Article based on the book Don’t Be a Jerk ©2016 by Brad Warner. Published with permission of New World Library. http://www.newworldlibrary.com

Author of Don’t Be a Jerk

What is The Shōbōgenzō: The True Treasury of the Dharma Eye and why did you decide to paraphrase it for a modern audience? 

Shōbōgenzō is a very long, very old book by a Japanese philosopher/monk named Dōgen. It was written 800 years ago and then largely forgotten. Its existence was known, but very few people read it. It was rediscovered by Japanese philosophy professors in the late 19^th Century and has since become widely regarded as one of the world’s great philosophical classics. And still hardly anyone ever reads it!

I think it’s an important book. But unfortunately translating Dōgen is extremely difficult. In the words of Kōsen Nishiyama and John Stevens who produced the first complete English edition of Shōbōgenzō, “a literal translation is almost totally incomprehensible and even a semi-literal one produces a mutant brand of English that alternately confounds and amuses the reader.” Books that try to explain Dōgen’s work are all too often written in the kind of deliberately difficult academic language that makes it very hard for anyone without advanced degrees to understand. Dōgen was not writing for audiences full of stuffy intellectuals. He wrote for ordinary people of his time. What I’m trying to do with Don’t Be a Jerk is to make Dōgen’s work accessible again, but for a very different kind of audience, one Dōgen himself couldn’t possibly have imagined would be interested in him.

I don’t feel like I’m the world’s greatest Dōgen scholar. But I have studied him for a very long time and I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I’m trying to express what I’ve learned from Dōgen in a way that’s easy to understand without sacrificing the depth of the original material.

I also think it’s very timely. I don’t think audiences 800 years ago could have understood Dōgen as well as contemporary audiences. What he said was very far ahead of its time. It still is!

The Shōbōgenzō was written by a Japanese Monk named Eihei Dōgen. What’s his story in a nutshell? 

Dōgen was born in the year 1200 as the illegitimate son of a Japanese aristocrat and his mistress. By the time he was just eight years old, both of his parents had died. This tragedy led him to enter monastic Buddhist practice when he was 12. He wasn’t satisfied with the Buddhism that was available in Japan at the time. So he traveled to China, which was then the most advanced nation in the world. There he found what he felt was a purer form of Buddhism, closer to the original practice begun in India around 500 BCE. He brought this style of Buddhism back to Japan in 1227 when he was 27 years old and established a temple. He died in 1254, at age 54, but he left behind a rich legacy of written work.

While it’s sad that he died so young, it also makes his work very interesting. Most of the written material we have about Buddhism was created by people who were much older when they started writing than Dōgen was when he died. So Dōgen’s work gives us a rare insight into the mind of a very serious practitioner who was also quite young when he wrote. His writing is much more energetic and stimulating than most other Buddhist writings because of this. He comes across in his writings like a very wise man, but also like a bit of a hot head. He’s very passionate about what he’s writing in a way that an older person wouldn’t be. He’s absolutely forthright in his opinions and extremely challenging to the status quo. He does not suffer fools kindly. He’s very in your face. Dōgen is like a punk rock Buddhist.

How did you come up with the title Don’t Be a Jerk? 

One of Dōgen’s essays in Shōbōgenzō is called Shoaku Makusa. This means “Avoid Doing Wrong.” This simple instruction, he says, is the very heart of all Buddhist teaching. In this book, I have tried to paraphrase Dōgen in the way people talk now. So I retitled that essay “Don’t Be a Jerk” because I think that’s a valid way of saying the same thing. I thought this idea was so crucial I decided it ought to be the title of the book.

What is Zazen and why is it important?  How does it different from other forms of meditation? 

Zazen is Japanese name for the essential practice of Buddhism. It goes by other names in other cultures. Zazen is often referred to as a kind of meditation. But it’s different from other forms of meditation in that it has no goal. For example, Mindfulness Meditation is trendy these days. The goal of that style of meditation is to become more mindful. In Zazen, mindfulness is considered to be a useful side-effect but it isn’t the goal. If you don’t become more mindful through doing Zazen, that doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong.

This idea of goal-less-ness is probably the hardest aspect of Zazen to really understand. We are used to every activity we do having some kind of goal. But that may be the very root of why we are so frustrated in life, because our goals are always in the future. Even when we achieve a certain goal, the first thing we do is look around for the next goal. There’s a lot of stress if you live that way, and most of us do. So learning to be without any goals at all can be incredibly freeing.

