Brad Warner's Blog

I recently watched most of episode one of AMC's remake of the classic Sixties TV show The Prisoner over at my friend Nina's house. She has cable and TiVo and I have neither. Unfortunately her TiVo thought the episode was an hour long when it was actually longer than that. So it cut off before the finish.

In any case, I wasn't too upset. The show was good enough that I'd like to have seen the ending. But not so compelling that I can even recall now exactly where things were when the TiVo decide...

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Lots of little things this time...

First check out this link:

Elephant Journal's Top 15 Books to Give as Holiday Gifts

Yep! Elephant Journal sez to give your loved ones a little Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate for Hanukkah, Kwanza, Rohatsu or Christmas this year! They'll love you so much they'll lick you on the ears for it! Thanks Waylon!

Also, here's a little holiday gift from me to you. Can't remember if I put this up once before. But I don't think I did. Check out:

Black Sabbath by...

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Here's an audio file of my talk at Dharma Field in Minneapolis last Sunday, December 6, 2009.

12/6/09 Dharma Field

Those of you who've heard my talks before will recognize that the first 15 minutes are a variation on my standard introductory stump speech. This is the autobiographical how-I-got-into-Zen thing I do a lot. But after 15 minutes, the Q&A started and it went in some interesting directions, I think.

I went several of places this time out. I started off in Vancouver, where I did a publi...

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Nishijima Roshi turned 90 on November 29th! The photo to your left is from the party held for him by students of Dogen Sangha in Tokyo, who meet each Saturday at Tokyo University's Young Buddhists Association. I guess 90 is pretty young! At the bottom of this post is a video made for his b-day by one of the Dogen Sangha groups in Frankfurt, Germany.

I'm in St. Paul today enjoying their double good hospitality and warmth. I sat in on a poetry reading at Macalester College last night, which was ...

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I promised an piece about jukai, so here it is. I've written extensively about jukai in all of my books. The longest bits about it are in Hardcore Zen, in which I talk about the jukai ceremonies I went through (three of them!) and in Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, where I talk about the jukai ceremonies I've performed.

For those who don't know, jukai is the traditional Buddhist ceremony of receiving the precepts. A person publicly vows to honor the Three Devotions, and uphold the T...

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You asked for it! You got it! New videos of the comedy team of Brad and Skylar!

For those of you who don't tune in regularly, Skylar is my niece, the daughter of my younger sister. A couple years ago Skylar did an interview with me that she posted on YouTube, which still gets more hits than anything but my interview with Sock Monkey. High brow entertainment is my middle name!

The one posted on top was just improvised. The "Pickle Monster" thing below was conceived by Skylar. I'm not sure why th...

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OK. My sister and her kids are due here any minute. So this will very likely be my last post for a while.

So far, so good on the first 20 hrs. or so of having the comments section back. I was intrigued by one of the first ones to appear. An anonymous commenter said:

Brad, good to see you Back.

Still seems like you carry a lot of grudges and revenge about a lot of stuff for someone who is supposed to have been practicing Zen.

I guess you don't seem like someone to respect or look up to. Isn't...

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OK. I've turned commenting back on. For now...

I've been enjoying Gniz's recent lambasting of Genpo Roshi and Big Mind® over on the Reblogging Brad Warner blog. It's good to see this stuff getting a public airing. But I've never felt the need to dig as deeply as Gniz has. The fact that Big Mind® is bullshit is overwhelmingly evident just by watching videos of it.

In any case, the fact that Gniz has chosen to write these pieces means that his blog is no longer really functioning as a place to c...

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I'm thinking about reinstating the comments section. But I'm gonna need to consult with Aaron now that he's involved.

Anyway, I've occasionally seen debates crop up over whether or not Brad Warner is really "street" or, in fact, secretly did not grow up in the alleys of the inner city, but (~gasp!~) in a quiet suburb. I think this comes from people who read Noah Levine's PR, confuse it with me and then accuse me of being a fake because I'm not what they imagine Noah is (which isn't what Noah i...

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I did my first talk in Victoria, BC last night. It was very nice. There's a photo of the event to your left. It was Rinzai style Zen in the tradition of Joshu Sasaki Roshi.

A couple days before that I gave a talk at another temple in the Sasaki tradition, Vancouver Zen Centre (they don't know how to spell the word "center" in Canada). That also went swimmingly. The talk was styled as a dialogue between me and Eshin, the head of the centre there. That was a good way to do things, I thought.

On ...

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