Some idea of perfection, or some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way for us. Each one of us must make his or her own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try and understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you. To be independent in this true sense, we have to forget everything which we have in our mind and discover something quite new and different moment after moment. This is how we live in this world.

-- Shunryu Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

That statement is one of the most truly punk rock things I’ve ever come across. The first time I read it 0DFx, the hardcore band I played bass in, had just broken up. The hardcore punk scene I’d been part of for the last couple years was turning to shit. We’d started off rejecting society and almost immediately set about creating our own miniature version of the very society we rejected -- only ours had cooler clothes and better music. I thought punk rock was about independence, but very few people within the movement were interested in real independence. They were just interested in the appearance of independence.

I thought Buddhism was the way of true independence. But I’m starting to wonder how many of the folks out there who label themselves as Buddhists are any more interested in true independence than the hardcore punks who only cared about looking scary.

My Wikipedia page was vandalized a couple weeks ago. I never actually saw the vandalized version myself. It was repaired before I got there. Them Wikipedia nerds are pretty quick. But it was vandalized by some so-called Buddhist who wanted to let the world know I was actually a big phony because I didn’t adhere to his standards of what Buddhist teachers ought to be like. It boggles the mind what people will waste their time doing…

Apparently much of the controversy about me in the Buddhist community relates to this video I posted of a precepts ceremony I performed for my friend Ren Kuroda last month. A precepts ceremony is where someone takes a public vow to uphold the ten Buddhist precepts, which are:

1) Don’t kill 2) Don’t steal 3) Don’t desire too much 4) Don’t lie 5) Don’t live by selling liquor* 6) Don’t discuss the failures of Buddhist monks and laypeople 7) Don’t praise yourself and berate others 8) Don’t be covetous 9) Don’t become angry and 10) Don’t abuse the Three Supreme Values; Buddha, Dharma (Buddhist teachings) and Sangha (the Buddhist community)

Apparently some Buddhists were aghast that I performed the ceremony while reading the instructions out of a book. Look. I don’t even like these ceremonies. You think I’m gonna waste my days and nights memorizing that shit? As if! I didn’t start practicing Buddhism because I wanted to be able to perform note-perfect renditions of ancient rituals. That’s not what it’s about. The ceremonies have some value. But you do them and get back to the real work.

The folks who don’t like the way I do ceremonies also do not like my “potty mouth,” and the fact that I’ve sometimes criticized stuff like Big Mind™ and the Holosync™ which are promoted as Buddhist practice but really are not. This, they say, breaks precepts number six and seven. I should therefore be quiet about the scams and let people get cheated. And, of course, they don’t like the fact that I write about Buddhism for you nice people here at Suicide Girls.

Whatever.

I’m not saying this stuff just to gripe about my own situation. Well maybe I am a little. I seem to do that a lot. But it’s actually bigger than that, I think. It’s not just me. All of us encounter pressure to conform to other people’s standards of how we should behave, how we should look, and even how we should think. We are social creatures. So it’s important to behave in ways that are acceptable in the society we live in.

But we’re very lucky to be living in a society that’s pretty advanced and liberal in its ability to tolerate diversity. We’re not quite where we need to be just yet. But we’ve made some significant strides very quickly. When I was at Wadsworth High School in Wadsworth, Ohio in the beginning of the Eighties I got threatened by the jocks because I had a mullet. A mullet for Christ’s sake! Things have gotten much better.

Even in this very progressive society we still get pressure to be like everybody else. The problem is that this very notion that there even is a “like everybody else” to be is a lie. No one is like everybody else. Even the most conformist among us can’t ever truly conform except in a very superficial way. It’s our nature to be independent. The attempt to conform to some illusory notion of normality is just the denial of what we actually are.

But it’s not that easy to come to truly know what you really are and to accept that. Maybe you think you already do. But I’d bet dollars to donuts you don’t. It takes a lot more than just getting a really rad tattoo or dying your hair chartreuse. There are scads of things about yourself that you don’t want to face. In my own case much of what I didn’t want to face had to do with how many ways I was exactly like everyone else, especially the ways in which I was exactly like all the “normal” douche bags** I spent most of my life seething with hatred at.

Because there’s so much about you that you aren’t ready to accept right now it’s good to move slowly into this stuff. If you go too fast the shock can be too much to take. When you do a practice like zazen you’ll discover aspects about yourself that are truly disturbing -- no matter how cool and unsettling a person you might think you are. You can only recognize that which you think is the worst in human nature because it’s part of you.

Still it’s a worthwhile pursuit. Because when you’ve learned to accept what you are then you can manifest what you are in a way that truly benefits you and truly benefits everyone you come in contact with. And that’s good for all of us. That’s the way you can save the world.

And stop it with trashing peoples’ Wikipedia entries, OK? That’s just stupid***.

* Liquor? Didn’t even know her!

