Dont be a jerk, p.1
Don't Be a Jerk, page 1
DON’T BE A JERK
Also by Brad Warner
Hardcore Zen
Sex, Sin, and Zen
Sit Down and Shut Up
There Is No God and He Is Always with You
Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate
New World Library
14 Pamaron Way
Novato, California 94949
Copyright © 2016 by Brad Warner
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Text design by Tona Pearce Myers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Warner, Brad, author.
Title: Don’t be a jerk and other practical advice from Dogen, Japan’s greatest Zen master : a radical but reverent paraphrasing of Dogen’s Treasury of the true dharma eye / Brad Warner.
Description: Novato, CA : New World Library, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015050026 | ISBN 9781608683888
Subjects: LCSH: Sōtōshū—Doctrines. | Dōgen, 1200–1253. Shōbō genzō.
Classification: LCC BQ9449.D657 W37 2016 | DDC 294.3/85—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050026
First printing, April 2016
ISBN 978-1-60868-388-8
EISBN 978-1-60868-389-5
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper
New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org
10987654321
CONTENTS
Introduction
1.Dōgen’s Zen FAQ (A Talk about Pursuing the Truth)
2.How to Sit Down and Shut Up (The Universal Guide to the Standard Method of Zazen)
3.Dōgen Explains the Heart Sutra (The Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom Sutra)
4.Note to Self: There Is No Self
5.You Are Not Yourself (The Realized Universe)
6.Did Dōgen Teach Reincarnation, and Does It Even Matter If He Did?
7.Won’t Get Fooled Again (One Bright Pearl)
8.You Can’t Say “I Miss You” in Japanese
9.A List of Rules (Rules for the Hall of the Accumulated Cloud)
10.You’re Already Enlightened, Except You’re Not (Mind Here and Now Is Buddha)
11.Banned in Japan: The Twisted History of Shōbōgenzō
12.Zen and the Art of Wiping Your Butt (Washing)
13.Three Encounters with Dōgen
14.Was Dōgen the First Buddhist Feminist? (Prostrating to That Which Has Attained the Marrow)
15.Hearing Weird Stuff Late at Night (River Voices and Mountain Forms)
16.Don’t Be a Jerk (Not Doing Wrong)
17.Psychedelic Dōgen (Being-Time)
18.The Mystical Power of the Clothes You Wear (Transmission of the Robe)
19.The Beer and Doritos Sutra (The Sutra of Mountains and Waters)
20.The Buddhist Hall of Fame (The Buddhist Patriarchs)
21.Buddhist Paperwork (The Certificate of Succession)
22.Twirly Flowers Twirl Twirly Flowers (The Flower of Dharma Turns the Flower of Dharma)
23.Stop Trying to Grab My Mind! (The Mind Cannot Be Grasped)
24.Monkeys and Mirrors and Stones (The Eternal Mirror)
25.Chanting Sutras (Reading — or Chanting — Sutras)
26.Dōgen’s Zen in the Twenty-First Century
Bibliography
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
IT USED TO be that nobody outside the worlds of stuffy academics and nerdy Zen studies knew who Dōgen was. And while this thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master and writer is still not one of the best-known philosophers on the planet, he’s well-known enough to have a character on the popular American TV series Lost named after him and to get referenced regularly in books and discussions of the world’s most important philosophical thinkers.
Unfortunately, in spite of all this, Dōgen still tends to be presented either as an inscrutable Oriental speaking in riddles and rhymes or as an insufferable intellectual making clever allusions to books you’re too dumb to have heard of. Nobody wants to read a guy like that.
You could argue that Dōgen really is these things. Sometimes. But he’s a lot more than that. When you work with him for a while, you start to see that he’s actually a pretty straightforward, no-nonsense guy. It’s hard to see that, though, because his world and ours are so very different.
A few months ago, my friend Whitney and I were at Atomic City Comics in Philadelphia. There I found The War That Time Forgot, a collection of DC comics from the fifties about American soldiers who battle living dinosaurs on a tropical island during World War II, and Whitney found a book called God Is Disappointed in You, by Mark Russell. The latter was far more influential in the formation of this book.
The publishers of that book, Top Shelf Publications, describe God Is Disappointed in You as being “for people who would like to read the Bible . . . if it would just cut to the chase.” In this book, Russell has summarized the entire Christian Bible in his own words, skipping over repetitive passages and generally making each book far more concise and straightforward than any existing translation. He livens up his prose with a funny, irreverent attitude that is nonetheless respectful to its source material. If you want to know what’s in the Bible but can’t deal with actually reading the whole darned thing, it’s a very good way to begin.
After she’d been reading God Is Disappointed in You for a while, Whitney showed it to me and suggested I try to do the same thing with Shōbōgenzō: The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. This eight-hundred-year-old classic, written by the Japanese monk Eihei Dōgen, expounds on and explains the philosophical basis for one of the largest and most influential sects of Zen Buddhism. It’s one of the great classics of philosophical literature, revered by people all over the world. However, like many revered philosophical classics, it’s rarely read, even by those who claim to love it.
