MY ZEN PEDIGREE

The subject of my Zen pedigree has come up a few times recently. I’m sure some of you will remember when Bruce Lambson, Director of the Big Mind Big Heart Institute said I was “not yet even a Sensei” whereas his boss was a Roshi*. While I’ve been making the rounds trying to set up some speaking engagements it came up again. A Zen center someone was trying to talk into booking me for a speaking engagement asked to know if I had permission to teach and said my blog wasn’t very informative about such matters.

OK. Well, now it is. The little profile over to the left now includes a brief rundown of my Zen breeding chart. I do have “permission to teach.” In fact I was actually kind of strong armed into teaching when I didn’t really want to. But that’s a whole other story that I’ve already told in my first book. I have Dharma Transmission from Gudo Wafu Nishijima, who in turn received Dharma Transmission from Renpo Niwa, who was at the time the head of the Soto sect in Japan. My papers are all in order should the Zen Gestapo ever collar me and demand to see them. I wear my brown rakusu and kesa with full impunity. Not very often. But I do. And contrary to Mr. Lambson’s assertions, I am officially a roshi.

Although I’m being kind of snarky about this stuff, I do understand why it matters. The institution that asked about my permission to teach has various affiliations as well as its own good reputation to uphold. They wouldn’t want just any old riff-raff to stink up their hallowed halls. And there are indeed a number of colorful characters running around designating themselves as Zen Masters and suchlike who claim to have received their transmissions in dreams or from disembodied spirits or who, when asked about their lineages simply decline to answer at all. No reputable Zen center would want to suffer the embarrassment of having invited someone to speak at their place who later turns out to be a phony.

The matter of lineage is a serious thing in Zen with a very long history. The legends say the line of Dharma Transmission has been unbroken since Buddha himself transmitted to his student Mahakashapa 2500 years ago. There’s certainly no way to prove the historical accuracy of that story. Nonetheless most folks in the scene believe it. I believe it too.

But what does it mean? That’s a whole different matter. Because there are duly transmitted Zen teachers who have all the proper paperwork but who are truly awful. I won’t name names here. And there are people who don’t claim any Buddhist lineage at all who can run rings around most of us with credentials, like U.G. Krishnamurti for example.

I’ll tell you what it means to me. It means I’m part of the club, whether the club wants me or not. I’m also part of the club whether I want to be or not.

The club, as a club, functions pretty much the way the Elks or the Free Masons or the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo function. There are little secrets known only to members — none of them very interesting in the case of Zen, by the way. There is a social network available only to the higher ups. There are little perks you get for being part of the administration rather than a mere member of the rank and file. There are favors the other members of the club will do for you. There’s a chummy atmosphere when everyone gets together. And so on and on.

While some folks who’ve attained the rank I have within the club are pretty proud of that fact, I tend to be fairly embarrassed about it. I’m not the only person who doesn’t wear his Zen status like a shiny red badge, by the way. I’d say most Zen teachers are pretty humble and try their best not to get too cocky about the whole thing no matter how much their students would prefer them to. Those who enjoy rank and status tend to make themselves more visible, as people who enjoy rank and status are prone to do. But I don’t pay them too much mind myself.

As for myself, I feel it’s important to own up to what I’ve done. Whether it was a momentary lapse of good judgment on my part that caused me to accept a position of rank or whether my teacher was senile and had no idea what he was doing (as some have implied, unfortunately it's not true) or whether it was a real step in the direction of establishing the Dharma, the deed was done. I didn't ask for it. But I said "yes" to it, which makes me just as guilty. I had the ceremonies and signed the certificates. I’ve been pretty public about it, I think, having written a trio of books on the subject. Yet I’ve tried not to hammer people over the head with it every chance I get, for example by having folks address me as “His Holiness” or “the Venerable” or any of that stupidity.

Hierarchies are a fact of human life, as silly and as phony as every last one of them is. Zen has them too. One hopes that hierarchy is Zen society is followed only to the extent that it is logical and practical. For example, when you need someone to lead a chanting service or you want to acknowledge the hard won spiritual growth of a particular individual so that you might better learn from that person. Unfortunately there’s always a certain amount of silliness involved when you get into this business. Hopefully we remain as aware of this as we can and make efforts to transcend it. In Zen there are some traditions established to try and cope with this matter. For example, when a monastic student rises to the rank of shuso or “head student” he or she also becomes the monastery’s official toilet cleaner.