** Apologies for breaking precept #7 just then.

*** And again there.

I’ll be speaking at the Akron Public Library on November 7th (Wednesday) at 7 PM. Be there or be (Highland) Square!

Then come watch my movie Cleveland’s Screaming! on November 9th at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland along with a live performance by 0DFx as well as CD Truth, Cheap Tragedies and This Moment in Black History.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

I’m up in Northern California this week doing book signings and talks in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Petaluma (if you Petaluma wrong it’ll bite you, so be careful). My trip to the North started off like this:

Bwaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!!!! What the fuck! I bolted out of bed to the loudest noise I have ever heard in my life. It sounded like the most obnoxious feedback in the world. At first I thought some piece of audio equipment in the house had gone nutso. So I’m looking all over the place trying to figure out what on God’s green Earth could make such an vile noise. Yuka, my wife, was awake too. Not even she could sleep through that.

Finally we figured out the noise was coming from outside the apartment too. When I opened the door I could smell smoke. The apartment is built around a central courtyard and I could see the neighbors running around trying to figure out what was happening. Something was on fire. That was for sure, and it had set off the alarm throughout the building. But none of us could figure out what or where the Hell was smoking. None of the apartments were spouting flames. I looked at my watch. It was just before five in the morning.

I called 911 and they put me on hold! I got one of those recorded messages like you get when you’re calling the DMV or something. “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. Calls will be taken in the order they are received.” Jesus H. Christ! I could be getting raped by Cossacks or something and they’re putting me on hold? With Muzak® too? After a couple minutes and operator came on and I told her my building was on fire. She said they were sending the fire guys and that I should wait in the front of the building.

Meanwhile Yuka had also called and she got through a lot faster. Do they take calls from women in distress before they take them from men?

Everybody in the building was standing out front. The dog owners all had their dogs. I didn’t see any of the cats I knew lived in the building, though. Where were they? And the guy down the hall with all the fish hadn’t brought them out. I guess fish are pretty much s.o.l. when there’s a fire. I brought out my computer because it had my new book on it.

It took the fire department a good long while to show up. But they finally arrived with two big, shiny fire trucks. They stretched out the ladder on one of them up to the roof of the apartment, four stories high. It was pretty impressive. I kept waiting to see if one of them was gonna race up there. But nobody ever did. What a rip off!

Anyway, as it turns out the fire was in the dumpster in the underground garage. Apparently the fire itself was already out by the time the fire department showed up, having been doused by the sprinkler system in the garage. But that didn’t stop it setting off the alarm.

They gave us the all clear to go back inside and we all started filing in. I heard a couple of the women in the building saying how hot the fire guys all were. I hadn’t noticed. A friend of mine has a fetish for firemen. Maybe this is something Suicide Girls should look into for the Suicide Boys site.

Anyway, I survived and I’m up in Santa Cruz now. Last night I did a talk at a bookstore called Gateways. That was fun. Then we went out to a vegetarian restaurant called the Satur’n Café (that’s how they spell it). It’s like a malt shop but with no meat. Pretty interesting.

I’ve done more radio interviews than I can count (well I could count ‘em, but I’m lazy). Did a book signing at the Virgin Megastore, which was weird, but fun. Got another couple gigs to do before I can go home, including a talk at San Quentin prison. Me and Johnny Cash, I guess. We’ll see if all this effort helps sell a few books or not.

Tonight (which is last night for you since I’m writing this on Friday) I’ll be at the San Francisco Zen Center. I’m pretty psyched about that because to my mind, San Francisco is the place where Buddhism really got its start in America. There had been some Buddhist books published over here in the early 20th century and you’d had the beat poets and their fascination with their own take on Zen (which was totally wrong, but that's another story). A few temples for the Asian communities had been established. But it wasn’t until Shunryu Suzuki washed up on our shores in the early Sixties that Zen as a practice really began to be established here.

There are a million other books where you can read about Suzuki’s story, the most notable is Crooked Cucumber, his biography by David Chadwick. So I’ll just give the briefest outline in the world here. Basically, Suzuki was sent to the US with the idea that he’d be a minister to the Japanese community living in San Francisco. But when hippies and beatniks began turning up at his doorstep wanting to know about meditation, instead of turning them away politely, he decided to try and teach them.

This is pretty unusual because in Japan, Zen temples tend to be training centers. You usually can’t just walk into one and start doing Zazen. So Suzuki’s policy of letting whoever showed up join the practice caused some consternation among the Japanese community who’d set him up in San Francisco to begin with. But he ignored them and kept on going with the Zazen classes and talks.

Pretty soon the San Francisco Zen Center began to grow exponentially. When the numbers got too much for Suzuki to handle himself, he invited two other teachers over from Japan to help out. One of these teachers was Dainin Katagiri and the other was Kobun Chino. Later on Kobun went on to be the teacher of my first Zen teacher, Tim McCarthy. So I’ve always felt a strong connection to the San Francisco Zen Center, although I’ve only visited it once before.

