Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality

by Brad Warner

NOTHING IS SACRED. Doubt—in everything—is absolutely essential. Everything, no matter how great, how fundamental, how beautiful, or important it is, must be questioned.

Truth can never be found in mere belief. Belief is restricted. Truth is boundless.

Truth doesn’t screw around, and truth doesn’t care about your opinions. It doesn’t care if you believe in it, deny it, or ignore it. It couldn’t care less what religion you are, what country you’re from, what color your skin is, what or who

you’ve got between your legs, or how much you’ve got invested in Mutual Funds. None of the trivial junk that concerns most people most of the time matter...

Oh, and one other thing: The truth is not open to negotiation—not by you, not by me, and not by the Leader of the Free World or the...

We have developed the capacity to destroy ourselves and each other utterly and that is never going to go away. All we

can do now is develop the capacity to see that we must never use that power—and we must see this not just individually but collectively, as the human race itself, as life itself, and from the very core of our collective being.

Religions, the supposed institutional repositories of humanity’s understanding of the deeper mysteries of the universe, have never offered anything more to me than sophisticated methods of avoiding the truth, of building elaborate fantasies in place of reality.

The last thing Buddha told his followers before he died was this: “Question authority.” Actually, if you look it up, you might see his last words translated as, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves.” A lot of guys who translated this kind of stuff really got into the King James Bible–sounding language. But the point is, a lamp is something you use to guide yourself in the dark. “Be lamps unto yourselves” means be your own master, be your own lamp. Don’t believe something because your hero, your teacher, or even Buddha himself said it. Look for yourself. See for yourself, with your own eyes. “Be lamps unto yourselves.” It’s another way of saying, “Question authority.”

Zen teaches that we are living in paradise right now, even amid all the shit that’s going down. This world is the Pure Land. This world is paradise. In fact, this world is better than paradise—but all we can do is piss and moan, and look around for something better.

This world is better than Utopia because—and follow this point carefully—you can never live in Utopia. Utopia is always somewhere else. That’s the very definition of Utopia.

Maybe you can go to a paradisiacal island, far away from your boss and your bills and anything else you want, but

pretty soon you’ll be complaining that you’ve got sand up your ass, or the snack machine ate your dollar, or hermit crabs stole your thongs. You’ll always find something wrong with wherever you are because it ...

You can’t go to paradise. Not now and not after you make your first million. Not after you die. And not if you eat all your peas and are really, really good. Not ever. What you call “you” can never enter the gates of heaven, no matter how convictedly you believe. Heaven and paradise aren’t in your future because you have no future. There is no future for you. There is no future for anyone. There is no future at all. Future is an idea. You can’t live in parad...

Pretty much all the rest of what people call “Buddhism”—the temples, the rituals, the funny outfits, and the ceremonies—isn’t the important stuff. It’s just decoration. That stuff is useful at times to create a theatrical sort of atmosphere that brings in the crowds, but it’s hardly necessary for seeing the reality that the Buddha’s teachings point to.

UNLIKE RELIGIONS, Zen doesn’t have a set system of beliefs for you to adopt. One thing that’s always impressed me about Buddhists is that they don’t give a damn about the fact that it’s widely known that many of the words attributed to Buddha were written hundreds of years after his death. “Who cares?” the devout Buddhists say. Because it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The only thing Buddhists believe in is the reality of the world in which we are all living right now. Buddhism is based on your real life as it is, not on whether or not you believe there’s an old guy with a beard above the clouds who will smite you or hand you a harp.

Once I’d achieved my goal I had to admit to myself it wasn’t what I expected and that it did not in fact make everything perfect. And this will happen to anyone who attains any kind of “success” no matter how it is defined —even if success is defined as complete, unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment. You will discover upon reaching it that whatever it is, it’s not what you expected and nothing is any more perfect than it ever was.

When certain Buddhist scholars elucidate this point they usually say that even if you get what you want it’s still suffering because it won’t last. This isn’t exactly wrong, I suppose, but to get a bit closer to the point you need to look at what suffering really is. Suffering occurs

when your ideas about how things ought to be don’t match how they really are.

THE GREAT HEART OF WISDOM SUTRA

Now I’ll take you through it line by line.

In ancient Buddhism, it was a commonly held—though very much mistaken—belief that only a monk or nun could become a full-fledged buddha, and so the category of bodhisattva, a being devoted to freeing others rather than just attaining enlightenment for himself, was created as something regular folk could aspire to.

