Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [14]
IN ITS EARLY DAYS, punk had a lot in common with Zen. It wasn’t just the fetish for shaved heads and black clothes, either. The attitude of not conforming blindly to society is an important aspect of Buddhist teaching. One thing that really endeared me to my current Zen teacher, a guy named Gudo Nishijima, was when I heard him talking about the new styles of dress that were becoming popular in Japan. The bizarre, bright hair dyes, strange-looking makeup, and outlandish clothes teenagers were getting into reminded me of the way my friends had looked fifteen years earlier. These weren’t just imitations of the older punk look (though there was a lot of that too), but a completely new Japanese style. I expected Nishijima, a Buddhist monk in his late seventies, to be critical of them. But he wasn’t. Instead he said these trends were representative of a more realistic outlook he believed was emerging in all of humanity. “They dress the way they want to,” he said, “not because society tells them how to dress. And that is very important.”
Question authority. Question society. Question reality.
But you’ve got to take it all the way: Question punk authority. Question punk society. Question your own rules and question your own values. Question Zen society. Question Zen authority. Question other people’s views on reality and question your own.
No matter what authority you submit to—your teacher, your government, even Jesus H. Christ or Gautama Buddha himself—that authority is wrong. It’s wrong because the very concept of authority is already a mistake. Deferring to authority is nothing more than a cowardly shirking of personal responsibility. The more power you grant an authority figure the worse you can behave in his name. That’s why people who take God as their ultimate authority are always capable of the worst humanity has to offer. Zen does not accept anything even resembling that kind of God.
If you aim to tear down authority, doing so honestly means doing so completely. Really tearing down authority means more than just opposing the big government and big business. You need to tear out the very roots of authority. This can never be done through violence of any kind—not ever—because the ultimate authority is your own belief in the very concept of authority. Revolt against that first. You need the courage to take responsibility for your own life and your own actions.
People have taken exception to my equating a noble tradition like Zen Buddhism with a scrappy upstart thing like punk rock. Zen Buddhism is ancient and venerable. Punk is trash. But punk is a cultural movement that was made possible only because of the increased understanding of reality that emerged in the twentieth century, the so-called postmodern worldview. The punks understood that all social institutions and socially approved codes of dress and behavior were a sham. This is one of the first steps to true understanding. It’s the unfortunate that not many punks actually followed through to what punk really implied: that all of our values need to be questioned. It’s typical for a minority social movement to throw away the accepted rules of society. But they almost always end up just substituting another set of rules for the ones they’ve challenged.
In spite of their talk about anarchy and “no rules” the punks quickly developed a very rigid set of rules of their own. Anarchy was just a symbol, a cool-looking letter “A” inside a circle. Big deal. Real anarchy has to come from deep within. Real anarchy isn’t immoral or amoral; it’s intensely moral. A pseudo-anarchist spraypaints a letter “A” in a circle on the side of a government building “to make a point.” A true anarchist understands that action in the present moment is what really matters and lives his life accordingly. Painting letters on buildings doesn’t accomplish anything except giving the poor grunts who do the building maintenance some extra work. No one’s going to see that letter “A” and decide to learn more about the philosophy of anarchy.
Questioning society’s values is a great and important