Brad Warner's Blog, page 17

PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM and NISHIJIMA ARTICLES

Here I am at the Philadelphia International Airport with an hour to go before my re-rescheduled flight back to Montreal. I had an extra day in Los Angeles after the first flight I booked got delayed such that my connecting flight wouldn't happen. Now my connecting flight to Montreal today was canceled so I was put on a different one. This is why I need to cut back on travel!

I've been looking at some of the comments, and I'd like to point everyone to a website that's been linked on this blog for ages, but which some of the people who comment on this website seem unaware of:

Lectures and Articles by Nishijima Roshi

One of the comments under the last piece referred obliquely to Nishijima's "very personal and particular interpretation of Dogen." I have to assume he means Nishijima's ideas about the fourfold logical structure of Shobogenzo. This way of reading Dogen isn't simply a personal bias, but the result of decades of working with the text.

Nishijima has written a very detailed explanation of this way of reading Shobogenzo, which is available as a free download at:

Understanding Shobogenzo

Another comment says something about Nishjima being "the ANS/four views crank." Nishijima's ideas about the ANS (autonomic nervous system) are covered in this piece:

Buddhism and the Autonomic Nervous System

I do not find these ideas "cranky" at all. He is trying to use the language of science rather than the language of mysticism to explain the effects of zazen practice. He doesn't claim to be a neurologist or even an expert in the workings of the ANS. This he makes quite explicit in the first paragraph of the piece. But he does find this means of expressing how zazen works far more useful than the older, more mystical sounding language.

It's very easy to condense someone's body of work into a few choice words and thereby dismiss it entirely. D.T. Suzuki did that when he wrote about Dogen. So it happens to the best of us and is often initiated by people with impressive credentials.

I just wanted to give anyone who was interested a chance to check out Nishijima's own words for themselves. Most of the articles on the page linked above are short and easy to read.

結跏趺坐 or Why The New Shobogenzo is the Second Best Translation

First logistical stuff. If you're in Los Angeles, you still have one more chance to hear me talk. Tomorrow (Sunday Nov. 14, 2010) at 7pm I'll be speaking at the Bodhi Tree bookstore 8585 Melrose Avenue West Hollywood, CA 90069-5199.

Also, the folks from Dogen Sangha Los Angeles have put together some videos of me and stuck them up on the Dogen Sangha Los Angeles YouTube Channel. They'll be adding more soon.

Also, my newest book Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between has been nominated as the worst religious book cover by a website called Religious Bulletin. Yay! I hope I win because then they can put "Award Winning Author" on my next book.

Also I just put up a new article on the Suicide Girls' Safe For Work Blog. It's called Desire and you can find it by clicking on the word "Desire" in this here sentence right here.

Ans speaking of Suicide Girls, I'll be on their radio show tomorrow night. For more details on that just click right here!

****

Last weekend I went to the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) to participate in an event celebrating the publication of Kazuaki Tanahashi's translation of the complete 95 chapter Shobogenzo.

If you want to see what I said there go to this link and scroll ahead to 36:26 into the piece.

This new English language edition of Shobogenzo is essentially the San Francisco Zen Center edition of Shobogenzo. They own the copyright, they provided the bulk of the funding for the project and 32 priests from SFZC acted as co-translators, the average person working on between one and three chapters.

Naturally, during the celebration this weekend a number of people proclaimed that this was the best English translation of Shobogenzo. And, of course, those of us who worked on or, as in my case, were associated with people who worked on other English translations said that ours were the best. It became a bit of a running gag. If you watch the video of my talk on Saturday you'll see my contribution to the gag. I was the third or forth person that day to make this joke. But it was not a joke.

At one point Kaz said that every translation of Shobogenzo was the best in its own way. Each one provided a unique and valuable perspective. A very diplomatic response! And true. I'm sure he meant it.

I haven't read much of the Tanahashi Shobogenzo yet. I read a few chapters while I was at Tassajara over the Summer and a couple more since I bought a copy for myself ($150, ouch! And that was with a discount!). I am not an expert on it the way I am on the Nishijima/Cross version, which I've read at least four times cover to cover, and have read my favorite bits maybe a dozen times or more and which I produced a book of my own about (see link below). Though I'm still hard pressed to quote chapter and verse even of this version.