I immediately thought it was a cool idea to try to do this with Shōbōgenzō, but I didn’t know if it would work. I’ve studied Shōbōgenzō for around thirty years, much of that time under the tutelage of Gudo Wafu Nishijima. Nishijima Roshi was my ordaining teacher, and he, along with his student Chodo Mike Cross, produced a highly respected English translation that was for many years the only full English translation available. I had already written one book about Shōbōgenzō, called Sit Down and Shut Up (New World Library, 2007), and had referenced Shōbōgenzō extensively in all five of my other books about Zen practice.
My attitude toward Shōbōgenzō is somewhat like Mark Russell’s attitude toward the Bible. I deeply respect the book and its author, Dōgen. But I don’t look at it the way a religious person regards a holy book. Zen Buddhism is not a religion, however much it sometimes looks like one. There are no holy books in Zen, especially the kind of Zen that Dōgen taught. In Dōgen’s view everything is sacred, and to single out one specific thing, like a book or a city or a person, as being more sacred than anything else is a huge mistake. So the idea of rewriting Dōgen’s masterwork didn’t feel at all blasphemous or heretical to me.
But Shōbōgenzō presents a whole set of challenges Russell didn’t face with the Bible. The biggest one is that the Bible is mainly a collection of narrative stories. What Russell did, for the most part, was to summarize those stories while skipping over much of the philosophizing that occurs within them. Shōbōgenzō, on the other hand, has just a few narrative storytelling sections, and these are usually very short. It’s mostly philosophy. This meant that I’d have to deal extensively with the kind of material Russell generally skipped over.
Still, it was such an interesting idea that I figured I’d give it a try. My idea was to present the reader with everything important in Shōbōgenzō. I didn’t summarize every single line. But I have tried to give a sense of every paragraph of the book without leaving anything significant out. While I’d caution you not to quote this book and attribute it to Dōgen, I have tried to produce a book wherein you could conceivably do so without too much fear of being told by someone, “That’s not really what Dōgen said!” Obviously, if a line mentions Twinkies or zombies or beer, you’ll know I’ve done a bit of liberal paraphrasing. I have noted these instances, though, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
In a sense, with this book I am following a time-honored tradition of misquoting Dōgen. When the first teachers of Soto Zen Buddhism showed up in America and Europe, there were not yet any translations of Dōgen in English or other European languages. So these teachers would just quote things from memory and translate them into English or French or whatever other foreign-to-them language they were attempting to communicate in on the fly.
Several well-known examples of this occur in the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. That book was compiled from transcripts of lectures Suzuki Roshi, who was then head of the San Francisco Zen Center, gave in the late 1960s. In it he quotes Dōgen a number of times, but most of these quotations are wrong.
For example, he has Dōgen saying, “Life is one continuous mistake.” It’s a great line, and lots of people — including me — have attributed it to Dōgen ever since. But when some folks at San Francisco Zen Center tried to trace that quote, nobody could find it. The nearest anyone has found is in the book Eihei Koroku (Dōgen’s Extensive Record) in which Dōgen says, “There is the principle of the Way that we must make one mistake after another” and elsewhere he says, “Making mistakes, we make more mistakes.”
As far as I’m concerned, though, Suzuki’s Dōgen quotations are all close enough for rock and roll. He understood the meaning of Dōgen’s words, even if he hadn’t memorized them. Some people even say that Dōgen’s own famous line, from his teacher Tendo Nyojo, about “dropping off body and mind” may be a misquote. Those words never appear in any of the existing transcripts of talks by Tendo Nyojo made by his Chinese disciples. However, this is perfectly fine. Buddhism is basically an oral tradition, not a religion based on a book. The meaning behind the words is far more important than the specific words used to convey that meaning. The way human beings tend to misremember what they’ve heard is actually part of the Zen tradition.
In any case, this is definitely not a new translation of Shōbōgenzō. We are lucky to be living in a time when several of those are available, with more on the way, so there’s no reason for me to add to that pile. Instead, what I offer here is a sense of what I get when I read Shōbōgenzō.
The Shōbōgenzō proper consists of ninety-five chapters. Apparently Dōgen originally planned to write a hundred, but he died before he could write the final five. In this book I have paraphrased the first twenty-one chapters, although in two cases I combined chapters that are two-parters in the original into single chapters, so you end up getting nineteen paraphrased chapters, plus I give you “Fukanzazengi” as a bonus, which is often included in Shōbōgenzō translations as an appendix. These twenty-one chapters constitute volume one of the Nishijima/Cross translation. Nishijima and Cross followed the now-established tradition of organizing their Shōbōgenzō translation chronologically, with Dōgen’s earliest dated writings first and his undated writings at the end. I haven’t started work on volume 2 yet. This was a bear of a book to put together, and I want to see how it goes with this one before diving in again. That means volume 2 may be up to you, dear reader. If you like this one, let me know (especially by buying it!).
When I posted a few lines from this book on the Interwebs to see what sort of reaction they got, people immediately demanded to know what Dōgen “really” said, either in the form of a standard translation or in the original Japanese. So I anticipate that readers of this book will want the same. In many cases I have given alternate translations, or even Dōgen’s actual Japanese. But if I did that for the whole book, the workload would’ve been too much, and the book itself would have been ginormous. Instead, I’ve put a bibliography at the end that includes the translations and Japanese versions I used. You’ll have to look up the lines I haven’t given alternate versions of for yourself, I’m afraid.