Mahayana means “great vehicle.” This movement was a more all-encompassing Buddhism than the monastery-bound tradition that had developed in the first centuries following Gautama Buddha’s death.

This section is called the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra, or just the Heart Sutra for short. It’s called the heart because it contains the core teaching of the whole sutra.

Avalokiteshvara in this context is a completely mythical character.

All religions firmly insist on the historical accuracy of their texts, however dubious that insistence may be. Buddhism, however, doesn’t care either way. It is the meaning of the texts right here and now in our lives that is important—and that has nothing to do with mere historical veracity.

Think about anger. Everyone experiences a flash of anger welling up in some circumstance or other. But anger can only continue to grow when it’s fed by thought. Prajna is the wisdom to notice anger before it becomes a problem, to see clearly why you feel angry and what that feeling of anger really is (and is not). This goes much deeper than just saying, “I’m angry because he called me a panty-waist with carburetor breath.” Why does an insult make you angry? Who is the “you” that has been insulted? What is the “you” that can get angry?

Prajna is the wisdom to get at the very root of any emotional response. Prajna is developed through the practice of zazen.

The word paramita essentially means “highest” (though it has other meanings as well), so in this context we simply read “prajna paramita” as ...

Five Skandhas Buddhists do not accept the existence of a soul, some unchanging thing that is somehow “the essence” of a person. Instead they see a human being as a composite of five skandhas. The word skandha literally means “heap.” Imagine a heap of junk: take away all the individual pieces of junk that make up the heap, and the heap is gone. There is no “heap essence” or “heap soul” aside from the pieces of junk on the heap. In Buddhism, the five “heaps” that make up a person are these: form, feelings, perceptions, impulses toward actions (and the actions themselves), and consciousness.

Nothing in the universe is permanent—and the thing we call “self” is no different.

Form Is Emptiness Emptiness is the single most

misunderstood word in all of Buddhism. The original Sanskrit word for this is shunyata, which ultimately points to the as-it-is-ness of things, the state of things being as they ...

Emptiness is not a nihilistic concept of voidness. Emptiness is not meaninglessness. Emptiness is that condition which is free from our conceptions and our perceptions. It’s the world as it is before we come along and start complaining about the stuff we don’t like.

Reality is you, you are reality.

It’s not “you” and “the universe.” It’s “

The first noble truth, suffering, represents idealism.

Nothing can possibly live up to the ideals and fantasies you’ve created. So we suffer because things are not the way we think they ought to be. Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what we’re living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.

This leads to the second noble truth, the origination of suffering: our wish that things be different from what they are when they cannot possibly be.

Everyone has desires. We can’t live without them. Nor should we.

The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.

The second noble truth was never supposed to be taken to mean our natural desires are evil and should be eliminated. Gautama had already tried that path as a ascetic yogi. After trying to abstain from all of his desires (including the desire to eat), he found himself thin and weak and miserable—and no closer to enlightenment than he had been when he started out (although he was way closer to Corpseville). He broke his fast by accepting a bowl of rice from a milkmaid who was taking it to a temple as an offering to one of the gods. Only after acknowledging and accepting his natural human desire for food and regaining his natural strength was he able to embark upon the practice that culminated in his enlightenment. Such a person would not be likely to preach that natural desire itself is the cause of suffering.

It’s not that we force ourselves to stop having desires. That wouldn’t solve anything and it’s impossible anyhow. Trying to force yourself not to desire just brings up more desires (not the least of which is the desire not to desire).

If you have desires, leave them as they are and

do what needs to be done.

Ultimately, the noble eightfold path is reality itself. To act according to the noble eightfold path is to act in accordance with reality. And that’s all.

The past exists only in our minds and our minds are easily changeable and so the past itself becomes malleable as well.

But don’t get too hung up on the future. The future’s out of your control. Enjoy what’s happening right now. Do what is appropriate, what is right, in the present moment and let the future be the future.

In the present moment there isn’t even time to complete a single thought, no matter how simple. In the present moment not even perception has time to occur. Action alone exists.

In the West, nirvana is often misunderstood as some kind of Buddhist heaven, or, since nirvana literally means “cessation” or “extinction,” a lot of people have a seriously mistaken tendency to equate