Even so, I feel safe saying the Tanahashi Shobogenzo is the second best one available, after the one by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and Chodo Cross, which will always be the best (which is high praise from someone as picky as me, for whatever that's worth) . I'm familiar with the earlier versions of Tanahashi's translations that have appeared in books like Moon In a Dewdrop and Enlightenment Unfolds. During the couple of years when it was tough to track down a copy of the Nishijima/Cross edition, I used to often recommend the Tanahashi books. I felt that they were the closest to the original. Now you can easily find the Nishijima/Cross version on line. (links to follow below)

The main reason the Nishijima/Cross version is best is because it so faithfully replicates the original Japanese Shobogenzo it's almost too much. Even Dogen's odd word order is retained as much as possible. This means it sacrifices a lot in terms of readablity. But then, so does Dogen's original. So that's as it should be. It was never meant to be easy reading.

The other big advantage of the Nishijima/Cross edition are the copious footnotes on every page. All of Dogen's obscure references to ancient Chinese texts are provided. And any time a Japanese word has been translated in a way that might be questionable, the original Japanese wording is also footnoted.

These two factors make for an edition of Shobogenzo that is the closest a person who can read English but can't read Japanese is going to get to discovering a pair of magic glasses that allow them to read the original Japanese. No one is ever going to be able to match it in that way until the day the English language itself changes so much that this version becomes outmoded for that reason. Sorry. It can't be done.

The reason the Tanahashi edition isn't quite as good relates to a lot of the aspects of trying to study something as personal and intimate as Zen in a large institution like SFZC. You can distill the reasons I think this edition is only second best by looking at the way they chose to translate the Japanese compound 結跏趺坐 (kekka fuza).

結跏趺坐 (kekka fuza) has one clear and totally unambiguous meaning in English. It means sitting in the Lotus posture (full, half or quarter). There is no other possible interpretation. So we're not talking here about a word that has nuances a translator could argue about. It's a proper noun with a set English equivalent. The word is used often in Shobogenzo as a synonym for zazen.

During the presentations on Sunday at Green Gulch someone (I think it was Kaz himself, but I'm a little uncertain -- it's probably somewhere in that video feed I linked to above) explained something about how their translation was accomplished using the example of how they had chosen to translate this word.

Apparently they'd originally translated it as "sitting cross legged," which is good. I think that's the phrase the Nishijima/Cross version uses. However, some talk arose around SFZC that certain readers may not be able to do the Lotus posture and would feel put off by such a translation. After some discussion it was decided that 結跏趺坐 (kekka fuza) would be translated as "sitting in meditation" so as to allow those who could not manage to sit in the Lotus posture to feel included in Dogen's message.

I admit this is not a major failing. Really, it's pretty much the same thing. It doesn't drastically alter Dogen's message. But it does alter it nonetheless.

It's not that it alters his message in a minor way that bothers me so much as the reasons why the editors chose to alter Dogen's message.

They altered it because they felt the actual meaning of the phrase might limit the book's appeal. They altered it because of a committee decision.

The matter of the Lotus posture in Dogen's teaching is one that a lot of people love to argue about. But Dogen is pretty uncompromising. In Fukanzazengi (Recommending Zazen for All People) he allows for full Lotus or half Lotus and that's it. My own teacher, Gudo Nishijima, extends the meaning of half Lotus to include what is commonly known as quarter Lotus or "Burmese Posture" in the West these days. But Dogen says nothing about using seiza benches or chairs or sitting in any of the other myriad ways you often encounter in Zen centers in the Americas and Europe these days.

I myself have taken some heat for being a stickler about posture. But here's a little secret. Whenever someone comes to me one-to-one and shows me that they really, honestly cannot do full, half or quarter Lotus (incl. Burmese) I always try to work with them to find another way. I'll bet you dollars to donuts even Master Dogen would have done the same in such a situation. Yet in public I never talk about any other postures.

The reason I don't talk in public about doing zazen in chairs or on seiza benches or what-have-you is that it seems like as soon as you mention the possibility of using these things, immediately half of the able bodied people in the room are rushing to get themselves a chair so they can be more comfortable. But zazen is not about comfort. In fact, without a bit of discomfort it's really not zazen.

Be that as it may, this change is just one of several in the book that reflect this attitude. In another instance Dogen's phrase "the kingly Bodhi Tree" was changed to "the glorious Bodhi tree" so as not to seem so sexist. I'm sure other such changes abound. They don't really alter the fundamental meaning of Dogen's prose, but they do alter it, and for reasons that appear to me to be a bit silly.