The chapter titles in Don’t Be a Jerk are fascinating. What does Note to Self: There is No Self mean? 

It’s a paradox. One of the most difficult aspects of Buddhist philosophy is the idea that there is no self, that selfhood is an illusion. Every other philosophy and religion I know of takes the existence of a self as granted and builds from there. In Christianity, for example, you have the idea of the soul, which is the immutable self that can even survive the death of the body. Hindus have a similar idea when they talk about the atman.

Buddhism says that there is no self. This seems absurd to us. Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” We know we have a self because we experience it all the time. You must have self! Who else could be reading this Q and A?

Dōgen doesn’t say that what we call “self” does not exist but that calling it “self” is the wrong way to understand it. This is a subtle distinction, but it’s important. It’s why Dōgen, a great believer in the idea of no-self, often writes in terms of self. He’s trying to get us to look more clearly at that which we call “self” in order to get a better idea what it actually is and what it is not.

What about You’re Already Enlightened, but You’re Not?

Another paradox! One of the most frustrating aspects of Dōgen is his use of contradictions. Early translators didn’t know how to deal with this. Some of them seemed to think Dōgen’s contradictions were mistakes and they went so far as to rewrite him so that he wasn’t contradicting himself.

But Dōgen’s contradictory writings are quite deliberate. He recognizes that in real life things are often one way and exactly the opposite way at the same time.

This is clear when we talk about the Buddhist concept of Enlightenment. Dōgen’s early teachers in Japan taught him that Enlightenment was a kind of almost magical thing that happens to Buddhist monks as the result of years of meditation. In China, Dōgen met a teacher who told him that Enlightenment is inherent in existence itself. And yet, his teacher said, we cannot actualize Enlightenment without practice. So you, dear reader, are both enlightened and unenlightened at the same time. And that time is right now.

The Shōbōgenzō was banned in Japan in the 1700s. Why?

After Dōgen died, his successors continued to teach and practice in the temple he established. Soon some of them established other temples. After a few hundred years the style of Buddhism Dōgen brought back from China, which was called Soto, became the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan. An organization called Soto-shu was established. It grew into a very large powerful religious institution much like the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

In the 1700s the Soto-shu came to believe they needed to have a monopoly on Dōgen’s teachings. So they petitioned the Japanese government to ban the printing and distribution of Shobogenzo. That way they were the only ones who had copies and therefore be the only ones who could tell people what the book said. They were a lot like the Catholic Church in that regard as well. Thankfully that restriction ended and now anyone can read Shobogenzo.

One of your chapters is called “Was Dōgen the First Buddhist Femininst?”  So was he and why? 

I think he was.

Dōgen was a firm believer in sexual equality. One of his essays makes that abundantly clear. In fact I had to cut that particular essay down considerably because he repeats the idea over and over until a modern reader ends up saying, “Enough already! I get it!” But given that he was writing in the 1200s in Japan, he probably had to bludgeon his audiences with the idea since it would have seemed absurd to them.

His society was steeped in the idea that women were inferior beings to men. There were supposedly sacred places that Buddhist nuns were forbidden to go because they were women but that any man, even if he was not a monk, was allowed to visit. That idea really pissed Dōgen off and he says so in no uncertain terms.

There was also an idea that a good Buddhist monk should never so much as look at a woman lest he be tempted to do something immoral. Dōgen says, “If whatever might become the object of lust should be hated, then all men should be hated too.”

What do you most hope people will take away from Don’t Be a Jerk?

I never know how to answer that question. People always ask authors what they want readers to take away from their books. But I don’t have any agenda like that. I write because I enjoy writing. I mostly hope others will enjoy reading what I enjoyed writing.

I’ve been studying Dōgen and doing the practices he recommends for around thirty years now, which is most of my life. I find his philosophical insights to be unique and extremely practical.

This book is about what Dōgen has meant to me. Maybe after reading Don’t Be a Jerk, readers can look at some of the more standard translations of Dōgen and not be so intimidated by how ancient and foreign it is. Maybe they’ll be able to apply Dōgen’s timeless insights to their own lives here and now.

Article based on the book Don’t Be a Jerk ©2016 by Brad Warner. Published with permission of New World Library. http://www.newworldlibrary.com

An Excerpt from Brad Warner

It used to be that nobody outside the worlds of stuffy academics and nerdy Zen studies knew who Do-gen 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, Do-gen 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 Do-gen 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 Do-gen, 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, Do-gen. 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 Do-gen taught. In Do-gen’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 Do-gen’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 Do-gen, 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 Do-gen 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.

