Brad Warner's Blog, page 2

MCA RIP

I didn't hear about Adam Yauch (aka MCA) of the Beastie Boys' death until a day or maybe two after it happened. But I was really sorry to hear that he'd passed away. I hope he made it to whatever bardo he was aiming for. Personally, if I were a Tibetan Buddhist, I'd aim for the Bridgette Bardo!

Ar! Ar! Ar!!

The fact that Adam Yauch was a Buddhist is something that has been brought to my attention by well-meaning people for years now. "Do you know the guy from the Beastie Boys is a Buddhist?" they'd say. Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. Thank you. Now that he was a Buddhist instead of is a Buddhist, I suppose I'll keep hearing it, but phrased in past tense. Which is fine. I don't mind. It's just kind of funny what little Buddhist factoids get pointed out to me repeatedly.

I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan. I liked them. But I never followed their career or bought any of their records except for the greatest hits compilation Sounds of Science. And even that I bought used years after it came out.

I was pretty excited, though, when they came out with their Japanese monster movie inspired video for the song Intergalactic. I can even tell you where exactly they got some of the ideas. The scene where you see the monster's foot crash through a miniature building from the inside is from something Tsuburaya Productions did a lot beginning around the time of the Ultraman Taro TV series in 1973-74. The octopus head monster appears to be inspired by Emperor Guillotine from Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot (by Toei, not Tsuburaya Pro). I was working for Tsuburaya at the time the video came out and tried desperately to get our management to understand what that meant for us and how we might capitalize on it. But to no avail.

I know that Adam Yauch put his Buddhist faith in song in a tune called Boddhisattva Vow. But I never thought that was one of their best. It was too self-conscious and obvious for me. Not that I think it's a bad sentiment or anything. It just lacked any subtlety and it wasn't even a very catchy piece of music. Fight for Your Right to Party was a lot more fun.

When  Fight for Your Right to Party came out I remember thinking, "Wow! These guys stole the Beastie Boys' name!" Because I was aware of a NYC based hardcore band called the Beastie Boys from a couple years before that. At the time it didn't occur to me that it could possibly be the same guys. What self-respecting hardcore band would do a song like that? Then I found out it was the same guys and I got the idea that the song was a joke. Once you know that it's hilarious.

I don't know much about Adam Yauch. But it seems like he saw some of the same things in punkrock that I did and saw the connections between punk and Buddhism. In that sense we shared something. And he was the bass player for the Beastie Boys when they played their own instruments.

A little before Adam Yauch died, Howard Hutchings of the Kent, Ohio band Hyper As Hell died. We (Zero Defex) played a tribute show in his memory last Saturday. Howard, Adam Yauch and I were all born the same year, so it was a reminder to me that we all are gonna pass away one of these days. But Nishijima Roshi said, well into his 80s, that he was always happy to wake up each morning one notice, "Wow! I'm still alive!" Crum the Cat always checks on me in the mornings to make sure I'm still alive to feed him by biting my toes.


In the comments section Matt from Houston said... Brad: the thing is that to a lot of people a little younger than you, MCA demonstrated very publicly that you could be a dope musician, be irreverent, use naughty words, love punk and hip hop and still be a committed Buddhist focused on doing lots of right in the world. I know that that's old news to you (and, to some extent, the Brad Warner® Brand), but it was a pretty important revelation to a lot of us kids.

He also demonstrated very publicly that you have no obligation to be the asshole you were when you were a 20-year-old asshole. I know that without his example my mind might not have opened to the Dharma. So there are a bunch of us who owe the dude some gratitude...AND THAT'S RIIIIIIIGHT.

Crazy Train

First off, tonight May 5, 2012, Zero Defex is playing at the Stone Tavern, 110 E. Main St, Kent, Ohio. There are six bands on the bill and the show starts at nine pm. So go!

Anonymous in the comments section of my previous post said:
The serious question then - does being enlightened give you any insight - from a theoretical perspective, not how to fix it - or what mental illness is? Or more broadly, do eastern spiritual leaders have something to say about this more than similar edicts about booze or sex?

This is a very good question. It's also an important one because a lot of people assume that an "enlightened" eastern spiritual master does have that kind of insight and are willing to follow their advise on the subject.

I can't answer for all spiritual masters. And I don't want to get into what it might mean to "master" any given form of spirituality. Nor do I even want to poke at what the term "enlightened" means right now. But still, I can answer for myself based on my experience. And I honestly feel that my experience is universal for others in my position.

Anyway. What insight do I have into what mental illness is?

I feel like I understand what that thing we label "mental illness" is in ways that neither I nor anyone else could possibly understand without decades of meditation. But that doesn't mean I know how to treat it or cure it or even deal with it when it confronts me on the street. That is an entirely different sort of problem.

One thing I understand is that the condition we call "normal" also probably ought to be labeled "mental illness." And I expect that in the future this will become clear. People will look back at us in the early 21st century and marvel at the fact that almost the entire world was what they will call "mentally ill." Though perhaps their term for it will be different.

