Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [23]
In the early 1970s, Nishijima started hosting lectures on Buddhism in English at Tokyo University’s Young Buddhists Association. With the help of a young British student named Mike Cross he embarked upon the massive task of translating the entirety of Master Dogen’s greatest work, the Shobogenzo, into English—all ninety-five hefty chapters of it. Nishijima gave his group the name Dogen Sangha to signify his dedication to the teachings of Dogen but also to place a bit of conceptual distance between himself and the mainstream Soto sect of Zen Buddhism into which he’d been ordained. Sangha, by the way, just means a group of Buddhists. Although Nishijima received Dharma Transmission from Niwa Rempo, then the head of the Soto sect and Head Abbot of Eihei-ji, the sect’s main temple, he has never felt entirely comfortable with the way they run things.
When I first started attending Nishijima’s lectures, I found them infuriating. His frank arrogance was contemptible. You’d think the guy believed that no one on Earth understood Buddhism except for him. He insisted that the only Buddhist books worth reading about were Dogen’s Shobogenzo—in his own translation, of course—and a book called Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, by an ancient Indian guy named Nagarjuna. Nishijima also mentioned that all existing English translations of this latter book were totally worthless. And he had all these weird theories about the autonomic nervous system. What was a Buddhist master doing talking about medical stuff? I wanted to hear about how to reach enlightenment!
Yet for all that, I couldn’t doubt this guy’s sincerity. He made no effort to try to convince anyone to accept his beliefs. He simply stated them like they were undeniable facts, utterly obvious to anyone with the sense to take a look. His unstated attitude seemed to be, “You came to hear what I have to say. Well, here it is. If you don’t like it, go listen to someone else.”—and a lot of people did indeed walk out on him. A few times I even gave up on the guy, staying away from the lectures for weeks at a time. But after a while I’d always be back. Something about his outlook felt right to me. Something about the old man really moved me.
There’s no way I can convey the full sense of what it was like to listen to him teach. Gudo Nishijima is like a force of nature. Describing his personality is like trying to describe the personality of an earthquake or a typhoon. Mostly you’re not concerned about what he’s really like so much as concerned about how to stay alive until he passes by. He’s just a little old bald man in robes but he has this voice that can rattle walls for miles in all directions. There are times he seems to be baiting the audience to come after him, sort of like GG Allin used to do.
In case you don’t know, GG Allin is perhaps the most notorious punk rocker of all time. He was so outrageous on stage that no one was really sure whether he was a performance artist nonpareil or an actual crazy person. He died in a spectacular suicide in 1993.
But Nishijima was way more dangerous than ol’ GG. The punks who came to witness GG Allin swearing at them, calling them names, and hurling excrement knew they had a chance of at least beating him up with their fists if they wanted to (and many did). But Nishijima wasn’t so easy to defeat. No one would think of physically attacking a kindly old monk in black robes. And no one I ever saw start an argument with him ever made it through the thing without being reduced to a sputtering fool. I know I never did.
MY UNDERWHELMING PERFORMANCE as Alien Dada wasn’t my first appearance in a Japanese monster production. In 1994 I appeared as an innocent bystander dodging the laserbeam breath of the brontosaurus-like Darengelon in Ultraman Neos. In the film Ultraman Zearth I was “American News Reporter Bradley Warner,” glimpsed for about three seconds reporting on the theft of a statue of King Tutankhamen by aliens. In episode one of the