This is what happens when committees get involved. Gudo Nishijima and Mike Cross had no such problems. There were only two people involved in the nitty gritty of the translation and three or four others involved in editing.

What happened with this new edition of Shobogezo is also instructive in understanding the difference between studying Zen in a large institution and studying Zen in a smaller setting. I am a big fan of the San Francisco Zen Center. I like what they do and I'm happy to support them. I often recommend people to go to SFZC, Tassajara and Green Gulch. They're good places. They're good people.

But the truth is, if SFZC and institutions like it had been the only places I knew of to study Zen, I'd probably have lasted a year at most. That's not my kind of scene.

Is one way better and the other worse? I can only speak for myself. I feel like the Nishijima/Cross edition of Shobogenzo is the best. This doesn't mean I hate every other edition. But only one edition can be the best. As far as teaching styles go, I went with the form of Zen that suited me. If I didn't feel it was best for me I would have gone somewhere else.

Just to be very clear here, the Kazuaki Tanahashi translation of Shobogenzo is a magnificent achievement. Here's a good article all about how it came to be. It's a really, really tremendous translation. I highly recommend it. I spent $150 on my copy, and I can't really afford to do that kind of stuff these days. I did it because I genuinely like it.

But it still ain't the best!

LINKS
• Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye by Brad Warner
• Master Dogen's Shobogenzo Book 1 translated by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross
•Master Dogen's Shobogenzo Book 2 translated by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross
•Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, Book 3 translated by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross
• Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, Book 4 translated by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross
• Enlightenment Unfolds by Dogen, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi
• Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi
• Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi
• Free digital download of the Nishjima/Cross edition of Shobogenzo in PDF format

Not Really About Last Night

I'll post something about the Dogen Translation Forum soon. But for now here is a a posting from a very unique and interesting perspective.

Also, the stuff I did yesterday is now or will soon be archived. I'll try and get the URL for that soon.

After San Francisco I'm heading south to Los Angeles where I'm doing a busload of gigs.

•November 9, 2010 (Tues) 7 pm - Hill Street Center 237 Hill St., Santa Monica, CA 90405

•November 10, 2010 (Wed) 7 am (yes that's 7 in the morning!) Dharma Zen Center 1025 S Cloverdale Ave Los Angeles, CA 90019-6733

•November 10, 2010 (Wed) 7:30 pm - Against The Stream 4300 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA

•November 12 (Fri) - 7pm An Lac Buddhist Temple 901, S.Saticoy Avenue Ventura, CA 93004. $2 Donation.

•November 14, 2010 (Sun) 7pm - Bodhi Tree Bookstore 8585 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA


Next I'm heading south to Los Angeles where I'm doing a busload of gigs.

•November 9, 2010 (Tues) 7 pm - Hill Street Center 237 Hill St., Santa Monica, CA 90405

•November 10, 2010 (Wed) 7 am (yes that's 7 in the morning!) Dharma Zen Center 1025 S Cloverdale Ave Los Angeles, CA 90019-6733

•November 10, 2010 (Wed) 7:30 pm - Against The Stream 4300 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA

•November 12 (Fri) - 7pm An Lac Buddhist Temple 901, S.Saticoy Avenue Ventura, CA 93004. $2 Donation.

•November 14, 2010 (Sun) 7pm - Bodhi Tree Bookstore 8585 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA

LIVE ON THE WEB SATURDAY

This Saturday, November 6th at 4pm Pacific Standard Time (PST) I'll be giving a talk at San Francisco Zen Center's Zen Translation Forum as part of a program titled Dogen: Lost and Found in Translation. The program will be streamed live on the web starting at 2 pm PST with an introduction by Steve Stuckey, Abbot of San Francisco Zen Center.

The URL for the live stream is http://www.livestream.com/sfzc. The live stream will also include presentations by Mel Weitsman, Abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, a panel discussion led by Steven Heine and including William Bodiford, Taigen Dan Leighton and Susan Moon. There will be further presentations by Frederike Bossevain, Gaelyn Godwin of Houston Zen Center, Chozen and Hogen Bays and a live calligraphy auction by Kazuaki Tanahashi.

It should be fun. My presentation is titled "Dogen for Punks." It should stick out like a sore thumb among all the serious, scholarly stuff.

They're going to try and open it up to questions from the on-line audience. So try your luck and see if you can get through. My talk is going to be pretty short. So I suggest you get your comments in early.