I feel that when we call someone "mentally ill" all we're really saying most of the time is that the person in question is unable to function in what we call "normal society." Of course there are different degrees of this. If a person's inability to function creates a danger to society, society has a right and duty to protect itself from that person. If that person isn't dangerous but is unable to look after himself, that's another matter. There are millions of degrees to the problem of mental illness. But at its core it's still the same problem.

One important thing to bear in mind is that none of us can deal with "normal society" all the time. I know I sure can't. Some people solve this problem by inventing sub-societies that protect them from the larger society, yet still manage to function with it. A monastery would be an example of one such place. It's a place of shelter from the wider more pervasive mental illness, a place one hopes is a bit less mentally ill. But even the best of these still have their own sorts of dysfunctions.

When I was at Tassajara last year there was one day when I simply had to hide in my room for about 24 hours because I could not deal with the relatively sane sub-society I had voluntarily committed myself to. I told people I was sick. But I wasn't. This sort of thing happens all the time. Nearly everyone who goes to a monastery — even a good one  — has this happen at some point.

The easy answer that Anonymous is looking for is that all mental illness comes from a mistaken identification of the ego as one's true and fundamental self. But that's such a cliché I wonder if it has any value at all anymore. Be that as it may, it's true that nearly everyone identifies her ego as her true self. But I think most people, whether they know it or not, have some basic intuition that this is not really the way it is. To the extent that they can put this false sense of identity aside, they can function with others and form a reasonable society.

An insight into the deeper origin of mental illness doesn't help a person be able to treat mental illness. This is because even if I understand that you are stuck in believing that your ego-structure is really you, I do not know the details of the stories that you tell yourself and I do not know the extent to which you are prepared to go to defend the false reality you believe in. Some people will kill to defend theirs. I like to stay well clear of those people.

One may, in fact, believe in their own ego-self so deeply that their belief has caused the very chemical structure of their brain and body to be altered to the extent that it's impossible to function in "normal" society without the help of chemicals. It may go so deep that one seems to have been born with this condition. Or that one seems to have had events in one's past that forced this upon the person. This doesn't mean their past is unreal nor the bad things that were done to them were unreal in the conventional sense.

Remember you're reading the words of a Buddhist who believes that even normal conventional notions of what constitutes reality are false. That's an important point. It's the position a lot of the supposedly more enlightened spiritual masters often are too "enlightened" to really understand or convey clearly.

And I am using the word "belief" in a way most people don't. There are aspects of life that are related to what we commonly call "belief" or "habit" that go much much deeper than the way we usually think belief and habit operate.

Also, we all have the same problem. The habit of falsely identifying with the ego self doesn't simply vanish just because you've noticed you're doing it. Noticing this habit is just the first step. But since most people don't even get to this first step, it's a significant one.

So yes, from a theoretical perspective many eastern spiritual masters or leaders or whatever may have some insight into the origin of mental illness. But merely explaining what that insight is may be deeply problematic. Because even mental health professionals are mentally ill in the sense that they are what we falsely call "normal." They're not, by and large, ready to even understand what these eastern spiritual guys are talking about, let alone put it into practice. They haven't done enough meditation to be able to grasp what's being talked about.

But that's OK. It's their job to try and deal with the concrete problems of mental illness. It's just that when these folks talk about mindfulness or even meditation many of them don't really get what they're dealing with. For one thing, they tend to seriously underestimate the real power of this stuff. They often seem to think it's just a way to make you calm down a little.










Here's a photo to show you what I had to deal with while writing this. Crum knows he's being obnoxiously cute. I'm sure of it.

Guided By Voices?

First up. Here is a very nice review of the new audiobook edition of Hardcore Zen. Thanks, Punk Globe!
But it's not all positives! Oh no! Gempo Roshi has lashed out against the audiobook in this new video:

Also, Zero Defex has been hard at work on a video shoot. Here's a still from what we did on Monday at Wadsworth High School (of all places).

 We'll be playing in Kent, Ohio this Saturday May 5th, 2012 at the Stone Tavern 110 E. Main St. in Kent. The show starts at 9. We go on later than that, though. Come and see Mick Hurray's head float through the air!


I got an interesting email the other day that went like this:

I read Hardcore Zen when I was in college about 8 years ago, thought it was pretty excellent and then promptly forgot about it.  In between my mind exploded, I was diagnosed with probably every major mental illness that existed and I've been drugged to the gills by people who think they are 'helping'.  I heard voices and still do occasionally.

The only thing besides a really incredible wife that has really helped me not put a bullet in my head is meditation and Buddhism, even though I hate almost everyone and everything that surrounds it.  After losing my mind a few times, I remembered reading somewhere something to the effect of "I don't understand why people that hear voices listen to them. I'd tell them to fuck off and get a body".  And for a long time, I thought, whoever this guy is a total fucking asshole who has no idea what he's talking about.  It's about as funny as a dead baby joke to someone who actually has a dead baby., It's bad advice, too.

So a few days ago I'm in a hippy-dippy used bookstore and I found your book and read it again.  And it resonated with me much more than it had 8 years ago, it's a fantastic book and it's wonderful to hear someone else's frustrations with the bullshit that surrounds Buddhism.  And then I found the quote that had stuck with me so long - in your book - and it sort of reflected everything else about Buddhism - that most people in these communities don't know shit about mental illness, they're just terrified of it and want to get away from it.

