16598209 zen wrapped in karma dipped in chocolate

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Introduction

ix

I n my mom died and then my grandmother died, my wifedecided she didn’t want to be my wife anymore, I lost my dream

job, and people I thought were my friends and colleagues in Bud-

dhist practice began attacking me in public over scandals that existed

solely in their own minds. Only one thing was clear by the end of

the year. I was going to have to start all over again.

I’m a Zen Buddhist teacher, a “Zen master” to use a common,

but very much mistaken, term.* Buddhism is intended to help people

deal with suffering. A Zen master, at least in the popular conception,

is a mystical being, an Enlightened One who can rise above all human

affliction and discontent. This year life opened a whole big can of

suffering on me. How does a real Zen master — as opposed to the

cartoonlike figure invented by pop culture — deal with death,

* I honestly don’t know where the term Zen master comes from. It sounds like some-

thing from a bad Charlie Chan movie, circa 1936, to me. I use it ironically to call

attention to the fact that even a dork like me has attained the rank so often trans-

lated as Zen master, or “the Venerable,” or “His Holiness,” or whatever. The irony

is often lost on some readers. But not on you, I’m sure.



x Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate

divorce, job loss, and personal discord? How does he* perform the

work of trying to help others get over their tough times while going

through some pretty heavy shit of his own? How do you sit and med-

itate while your world crumbles all around you? Is meditation a valid

reaction or just a form of spiritual escapism? These are all reasonable

questions. They’re questions I asked myself a lot that year.

This is my third book. You don’t need to read the other two to

understand this one. But in some sense this is episode three of a

series, and we need a little “previously in Brad’s books” thing tobring everyone up to speed. My first book, Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock,

Monster Movies, and the Truth about Reality , was an autobiographi-

cal account of how I made the transition from hardcore punk rock

bassist to Zen Buddhist monk. I also tried to lay out some of the fun-

damentals of Zen Buddhist philosophy. Zen is essentially a “back to

basics” form of Buddhism that emerged in China maybe a thousand

years or so after Buddha died (he died around BCE). Over thosethousand years, Buddhism, which had begun as a very simple prac-

tice and philosophy focused on seated meditation, had acquired a

whole lot of other stuff — gods, demons, chants, statues, big-ass

temples filled with elaborate paintings, and all kinds of other similarly

useless junk. The Zen movement sought to strip all that away and

get back to what mattered, the bare-bones meditation practice Bud-

dha had discovered as he sat under a ficus tree looking for the truth.There’s more to it than that, of course. But that’s it in a nutshell.

I discovered Zen entirely by accident when I was the eighteen-

year-old bass player for the Akron, Ohio–based hardcore punk band

Zero Defex (aka DFx). At the time, the early s, hardcore punk

was the loudest and toughest kind of music there was. It was also a

social movement intended to create a more realistic framework in

which to understand the world. In Zen I discovered something far

more powerful and real than hardcore. Yet I never stopped being a

* Or she, but I’m sure you know Zen teachers can be either gender.



punk rocker. In fact, Zero Defex re-formed about a year after the

book came out, and we still play shows when we can get together.

My second book, Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commen-

taries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of

the True Dharma Eye, got deeper into the specific Buddhist philoso-

phy that I practice and teach. That philosophy stems mainly from

the works of Dogen Zenji, a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist

monk who wrote lots of deeply philosophical tomes, as well as a ton

of extremely nuts-and-bolts manuals on how to practice and live theZen way. Sometimes he mixed the two so thoroughly it’d make you

dizzy. In one chapter he’s telling you about the nature of being and

time, and in the next he’s writing about how a monk should take a

dump. No joke, folks. He really does devote an entire chapter to how

to use the toilet. Dogen did not consider this to be the least bit ironic.

To him, taking a dump and examining the nature of being and time

were exactly the same thing.I lived in Japan when I wrote the first book. But while I was

writing the second I moved to Los Angeles and began, for the first

time, trying to teach Buddhism in the country of my birth. Because

of the two books I found myself becoming the very thing I had

always hated — a religious authority figure, a spiritual celebrity, a

famous Zen master. People began to expect me — of all people —

to be the thing they envisioned a Buddhist master ought to be. But letme clue you in on a little secret, friends and neighbors. Not only am

I not that thing, but no one is. No one. Not even what’s-his-face

whose smiling mug graces the cover of every other issue of the

big Buddhist rags by the checkout counter in your local new age

bookshop.

I began to see that it was necessary to demonstrate that in a very

clear and unambiguous way. Some folks have tried this before. But theyusually try by pointing outward, away from themselves. There must be

a hundred tell-all accounts of some spiritual teacher’s transgressions

— their big cars, their drug habits, their bizarre sexual peccadilloes.