Since there are people out there who wonder about my rank, I’ve decided to make that information more easily available than I have in the past. I do so because it’s expedient and useful. Ultimately these designations don’t mean shit.

I remember when I realized this very clearly. I’d just started working for Tsuburaya Productions and was pretty amazed to be in the company of people I had admired from afar for a very long time, people like Noboru Tsuburaya or Koichi Takano. Yet when I traveled with them I noticed that when they were inside that body of people who knew who they were they’d be treated like royalty (and milked every minute of it for all it was worth), whereas when they stood on a crowded subway platform they’d be bumped and jostled just like anybody else.

I feel sorry for people who get so well known that they transcend that experience and are always treated deferentially. Celebrity spiritual masters must lead a very surreal life, in which it’s a daily struggle just to maintain their simple humanity. I wonder if anyone can really do that? It’s not something I think will ever concern me personally, thank you Jesus. But I am very wary of our current crop of Buddhist superstars. They seem about as valid to me as Top 40 rock bands. Occasionally a bit of truly worthwhile music makes it into the big leagues, like The Beatles for example. But most of what makes the top of the charts is just calculated schlock. It’s the same with the world of Buddhism, sadly.

So there you have a long-winded and probably fairly useless justification for why I’ve suddenly started mentioning my Zen rank on the top page of this blog.

Big deal.


*Here’s the quote in full in case you don’t want to look it up: “I find it ironic and bizarre that a kid like Brad Warner, with a few years of Zen experience, puts himself out there as a ‘Dharma Punk’, which is to be taken I guess as some revolutionary new thing, and then goes on to rip on a guy who has 37 years of Zen experience, and is a Roshi, (Brad is not yet even a Sensei). Genpo Roshi has literally thousands of students, has written 5 books, and is well respected throughout the world.”

ZEN ULTRAMAN EPISODE

While going through some old files related to my former job, I came across this very brief synopsis of an episode of Ultraman I proposed sometime in the mid-90s.

The episode was to be titled "Shiki Soku Ze Ku" or "Form is Emptiness." It was proposed for a series which was to have been titled Ultraman Neos. Eventually Ultraman Neos was shelved in favor of a show called Ultraman Tiga. My episode was never produced.

This version has been rewritten for a proposed Ultraman novel, which would have featured the characters from the original Ultraman TV series (the one that was shown on UHF stations over here in the US in the Seventies). The novel never happened either.

What I present here is from the synopsis of the novel that I planned to send to publishers to get them interested. This section would have been chapter five.

There was a lot more detail in the story proposal I submitted. But I have no idea where that is anymore.

ULTRAMAN CHAPTER 5 "Form is Emptiness"

A Zen Buddhist temple in the mountains is attacked by a monster. Ultraman appears and battles the monster. But before he can defeat it he finds himself transformed back into Hayata and held prisoner in an alien space ship. It turns out that the monster and the temple were all an illusion created by unearthly creatures to make Hayata reveal himself as the human form of Ultraman. While Hayata is imprisoned the aliens create the illusion that he is still among the members of the Science Patrol.

Meanwhile unknown flying saucers hover ominously over the world's capital cities.

In Tokyo as in the rest of the world the people become increasingly convinced that the aliens intend to attack. Hysteria builds and finally the attack comes. A gigantic creature descends from the ship and rampages through the city. Hayata, still held prisoner, watches in amazement as Ultraman appears and battles the creature.

Before the monster can be defeated, both the creature and Ultraman disappear. The city, destroyed in the battle, resumes its previous state. The face of a young girl appears in the sky. She says that the entire encounter was an illusion projected by the beings of the Galactic Federation, a group of peaceful planets throughout the galaxy. The purpose was to discover how humans would react to the presence of alien beings in their midst. Humanity failed the test and are refused entry into the Galactic Federation.