Why am I telling you this? Not to pin the blame on you over one fucking sentence in a book you wrote years ago and not because I believe you are intentionally perpetuating this prejudice.  Because if you consider yourself a teacher, I want to tell you that statements like these, while funny and true, cut deep.  They drive away people like me that need to know reality and need to know they aren't alone at the same time that many mental-health practitioners are pushing shitty drugs and Orwellian doublespeak under the banner of mindfulness.

This is how I replied:

I just recorded the audiobook version of Hardcore Zen and when I came to that line I wanted to change it. This was before I even read your email. But I left it in because I feel really strongly that people who change works of art suck. Like George Lucas did with Star Wars. Ugh!

The reason I wanted to change it is that I'm now a lot more aware of the realities of mental illness than I was in 2003. So I realize now that joke is not really very good. On the other hand, it's an honest statement of what I thought at the time. I feel like that's often useful even when it's wrong. Does that make sense? If people are put off by that statement, maybe they should be. It shows that I don't have all the answers and people ought to know that.

Anyway, I know now it's not as easy as what I wrote. I think I knew it at the time too. I think possibly what I was getting at was the Buddhist notion that you have to learn not to believe your own bullshit. Not everyone hears actual disembodied voices. But everyone tells themselves things & then believes those things. We all need to learn to tell ourselves to fuck off.

I'm really sorry the statement caused you trouble. I'm glad you're getting better now. 

The issue of meditation and mental illness is really complex, especially these days. Traditionally, Buddhists have almost always touted meditation as a better treatment for mental illness than the standard medical methods. For example, somewhere in Shobogenzo Dogen gives a list of advice for practitioners. One of these is, "Don't take medicine for mental illness."

Of course the medicines prescribed for mental illness in Dogen's time (13th century CE Japan) were not like the ones we have today. It's hard to even imagine what he might have been referring to. Nor was mental illness understood in the way we understand it today. Which isn't to say we have a complete understanding of it even now. But I think it's safe to say our understanding of metal illness today is objectively better than it was in Dogen's time.

Even so, these days a lot of meditation teachers still insist that meditation is a better treatment for mental illness than drugs. I tend to agree somewhat but only with some very significant reservations. I think ultimately, in the very long term, if one is extremely committed to meditation practice, with an exceedingly patient and loyal teacher, that meditation is probably a better way to go. But I think it's extremely rare for all these conditions to come together. For example, I don't think I could be patient enough to deal with a student who was seriously mentally ill no matter how dedicated he was. It also depends on the severity of the illness in question. These days medication for mental illness is prescribed for a lot of people who really don't need it. That's a whole debate in itself, which I'm not going to get into. 

There are a lot of people who really need these medications just to have any semblance of a normal life. There are a lot of people who might benefit from meditation, but who will not dedicate themselves to it enough for it to be really effective. In the real world it isn't always possible to establish ideal conditions.

It's kind of like dieting and exercise. I think it's pretty clear that the best, most natural, least complicated way to slim down is through diet and exercise. But it's a very different thing for someone who is twenty pounds overweight than it is for someone who is three-hundred pounds overweight. Somebody who weighs 450 pounds might die before diet and exercise could have a significant effect — even though he can take off twenty pounds through diet and exercise just like a slimmer person. He may therefore need something more drastic. Meditation and mental illness work something like that. But this is still a very incomplete metaphor.


*****

In case people don't get the joke with the video above, I was referencing a series called Ask Roshi. You can find several examples on YouTube. There's one about The Law of Attraction in which Genpo tries to draw in fans of The Secret. There's one on Why We Suffer in which Genpo identifies himself on screen as a "Zen Master." Like I've said before, anyone who would use such a term except as a joke doesn't have a single clue what Zen is about. These videos each have well over 10,000 views. 

It's really warped what the general public thinks is significant and serious in terms of Zen or meditation in general.  I aim to spend the next couple years doing some significant damage to this bullshit.

Going to California

I'm now committed.

On Friday my friend Pirooz, director of Shoplifting from American Apparel , signed a lease for an apartment in Los Angeles, California that he and I will move into in June, 2012. On that very same day — perhaps at the exact same moment — I signed a contract with New World Library to publish my next book There Is No God And He Is Your Creator. This could come out as soon as Spring 2013 or might be pushed back to Fall. We're not sure yet.

In the meanwhile, the audiobook of Hardcore Zen is on sale right now. Just in case you've forgotten.

And a new eBook collection called Hardcore Zen Strikes Again will be out any minute now. I think they're still working out some kinks in formatting. I realized I couldn't do it myself so the fine folks at Cooperative Press in Cleveland are handling that part. Up till now they've only done books about knitting. But Shannon, who runs the company, is a fan of my writing. So this will be their first non-knitting related title.

