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Page 126.02
Sit Down and Shut Up
Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye
by Brad Warner
May 2007
Trade Paper
$14.95 US
($19.50 CAN)
978-1-57731-559-9 | 9781577315599
1-57731-559-6 | 1577315596
256 pp
36 per carton
Philosophy & Spirituality
RELIGION
Buddhism/Zen (see also PHILOSOPHY/Zen)
Spring 2007
Imprint Rights: W* (excludes United Kingdom, Australia & New Zealand)
Title Rights: W
Product Safety: Mfgr warrants no warnings apply
Published by
New World Library
Description:
In Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad Warner tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo by 13th-century Zen master Dogen. Illuminating Dogen’s enigmatic teachings in plain language, Warner intertwines sharp philosophical musings on sex, evil, anger, meditation, enlightenment, death, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the power and pain of the punk rock ethos. Riffing on his triumphant return to Ohio for a reunion concert of Akron punk bands, Brad uncovers the real heart of Zen, in teachings and stories with a sharp smack of truth,.
Excerpt:
WHY DOGEN MATTERS
Long before I was a Zen monk, I was a punk rock bass player. Long before I was exposed to the teachings of Dogen Zenji, I studied the teachings of Ian MacKaye of the DC-based hardcore band Minor Threat who advocated a remarkably similar philosophy — no drink, no drugs, no smoking, just honest hard work and a commitment to what was true.
When I was just seventeen, I first saw the hardcore punk band ODFx (aka Zero Defects or Zero Defex) play at a nightclub called The Bank in downtown Akron. I thought they were God’s gift to music. They were the most over-the-top thing I had ever seen on stage and remain so to this day. When I found out they were looking for a bass player, I jumped at the chance to join. I say without apology that ODFx was Akron Ohio’s premier hardcore punk band. Which means pretty much nothing. It meant we played to crowds of fifty people instead of crowds of five. We were big fish in a very small pond. And we didn’t last very long. The band played its last show sometime in the Spring of 1983. By then I was fed up with punk rock. We all were.
In almost no time at all, hardcore punk had gone from being a potent force for change into an excuse for tough dudes to beat the crap out of each other. I loved the guys in the band. But I was ready to do something else. It turned out we all were ready to do something else. If we could have found a way to do that within the framework of the group, I have no doubt ODFx would have been a major force on the music scene in the 1980’s rather than a footnote. But, such is life.
I moved on to other things. I signed with New York’s Midnight Records label and put out five albums of the most anti-punk music on Earth — psychedelia — with an ever changing line up I dubbed Dimentia 13 after a cheesy horror flick by a young Francis Ford Coppola. I discovered Zen Buddhism. I moved to Japan. Appeared in monster movies. Became a Buddhist monk (footnote: You can read all about this in my first book, so I’m skipping the details here.). Got married. Moved to Los Angeles. And somewhere in the middle of all of that the Internet appeared. Suddenly kids who were in diapers when ODFx breathed its last wanted to know about the old hardcore scene. The members of the band found each other via a website called ClePunk, dedicated to the Cleveland and Akron punk rock scene. We started talking about playing some shows again.
In the meantime, I was working on a book. As some of you must surely know, I wrote a book a couple years before this one called Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth About Reality. I didn’t come up with that title, by the way. That’s what my publishers decided to call it. But I liked that title, so I went with it.
I originally wrote the book believing there was no way in Hell anyone would ever want to publish such a thing. I’d been dedicated to Zen for nearly two decades before I started working on the book. But my take on Zen seemed to be completely at odds with nearly everyone else I encountered who was interested in the philosophy.
The people I met at Zen centers I visited were usually older than me. And smarter, too. And a lot quieter. They were generally almost studiously ignorant of popular culture, the kind of people who don’t own TVs or purchase CDs, unless maybe they’re recordings of Chinese chants or something. I never met a single Zen practitioner who was into punk rock or who liked Godzilla movies, let alone one who played punk rock and appeared in Godzilla movies (footnote: Actually I’ve never been in a Godzilla movie — yet. But I’ve been in a bunch of Ultraman movies, which, to the untrained eye often appear to be pretty much the same thing). Zen people tend to be bookish intellectuals in pale blue pullovers rather than ratty haired guitarists in ripped up jeans.
Yet I had found this philosophy to be deeply appealing to me for the very same reasons I had found punk rock appealing. It was a philosophy that asked questions rather than providing pat answers. It didn’t have any time for bullshit. It was completely unpretentious. Zen teachers were rude and uncouth, rebellious, real.
I thought that maybe, just may be, there might be a few people out there who might be interested in Zen if only it weren’t presented in such a wimpy nerdy fashion all the time. So I wrote what I conceived of as a loud book about silence. When I was done, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. My most concrete plan was to Xerox it myself and see if I could get it distributed by whoever stocks the book shelves at Tower Records, since they seemed to carry a lot of off-the-wall stuff. But, I thought, I might as well give it a shot with a few publishers before I took it to the local Kinko’s.
I got turned down by most of the publishers I sent it to, which was no surprise. But, one publisher liked it and wanted to put it out. I was game (footnote: So he shot her). So I signed a contract and got down to the work of making my fanzine quality writing into a slick, shiny, professional type book. The resulting book was OK. And there was immediately a demand for another one just like it. But I’d written that book already and I really didn’t want to turn it into some kind of Chicken (Tofu?) Soup for the Zen Soul Part a Million kind of thing. So I hemmed and hawed for a long time.
Eventually, though, I started writing another book. I wanted this one to be something completely different from Hardcore Zen. It was gonna be about a very old book called Shobogenzo or ???? if you’re into reading it in Japanese. It means Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye. Don’t ask about the left Dharma eye, by the way (footnote; Sometimes it’s translated as the True Dharma Eye Treasury. Whatever). It’s by a dead Japanese guy named Dogen, sometimes known as Dogen Zenji meaning “Zen Master Dogen” or Eihei Dogen meaning “Dogen, you know, that dude who lives in Eihei temple.”
The English translation of Dogen’s Shobogenzo by my teacher Gudo Nishijima and his student Chodo Cross — which is the source of most of the quotations in this book — had been the cornerstone of the intellectual side of my Zen practice. But Zen isn’t really about intellectual stuff like books. It’s a philosophy of action, a philosophy you do rather than one you read about. Yet what really sets Dogen apart from all the other Buddhist Masters before and since is his ability to express his insights in words. Others may have plumbed those depths. But none had ever described what they’d discovered quite so well. But in order to describe what he’d understood Dogen had to almost reinvent human language itself. Even in its original Japanese his style is full of weird turns of phrase and bizarre grammar. Upon first reading, either in translation or in the original language, it almost sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person. Get into the rhythm a little bit, though, and you discover he wasn’t just a guy who talked crazy. In fact all hiss crazy talk has a very clear and consistent logic to it. It may be the most sane material anyone has ever committed to writing. I’d gotten a lot out of my reading of Dogen and I thought I’d try and share some of that. So I bit the bullet and wrote another god damned book.
Let me give you a little background on Dogen to start off with. Dogen was born in 1200 to an aristocratic family back in the days when all of Japan looked like the sets for The Last Samurai. His father died when he was just three years old and his mother died only five years later. Having lost even those people children believe are the most reliable, stable things in the world — his parents — at such a young age, he started searching something that was perfectly reliable. That’s what got him into Buddhism.
I can relate to this myself. My parents are both still alive. But several people in my family have contracted a particular disease and died from it while still quite young. I saw some of this happening when I was a child. At the time, I also l
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