BACK FROM THE WILDERNESS

I just got back from ten days at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center deep in the Ventana Wilderness Area near Carmel Valley, California. Tassajara's annual schedule goes something like this:

Winter Practice Period
Spring Work Period
Summer Guest Season
Late Summer Work Period
Fall Practice Period
Interim

The two practice periods are zazen intensives -- pretty much straight wall-gazing from 4AM till 9PM with extra zazen thrown in during sesshins. Plus the first one you attend you gotta do 5 days of tangaryo practice, in which you're not just doing zazen all those hours, you get no breaks at all except to go potty. Oh, and you're not allowed to bathe for those 5 days. The practice periods are restricted to students only. You either pay a fee to attend these or else you work during the summer guest season to earn tuition.

The work periods are more-or-less free. You pay a $70 application fee and then you work as many days as you want (I think you have to put in at least 5). They provide you room and board. The work is not that hard and the hours are very good. You start early but you're finished by like 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon. Zazen is available each morning and evening but is optional. There are no guests present at this time. Summer guest season works much the same way as work period, but paying guests are present and much of the work involves catering to them, so the hours are longer and the work is harder -- often lots harder. You get paid in room and board plus the chance to earn free practice periods.

After the Fall practice period there's an interim. This is neither a work period nor a practice period. But the place needs to be kept in something like running order. So former students and workers are invited to come down to the valley and keep Tassajara from falling to bits.

That's what I went up and did last week. It was cold. There's no source of heat in the cabins but wood stoves and I can't start a fire for sour beans. It was tough. Most of the basic survival stuff you have to do for yourself. It was lovely. Leilani and I spent a lot of time in the hot spring baths and a lot of time washing dishes.

The best part was New Year's Eve. There's no zazen schedule during interim, which is a damned shame. In San Francisco Zen Center's way of classifying stuff (Tassajara is part of SFZC), zazen is officially a kind of ceremony. Ceremonies don't happen on holidays. So there's no zazen during the winter break. Or on Sundays at their center in SF, for that matter. Screw that. Zazen is not a ceremony. I did it every day, morning and night. Sometimes alone. Saying zazen is a ceremony is like saying toothbrushing is a ceremony. Whoever came up with that classification should be smacked with a big kiyosaku. Which is not to badmouth SFZC in all aspects. I mostly like the place a whole lot. They just have a few bass-ackwards ideas. No doubt about it. But I digress.

I was talking about New Year's Eve. The one time there is scheduled zazen during interim is New Year's Eve. They sit from 7PM - 9PM and ring the bell outside the zendo 108 times to announce the new year to any local squirrels, deer, raccoons or mountain lions who might be listening. Then afterwards they have a bonfire in which you're supposed to burn something that represents a hindrance you hope to overcome in the coming year.

We mainly stood around singing bad 80s TV show theme songs and doing Mitch Hedburg routines. There were very few senior staff around, so it was mostly 20-somethings who'd arrived early for the Winter practice period. A fun group. I often wonder what drives a 25 year old way into the mountains to stare at walls all day. Though I shouldn't wonder too hard. I probably would've done it myself if Tassajara hadn't been several thousand miles away when I was that age. I'm sure it builds character and all that.

So anyway, that's what I did.

I'm still booking my 2009 book tour. The current tour dates are at this link, which is also conveniently over there on your left at the top of the links section.

In addition to these I have some tentative bookings in Austin, Chicago and Atlanta.

I am looking for more gigs in the NYC area or the East Coast in general in late March or early April.

I am also hoping something will come up for the following cities:

Dallas, TX
Portland, OR
Detroit, MI
Seattle, WA
Akron or Cleveland, OH
Vancouver, BC
Anywhere else in Canada

...or for that matter pretty much anywhere that anyone will have me.

Write me at spoozilla@gmail.com if you have any means by which to make a gig happen.

Zazen will be as usual on Saturday Jan. 3, 2009 at Hill Street Center. Info on that is to your left. See you there!

SHUKKE and THE MONTY HALL DILEMMA (or DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB!)

First the administrative stuff:

Tomorrow, Dec. 20, 2008 we’ll have our all-day Zen thing at Hill Street Center (details at link to your left). There will be no prepared lunch this time. I’ll be having a peanut butter sandwich at HSC. Others are welcome to join me. But bring your own sandwiches.

