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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brad Warner
Read between
July 21 - August 8, 2022
“Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture. But when you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.”
The second principle is what he calls “deep belief in the rule of cause and effect.”
Dogen’s third principle is that our life is just action at the present moment.
The final principle is the practice of zazen itself. Buddhism is not a philosophy you just read about. It is a philosophy you do. So the principles of Buddhism include actual action, which cannot be put into words. In Dogen’s view the best way to learn how to truly experience the world just as it is, is through the daily practice of zazen.
The very act of trying to play a song with a group of other people forces you to concentrate very clearly on the here and now.
These four points of view are idealism, materialism, action, and reality, the last of which synthesizes the previous three.
“And though it is like this, it is only that flowers, while loved, fall; and weeds while hated, flourish.” I happen to like that last line a whole lot. In one sense he’s saying something like, “Shit happens. Deal with it.” But it goes deeper than that. He’s saying that the world will never behave the way we think it should behave, but that isn’t so terrible because the self that thinks the world should behave according to its wishes doesn’t really exist.
“The Buddha’s truth is transcendent over abundance and scarcity.”
When I am playing the bass line to Zero Defects’s ever-popular chant song, “No More Control,”*I am transcending abundance and scarcity. I am in the middle ground between the idealistic phase in which the song is conceived and the materialistic phase in which it becomes a set of sound vibrations for a bunch of thrashing kids in the pit to beat themselves senseless to. I am just playing, just moving my fingers and trying to hit the right notes at the right time. Thought is no longer part of the picture. All forms of action are like this.
“To learn the Buddha’s truth is to learn ourselves. To learn ourselves is to forget ourselves. To forget ourselves is to be experienced by the myriad dharmas. To be experienced by the myriad dharmas is to let our own body-and-mind, and the body-and-mind of the external world, fall away.”
“A person getting realization is like the moon being reflected in water: the moon does not get wet, and the water is not broken. The whole moon and the whole sky are reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass. Realization does not break the individual, just as the moon does not pierce the water. The individual does not hinder the state of realization, just as a dew-drop does not hinder the sky and moon.”
forget our ideas of self when we stop concentrating exclusively on how we experience the universe and learn how the universe experiences us.
Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing. What we call “success” is just the manifestation of our mind’s ability to categorize things. This is “success.” That is “failure.” Who says? You says. That’s all. Reality is what it is, beyond all concepts of success and failure.
You could regret your past actions. But what does that help? You can’t change them.
Real hate is that part of you that sees itself as eternally separate from the rest of creation. Real love is that part of you that sees everything as a seamless whole. The truth of the situation, though, is right smack-dab in the middle.
“Is Zen practice a good way to manage stress?”
If there’s any single point I don’t mind repeating until you’re sick to death of it, it’s that there are never any shortcuts. You’ve got to be willing to give up the root cause of your stress. This is not an easy thing to do because the root cause of your stress is that imaginary thing you call your “self.”
“We give ourselves to ourselves, and we give the external world to the external world. The reason is that in becoming giver and receiver, the subject and object of giving are connected.”
“earning a living and doing productive work are originally nothing other than free giving.”
“It is because we are originally equipped with the virtue of free giving that we have received ourselves as we are now.”
Buddhism is emphatically not about running away from this world into some beautiful cosmic la-la land where nothing matters and nothing can ever bother you again. It’s about seeing your real troubles, your real trials, all your real difficulties and real joys as they actually are, without the overblown drama we usually ladle on top of them.
From the point of view of action, neither of the expressions about cause and effect can be called correct. If I hit the low E-string real hard and let it ring at the beginning of the Zero Defects song “By the Day,” in terms of thought we can say that’s the right note or it’s not. But in terms of action, it is just what it is. blarrrrrinnnnnnggg!!!! This is because real action in the real world refuses to be limited to the boxes we try and fit it in. Real causes and real effects are not ever the same as our images of cause and effect.
if these ideas were not part of your mental makeup to begin with, you’d never have been able to understand them in the first place.
The first thing you gotta know is that in Buddhism there’s no such thing as sin.
Buddhism doesn’t ask us to deny our natural desires. But it does ask us to regulate how we respond to them. And so there is a fundamental Buddhist precept against the misuse of sexuality.
As far as Buddhism is concerned, wasting time is the most heinous — sinful, even — thing a person can do.
But faith is just one side of the coin. The other is doubt. Tim liked to say that to practice Zen, you need equal amounts of doubt and faith. It took me a long time to understand what he meant by that. But nowadays I’ve adopted the slogan. Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
If your beliefs are not realistic, you must be able to throw them away, no matter how precious they are.
As we know, according to Buddha everything in the universe is subject to the laws of cause and effect.
“God is the Universe. The Universe is God.”
“If you want to attain to the matter which is it, you must be a person who is it. Already being a person who is it, why worry about the matter which is it?”
The Zen master Dogen uses the word it to talk about the ultimate truth.
“The whole Universe in ten directions is just a small part of the supreme truth of bodhi.”
“because the body and the mind both appear in the Universe, yet neither is our self.”
The word stillness is often used in Buddhism to refer to the present moment.
Half the arguments I’ve had in my life boil down to cases of two people who think exactly the same thing but express it differently.*
And yet the universe that doesn’t even give a rat’s ass about you is you. And because of this, it cares more about you than you could ever care about you.
“To turn one’s back on the Truth is wrong. The Truth is the approaching and the turning away, which, in each instance of approaching or turning away, are the Truth itself.”
In the end, though, you just say what you say, and people get it or they don’t. And if they don’t get it, that’s fine too.
“People of abundant desire abundantly seek gain, and so their suffering also is abundant. People of small desire never curry favor and bend in order to gain the minds of others. Further, they are not led by the sense organs. Those who practice small desire are level in mind; they are without worries and fears; when they come into contact with things, they have latitude; and they are constantly free from dissatisfaction.”
Notice that we’re talking about small desire here and not about some imaginary state of desirelessness. We can never be completely free from desire, anyhow, as I said earlier. But the less desire you have, the less of a pain in the ass your life will be.
Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.
There is nothing that cannot be corrupted and bent into the service of a powerful ego.
It’s useless to long for the Enlightenment to End All Enlightenments. The Ultimate Truth never rests. But that’s just the way we like it. So sit down and shut up, already!