After San Francisco I'm heading south to Los Angeles where I'm doing a busload of gigs.

•November 9, 2010 (Tues) 7 pm - Hill Street Center 237 Hill St., Santa Monica, CA 90405

•November 10, 2010 (Wed) 7 am (yes that's 7 in the morning!) Dharma Zen Center 1025 S Cloverdale Ave Los Angeles, CA 90019-6733

•November 10, 2010 (Wed) 7:30 pm - Against The Stream 4300 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA

•November 12 (Fri) - 7pm An Lac Buddhist Temple 901, S.Saticoy Avenue Ventura, CA 93004. $2 Donation.

•November 14, 2010 (Sun) 7pm - Bodhi Tree Bookstore 8585 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA

Now that you've been told you have no excuse to miss any of them!

***

A lot of times when I talk about Zen to audiences made up mainly of people who don't know anything at all about Zen, I have to deal with deeply held misconceptions of what Zen is. Just last week I gave a talk in which I didn't even once mention the concept of non-attachment. When I started taking questions a guy said, "You're talking about detachment and I don't agree that people should try to be aloof and detached with no personal relationships. I think personal relationships even of a sexual nature can be very nurturing things that all human beings need, etc., etc."

If you want to know my opinion about this matter, I devote a chapter to it in my new book, Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between. But any of you who have read anything I've written probably know that I am not sitting here trying to get people to give up all their personal relationships. And if you've even read just the Amazon description of my new book you know for sure I'm not telling people to give up sex!

The point I'm trying to make here is that even though I said nothing at all about having an aloof, detached attitude, this guy had heard a few things about Zen, assumed it was all about being detached, and went after me for what he perceived I was talking about. Although the subject had not come up at all, everything he heard from me was filtered through that lens.

It's interesting how this happens and it will probably be my life's work to untangle all the misconceptions of Zen practice I run into. I came across a book just the other day that said, "Surely the Buddha was right that love is the fountainhead of hurt and misery, suffering and despair. He also taught that life and love were not worth while." Oh boy!

Not that I'm the ace genius who knows the be all and end all of Zen. But some of the misconceptions out there are so vast and deep! Sometimes these misconceptions even lead people to think they can become Enlightened® in an hour...

Here's a song about that:

All Is One

See! I used to know how to program a drum machine!

Just some observations for now. See you this weekend on the Interwebs!

SEX AT DAWN REVIEW and PODCAST

First off, here's a new podcast interview I did:

Find is at http://darrenmain.libsyn.com/sex-sin-zen

I also have a new thing up on Suicide Girls (SG). It's at http://suicidegirlsblog.com/blog/hardcore-zen-sex-at-dawn/. It's a review of the new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. I'm going to give the piece a little time there on SG before I comment on it. But there are, I feel, a few other things to say about the book.

The new SG blog site is supposed to be safe for work and it's freely accessible by anyone.

That's it for now. I'll write more on this subject in the next day or two.

OH! And if you're in San Francisco or Los Angeles, I'm gonna be doing a whole busload of talks and things over the next couple weeks. Go to http://web.me.com/doubtboy/Site/BookTour_2010.html for all the details. See you there!

IS BLAMING THE VICTIM A "ZEN" THING TO DO?

An anonymous commenter on this blog said:

"You shouldn't see people as victims because the victims are the ones at fault. I guess you could say that they really wanted or needed to be abused. Anyway, this controversy doesn't seem to warrant the of time effort and energy Brad would need to devote to it in order to even form an opinion. Dude has got shirts to move."

This was in response to my response to comments regarding allegations against a certain Zen teacher. He's named in the comments section. But I'm not going to name him here. I basically said that I felt the matter wasn't really worth the time effort and energy I'd need to devote to getting to the bottom of it so that I could form an opinion. It would take a lot of detective work to even get a sense of who did what and why among the morass of he-said she-said that is all I have to go by at this point. I expressed the opinion that it's a "buyer beware" situation when you start working with any spiritual teacher. Even if I were to ferret out what I think really happened in this case and make my opinions known, it wouldn't do a whole lot of good. Not everyone listens to me, and even if they do I'd only be exposing one guy. I don't have the time, energy or even the inclinaton to police the entire world of spiritual masters.