Also, I have updated my tour dates (link also to your left). If you want me to come to your town, please write me at spoozilla@gmail.com and we’ll try to work it out. I will have a lot of available dates (see below for details on that).

Now the article:

Shukke (spelled 出家 in Chinese characters) means leaving home and family. In the olden days, Buddhists monks literally left everything behind when they joined the order. These days the word shukke mainly refers to a ceremony that symbolically represents that act, although the monks themselves often continue to live as they did before.

Different lineages of Buddhism handle it in different ways. I’ve heard that in Thailand the custom is that one literally leaves home and family for a time but then comes back after a proscribed period. Sort of like doing a tour of duty in the armed forces. In Japanese-style Zen, though, it’s pretty rare to actually leave everything behind.

Whatever. I’m bringing it up today because yesterday I left my family of 14 years. For the past year I’ve been in a state of limbo with the Japanese monster movie company that sent me to Los Angeles to be their liaison. I got laid off at the end of 2007. But at the beginning of 2008 they said they wanted me back to work on a film project in the USA and so I began working for them again in a limited capacity. That film project never quite got off the ground. In September I went and met with them and they asked me to come back to Japan to do essentially the same job I used to do when I last lived there.

But I wasn’t really interested in doing that job again and, as much as I love Japan, I didn’t really feel like moving back there. Everybody keeps saying how the US economy is falling to pieces and I was being offered a relatively secure job with a steady paycheck at a stable company in a country where the economy was not going down the drain. So I thought hard about whether I ought to take the job or not.

This week I finally gave them my answer. I said no thank you in as polite a way as possible. They accepted and now I’m a free man. That company was very much like a family to me and leaving them was not easy. The photo I posted above was staged spontaneously by a bunch of guys from the Events Dept. as a surprise going-away gift in 2004 when I was just about to leave for LA. That's my family.

It was also a tough decision to make because the most rational, sensible course of action would have been to go to Japan. Try as I might I couldn’t make it add up any other way. I’m making a little bit of money off book sales. But if you average out what I get paid for a book compared to how long it takes to write one, my annual wage from writing is not impressive at all. I know there are professional authors whose sales are less than Eckhart Tolle’s and Deepak Chopra’s but who manage somehow. But I don’t know how. Guess I’ll find out.

It was a classic example of the Monty Hall Dilemma. Actually I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the Monty Hall Dilemma until I did a Google search just now. I was trying to remember the name of the game show hosted by Monty Hall in which contestants were given a choice between say, a year’s supply of Turtle Wax and whatever was behind door number three, which could have been something better than the Turtle Wax, like a brand new car, or could have been a bail of hay or a goat or something. Turns out the show was called Let’s Make a Deal. I can’t believe I wasted several hours of my precious and fleeting life watching Let’s Make a Deal. But I suppose it did me some good after all.

ANYWAY, the thing was that even though my rational mind told me the best way to go was to take the job in Japan, my instincts told me otherwise. And it wasn’t just my own rational mind that said it was a bad idea to turn down the job in Japan either. Everyone I spoke to about the matter, including two Zen teachers, told me the most sensible course of action was to go to Japan.

But in the end I made the irrational choice. Actually, though, I wouldn’t call it irrational. I’d call it intuitive. Intuition isn’t really irrational. It has its own sense.

Have I made the right choice? Who knows? Not me. When faced with decisions like these we never really know what the “right choice” is. I’m not even sure the concept of there being a right choice is very sound to begin with.

In Buddhism we always say that when you’re faced with a decision, the true way to go appears instantly. But we’re so locked into our thinking mind that we can miss it very easily. Still, once you’ve made your choice the only thing you can do is find a way to make that choice work.

In spite of everything, I feel good about this. It’s a bit of a test, though. I always say that the universe takes care of you. I believe that. Now I’ll get to see if it’s true.