I’m pretty honored they asked me to talk. So I guess I better go figure out what I’m gonna say. I’ll let you know how it went next week.

In the meantime, take care and don’t get caught on fire!

Here's the remaining dates of the tour:

TONIGHT Saturday June 16th 7 PM I'll be at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th I'm at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashin’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. Supplies are dwindling. Get yours today!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki says that in most religions practitioners become like a sharp angle pointing away from themselves, while in Zen the angle points towards ourselves. The events Monday at Virginia Tech showed clearly what can happen when someone keeps sharpening and sharpening that angle pointing away from himself. We can say that the worthless piece of garbage who committed those murders was a nut case, schizophrenic or whatever multi-syllable word they finally settle on to describe him, and maybe it’s true. But he wasn’t the least bit different from the rest of us.

We all strengthen and enlarge our egos by constantly raging against things outside ourselves that we say make us upset — exactly like that dirtbag did. Maybe in our case it's different stuff we blame for our troubles and maybe we don't deal with it the same way. But we are absolutely convinced, just as he was, that the source of our problems is out there somewhere, not inside our own hearts, minds and bodies. That sharp angle points ever and always utterly away from the real source of trouble.

Thankfully most of us don’t take things to the kind of extremes we saw on Monday. We’re more likely to simmer and stew in our own misery occasionally pausing to rail at a world we never asked to be born into, but mostly just feeling sad and sorry for ourselves. Trust me, friends and neighbors, I know all about this. I was the sharpest angle pointing away from himself you could ever want to meet. My unhappiness was everybody’s fault but mine. There was never any lack of evidence of this, so nobody could ever convince me I was wrong. Not that most people I knew ever tried very hard. Cuz if my troubles weren’t out there then neither were theirs. And that’s not an easy thing to own up to. I was lucky enough to meet one person who had admitted to himself where the real source of his problems were and who helped me to see the real source of mine. I later discovered there was a long tradition of people who did this. But it’s always been a tiny, tiny minority.

It is the hardest thing in the world to admit that you are the real source of your own problems and your own pain. Harder than anything you can possibly imagine. We’ll commit any kind of atrocity, endure any kind of agony, slaughter our families, friends and neighbors, terrorize each other, do pretty much anything horrible, wrong, deceitful and stupid all just to get away from putting the blame for our troubles where it really belongs. Not out there in those bad people. Not out there in those terrible circumstances. But right in here. It’s you. It’s always been you and it always will be you.

Pretending the trouble is out there is a great way to avoid doing the real work that actually needs to be done. You can never really do anything about your problems as long as they’re out there. It’s hopeless to try and change the whole wide world into something more to your liking. You can write blogs or letters to the editor or scream and shout on street corners. You can shoot up your whole campus or post office or blow up a few major buildings. Or you can just do the little things we all usually do, act like jerks, insist on our own way, cut in line, litter, pardy hardy and wake up our lousy neighbors. But no matter what you do to all those people out there who’ve made you so upset it’s never, ever, ever going to solve your real problem. September 11th didn’t convert the world to the Muslim faith. McVey didn’t topple the United States government. That asswipe in Virginia didn’t teach the rich and the debauched a damn thing. And nothing you do against all those people and things out there you think caused all the shit in your life will ever make a bit of difference either. But when you change your attitude and change your focus, point that sharp angle back at yourself then — presto! — everything changes completely.

Does this mean you never do anything to put the outside world right cuz everything's, like, groovy now and you're all enlightened? Not a chance. You’ll be working at it every second of every day for the rest of your life. Because the most important thing you can do to put the outside world right is to get yourself together. And that's a job that never ends.

This is a very serious matter. The idea that our problems are all out there beyond ourselves is the cause of all human misery — every crime, every suicide, every act of terrorism, every war. Even your common garden-variety complaints can always be traced back to the deeper underlying idea that our problems are somewhere out there.

If you really want to do something to make sure other tragedies like this don’t occur anymore, you can. There’s a lot of work to be done, and it’s going to take time. But it’s work you can do right here and right now. More than that, it's the work you really want to do. It's what you were born for. It takes real courage to do this work because what you’re going to see is that the crazed killer isn’t out there in Virginia or out there in the hills of Afghanistan or out there in the White House. He’s you. But the good news is that once you see that, then you can take real, useful action. And it doesn’t start by watching that idiot’s dumbass manifesto over and over and over on YouTube or whatever. Or watching the folks at NBC lie to us that their motivation for releasing the tape was anything other than irresponsible greed. Or even with reading what I or Shunryu Suzuki or anyone else has to say about it. It starts with you being very quiet and seeing who you really are.

This won't fix everything today or tomorrow or by the end of next year or in the next decade. But slowly the effect will spread. It's all up to you.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.