I've written a lot in my books, on this blog and in contributions I've made to various magazines and spoken a lot in interviews and public talks about how one might go about detecting the minority of abusive charlatans out there masquerading as Zen teachers and other types of spiritual masters. My friend Scott Edelstein just came out with a book called Sex and the Spiritual Teacher: Why It Happens, When It's a Problem, and What We All Can Do that also spends a great deal of energy trying to address this sort of problem and help prospective students understand how not to fall into the same traps others have before.

There's a movement afoot to try and come up with some sort of data base of approved Soto Zen teachers. The Soto Zen Buddhist Association (SZBA) is a group that tries to police its membership and weed out the fakes. I don't belong to SZBA for a number of reasons, one of which is that ultimately I think this strategy of creating a data base of reliable teachers will have to fail. One would assume that one of the original purposes of the Holy Roman Catholic Church was to try to create an organization that would police itself so that whenever you placed your kids in the care of members of that organization you could be assured someone was going to be responsible should anything go wrong. We all know how well that worked out. The SZBA seems to be pretty good for now, but this is ultimately a losing strategy.*

All you can really do is talk in general terms. I used the phrase "buyer beware" to express that. It's best to keep your bullshit detector in good working order when approaching any kind of spiritual teacher. Buddha himself even said this in the Kalama Sutra, which I've quoted so often it hurts.

There's another deeper issue this comment raises, though. The commenter says, "the victims are the ones at fault. I guess you could say that they really wanted or needed to be abused." I have to assume he is trying to throw back in my face attitudes he believes he has heard me express. But he doesn't get it. So I'm going to try again.

I have often said that I believe whatever we get in this life is, at some level, something we wanted or needed. When I say this I am only applying it inwardly to myself. I never look at someone else in a shitty situation and say, "That person must have wanted it." But I often look at myself when I'm in a shitty situation and ask, "In what way did I want or need this shitty thing to happen?"

The strategy of pointing to others and saying they wanted whatever awful thing they got doesn't help anyone. I highly recommend avoiding it. Everyone will hate you if you say it out loud. If you say it only to yourself you'll end up coming off smug and heartless, and everybody will also hate you then too. So don't even say it just to yourself no matter how tempting it might be. This is a very important point. Don't pass it over, please.

But when I apply this view to myself, my own suffering becomes much easier to bear. I remember one of the first major incidents when I tried applying this thinking to myself. It was in the early 1990s. I was brutally physically attacked on the streets of Akron by people I did not know at all for reasons I have never been able to comprehend. As far as I could tell then and as far as I can tell now in retrospect the attack was absolutely random. And, by the way, these guys were most definitely trying to kill me.

I won't go into the full story here. Maybe I've told it elsewhere, I don't know. In any case, after the attack I thought to myself, "Buddhism teaches that what we get in life is somehow something we wanted, how does that apply here?"

One might assume that this sort of thinking would lead to self-blame and make me feel even worse. But that's not what happened at all. When I began framing it this way to myself I felt like less of a helpless victim and more like a person who could do something active to improve his own life. And I did. I moved to Japan and incredible, wonderful things started happening. For the first time in my life I stopped feeling like a victim of circumstance and really took control of my fate. Had I not started thinking this way I might still be living in Akron feeling sorry for myself.

I don't even care if this idea is objectively true or not. I believe it is or I wouldn't use it. But even if it turns out I'm wrong, this way of thinking has been so incredibly useful I still wouldn't give it up.

While I never, ever apply this sort of thinking to others and say, "Ha! They wanted that awful thing to happen!" I do try and communicate this view to others because it's been so useful to me. Of course the danger is that what I say will be misinterpreted by people like the guy who left the comment. But I've also seen clearly that absolutely anything you say can and will be misinterpreted. Even if you take a vow of silence, that too can and will be misinterpreted. Such is life.

I'd also like to thank the commenter for pointing out the availability of an ever growing variety of attractive T-shirts designed by me over at http://www.redbubble.com/people/bradwarner. Get yours today!

And if you're in Montreal and want to talk to me about this, go to the Chapters bookstore downtown around 7 o'clock where I'll be signing books.


*Which is not to say I'll never join the SZBA. I might someday. But not because I'll change my mind about this particular point.

HARDCORE ZEN TOUR

Before I forget, I've put a couple new T-shirt designs up on Red Bubble. You can take a look at them by clicking here. The Ultraman one won't be there for long. So if you're thinking of getting it, you oughta do so now.