That being said, I really didn’t want this to be a book full of those kinds of fake Buddha quotes people are constantly sending each other on Facebook, only to be told that Buddha never really said those things. So I’ve been pretty careful with my paraphrasing. I relied mainly on my teacher’s translation of Shōbōgenzō. That edition is extremely useful because it has copious footnotes. Most lines, phrases, and words that could be translated very differently are noted, with the original Japanese. I also kept Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation at hand to double-check anything I had doubts about. If I still wasn’t certain, I’d go to the original thirteenth-century Japanese text, which Nishijima Roshi provides in his twelve-volume translation of Shōbōgenzō into modern Japanese. Finally, I kept one eye on the Soto Zen Text Project’s translation of Shōbōgenzō, which is currently incomplete and only available online, and another on the Shasta Abbey translation, which tends to be kind of florid in its language but doesn’t stray too far from the original meaning. I also consulted the translation by Kōsen Nishiyama and John Stevens frequently, as well as the partial translations by Norman Waddell, Masao Abe, and Thomas Cleary; I consulted several other partial translations too.
As I said earlier, I studied and practiced the Shōbōgenzō in Japan with Gudo Wafu Nishijima for around two decades and before that did another decade of study and practice with an American teacher named Tim McCarthy. When I say, I “studied and practiced the Shōbōgenzō,” I mean that I not only studied the text but also tried to put its lessons into practice in the traditional way.
I never entered a monastery as a full-time live-in monk, which many people consider the only way to practice what Dōgen preached. But this would ignore the fact that Dōgen taught a number of lay students throughout his life and, indeed, recommended zazen as a daily practice not only for those who live in monasteries but also to anyone interested in self-discovery. During those decades, I did zazen every day, attended a whole lot of Zen retreats, and read Shōbōgenzō numerous times by myself, besides listening to hundreds of Nishijima’s lectures about it. I also read as much of the scholarship about Dōgen as I could handle, being a guy who is generally more drawn to works like The War That Time Forgot.
My teacher Nishijima Roshi was mostly a self-made scholar of Shōbōgenzō. He first came across the work in a used bookstore when he was in his teens. He said that it intrigued him because even though it was written in his own language, he couldn’t understand it at all. And yet, like a lot of us, he could feel that although the book was opaque and hard to comprehend, it appeared to have a logic and power all its own. As weird as some of its passages are, it never seems like the ravings of a madman. Rather, it appears to be the work of someone who has touched a very profound truth and is struggling to put that truth into words that others can understand.
Later on Nishijima studied with Kodo Sawaki, the legendary “homeless monk” who never kept a temple of his own (until he was very old, anyway) and instead traveled all over Japan, leading retreats for interested laypeople. Sawaki was also a Dōgen scholar and professor at Komazawa University, which was founded by the Soto sect, the organization that traces their roots back to the temple Dōgen founded in the thirteenth century.
Nishijima devoted his life to studying Shōbōgenzō. The footnotes he added to his translations show the incredible breadth of his study. Every obscure old text Dōgen referenced, Nishijima looked up and read. Every name Dōgen mentions, Nishijima traces and gives you a brief history of the person. The translation he produced has yet to be equaled in its thorough scholarship, even though technically it’s the work of an amateur, since he was never a professor of Dōgen studies or anything like that (he worked in finance most of his life).
For most readers, the biggest single obstacle in Dōgen’s writing is his use of contradictions. He constantly tells you something is one way and then a few sentences or even a couple of words later tells you it’s the exact opposite way. This violates one of the cardinal rules of logic. Aristotle said, “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time.” But Dōgen does that all over the place!
Nishijima Roshi’s way of explaining this was to say that Dōgen adopted four points of view when talking about any given topic. These four points of view were (1) idealism/subjectivism, (2) materialism/objectivism, (3) action, and (4) realism, which synthesizes the other three. We can look at any topic through these four lenses, and it will appear quite different through each one. Often the same thing can look so different, depending on how you look at it, that it appears to be its own opposite.
Our Western philosophical tradition is generally confined to the first two of these points of view. Our religions are spiritual, which in most cases is a synonym for idealistic. Here I’m not using the word idealistic to mean that one has ideals in the sense of principles, morals, and ethics and sticks to them, or as in idealism, used almost like a synonym for optimism. I mean instead that religions take the stance that the spiritual side of our experience — the world of ideas and meanings and inner, subjective reality — is more real than the material side.
Science, on the other hand, is materialistic. It concerns itself only with physical matter and measurable energy and ignores or at least marginalizes the subjective world of ideas and spirituality. No matter what belief system you have, paper always burns at 425° F (218° C). No matter what religion you are, the speed of light as measured by a stationary observer is the same. More radical versions of materialism take the stance that our subjective/spiritual sense is negligible or even destructive. This can lead people to adopt the more common form of materialism, which says that the best way to live is to get as much money, social prestige, and power as possible: he who dies with the most toys wins.
