it’s done.

But watch out. This kind of edgeplay doesn’t come baring fangs and out for blood. Nobody will yell at you, nobody will smack you with a stick, nobody will even tell you when you get all the steps wrong. It’s very warm here, very friendly and welcoming. All smiles. We’ll even brew you some tea and tell you lousy old jokes. No need for posturing. That’s because we know who the hardest mistress of all is. We’re not even going to try and match the punishment she can mete out. The best we can do is point you in her direction and let you decide whether you’d rather run away whimpering with your tail between your legs.

Most people haven’t got what it takes to face themselves. That’s not a judgment call. That’s just a fact of life. We’ll face anything else to avoid the terror of confronting our own hearts and minds. Leather restraints and single tail bullwhips don’t even come close. The fundamental nature of your own being? Now that’s scary. That can cut you up good. Slice you to ribbons and not even break a sweat.

I’ve never been interested in any kind of meditation that wasn’t edgeplay. I never had a whole lot of patience with people wanted to guide me through some kind of a process. “Envision the white light of the cosmos enveloping your body…” Fuck that. Don’t give me your pictures and stories. Every religious nut I met — and I met a few of them — had pictures and stories they wanted to stuff into my head and teach me how to regurgitate on command. As if God cared whether I could recite their stupid fairy tales when ordered to do so. They could stuff their stories. I wanted to slash away everything I didn’t need and get down to the raw burning core. The only way to strip away everything is to strip away everything.

The Zen way is excruciatingly slow. At least when they hang you from hooks in your back they take you down after a few minutes. We’ll just leave you sitting there twisted up like a pretzel for days or weeks at a time. It’ll take for-fucking-ever before you even have a clue why you’re wasting all this time staring at walls. Quick fixes are for hyperactive retards. If you’re looking for a speedy solution don’t let the door smack your ass on the way out.

But the scary stuff is just one side of the picture. We’re all afraid of reality. All of us. Me, too. But the truth about reality is that it’s never as scary as we imagine it. I suspect this is what people like my stripper friend discover in their edgeplay. When you actually come face to face with the things that scare you, usually you that what you thought was Satan come to burn you in the fires of damnation is really just Gene Simmons, a nice old Jewish man in freaky make-up.

Reality is always the best place to be. The truth is always the best thing to see. There are never any exceptions. You can’t run away anyhow. So why waste your energy trying? And God? God isn’t a million zillion miles away on his diamond throne somewhere in outer space. God is the wind on your face. God is the sky as your reflection. God is that something buried in your head that you always thought was you. It’s not you. There is no you. That thing you think is you, actually belongs to the universe. And the universe will take it back one day. On that day it will be just like you never existed at all. Cuz you never did. But the universe will carry on forever. And so will that something you always thought of as yourself. And so will God. So there.

Ms. Edgeplay stripper wrenched my friend’s nipples and stage-whispered to her how wet she was getting. As if I couldn’t hear. Humped her leg like a dog in heat. God wasn’t far away at all. If I ever doubted Her presence She showed it to me by grabbing my cock and telling me how She wanted to feel it inside Her.

There is no God and she dances for tips at Tigress.

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.

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.