In 2009 when I made my first trip to Finland, a guy named Sike (pronounced c.k.) Sillanpää (pronounced like it's spelled, if you know how to pronounce things in Finnish) followed me around and made a movie. Sike was an interesting character. He hardly ever said anything and he didn't seem to need to eat. We kept joking that he lived on sunshine and good vibes.

I like his movie a lot. It's an honest documentary of what happened on that tour. He recently put the entire thing up on YouTube and asked me to let all you nice folks in Blog Land take a look. So here it is:

PART 1


PART 2


PART 3


PART 4


If you liked watching this movie, please consider making a donation! (see button on top left of this blog)

T-Shirts and More Questions

First up, for those of you who have been asking about t-shirts, I've decided to try out a company called Red Bubble and see how that works. SO, you can NOW ORDER T-SHIRTS AND HOODIES BY CLICKING THIS LINK! Yay!

I've uploaded two designs. You can get them as T-shirts, stickers or hoodies. If you order one, send me a quick email at askbradwarner@hotmail.com and let me know how it is.

TODAY'S FIRST QUESTION:
I'd like to ask you about motivation to continue zazen practice.

I've done zazen for about 5 years or so almost every day and I feel that it had become kind of easy nowadays. Funny thing is that the easier it had become the more difficult it had become to find reasons to continue my practice. I mean, at first it was kind of cool if I managed to sit like 20 minutes staring at the wall, but now I feel that it's hard to find a meaning to go on. I just wondered if you'd have something smart to say on this subject.

MY ANSWER:
This is one of the questions I get more than any other. How do you get started in Zen practice? How do you keep going?

The questioners usually end up asking for motivation. But I wonder if motivation is what we really need.

The stated purpose of a dharma talk is usually "encouragement." The talk is supposed to provide listeners with a motivation to carry on doing this often difficult and seemingly fruitless practice. When those dharma talks often include -- as mine often do -- phrases like Kodo Sawaki's infamous "Zazen is good for nothing" it often feels like they fail if their purpose. Why should we carry on doing something that's good for nothing?

The only way I can answer this question is to try and figure out why I keep on doing it. I suppose in that I am a good test case, because I have kept up this useless practice for well over twenty years now and have no intention of stopping. Yet I often wonder why I do it, even as I'm sitting there on a rolled up towel facing the wall of some hotel room in the middle of a foreign country, with sirens blaring outside or prayer calls from the local mosque tearing up my eardrums, having woken up early and delaying breakfast so I can get this thing done.

Yet even as I wonder why I'm doing it, I still keep going. Even knowing that it is good for nothing, I keep on sitting. Am I an idiot? Maybe. And maybe that's what it takes.

I used to do zazen because I wanted to have an enlightenment experience. Pure and simple. I didn't start off with this motivation. But pretty soon after I'd started doing zazen I read Philip Kapleau's Three Pillars of Zen with its amazing descriptions of real life enlightenment experiences and I wanted one of those. This proved to be lousy motivation because it kept not happening. And so I'd give up.

It was when I gave up on zazen that I discovered the only form of motivation that's ever really worked. Quite simply, I felt like shit when I stopped doing zazen. The first few times I gave up the practice I didn't really understand why I felt so shitty. Then when I'd get back to it, things would get a little better. It wasn't a vast improvement. But it was better than when I didn't do it. So I got back to the practice.

I've said this more times than I can count. I'm sure it's in most of my books in one form or another. And I know it's been on this blog a few times too. Yet people still keep asking for motivation...

I can say a few things that might help. One is that it gets better. There really are moments of insight and transcendence to be had. You can get through a lot of the garbage that's been holding you down. You might even have one of those so-called "enlightenment experiences."

I don't hold that these things don't happen. They do. And they have some value. Sure. Yet, as I've said, enlightenment is for sissies. It's not the point of practice. It's not the goal.

Ultimately we all have to provide our own motivation. What motivates me might not work for you. Hopefully this will help you find yours.

QUESTION #2:
You mention that you don't focus your mind on anything in particular, you just let your awareness go where it goes, but you do keep making sure that your posture is correct.

It's been my experience that every teacher teaches the posture of zazen slightly differently. Back of the hands resting on the thighs, hands so that the little fingers rest on the stomach just below the belly-button would be one example.

But here's the real question: when zazen "gets up and walks around", as Kobun Chino Otogawa averred it sometimes does, how will you make sure your posture is correct?

ANSWER #2:
This is another one I get asked a lot. One popular variation is: How do you keep your zazen mind when you're not sitting on the cushion? And, again, I can only answer from my own experience.

