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Sit Down and Shut Up Sit Down and Shut Up Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death,and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye Brad Warner New World Library Novato, California New World Library 14 Pamaron Way Novato, California 94949 Copyright © 2007 by Brad Warner All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Grateful acknowledgment to Alfred Publishing and Hal Leonard Publishing for use of the lyrics to “Hell Hole” by Spinal Tap on pages 155–56. Text design and typography by Tona Pearce Myers Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warner, Brad. Sit down and shut up : punk rock commentaries on Buddha, god, truth, sex, death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the right dharma eye / Brad Warner. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-57731-559-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Meditation—Zen Buddhism. 2. Dogen, 1200–1253. I. Title. BQ9288.W377 2007 294.3'85—dc22 2007002802 First printing, May 2007 ISBN-10: 1-57731-559-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-57731-559-9 Printed in Canada on acid-free, recycled paper New World Library is a proud member of the Green Press Initiative. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Dedicated to my mother, Sandra Sue Warner Contents 1. Why Dogen Matters 2. “Genjo Koan” 3. Proper Posture Required 4. Four Points of Zazen 5. Zazen by Alone 6. The Colors of the Mind 7. Kill Your Anger 8. Zen and Stress Management 9. Buddha Never Metta Man He Didn’t Like 10. Cleaning Up Your Room 11. Evil Is Stupid 12. “Hyakujo’s Fox” 13. The Twelvefold Chain 14. Sex and Sin 15. The Futile Pursuit of Happiness? 16. The Day They Shot a Hole in the Jesus Egg 17. Death 18. God 19. It! The Thing from Beyond the Realm of Mind 20. Buddha Is Boring 21. Bad Hair Day 22. The Same Difference 23. Enlightenment Is for Sissies! 24. The Eight Truths of Great Human Beings 25. The Ultimate Truth Acknowledgments About the Author Zero Defects at The Dale in Akron, Ohio, sometime in 1982. The guy jumping across the frame is Fraser Suicyde of Starvation Army. This is where we played with MDC, the Meat Puppets, the Crucifucks, DRI, and about a zillion other bands. Zero Defects at the Cleveland's Screaming show at the Beachland Ballroom, December 5, 2005. My shirt says "Bear Claw" and shows a cute teddy bear ripping up Ronald McDonald's face with a set of metal claws like Wolverine from the X-Men. I bought it in Tokyo. I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. Chapter 1 Why Dogen Matters Long before I was a Zen monk, I was a punk rock bass player. Long before I was exposed to the teachings of Dogen Zenji, I studied the teachings of Ian MacKaye, of the DC-based hardcore band Minor Threat, who advocated a remarkably similar philosophy — no drink, no drugs, no smoking, just honest hard work and a commitment to what was true. When I was seventeen, I saw the hardcore punk band Zero Defects (aka 0DFx or Zero Defex) play at a nightclub called The Bank in downtown Akron, Ohio. I thought they were God’s gift to music. They were the most over-the-top thing I had ever seen onstage, and to me they remain so to this day. When I found out they were looking for a bass player, I jumped at the chance to join. Zero Defects was Akron’s premier punk band — which means we played to crowds of fifty people instead of crowds of five. We were big fish in a very small pond. And we didn’t last very long. The band played its last show sometime in the spring of 1983. In almost no time at all hardcore punk had gone from being a potent force for change to being an excuse for tough dudes to beat the crap out of each other. I loved the guys in the band. But I was ready to do something else. It turned out that we all were ready to do something else. If we could have found a way to do that within the group, I have no doubt that Zero Defects would have been a major force on the music scene in the 1980s rather than a footnote. But such is life. I moved on to other things. I signed with New York’s Midnight Records label and put out five albums of the most antipunk music on earth — psychedelia — with an ever-changing lineup I dubbed Dimentia 13, after a cheesy horror flick made by a young Francis Ford Coppola. I discovered Zen Buddhism. I moved to Japan. Appeared in monster movies. Became a Buddhist monk.* Got married. Moved to Los Angeles. And somewhere in the middle of all that the Internet appeared. Suddenly, kids who had been in diapers when Zero Defects breathed its last wanted to know about the old hardcore scene. The members of the band found each other via a website called ClePunk, dedicated to the Cleveland and Akron punk rock scene. We started talking about playing shows again. In the meantime I was working on a book. As some of you must surely know, I wrote a book a few years ago called Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth about Reality. I didn’t come up with that title, by the way. That’s what my publishers decided to call it. But I liked that title, so I went with it. I wrote the book believing there was no way in hell anyone would ever publish such a thing. I’d been dedicated to Zen for nearly two decades before I’d started working on the book. But my take on Zen seemed to be completely at odds with that of nearly everyone else I encountered who was interested in the philosophy. The people I met at Zen centers I visited were usually older than me. And smarter, too. And a lot quieter. They were generally almost studiously ignorant of popular culture, the kind of people who don’t own TVs or purchase CDs, unless maybe they’re recordings of Chinese chants or something. I never met a single Zen practitioner who was into punk rock or who liked Godzilla movies, let alone one who played punk rock and appeared in Godzilla movies.* Zen people tend to be bookish intellectuals in pale-blue pullovers rather than ratty-haired guitarists in ripped-up jeans. Yet I had found this philosophy to be deeply appealing for the same reasons I had found punk rock appealing. It was a philosophy that asked questions rather than providing pat answers. It didn’t have any time for bullshit. It was completely unpretentious. Zen teachers were rude and uncouth, rebellious, real. I thought that maybe, just maybe, there might be a few people out there who would be interested in Zen if only it weren’t presented in such a wimpy, nerdy fashion. So I wrote what I conceived of as a loud book about silence. When I was done, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. My most concrete plan was to xerox it myself and see if I could get it distributed by whoever stocks the bookshelves at Tower Records, since they seemed to carry a lot of off-the-wall stuff. But, I thought, I might as well give it a shot with a few publishers before I take it to the local Kinko’s. I got turned down by most of the publishers I sent it to, which was no surprise. But one publisher liked it and wanted to put it out. I was game. So I signed a contract and got down to the work of turning my fanzine-quality writings into a slick, shiny, professional-type book. The result was okay. And there was immediately a demand for another one just like it. But I’d written that book already, and I really didn’t want to turn it into some sort of Chicken (Tofu?) Soup for the Zen Soul kind of thing. So I hemmed and hawed for a long time. Eventually, though, I started writing another book. I wanted it to be something completely different from Hardcore Zen. It was going to be about a very old book called Shobogenzo, or , if you’re into reading it in Japanese (the Japanese language spells out most words in Chinese characters). It means “Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye.” Don’t ask about the left dharma eye, by the way.* It’s by a dead Japanese guy named Dogen, sometimes known as Dogen Zenji, meaning “Zen Master Dogen,” or Eihei Dogen, meaning “Dogen, you know, that dude who lives in Eihei temple.” The English translation of Dogen’s Shobogenzo by my teacher, Gudo Nishijima, and his student, Chodo Cross — which is the source of most of the quotations in this book — had been the cornerstone of the intellectual side of my Zen practice. But Zen isn’t really about intellectual stuff like books. It’s a philosophy of action, a philosophy you do rather than read about. Yet what really sets Dogen apart from all the other Buddhist masters before and since is his ability to express his insights in words.