In 2003, Brad Warner, Zen priest and former bassist for hardcore punk band Zero Defects, blew the top off the Buddhist world with his autobiography/manifesto Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth About Reality. In his latest book Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death and Dogen’s “Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye” Brad tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, Shobogenzo (Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye), by thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen. The following is an excerpt.
The main reason I write books and give talks isn’t because I think I have anything really wonderful to say. It’s more because I’ve looked at the so-called spiritual scene and think it’s incredibly awful. Hardly any Buddhism books out today are even worth the paper they’re printed on. But I know that Buddhism really is a good thing.
It’s the same thing that drove me to be a part of Zero Defects and make my own records. I knew that rock music could be amazing stuff. Yet the people out there who were supposed to be doing rock and roll in those days were, for the most part, putting out pure garbage. There were a few people doing good things, just like there are some really genuine people on the so-called spiritual scene. But there were not enough, and their voices were virtually drowned out by all the schlock.
The worst thing about all those crap spiritual masters out there is the way they deliberately mislead people. I know I sound like a crank. But I won’t cut any of these people the least bit of slack. They cheat and lie, and they are well aware of it. But when you get right down to it, if you’re misled by a bad spiritual master, you have only yourself to blame. That sounds pretty harsh, I know. But it’s true. Dogen has a little story that helps explain why that is.
A few hundred years ago a dude named Gensa, who later went on to be one of the great Buddhist teachers, was still a young monk. One day he gets fed up with the temple where he’s studying. He figures he’d be better off getting out and seeing what the rest of the world has to offer. Maybe another temple will have whatever it is he’s been looking for. Or maybe he’ll just give up on temples altogether. As he’s heading out the gate, he stubs his toe on a big ol’ rock. He’s hopping around in terrible pain, bleeding from under his toenail, going, “Ow! Ow! Shit! Piss! Damn!” And he thinks, “I’ve heard that the body is an illusion. So where the hell did all this pain come from?”
All at once he gets it.
Later on, his teacher, a guy named Seppo Gisan, asks him what’s up, and he says, “I just can’t be deceived by others.”
Seppo really gets off on this statement. “Is there anyone who doesn’t have these words?” he says. “But who else can speak them?”
There you have the key to understanding Buddhism. That one sentence, “I can’t be deceived,” says all you need to know.
When people say stuff like “I can’t be deceived,” the emphasis is usually on “I.” They’re usually saying something like, “Maybe all those other people out there can be deceived, but nobody can make a fool out of me!” But that’s not what Gensa means here. “I” here is absolutely universal. It refers just as much to you and me as it does to Gensa himself. He’s not bragging. He might even be a little bit sad when he says, “I can’t be deceived.”
You’re probably thinking, Why would he be sad about that? I mean, he’s enlightened, right? And enlightenment is supposed to be the happiest thing that can ever happen to a person — just like Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth — right? Otherwise why strive for it? But think about it for a sec. Imagine a situation in which you suddenly realize with absolute certainty that you can never blame anyone else for anything that happens to you. You can’t even blame your circumstances since you know those, too, are of your own making. You can no longer tell yourself that if only this or that happened, then you’d find perfect happiness. Your future has entirely vanished, along with your past. It must be just a little sad. But it’s sad in a different way from usual sadness. It’s a sadness that knows what sadness really is. It knows that there is no merit in taking hold of sadness, so it lets the sadness drift by. Still, it’s not as if sadness isn’t part of the equation.
The idea that we can be deceived is an illusion created by our amazing ability to think. Real deception never happens. We pretend to be deceived. We even fool ourselves into actually thinking we believe we’ve been had. But it just doesn’t happen. When Gensa stubbed his toe on that rock — in other words, when he suddenly came face-to-face with the undeniable fact that he was living in this world and not in the world he created in his mind, in which the body is an illusion* — he understood that he could not be deceived.
This was not some unique, miraculous event, something that could only happen to an advanced student like Gensa, either. As his teacher says, “Is there anyone who does not have these words?” Is there anyone, anywhere in the world who does not come face-to-face with the real facts of the real world every moment of every day? But, says Gensa’s teacher, who else but Gensa can speak them? In other words, why, oh why, do we keep insisting that we live in some other reality far removed from the one we encounter all the time? Why is it that any time someone says something true, we act like he or she has some magical supernatural power far beyond that of ordinary human beings?
There’s a very good, very practical reason people want to believe that they can be deceived by others. See, when you’ve been deceived, nothing you do is really your fault. Just like the Nazis, you can plead, “I was only following orders.” Maybe folks will even believe you. I won’t. But that’s just me. As far as I’m concerned, pretending you’ve been deceived — making believe that reality hit you smack in the face and you still didn’t notice it — is nothing more than a way of abdicating all responsibility. You might get away with it because this world is run by people who also want to be able to use that excuse themselves if it ever comes down to it. People like you. People like me.
But it’s a lame excuse. No decent Zen teacher would ever accept it. I used to come to my teachers with variations of that one all the time. “I was deceived! I’m in delusion! Please help me. Please tell me what’s really true!” It was just another way of saying, “Please take responsibility for me.”
“Nobody’s tricked you, you moron,” they’d say. “You know what the truth is. Stop being such a bonehead, and take an honest look at yourself.” Gensa didn’t need a Learned Zen Master to tell him he was in pain when he stubbed his toe that day. And you don’t need anyone to tell you what your life really is either. You sure as heck don’t need me. I cannot possibly tell you anything you don’t already know. You probably agree, since, if you’re like most people, you think I’m an idiot. But you probably also think that somewhere out there in the land where books are written is someone way cooler and tons more spiritually advanced than me who can tell you something you don’t already know. Keep right on looking. The publishing industry loves you.
Brad Warner is a Zen priest, filmmaker and Japanese monster-movie marketer living in Los Angeles. His website is hardcorezen.blogspot.com.
Excerpted from Sit Down and Shut Up. Copyright ©2007 by Brad Warner. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. newworldlibrary.com or 800.972.6657 x 52.
* Ah, but yes, Grasshopper, according to Buddhist theory, the body is an illusion. Yet it may be that the words “the body is an illusion” and the real illusory nature of the body are not the same at all.