I used to work at this sort of thing. When I first started sitting I had a job as a part-time mail carrier. So when I walked my routes I'd be paying attention to the sensations of my feel, to keeping my back straight and chest open as I walked, to the color of the sky and the sounds around me. That sort of thing. I read about this in a book, I think. Probably not a Zen book.

Nowadays I don't really do that. At least I don't do it consciously. Maybe I've internalized it and made it habit. I don't know.

At some point, maybe a decade or so into my practice I noticed something kind of weird. Colors had become brighter, sounds sharper, my vision somehow clearer, my senses somehow enhanced. It was like a big shroud made of black gauze wrapping my entire body had been taken off and I could now see and experience things directly. The only other time I'd ever felt anything like that was when I was on LSD.

What made that happen? I don't know. Over ten years of zazen every morning and evening plus loads of multi-day zen retreats certainly had something to do with it. But it wasn't something I drove myself to experience.

Nowadays I don't feel right when I'm slumped over in a chair or on a couch. A few years ago I got rid of the couch in my living room (when I had a living room, ah luxury!) because I couldn't stand sitting on it anymore. I couldn't focus on anything. I replaced the couch with some cushions on the floor.

Right now I'm sitting in a coffee shop (Shaika, on Sherbrooke in Montreal's NDG district) and I'm not resting my back against the chair because when I do it feels too lax and unfocused. When I drive I put the driver's seat almost straight up or else I feel like I'm only half awake.

So how do you keep that zazen mind while you're doing something else? Just like you do when you're doing zazen itself; when you find yourself drifting, get back to the right posture. When you find yourself drifting again, do it again. After a while this becomes a new habit and you don't even really have to think about it much.

Good? Good.

Now I'm gonna go do something else!

Send your questions to: askbradwarner@hotmail.com

A COUPLE OF QUESTIONS

I'm coming to you tonight live from a rustic cabin in Spencertown, New York, about two and a half hours drive north of New York City in the middle of the vast wilderness that lies between New York and Montreal.

It's amazing how as soon as you get out of New York City suddenly all signs of human civilization disappear entirely. Well, OK. Maybe not entirely. But it's such a huge contrast. About an hour and a half out of town I had to pee like crazy. I was driving on the Taconic State Parkway and I swear to God there weren't even any gas stations to be found. Where did they all go? Where do people driving on the Taconic Parkway get gasoline? What is a Taconic anyway? Is that a condition of the parkway? "I'm sorry ma'am, but I'm afraid your parkway has become taconic."

Anyway, you will see that Sock Monkey is with me here. He ran off while I was in New York. Apparently -- and the people who found him told me this, I didn't make it up -- he was riding a mechanical bull. What a wild monkey! I lost him for about three days and I was actually pretty sad about it. I'm well aware he is an inanimate object. Even Sock Monkey himself admits this. But it's weird how attached you can get to a stuffed animal, especially when you've traveled so much with him.

I am returning to Montreal from five days in New York City where I did a book signing and a two-day retreat. People always ask stuff like, "How was the retreat?" And it's hard to answer. It was good. It was noisy, being as it was in the East Village with jackhammers jackhammering and sirens wailing. But I'm pretty much used to urban zazen these days and that's just what comes with the territory.

Some cool people showed up, which was cool. Nobody died. No one was seriously injured. I suppose if I were Genpo Roshi, I could have given them all enlightenment experiences. But I'm not. So I didn't. (Someone posted a link to a nice podcast that mentions Genpo disparagingly, but I can't find it anymore. Maybe you can post the link again?)

It's weird doing whatever it is I do. I do basically what my dad has done for the last twenty or so years, I'm a traveling salesman. My dad sells rubber chemicals. I sell books. But we do pretty much the same thing. We get in a car and we drive a long, long, long way to go talk to people. Funny how that works.

OK. I said I'd answer questions people sent in. So let's go.

After all your spot on observations about the dangers of "teachers" accepting money from students in return for teaching, I find it kind of amazing that you are now offering :

"As a way of making it feel a bit like readers are getting something for their money, I'm going to start answering more questions sent in from you folks out there. "

It's your call obviously, but it just seems like a bad idea.

I didn't press the donate button to get your attention, I just want you to keep doing your work.

This brings up a few issues. First off, I really didn't mean to directly associate the donation button with the answering of questions as if you could now pay me to answer stuff. I can see how it came off that way. I was being facetious though. I'm too scatterbrained to work out who sent questions and who sent donations and correlate the two anyway. So even if that was my goal I'd fail.

