Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [78]
Sit zazen.
And rest assured, by sitting staring at blank walls you can transform everything. Everything. This is not a metaphor. This is not exaggeration. This is the simple fact of the matter.
ZEN REPLACES ALL OBJECTS OF BELIEF with one single thing: reality itself. We believe only in this universe. We don’t believe in the afterlife. We don’t believe in the sovereignty of nations. We don’t believe in money or power or fame. We don’t believe in our idols. We don’t believe in our positions or our possessions. We don’t believe we can be insulted, or that our honor or the honor of our family, our nation or our faith can be offended. We don’t believe in Buddha.
We just believe in reality. Just this.
Zen doesn’t ask you to believe in anything you cannot confirm for yourself. It does not ask you to memorize any sacred words. It doesn’t require you to worship any particular thing or revere any particular person. It doesn’t offer any rules to obey. It doesn’t give you any hierarchy of learned men whose profound teachings you must follow to the letter. It doesn’t ask you to conform to any code of dress. It doesn’t ask you to allow anyone else to choose what is right for you and what is wrong.
Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority. Zen tears away every false refuge in which you might hide from the truth and forces you to sit naked before what is real. That’s real refuge.
Reality will announce itself to you in utterly unmistakable ways once you learn to listen. Learning to listen to reality, though, ain’t so easy. You’re so used to shouting reality down, drowning it out completely with your own opinions and views, that you might not even be able to recognize reality’s voice anymore. It’s a funny thing, though, because reality is the single most glaringly obvious thing there is. As the woman said in those old Palmolive® commercials, “You’re soaking in it!” Yet we’ve forgotten how to recognize it.
All your life you learned to deal with reality by excluding certain things, dividing things up into categories, differentiating between this and that. But reality includes all those things we call “wrong,” all those things we call “evil,” all those things we hate because we know in our hearts they are bad things. We can only know what’s “bad” when we discover it within ourselves and label it as such. But what happens is that we establish psychological blinders that prevent us from even seeing that what we consider bad is part of our own psychological makeup. To face reality as it is means we must face even the bad things about ourselves, the things we desperately want to believe are not there because we so desperately want to cling to the idea that we are “good.”
And knowing what’s really within us, we must still practice being good. Practicing Buddhism means being aware of what’s here and now. And that ain’t easy.
The word Buddhism means a lot of things to a lot of people—stuff like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, those Vietnamese guys who burned themselves on the street in the ’60s, and the Aum Shinri Kyo cult who gassed the Tokyo subways. For Japanese people, Buddhism means funerals and temples and the popular TV image of monks standing naked under waterfalls in the middle of the winter.12
Hollywood has turned Buddhism into a lightweight religion full of smiling old bald men spewing meaningless words in voices resonating with authority. Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of trash like Zig Zag Zen and a dozen vapid, syrupy tomes with the word Zen in the title and some serene image on the cover.
Then there are pop culture’s approved list of pseudo-Buddhist masters, people like Ken Wilber, for whom the goal of Buddhism is some imaginary “formless state,” or others for whom the “goal” of Buddhism is some fantasy called satori. Or Allan Hunt Badiner and the rest of the crew in Zig Zag Zen, for whom the goal of Buddhism seems to be to get a really good buzz on.