It's kinda doubly weird for me. Because I've seen through things to the degree that I understand clearly that the universe isn't what most people say it is and does not operate in at all the way most people think it does. Yet the power of what most people think is very strong. You should never underestimate it. (This is one of about a million things wrong with the whole "let's get an Enlightenment Experience right this minute" mindset, by the way. But that's a whole 'nother article. Maybe a book.)

Join me on these pages in the following months and together we can all see how it goes…

FINLAND and the good ol' USA

I'm going to Finland! August 24 - 30, 2009 I'll be doing a bunch of talks and zazen things in Finland. I'll be in Jyväskylä and Helsinki and probably a few other places. I don't have specific dates yet. But I'll post them when I get them. If you're on Facebook, they've set up a group about the trip. So go join up. Info is posted in Finnish and English.

I know there are readers in other parts of Europe who've asked me to come out to speak in your countries. Now's your chance. Since I'll be in Europe anyhow, I can arrange to make it to other places while I'm over there.

The only possible conflicting dates around that time as of this writing are

August 6 - 15 Great Sky Sesshin, Eitzen, Minnesota
September 19 - 22 (tentative) Dogen Sangha Retreat, Shizuoka, Japan

If you have any ideas of arranging stuff that doesn't bump into those dates, please send me an e-mail at spoozilla@gmail.com.

Please bear in mind I am a one-man show. I have no staff to set these kinds of things up and I am terrible beyond any definition of terrible you can possibly come up with at organization and scheduling. So if you want to do this, you'll need to set things up. Also keep in mind that I am not independently wealthy. So you'll need to figure out how to finance the thing. But I will take any serious plan seriously.

And for those of you in the USA, I'll be doing a book tour this year and am on the look-out for places to come and speak. Here are the dates so far.

Bodhi Tree Bookstore - Los Angeles, CA - Thursday March 12, 2009

Favors.Org - Event - Bay Area, CA (location TBD) - Thursday March 19, 2009
SF Zen Center - Event - San Francisco, Friday March 20, 2009
Green Apple Books - San Francisco, CA - Author Event - Saturday March 21, 2009 - 4 pm
Copperfield's Books - Petaluma, CA - Author Event - Sunday March 22, 2009 - 1:30 pm

Interdependence Project - New York, NY - Wednesday March 25, 2009

Southern Dharma Retreat Center - Asheville, North Carolina - April 2 - 5, 2009

Same deal goes for gigs in the US as in Europe.

I promise I won't monopolize the blog with tour dates. But for now it's the only place I have to announce these things. I'm gonna be working on that as well.

For now I've added a link with all the dates on it over there to your left.

NEW SUICIDE GIRLS ARTICLE: YOU CELIBATE I'LL BUY A BIT!

I got a new Suicide Girls article up right now. Go look.

According to the press the Dalai Lama said sex invariably spells trouble. Actually what he said (in part) was, "Sexual pleasure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication. Too much attachment towards your children, towards your partner (is) one of the obstacle or hindrance of peace of mind." He also said celibacy was good. This made the news. So I wrote about that.

See ya!

MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL, ALTBOOK BAZAAR in BURBANK Dec. 13th 6-9PM (free booze)

The current issue of Maximum Rocknroll (#308, January 2009), one of the longest running and coolest punk rock magazines has an interview with me on the subject of my movie Cleveland's Screaming!. So go out and get a copy today. It's just four bucks and the rest of the magazine is pretty groovy. Look for "Cleveland's Screaming" right on the front cover!

Also, I will be at the ALTBOOK BAZAAR at the Wax Poetic Gallery at 3208 West Magnolia Blvd. in Burbank, California this Saturday December 13th, 2008 from 6-9 PM. They'll have free food and free drinks and you can meet a whole slew of local authors including my fellow Suicide Girls columnist Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna (aka Miss Truth Hurts). So come on down! No zazen required.

But if you want some zazen first, we'll be having the usual zazen at Hill Street Center that day. See the link over there on your left for details.

I'm writing my latest Suicide Girls column, which will go live on Monday morning. So I gotta run off and do that.

I hope to see a few of you at the ALTBOOK BAZAAR, though.

Bye!

ADDENDUM 12/11/08

Do I have any readers in Portland? If so, please write me at spoozilla@gmail.com and put "Portland" somewhere in the subject line.