The idea of accepting money for teaching Zen is a bit more problematic. I've already said before that I tend to deal with my own conundrum in that area by regarding myself mainly as a writer. Writers get paid for writing. Well, they do if they're lucky, anyhow. I don't feel bad taking money for the things that I write. I don't feel bad getting paid for a lecture by someone who hires me to give a talk about my books. Since I write mainly about Buddhism, this makes my own position somewhat ambiguous. But I'm OK with that.

I don't believe it's a very good idea to be a Zen teacher for a living. But I really don't think it's wrong for Zen teachers to make a living being Zen teachers. The temptation to dumb down the teachings in order to get more butts in seats is very strong when it means the difference between paying the rent or getting evicted. You might even try a scheme where rich people pay you $50,000 to tell them they're enlightened.

That would be the very dark side of it. The somewhat less dark side of it is that by accepting money for teaching Zen, you send the message to students that they have a right to demand how Zen ought to be taught to them.

That being said, Zen teachers still need to eat and pay the rent and they should have a means to do that. If a person devotes their entire lives to Zen teaching, how are they going to make a living other than by accepting support from students? In and of itself there is nothing evil about that.

This is why I try as much as possible to keep the writer side separate from the teacher side. Though they do co-mingle. しょうがないな？

Next question:

I`ve been sitting for 3 years daily, and for one year I intensively focused on doing the first koan of my practice; "What am I?" It became really interesting but I had to quit it because I felt that energies in my body/mind were bit out of control. There was this vibrating spot that sometimes vibrated in my head. And it feels like it's not going to the right direction or something.

So nowadays I've been just sitting and focusing on the body and it feels good and grounding. But especially in stressful situations the focus point goes to head and starts vibrating with sounds.

What do you think about hara for example? I have always been told to focus on the hara, but I never learned how. I'm not sure what to do with focusing the mind.
Just sitting and feeling the body feels good and also slightly focusing on the lower back. Maybe just continue like that?

Shikantaza type zazen in it's purest form doesn't have any specific point of focus. I'm aware that lots of teachers tell you to concentrate on the hara or tanden, which basically means a spot just below your chest somewhere. But my teachers never taught that and I never did it.

When I sit, I really just sit. Wherever my awareness goes it just goes. The only thing deliberate I do is to keep making sure my posture is correct. I try not to consider things too much.

Dogen uses the words　無思料 (mushiryou) and　非思料 (hishiryou) to describe what should be done with the mind during zazen. 思料 (shiryou) is often translated in Zen books as "thinking." The modifiers 無 (mu) and 非 (hi) are different levels of denial. In Mike Cross and Nishijima Roshi's translation of Shobogenzo, 無思料 (mushiryou) is "not thinking" and 非思料 (hishiryou) is "different from thinking," as in absolutely different from thinking.

But any Japanese/English dictionary will tell you that 思料 (shiryou) is "consideration." Thinking is usually 考える (kangaeru). So I believe what Dogen was getting at wasn't that we should stop all thought and make our brains completely silent. He was saying something more like that we should avoid actively messing around with the various thoughts that pop into our heads.

Concentrating on the hara seems to me to be the opposite of that. It is a kind of deliberate consideration. You're considering your belly. Same with counting the breath. And it's especially same with using a koan. That, to me, seems to be absolutely without a doubt a form of consideration and definitely not at all what Dogen was talking about.

Phew! That was a lot more work than I thought it would be.

But keep sending your questions in to askbradwarner@hotmail.com and I'll do my best to answer them whether you make a donation or not.

New York City! (again)

Here's another new interview.

I just got to New York City and I'm sure as heck not gonna spend my time all up on this computer. Besides I have an interview to get to across town.

So here's one last plug for the two events I'm doing in New York next week. The first is a book signing at 7 pm on October 15th at the Iinterdependence Project in the East Village. Be there!

The following two days, October 16th and 17th, we're having a two-day non-residential retreat at the Interdependence Project in the East Village. This is a terrific opportunity for anyone who wants to get a real taste of what zazen is all about. The retreat is open to beginners, no experience necessary. It will be focused on shikantaza style zazen as taught by Dogen Zenji. It's non-residential, which means you get to go out and have a night on the town in Manhattan afterward instead of being cooped up with a bunch of Zen nerds all night.