Hardcore Zen Strikes Again is a collection of essays I wrote for the old Sit Down and Shut Up webpage. Many of the articles I wrote for that page ended up reworked into chapters of Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality . Many did not. Others were so thoroughly reworked you wouldn't recognize them. It is articles from the latter two categories that I chose for Hardcore Zen Strikes Again. I've also included a chapter that was cut out of Hardcore Zen and an article I wrote for a Japanese monster fanzine consisting mainly of things I wrote about my work at Tsuburaya Productions that were also removed from Hardcore Zen. So the book is sort of like the bonus disc for Hardcore Zen. Hence the title. The essays are each accompanied by new introductions and afterwords talking about how my views on things have totally changed now and why the essays are shit.

Not really. But I am not nearly as loud in my writing as I was in 2001. I say pretty much the same stuff, just in a different way.

Those of you without Kindles or iPads or Nooks need not fret. There will be a print version as well. But the print version will be produced in limited quantities. Whether you'll be able to find it in stores or not is still an open question. Probably you will.

Going to California is a big move for me, and, in some ways a thoroughly stupid one. It's stupid because I could have saved myself a lot of hassle and just stayed in Los Angeles. But, really, things there at the time had become un-workable and I needed a change. It's also stupid because I'm now making way less money than I was when I moved away and am going to a place where the rent is more than twice what I'm paying in Akron.

But it's also a good move because I liked living in California. It's sunny. It's warm. It's L.A., with all the weirdness that means. I'm going to try getting a teaching gig out there or maybe work in the film industry. Pirooz has a company, which is mainly just him right now, called Sangha Films. Years and years before I ever met Pirooz I had the notion that maybe there could be a Buddhist sangha whose livelihood was supported by making movies. Lots of Buddhist sanghas support themselves with commercial endeavors. Some sanghas make tofu, some bake bread, San Francisco Zen Center runs a luxury tourist resort (Tassajara). So why not movies?

I'm hoping to talk Pirooz into moving in this direction with me. But every time I say something about it he just sort of grunts noncommittally. We'll see. I envision it as sort of a Zen version of Troma Films. Not in terms of the gore and splatter. But in terms of the way Troma is fiercely independent, knows its audience thoroughly, and makes its way in the world by producing movies that will never be big hits but always sell to its loyal core audience. Pirooz wants to make a zombie movie next. I'm trying to convince him to make it a Zen zombie movie. We'll see...

Every choice a person makes in life affects their future in ways large and small, foreseeable and unforeseeable. Even a smile or a frown can make a huge difference. But some decisions seem more momentous than others. Signing that book contract and committing to a huge move in the same day seem pretty momentous to me. To be honest, I'm scared shitless. Maybe a year from now you'll find me living in a cardboard box on Venice Beach trying to sell CD-Rs of my audiobook in order to buy burritos. But maybe not.

Sometimes you just gotta make a move.

The Three Stooges

On Tuesday night I watched the new Three Stooges movie directed by the Farrelly Brothers.

I've been a big Stooges fan since I was a little kid and watched them on VOK (Voice of Kenya) in Nairobi. It was the publication of Moe Howard's autobiography Moe Howard and the 3 Stooges: The Pictorial Biography of the Wildest Trio in the History of American Entertainment that really sealed it for me, though. That book humanized the trio and I began to like them not just because they were funny, but for the story of who they were. Since then I've read everything I could find about the Stooges including not one, not two, but three biographies of Larry Fine, the Stooge in the middle. (One Fine Stooge: Larry Fine's Frizzy Life In Pictures is the best, by the way).

I attended a 9:40 showing at a multiplex on Akron's west side. I was the only one in the theater in which the Stooges film was shown. That was pretty weird. I've been to a few showings at such multiplexes where very few people showed up. But this was the first time I'd watched a movie in a theater completely alone. Would they have shown it at all if I hadn't been in there? Is this a koan?

I liked the movie but I didn't love it. I wanted to love it. But I couldn't. Here's what was good about the movie. Larry David was terrific as Sister Mary-Mengele, a nun who bears the brunt of most of the Stooges outlandish behavior. All of the actors who play the Stooges do a tremendous impressions of the real guys, particularly Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe. He really has the voice and the mannerisms down. And there were some genuine laugh-out-loud moments. I'm usually not the type who LOLs at movies even when there's an audience in the theater with me. But I actually laughed aloud several times during my private screening.

But maybe I came to the film with too many fanboy hopes. See, if I were to make a Three Stooges movie, I would recreate some of the iconic Stooge moments. I'd have Curly trap himself in a maze of pipes while trying to fix a leak. I'd have Moe do the Niagara Falls routine. I'd have them do the maharaja routine. I'd hire Samuel L. Jackson in a cameo to do Dudley Dickerson's "This house has sho' gone crazy" line. I'd get someone to say "Hold hands you love birds." I'd also put in some references to Shemp, Joe Besser and Curly Joe DeRita. There is one scene in the movie where a rat makes Shemp's trademark "Eep-eep-eep" sound. But that's as close as we get. Maybe I'd have them get a sandwich at De Rita's Delicatessen or have them meet a character who does Joe Besser's effeminate mannerisms and make something out of how that would play in the 21st century.