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Brad Warner is the author of Don’t Be a Jerk and numerous other titles including Sit Down & Shut Up, Hardcore Zen, and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. A Soto Zen priest, he is a punk bassist, filmmaker, Japanese-monster-movie marketer, and popular blogger based in Los Angeles. Visit him online at www.hardcorezen.info.

Excerpted from Don’t Be a Jerk ©2016 by Brad Warner.  Published with permission of New World Library. http://www.newworldlibrary.com

Article based on the book Don’t Be a Jerk ©2016 by Brad Warner. Published with permission of New World Library. http://www.newworldlibrary.com

By Brad Warner, author of Don’t Be a Jerk

I discovered the 13^th Century Japanese Zen Master Eihei Do-gen when I was an 18 year-old punk rock bass player. Now I’m a waaaayyy-more-than 18 year-old punk rock bass player and I’m still trying to understand his philosophy and practice.

Do-gen is unusual in the realm of Zen Buddhist thinkers in that he wrote his own stuff and he was pretty young when he did so. Mostly when you read ancient Zen philosophy, you’re not only reading the words of a very old person, but you’re reading those words as interpreted by their students since few of the old Zen Masters (male and female, see below) were writers.

Do-gen was a writer and what’s more, he started writing very early in his career. Most of his writing was done when he was in his 30s and 40s. He became a monk when he was just 12. So while he’s very wise, he’s also young and fired up and often kind of ornery. Just the kind of thing a punk rock kid like me needed.

But Do-gen wrote 800 years ago in a time and a place very unlike ours. So he’s not that easy to understand. Still, if you work with him, and if you do the meditation practice he keeps recommending, it gets a little easier.

Here are a few things I learned from Mr. Do-gen.

1. Sit Down and Shut Up — Do-gen taught a style of meditation called Shikantaza, which means, “just sitting.” It’s meditation without any goal. You’re not trying to become more balanced or more in touch with yourself or more mindful. You’re just sitting with yourself exactly as you are. On one hand it’s dirt simple. You can learn all there is to know about the technique in a couple of minutes. But you can spend a lifetime on it and never exhaust what you can learn from it.

2. Don’t Be a Jerk —There’s a misconception that Zen is all about self-improvement and has nothing to do with ethics. But Do-gen says that the very essence of the practice can be summed up as “Don’t be a jerk.” Actually, that’s my paraphrase. In the original it’s more like, “Just avoid doing wrong.” Ethics isn’t about memorizing a set of supposedly universal moral standards because every situation is a little different. No set of rules can ever cover every situation. It’s about sitting down and shutting up and allowing what the Old Testament called the “still small voice” we all possess show you what the right action is in this specific situation.

3. Keep Your Bum Clean — When people translate Do-gen, they generally choose the juicy philosophical parts. But Do-gen also wrote some very nuts-and-bolts pieces about how to practice in a Zen monastery. My favorite of these pieces is the one in which he gives extremely detailed instructions about how monks should clean themselves after using the toilet. It’s really TMI! But Do-gen’s teaching isn’t just about high-minded philosophical ideals. It’s about every little thing you do. It’s what my teacher called a “philosophy of action.” It’s not a philosophy you read and memorize. It’s a philosophy you do.

4. Women and Men Are Both Just as Stupid — In the year 1240 CE, Do-gen wrote a sermon called Prostrating to That Which Has Attained the Marrow. You wouldn’t guess from the title, but the sermon is mostly about how men and women should be regarded as absolutely equal when it comes to their capacity to understand the deepest truths of life. In Japan in the 13^th Century that was revolutionary.

Remember that women couldn’t even vote in the USA until 1920. In Japan in Do-gen’s day the spiritual inequality of women was taken for granted. There were temples that all women, including Buddhist nuns, were forbidden to enter that any man could walk into any time he pleased. Do-gen denounced that practice in no uncertain terms and went on to say that anyone who held the view that men are superior to women is an idiot. I already believed that before I read Do-gen, but it was amazing and inspiring to read words like that from a man who lived when he did.

5. You Are Not Your Self and Neither Am I — The Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion is one of the trickiest aspects of the philosophy. You can tell me the Loch Ness Monster and the Easter Bunny aren’t real, but if you say that my self is unreal that just sounds crazy. I know I have a self because here I am!

