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

No, mostly zazen is nothing like what anyone would hold up as “enlightenment.” It’s lots of boredom and stiff legs and just trying your best to get through it. Occasionally insights arise, and some of them can be quite amazing. But mostly, your teachers — if they’re any good — will tell you to forget about them. If you believe that at the end of all this pain and boredom you’ll be rewarded with the peak experience to end all peak experiences, maybe you can get through it. But if someone tells you that the practice itself is enlightenment? Come on! What is 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.

“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.”

None of the Zen teachers I’ve known was the least bit like a robot. If anything, their personalities were stronger than other people’s because they had fewer illusions about who they were.

How can we ever leave where we are? But we do it all the time. In fact, most of us are sunk so deeply into our own mental images that we can barely even recognize where we are anymore. We need to learn to come back to a place we have never left. It’s absurd. But that’s the way it is.

“There is a state in which the traces of realization are forgotten; and it manifests the traces of forgotten realization for a long, long time.”

The fact that Zen Buddhism doesn’t have any set lists of hard-and-fast rules that are supposed to work anywhere at any time for anyone at all does not mean that everything is okay. Right and wrong still exist.

See, you might say that there are two basic kinds of thought. There are thoughts that pop up unannounced and uninvited in our brains for no reason we’re able to discern. These are just the results of previous thoughts and experiences that have left their traces in the neural pathways of our brains. You can’t do much to stop these, nor should you try. The other kind of thought is when we grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it the way your mom always told you not to do with your wee-wee in front of the neighbors. We dig deep into these thoughts and roll around in them like a pig rolling in its own doo-doo, feeling all that delicious coolness and drinking deep of their lovely stink. To practice “thinking not thinking,” all you need to do is ignore the first kind of thoughts and learn how not to instigate the second type. This is easier said than done, of course. But get into the habit, and it begins to come naturally.

One thing about thinking that few of us ever really, uh, think about is the fact that thinking actually takes a certain amount of effort. We often hear the word ruminate used in reference to going over stuff in our heads. The word ruminate, though, literally refers to what cows do when they barf up half-digested food and chew it some more before swallowing it again. That’s kind of an apt analogy for what we do in our heads. Only with cows, this activity performs a useful function in digestion. In human beings its usefulness is a little more doubtful. The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It’s more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again. This is easier said than done, of course, like most things worth doing. But work on it for a while, and eventually you’ll get the hang of it.

To drive home his point about the need for practice even more, Dogen brings up another allegory. “If your cart doesn’t move,” he asks, “is it better to prod the cart or to prod the horse?” Of course everybody knows there’s no use prodding the cart, so you should prod the horse. But, being his usual contrary self, Dogen insists that it sometimes makes more sense to prod the cart.

In Dogen’s view zazen is a method of prodding the cart. It addresses the physical side first. And when the physical body is right, the mind naturally follows suit. He doesn’t deny the existence of the component of “prodding the horse” in zazen, though. He says, “There should be fist beating fist and should be horse beating horse.” And though this sounds like a single-sentence treatment for a madefor-TV movie in which Mr. Ed wails on Francis the Talking Mule, it actually refers to taking real action here and now, or just doing it, as the sneaker ad used to put it.

So when you do zazen, the focus should be on the practice itself, not on what it’s gonna do for you or whether or not it’s worthwhile. Even thoughts about whether you’re doing it right are meaningless. If you find your posture slipping, straighten up. If you find your mind drifting, pull it back. Do that over and over for long enough, and it becomes a habit. And if it doesn’t, don’t worry. Just keep on keeping on. Eventually zazen gets easier. After a while you’ll even learn to enjoy it. You’ll start doing it because you want to do it.

When he told his Zen master about what had happened to him, the master admonished him, saying, “You may get all sorts of experiences while training, but you must not linger on them.”

It’s not hard to understand why you need a teacher. You need to have a mirror to fix your hair or apply your lipstick properly. It’s certainly physically possible to do these things without a mirror, and there are no laws against it. But you’d have no real idea what you actually looked like until you walked outside and everyone started giggling at you because you’d smeared lipstick all over your nose. A good Buddhist teacher can be your mirror. The teacher, in turn, learns to use his or her students as a mirror in a similar way.

We create this thing called “me,” which we believe thinks and feels and experiences. We live in abject terror of the day that thing will come to an end. And when we’re not dreading that, we’re petrified that this “me” might someday find itself in some horrendous situation. We make all sorts of efforts to protect this thing above all else. We buy it gifts. We reward our “self ” for doing good things like sticking with a diet. We show our “self ” off to the world and hope that others envy it. We want it to become rich and famous, to live in a beautiful house with a bodacious wife or a hunky husband (or both maybe, I don’t know). Every minute of every day we look for new reasons to make believe it exists and that it is important. But it doesn’t, and it’s not.

We were pissed off at the senile B-movie actor who’d somehow been elected president.

To get back to Dogen’s definition of free giving, though, you might tend to equate free giving with charity. But too often we place ourselves above those to whom we wish to be charitable. Our “giving” then becomes just another way to enhance our self-image. And just as often, we place ourselves below those to whom we give our charity, thinking, for example, that a charitable contribution to some spiritual master will gain us merit in the spiritual world or that a gift of dana to some Zen master might speed us on the way to enlightenment — and, believe me, folks, there are lots of teachers who play right into this one (see above). But when we do this our so-called giving becomes just another form of greed.

Dogen likens real Zen practice to the way you get wet if you walk through fog. You don’t notice it as it’s happening. But walk through that fog long enough, and you’ll get thoroughly soaked.

The human mind is simply incapable of factoring in everything that needs to be taken into account in order to truly comprehend the cause and effect relationships we experience. But that does not mean that things happen at random. It just means that what we call cause and effect and real cause and effect are two different things. Just like you can’t drink your Kool-Aid® out of the word cup.

Most Zen teachers I know of caution against attempting to practice total abstinence from sex since such a practice often ends up making people even more sex crazed.

So what he’s talking about here is the ordinariest of the ordinary. In this chapter he quotes Great Master Musai, who expressed his enlightened state saying, “Having finished a meal, I calmly look forward to a nap.” And then he quotes Zen Master Enchi Dai-an, who summed up the accomplishments of his life as a Buddhist master saying: “I lived on Isan mountain for thirty years, eating Isan meals, shitting Isan shit.”

How do we know there even is a supreme truth? How do we know we aren’t just random animals existing in a universe devoid of meaning? “We know it is so,” says Dogen, “because the body and the mind both appear in the Universe, yet neither is our self.”

In other words, written teachings address the problem of how to live a sane and peaceful life in one way, and the actual practice of zazen addresses it in another. Comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges or trying to judge Johnny Ramone’s guitar style by the same criteria you’d use to judge Yngwie Malmsteen’s. It makes no sense.

True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.

The Ultimate Truth is not a secret. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that it is,’cuz they will try to. But that’s all marketing. It’s nonsense. It’s a lie. The Ultimate Truth is right there in front of your eyes at all times. There is nowhere you can run to to get away from it. Nowhere you can hide from it. It never leaves you. It couldn’t. You are an expression of the Ultimate Truth.

The outside world is real. At the same time, everything you have ever encountered and everything you will ever encounter is nothing but you. There is no one else it could ever be. Yet I can’t date your girlfriend, and you can’t use my credit card. Don’t be unclear on this point, or someone will punch you in the face.