The Farrelly Brothers seem to understand that part of the key to the Stooges' humor is all about the lower classes making fun of the upper class. But they never really take it far enough. The representatives of the upper classes are bad people because they're plotting a murder. In the Stooges' films the upper classes were always just twits because they were twits. Not that the Stooges were intrinsically better. I think what I like best about the Stooges' films is that in them everybody is an idiot, even the main characters (the Stooges) you're supposed to identify with.

It's funny to see the Stooges portrayed as they were in the 1930s having to come to terms with contemporary American society — like having Curly try to use an iPhone and Moe getting cast on The Jersey Shore. But even these feel a bit half-hearted. Why not do a whole movie about this? It's never really explained why the Stooges alone dress, talk and act like people from the 1930s while everyone else exists in 2012. I kept wondering if these bits were left over from some unused version of the script in which the Three Stooges time travel to our era.

All in all, it's a good movie, but not a great one. Am I weird for thinking there actually could be a great movie about The Three Stooges?

Dogen Sangha International Post Mortem

I'm going to keep posting commercials until everyone in the world buys a copy of the Hardcore Zen audiobook.

This one came out pretty good. This was a surprise because I'm working with iMovie, which is a pain in the butt compared to Final Cut. I used to use Final Cut. But now the program no longer works so I'm stuck with iMovie. iMove is made for dad to edit out the parts where little Molly drools on the dog and then upload it to YouTube and not much else. Bending it to do what I'm doing takes a certain amount of what feels to me like fooling the program into doing things it doesn't want to do.

Be that as it may. I was talking with Tim McCarthy, my first Zen teacher, yesterday about the demise of Dogen Sangha International (DSI) and about lineages in general. Tim pointed out that the Asian model for passing on lineages in things like Zen, the martial arts, tea ceremony and so on goes something like this. A teacher will often appoint several successors to whom he (or she, but I'll use he for now) gives his blessing to teach as part of his lineage. When the teacher wishes to retire or feels he's about to die, he will often single out one of these successors to inherit whatever that teacher has established in the form of a school. There may be property involved, there might be money, there might be a roster of students, teachers and other such members of that school.

In the case of DSI, the school was almost entirely conceptual. There was no property or money passed on to me and not even a list of members. The only property DSI may or may not have held were certain intellectual property items in the form of the copyrights to certain of Nishijima's written work in English.

I say "may or may not" because even this was never really made clear to me. However, I had long believed that if there was one thing all of Nishijima Roshi's dharma heirs agreed upon it was that some one person or entity should take charge of Nishijima Roshi's written work. There has been a hell of a lot of bickering about Nishijima Roshi's written material in English because he did not produce any of it by himself. He always worked with some native English speaker to turn his ideas into publishable English.

I had believed that all of this had been settled. I was well aware that a number of people were not entirely happy with the way it had been settled. But I had believed at least they accepted things. When I published my last blog I found out immediately that this was not true.

If I felt that Nishijima Roshi's written legacy in English might disappear unless I entered into the fray and fought for DSI to administer all of this material, I might be inclined to fight about it. But everything is available, even if there are several sources for it. What matters is that it's out there. Since this is true it doesn't seem important to me to spend any effort on consolidating things.

What has happened in DSI regarding this material is precisely what always happens when people produce some kind of collaborative piece of art without stipulating one single person or entity as the sole owner of that thing. This is why filmmakers these days are usually very meticulous about having everyone involved sign contracts specifically stating what sort of compensation they will receive and what, if any, rights of ownership they'll have over the finished product. You don't want some guy whose only role in Titanic was to go "Arrrrrggghhh!!" and fall off the ship to start saying he now owns the whole movie.

There are currently no legal versions of any of the Ultraman programs made between 1966 and 1974 available outside of Japan because of problems of this nature. Eventually all the animosity involved in this tore the original Tsuburaya Productions apart. None of the Tsuburaya family are involved in the company that now bears their name.

Some of you who like to post in the comments section appear to believe that, as far as spiritual organizations go, this situation is unique to Dogen Sangha. This is because Dogen Sangha is far more open about our own shortcomings than anyone else in this business. We don't have professional PR people, legal departments and so forth to promote a false image of solidarity like other spiritual organizations do. And trust me folks, they really do. Even the ones headed by those beatifically smiling faces you see on all the covers of the Buddhist mags. Especially them! This is one of the things I like about us. We are honest and open to a fault. It's one of the reasons Dogen Sangha will never be as "successful" as those other spiritual organizations. But in my way of thinking this is the true success of Dogen Sangha.

The issue of the matter of there being multiple successors with one person being singled out as a kind of special successor, or head successor, or whatever, will always be a problem for organizations like Dogen Sangha. The Western solution in many cases seems to be to either try to create some kind of legal framework around this process or to democratize it or both. That's how we handle things. That's how we arrogantly think things must be handled.

But Buddhism isn't like a government or a corporation. When you try to force it into that mold, it breaks. Lots of people will assure you this is not true. But they're mistaken.

Typically when one person is singled out as some kind of special successor in cases like these, the older members of the group refuse to accept him, those who joined around the same time as the newly appointed special successor may grudgingly agree to go along, and those who join after the appointment has been made simply accept it. This is precisely what happened with DSI.