Introduction xi



xii Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate

The underlying assumption often seems to be that although that guy

wasn’t the real deal, maybe somewhere out there someone is.

Shoes Outside the Door by Michael Downing presented the story

of the scandalous downfall of Richard Baker Roshi,* the dharma heir

of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind .

Baker Roshi was perceived by some as the spiritual superman they

sought until his abuse of power, money, fame, and sex became too fla-

grant to attribute to some kind of “crazy wisdom” spirituality. In her

book The Great Failure, Natalie Goldberg revealed the truth thatrather than being the “clean” — a word she repeats so many times

it gets annoying — Enlightened Master they all thought he was,

Dainin Katagiri Roshi actually had — gasp! — sex with a few of his

students.** It was time someone told the story of what it’s like to do

this very unusual job from inside. I’m not the first to do it. But the

practice is still far too uncommon.

When Zen Buddhism and other forms of so-called Eastern wis-

dom first became trendy in the West in the sixties and seventies, many

followers tended to see their teachers as supernatural creatures.

Unlike Western religions, many Eastern spiritual traditions had this

idea of the “enlightened being,” of which the teacher was supposed

to be an example. This idea seemed to suggest that the teacher was a

kind of Christ-like paranormal creature with powers and abilities farbeyond those of ordinary people. Plenty of folks still make a bundle

by playing the role of the spiritual superman. It’s a scam. It’s impor-

tant to show that all of us in this Eastern spiritual master game are no

more supernatural than any Catholic priest, rabbi, minister, shoe

salesman, or fishmonger.

A lot of people out there have a vested interest in not having

* Roshi is an honorific term for a Zen teacher that comes after the person’s name.

Some people mistake it for a last name. It’s not.

** And, by the way, Goldberg herself never did it with Katagiri. None of the women

Katagiri actually slept with felt the matter was worth writing a book about.



anyone say the kinds of things I’m going to say in this book. Their

livelihood depends on their followers believing that they’re some-

thing they are not. Maybe this book will make it a little more difficult

for some of those people to get rich that way. I certainly hope so. I

guess that sounds mean. But the people who do that sort of thing are

doing untold damage not only to their followers but to themselves as

well. They would be better off if they had to get jobs at the local In-

N-Out Burger instead.

To do the damage that needs to be done to the absurd idea of theEastern spiritual master as superhuman, I’m focusing on the events

in my own life in as specific examples of how Zen teaching and

Zen practice are very much human activities performed by real peo-

ple in the midst of real-life problems. Zen does not offer the kind of

neat and pretty “ultimate solutions” promised by so many religions

and cults. Instead, it is unrelentingly realistic. Yet it does provide an

exceptionally practical way to deal with what life dishes out to all of us. In fact, I believe Zen practice and philosophy provide the only

truly rational and realistic way to live a balanced and happy life.

Some people don’t like it when I say that. They’d rather I told them

that Zen was just one of many good ways to deal with stuff. But if I

thought that way I wouldn’t be teaching and writing about Zen, and

I probably wouldn’t even bother practicing it. This doesn’t mean I

want everyone to convert to my way of thinking or that I want todestroy all other religions and philosophies. It only means that I’m

not interested in teaching or even practicing anything other than the

philosophy I believe to be the best in the world.

I had another question when I came back to America after eleven

years: does real Buddhism exist in the West? After I returned I began

to be invited to speak and practice at a lot of Buddhist centers around

the country. I had the opportunity to see firsthand what went on inthe name of Buddhism both in the places I visited and through the

people who visited and contacted me and showed me the results of

their practice. While I’ve found shining examples of the Buddha’s

Introduction xiii



way in prisons and at heavy metal shows, I’ve also seen sad perver-

sions of Buddhism in its very own temples and among those sup-

posedly propagating the Way in America. Authentic Buddhism

doesn’t always come packaged the way we imagine it should.

There is something very profound, perhaps we can even say

holy, in every human being. We all have access to this something

every moment of every day, but most of us will live our entire lives

without even suspecting it exists. The Buddha was not full of shit

when he said the cause of suffering could be uprooted and that youcan put an end to it once and for all. There is a way out of this mess

humanity has found itself in. It ’s just that the answer to the cause of

suffering — and the way to end it — are nothing at all like what you

think they are or imagine they should be.

From the book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. Copy-

right © 2009 by Brad Warner. Reprinted with permission of New

World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800/972-

6657 ext. 52.

xiv Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate

16598209 zen wrapped in karma dipped in chocolate

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