But Do-gen isn’t saying that all those things you include within the concept of “self” are unreal. You have a personality and an individual history, you have your credit cards and I can’t use them, that’s all true. It’s just that when we combine this stuff into something called “self” — and then believe that this “self” we have created is a real thing — that’s when we get into trouble.

We waste our time, energy and effort building up something that doesn’t even exist. Then we defend this imaginary concept against imaginary attacks. We hold this “self” — that doesn’t even exist except in our minds — to be the single most important thing in all the world. And because of that, we suffer.

It takes more to get past this than simply acknowledging that we understand the self to be unreal. But that’s a very good first step. I know it’s made my life a whole lot better.

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Brad Warner is the author of Don’t Be a Jerk and numerous other titles including Sit Down & Shut Up, Hardcore Zen, and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. A Soto Zen priest, he is a punk bassist, filmmaker, Japanese-monster-movie marketer, and popular blogger based in Los Angeles. Visit him online at www.hardcorezen.info.

Based on the book Don’t Be a Jerk ©2016 by Brad Warner.  Published with permission of New World Library. http://www.newworldlibrary.com

The ones who hurt Jordan go on, while his days with us slip farther and farther into the past. What was the plan, the purpose, in his leaving so early, in the middle of a passionate life?

In the beginning I tried to explain that rendezvous — between Jordan and his murderers — as chance, as a random convulsion of fate where men who are prone to violence happened to cross his path. And I have imagined them as victims too, poured from families and neighborhoods that breed trauma. I have imagined them, impoverished of other opportunities, using violence as an instrument to prove themselves or meet basic needs.

I have tried to explain violence — and the moment Jordan died — as the poet W. H. Auden did: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”* But while that statement is absolutely true — as I know from my own work with trauma victims — I less and less believe it as the reason for losing my son. That’s because the matrix of cause and effect is only the most obvious explanation for events.

If I let go of my pen, the force of gravity will make it fall. Cause and effect. If a child is raised in a brutal, treacherous environment, attachment theory predicts he or she will struggle with emotion dysregulation, as well as with aggressive or impulsive behavior. Again, this would appear to be cause and effect. However, falling pens don’t make choices. Our human ability to choose — through some degree of free will — tangles the web of cause and effect. Causes become harder to trace.

To understand why Jordan was killed I’ve had to go back to the question of why we are here. In fact, I’ve had to go even further, to the purpose of the material universe.

Jordan tells me this:

The purpose of matter — whether in the form of circling planets or the human body — is to help consciousness grow. All of physical existence serves this purpose. Consciousness creates matter and the laws of the universe. Then it manipulates and lives in physical worlds in order to learn and evolve. So every event is an opportunity for souls to grow.

There is no tragedy; there is no loss. There are just events we learn from.

We select lives based on what will probably happen in that life, and what those experiences will teach. So our lesson plan determines the body, family, and environment we enter — including major relationships, challenges, and crises. But things don’t always go according to plan, because of choices — our own and those of the souls around us. The possibilities at the moment when we select a life are often changed by the counterforce of free will.

The matrix of cause and effect, stretched over time, collides with hundreds of choices by dozens of nearby souls. As a result, what we signed up for may look very different thirty, forty, or fifty years into a particular life. To add to the uncertainty, lessons that go unlearned must be presented again in new circumstances. And karmic challenges that have finally been faced and surmounted will be dropped from the lesson plan, with new learning opportunities to replace them.

How much, I ask Jordan, of the lesson plan for a life actually happens?

The big challenges and major events usually occur. This is because the waves of probability are so strong and because they intersect from multiple sources. But events with a lower probability are often erased by decisions we make. For example, souls born in the 1920s and 1930s had an almost 100 percent probability of facing World War II. Where they lived and how the war might touch them wasn’t likely to change. But choices they made responding to countless life events could change their circumstances — even to the point of altering the likely span of their lives.

In short, the big stuff is set. But as the force of probability diminishes, our individual wills have more effect on what happens. This much is always true: whether events occur as planned or are affected by choice, the purpose of everything is to learn.

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Matthew McKay, PhD, is the author of Seeking Jordan and numerous other books. He is a clinical psychologist, professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA, and founder and publisher at New Harbinger Publications. Visit him online at http://www.SeekingJordan.com.

Excerpted from Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe. Copyright ©2016 by Matthew McKay, PhD. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com