I don't have any interest in trying to convince Nishijima Roshi's older students to accept me as their new dharma daddy. It's like asking me to join in a fight over who gets to eat the last chicken leg in the Col. Sanders bucket. I'm a vegetarian. I don't care who eats it.

I also have no desire to lead Dogen Sangha International. It's not fun. It doesn't make money. It doesn't make me a hit with the ladies. And worse than that it doesn't even help spread the teachings of Dogen. So why do it? That's a serious question that I have put to a number of people and I have never heard a single convincing answer.

Once when I was having some trouble with my little band of misfit meditators in Los Angeles, I went to see Mel Weitsman of the Berkeley Zen Center about it. After listening to me whine for a while, he asked, "What's your bottom line with your group?" I had never thought about it like that. I said that my bottom line was, "I sit zazen ever day. On Saturdays I invite other people to sit with me." And that was it. That's what was at the very bottom for me.

In that case if someone were to come on Saturday and start making a lot of fuss and noise, they'd be interfering with my bottom line and I'd ask them to leave. If they refused to go, I'd end the practice of opening my place to strangers.

As far as Dogen Sangha (International or otherwise) is concerned, I feel pretty much the same way. My bottom line is that I sit and you can join me if you want. Anything that interferes with that needs to be stripped away. Dogen Sangha International was interfering with that, and now it's gone.


SOMEONE SENT ME AN E-MAIL ABOUT THE SPANISH VERSION OF HARDCORE ZEN. I LOST YOUR E-MAIL. PLEASE SEND IT AGAIN IF YOU SEE THIS!

Dogen Sangha International is No More

In one of my comments on the previous posting I said that I might dissolve Dogen Sangha International but not just yet.

 Well, I've thought about it some more and I've decided that now is the time to put the thing out of its misery. As of today April 20, 2012 at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (USA), Dogen Sangha International is no more.

Any groups who wish to continue using the name Dogen Sangha may do so. Not that you need my permission anyway. And that's that.

Phew!

 I've wanted to do this for a very long time. There's really no reason to wait any longer. I'm not retiring my position as a monk or discontinuing teaching Zen or anything like that. I'm simply ending Dogen Sangha International.

Betrayal of the Spirit

I just finished reading Betrayal of the Spirit: My Life behind the Headlines of the Hare Krishna Movement by Nori J. Muster. This in spite of the fact that I have two Zen related books waiting patiently for me to review them. One's about Haukuin, the other is about the Heart Sutra. But, frankly, I'm more interested in what happened to the Hare Krishna movement.

In a nutshell, this book is the tale of Nori J. Muster who once went by the name Nandini and served as a key P.R. person for ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) during its most turbulent years, the late 70s through the late 80s. This was the time from right after founder A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's death through the murders and violence depicted in the book Monkey on a Stick, which covers the debacle of New Vrindaban, the "Hare Krishna Disneyland" (they really called it that) in West Virginia.

The Hare Krishna story in short is that a charismatic, dedicated and sincere monk named A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (the Prabhupada part was added later) came to American with something like $2.75 in his pocket and started a worldwide movement based on the ancient teachings he had studied and practiced throughout most of his life. Then he died without clearly naming a successor. The members of his movement have been fighting about this ever since, although things have settled down a lot in the past twenty years.

I can't find the precise quote because I borrowed the book from the library and didn't want to mark it up (though I liked it so much I'll be buying my own copy). But Muster quotes someone who said that Srila Prabhupada had two kinds of authority. There was the institutional authority conferred upon him by his spiritual master. This made him a monk and a teacher. This type of authority could conceivably be conferred upon anyone who went through the necessary steps to receive it.

The other type of authority Srila Prabhupada had was much more nebulous. It was a personal sort of authority that came through his particular personality and the strength of his commitment to his practice combined with all sorts of accidents of fate such as his coming to America in 1965 just when young people there were searching for gurus.

Not long before he died, Prabhupada named eleven men as having the power to initiate new disciples. Each was responsible for a different territory. But he was a bit vague as to whether these men were gurus like him or not. This has been a point of contention ever since. Be that as it may, Prabhupada could only confer institutional authority upon his disciples. He couldn't give them his charisma or his commitment to practice. And he sure couldn't pass on to them the accidents of fate that made what he did possible.

A few of the men among that group of eleven were extremely charismatic but insane. A few others lacked such charisma but were very sincere and tried their best to follow what Praphupada had taught. A couple of those failed spectacularly in their efforts, thus sullying the movement even more. Just two of these eleven men remained in positions of authority within ISKCON at the time Muster wrote her book (1997).

This is all fascinating to me because I find myself in much the same position as those eleven guys. There is a lot less at stake in Dogen Sangha International (DSI). We have no monetary assets at all, no "Palace of Gold" in West Virginia, no one selling our literature or our delicious cookies at airports. Dogen Sangha International is not even registered as an entity with any government agency anywhere. Dogen Sangha Los Angeles is. And I believe Dogen Sangha Bristol in England may be. Dogen Sangha (minus the international) in Chiba, Japan may also be. It's possible others are legally registered in France, Germany and Israel. I'm not sure. But if they are, they are just local entities using that name. DSI has no worldwide meetings to decide policy, no board of governors, no nothing. It's just a name, really.

