Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [67]
THERE WAS AN OLD ZEN MASTER in China who would wake up each morning and shout, “Master!” and then answer himself, “Yes, Master?” Then he’d say, “Don’t be deceived, Master!” and then reply, “No, Master, I won’t!”
That’s true understanding of authority.
“PASS ME the ECSTASY, RAINBOW, I’M GOING TO NIRVANA ON STRETCHER!”
Can you hear that, dude? That’s my skull! I’m so wasted!
JEFF SPICOLI (PLAYED BY SEAN PENN)
IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH
ENJOYING A HEIGHTENED STATE OF AWARENESS
UNTIL RECENTLY I was naïve enough to believe that the idiotic notion that taking drugs was somehow a legitimate path toward Buddhist enlightenment had gone out of fashion long ago—about the time The Velvet Underground recorded their final album and the last Star Trek episode aired with Captain Kirk on the bridge. But when I was in America visiting my parents in July 2002, I was deeply disappointed to find a putrid little book called Zig Zag Zen edited by Allan Hunt Badiner taking up a big hunk of shelf space allotted to Buddhism in the local Supermarket ‘n’ Bookstore.
I picked up that lump of turd and read it. Near as I can come to making any sense out of it, Badiner’s argument goes something like this: (A) Buddhism is about enlightenment; (B) enlightenment is some far-out, trippy mystical brain-fuck kind of state; (C) drugs will screw up your brain too; therefore (D) doing drugs will get you enlightened. And besides that, it’s much easier to score a hit of acid than it is to sit around staring at walls for years (plus, when you’re on acid the blank walls look so much more far out, man).
Badiner believes that we must address the issue of how Buddhism and drugs are related because lots of Westerners who went on to become Buddhist masters—like me, for example—used drugs in their early years (as did lots of people who went on to become career criminals—but let’s leave that aside). According to Badiner, these Buddhist masters’ youthful drug abuse is “Western Buddhism’s deep, dark secret.” Most Buddhist teachers who’ve used drugs in the past have gone on to say that they are dangerous at worst and a waste of time at best—and in any case certainly unrelated to Buddhism. Yet, Badiner believes, the enlightenment those guys found in Buddhism was the same whacked-out state of mind they got from dope.
In fact, drugs occupy exactly the same place in Western Buddhism as Gautama Buddha’s early experiments with severe asceticism. Before he discovered the Middle Way, Gautama tried all kinds of weird-ass stuff to attain enlightenment, including starving himself nearly to death. He saw that although ascetic practices could give him that same tripped-out feeling you can get when doing some really primo shit, none of that got him any closer to understanding the truth or stopping suffering. He gave it up and spent the rest of his career putting those practices down.
A number of Zig Zag Zen’s contributors point out that various sects that claim to be Buddhist use techniques such as physical exhaustion, food and sleep deprivation, and various kinds of mental gymnastics to achieve changes in brain chemistry similar to the ones you get from the stuff you can buy from the sleazebags slouching around down by the nine-year-old girls at the playground. True enough. But those practices are not Buddhism, no matter how venerable and traditional the guys hawking them appear to be. It’s a sad fact that far too many of those who claim to be Buddha’s followers indulge in the sort of practices the Buddha himself clearly and unambiguously condemned.
And then there is the little problem of the fifth precept—the one in which Buddha explicitly told his followers not to do drugs. In Zig Zag Zen, Badiner takes great pains to point out the distinction between what he calls “consciousness-restricting drugs” and what he calls “entheogens,” drugs he believes give you real spiritual experiences. Perhaps we’re to believe that Buddha