Nishijima Roshi conferred a certain degree of what we might call "institutional authority" upon a number of his students, me included. Like Srila Prabhupada, Nishijima could not confer his personal authority upon anyone. The word authority here is problematic. But I'm using it here because I can't come up with a better term.

Nishijima also named me as president of Dogen Sangha International. But he never spelled out exactly what that meant. It was extremely important to him, though. And because it was so important to him I said "yes" even though I'm no clearer on what it means to be president of something that doesn't exist than anyone else is. I have resisted any attempts to make Dogen Sangha International anything more definite than it is. (Dogen Sangha Los Angeles, is something entirely different and I'm working toward establishing that as a religious non-profit corporation in the State of California. DSLA will have no authority over any other Dogen Sangha branch.)

In my book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate I wrote about what happened when that appointment was made. It was remarkably like what happened to the Hare Krishnas, but without anyone being beheaded by a mad disciple.

I've heard from dozens of people since that book came out telling me how things went precisely the same way in their aikido dojo when the master died, or in their church when the pastor passed on and so forth. It's an incredibly common scenario. It happened at the San Francisco Zen Center when Suzuki Roshi died and, to a lesser extent, at some of the temples Katagiri Roshi established after he died. Paul, Peter and James battled over whose interpretations of Christ's teachings were correct.

It happened after Buddha died too, according to Stephen Batchelor in his book Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Batchelor believes that Maha Kashyapa, revered by many Buddhists (and pretty much all Zen Buddhists) as Gautama Buddha's rightful successor was more of a guy with political savvy who pulled the ranks together than someone who actually understood what Buddha was on about. In fact, Buddha is on record as telling his followers not to appoint a successor.

And this will happen again, many more times.

So why do guys like Gautama Buddha, Srila Prabhupada, Nishijima Roshi and so many others even attempt to set up these institutions? Are they so naive as to think that their institution alone won't go through what every single other one like it has gone through as far back as the beginnings of recorded human history?

Some of them may be that naive. But my guess is that most are not. Because institutions also manage to preserve these teachings even in spite of the power struggles and suchlike that always take place. We know what Buddha taught (or at least some approximation thereof) because of the institution that wily old politician Maha Kashyapa set up to preserve it. Had Buddha's followers actually taken his instructions not to appoint a successor to heart, we probably wouldn't know very much about Buddha today except as a minor philosopher in ancient India.

And there you have my dilemma regarding Dogen Sangha International, and why I am so wishy-washy as to what to do about it.

Answers on a postcard please.


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And now yet another commercial for the new audiobook edition of Hardcore Zen!



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Hardcore Zen Audiobook Part 2

Yep, folks, the audiobook version of Hardcore Zen is now available from the nice folks at CD Baby! Just follow the link below to get yours!

http://www.cdbaby.com/AlbumDetails.aspx?AlbumID=bradwarner

See what it did for Melissa? Here are a few more reasons to buy the audiobook:

• I have personally enhanced the audiobook! Now you don't just have to imagine what "Drop the A-Bomb On Me!" sounds like. You can hear it for yourself in the context of the story! And that's not all. There are plenty of other groovy enhancements as well!

• You may get an email directly from me! That's because track #9 is kind of screwed up. Until the replacement goes live, I'll be contacting everyone who buys the book and submits their email address to CD Baby to tell them where to get the fixed version. (The current version isn't horrible. It just has one short segment in which you can hear two Brad Warners reading instead of only one.) If you got the audiobook but didn't hear from me about the link, write me at spoozilla@gmail.com.

• I get way more percentage of the audiobook than I do from the plain old printed book! Wisdom Publications gives me something like 14%. So when you buy the book from Amazon or a similar discount site that nets me less than $1 per book after all the other mystery items are subtracted. But I get something like a 75% royalty from each $10 audiobook. Granted, this is more of a reason I want you to buy the audiobook than any real advantage of the audiobook itself...

• You get to hear me read the book in my own voice! Not only do I have a super sexy voice. But now you can find out what sort of tone I intended. I think a lot of people imagined I was screaming at them when they read that book. But I wasn't. I swear.

And thanks to everyone who participated in filming the new commercial "Melissa's Not a Loser Anymore!" (seen above) last night. These are the participants in my weekly Sunday night zazen thing at the Akron Shambhala Center in Cuyahoga Falls (every Sunday at 7pm!). They were awesome and very patient. Now I need to get myself a tripod and think of some more commercial ideas.

HARDCORE ZEN AUDIOBOOK!!

The Hardcore Zen audiobook has arrived! You can get it at CD Baby by following the link below:

http://www.cdbaby.com/AlbumDetails.aspx?AlbumID=bradwarner

Don't risk damaging your eyes and your brain doing old-fashioned style reading just like your grandma did back during the Gold Rush while sucking down a sarsparilla! Get with the times! Download the audiobook like a real 21st Century citizen.

People have been talking about an audiobook version of Hardcore Zen since 2003. But nobody did anything. Last year Smog Veil Records said they wanted to do it. So I went to Wisdom Publications and they said, "No. We want to do it!" So I waited around for like six months. After hearing nothing, I contacted Wisdom and they were like, "Oh we don't want to do it anymore." So I told them thanks for letting me know and said I was gonna do it myself and now HERE IT IS!

This is a real DIY piece of work. But for all that, it came out pretty good. That's because the quality you can get with cheap equipment at home is like twice as good as what you could get using a professional studio twenty or even ten years ago. Pirooz Kaleyah, director of Shoplifting from American Apparel, donated a Snowball microphone made by a company called Blue. I plugged that into my MacBook, opened up Garage Band and started reading the book.

I haven't read Hardcore Zen even silently to myself since before it was published. The last time I read it all the way through was when I had to proofread the final copy edited version just before it went to press. I've read bits and pieces of it since then. But not the whole book.

I still have mixed feelings about that book. It's OK. It might even be good. But it's not the book I wanted it to be.

I wanted Hardcore Zen to be an example of what it was about. I wanted it to be a punk rock book about punk rock. As it stands it's sort of a self-help book about punk rock.

As a punk rock book about punk rock it would have been rougher, less professional, and far less formulaic. It was intended to have digressive passages that just wandered off into nowhere for no discernible reason. I wanted it to meander> I wanted readers to be like, "what the fuck just happened?" Only one of those digressions actually made the cut.

In that particular digression, I wanted to describe some of the interesting things that have come up from my practice. Nishijima Roshi always said, "When you do zazen, you come back to your childhood." This is really true. At one point I kept getting flooded with memories of things that had happened very long ago. I started to understand that the way I had perceived and conceived of the world when I was two or three years old was more correct than the way I had learned to perceive and conceive of it as an adult.

One of those memories involved being in the back of an old VW bug, probably my grandmother's. Those cars had this weird storage space right behind the back seat, between the seat and the window. A little tiny kid could fit in there. And my memory was of being in there and looking out at the sky through the little oval back window. That space is so small there's no way I could have been more than three years old. Probably less. But something about the way things had looked to me that day came rushing back all at once.

So I wrote it down. But instead of telling the story in the first person, I told it in second person (i.e. "You are sitting in a VW bug" or whatever I said). Josh Bartok, my editor, really wanted to cut that out. But I held fast. He cut out a lot of other good stuff. But I wasn't going to let him take that one away. Still, he did move it to the end of a chapter where its placement was a little more "user friendly" and normal. Ah well...

My version of the book wouldn't have sold nearly as well. So it's fine.

I also realized, while reading the book aloud, why that book has sold so much better than my others. Recently I was told by somebody who is supposed to know about such things that my books would sell better if they were more "prescriptive."

I was like, "More what?"

Apparently that means you have to give life lessons. People love life lessons. This person told me that I should write out my stories of things that happened to me and then follow those up with, like, a little capsule lesson to take away from it. I went to the library and took out a bunch of books by the likes of Deepak Choprah, Joel Osteen and even our old buddy Thich Naht Hanh. Choprah and Osteen follow that formula to the letter. Every single chapter is set up exactly like that. First the story, then the life lesson. They even put the thing you're supposed to learn from this story in big bold letters so you can't possibly miss it. TNH's books don't follow the formula quite so closely, but it's in there with his writing as well.

As I read the book aloud I realized that in editing my manuscript, Josh Bartok had done precisely the same thing. He didn't change too much of what I wrote. He just moved the sentences and paragraphs around such that it went Story, Life Lesson, Story, Life Lesson etc. It follows the Joel Osteen, Deepak Choprah formula very closely.

This doesn't make it a bad book. It's fine. But it makes it a lot like a pretty standard self-help book. Except that it's not really a self-help book at all. It's way more practical than anything Osteen or Choprah ever wrote, and far more real. Deepak Choprah and Joel Osteen can eat my shorts. After they finish polishing the Mercedeses and winding their Rolexes. They're rich, but they suck. I'm poor as shit, but at least I don't suck.

The only parts of the book that made me squirmy were the little cheerleading style bits near the end. Basically the entire epilogue kind of made me want to barf a little bit. The book was meant to end with the story of eating the tangerine. It was supposed to stop right there. But instead, I was encouraged to write that little cheerleader section that ends it. And I did. So I can't blame anyone else for that. Maybe it's OK. Maybe people need that kind of thing.

All that being said, I still feel like it's a worthy book. It's a very polished, refined version of what I really wanted to say. The rough edges were sanded down and made pretty. But it's still mostly there.

I didn't change anything as I was reading. I feel like it should stand as it actually is. I hated what George Lucas did to the Star Wars movies and I don't even want to see how he messed up THX 1138. Those movies should stand as what they actually were. And so should Hardcore Zen.

Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate is still a far superior book. I'm not sure if I could do an audiobook of that one, though. It's too intense. It's too personal. I might try it sometime. If I succeed, I'll let you know.