SBZC welcomed guest teacher Brad Warner on May 29, 2021.

Brad Warner is the author of Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen, Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up, Don’t Be a Jerk, and several other books. He was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk by Gudo Nishijima Roshi. He grew up in Akron, Ohio and Nairobi, Kenya. He has practiced Zen for over 30 years. He plays bass in the hardcore punk band Zero Defex. For 11 years, he worked in Japan for the company founded by creator of Godzilla. He’s appeared in the film Zombie Bounty Hunter M.D. and there is a documentary about him titled Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen.

Full Transcript

Okay, good morning everybody. I'm supposed to go till 9:50, so I'll try to make that work. I'm not in my usual place. I'm at the Angel Cities Zen Center because we're going to have a sitting starting at 10am, so I'm going to join them late after talking to you guys here.

I thought I would talk a little bit about American Zen and myself and how all that comes together as far as I'm concerned. I made some notes for this talk but it's not exactly a scripted talk, so forgive me if it rambles a little bit.

Probably, looking at the group here in Gallery View, I'm going to assume most people kind of know the story of Zen coming to America, so I'll be short with it. Basically, Buddhism appeared in the United States in the 20th century, 2500 years after it had appeared in Asia. So we're coming into the game very late. Really, as far as being widely practiced in this country, it wasn't until the 1960s that that happened, even though there were some practitioners before then. It was confined mostly to ethnic groups practicing in their own traditions, isolated usually from the wider community, and just extremely small groups of others.

You really had that explosion in the 60s when all the masters came over, not just Buddhist but various other Eastern traditions. You had the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and all those people in the Hare Krishna movement and all of that. So we've only been at this game about 50 years.

I think there are some interesting parallels between how it got introduced into our country and how it usually tends to get introduced everywhere it goes, except probably the only real exception is India because it started out there. In every other place that Buddhism has entered, it's done pretty much the same thing, which is it first gets transmitted as a matter of intellectual study.

In our country, we had all the books by D.T. Suzuki and people like that that were studied in universities and things for a few decades before people actually started practicing. If you look at the history of Buddhism in Japan and Buddhism in China, it's exactly the same thing. If you look at Dogen's history, that we're probably all roughly familiar with, Buddhism had been studied as an intellectual matter in Japan for quite a while, actually quite a bit longer than it was studied over here. Then Dogen was one of the first actual priests of Zen. I mean, they had, you know, it's very complicated, but people were actually practitioner priests rather than intellectuals of the Zen lineage anyway. You had Eisai and then you had Nonin and then you had Dogen. So these three people were really the first ones in Japan to do it.

So we had the San Francisco Zen Center and all of that. I came into it in the early 80s. I don't know how many of you read my biography. I'm 57 years old. A lot of people look at me and guess that I'm 35 or something, which is sort of nice in some ways. But in the teaching of Zen business, it's actually a disadvantage because everybody goes, "Oh, how's that kid? He doesn't know anything."

But I was a kid when I first encountered this stuff in around 1983, I'm guessing, maybe 84. I was a student at Kent State University in Ohio. As my bio says, I had grown up partly in Africa. I was mostly raised in Ohio, but we spent about four years of my childhood in Nairobi, Kenya. East Africa has a very large Indian population, so I saw a lot of Hinduism when I was there. I think that just stuck with me as an object of fascination. Like, what is this stuff? My dad had a friend who was Indian and we'd go to his house and see these statues and pictures sometimes and go, "What's that about?"

So that got planted in my mind and I wanted to study something about Hinduism when I got to the university. But the only class I could find that was remotely related to Hinduism was a class called Zen Buddhism. So I took that as kind of like, I'll do this instead because what I want isn't on the syllabus. And that really profoundly changed my life.

When I look back at the time that it happened, the sort of societal time in American history and how old I was, I was like 19 or 18. At that point, people my age, especially among the peer group I hung out with, were largely very dismissive of Eastern religions because I was in the sort of punk rock scene. Part of what the punk rock scene was all about was rejecting the 60s. We saw that sort of peace and love stuff happen when we were kids. A lot of my parents weren't hippies, but a lot of people I knew had sort of hippie parents and had become disillusioned, seeing the trajectory where it was supposed to go and where it actually ended up by the end of the 70s and into the 80s. It was like, oh, that whole thing failed.

Eastern religions were just kind of, I don't know how we looked at it, how most of my peer group looked at it. It's just like the old hippie junk that we rejected. We rejected drugs and rejected anything that was associated with that sort of thing. So I tended to kind of keep a low profile about my involvement in this stuff among my peers. I was sort of embarrassed to tell them that I was into Zen.

I think this kind of has shaped how I look at Americans, because I see a lot of it holding on to this. It's almost a nostalgic 60s thing that I see going on sometimes and I go, oh, we got to get away from that.

So that's how I kind of came into it. One thing that happened though for me was that around 1993, I think it was 1993, I moved to Japan. I had been studying and practicing Zen for about 10 years by then with an American teacher who was in the lineage of Kobun Chino, who was one of those founders, founding pioneers of Buddhism in America. My teacher Tim had been his student.

At the time that I met Tim, it was unusual to see a non-Asian person as an ordained teacher of Buddhism. This is, you know, early 80s. They were starting to appear in the world, but I remember going to the class and being like, "Oh, the teacher is not an Asian guy." I was actually trying a few months ago to figure out when the first non-Asian Buddhist priests were ordained in the US. And I couldn't figure it out. But just to make a guess, I would say in the early 80s, there were maybe a couple of dozen that existed, and if you go back five years before that, it was probably a dozen. There's not that many.

What happened when I went to Japan, I told you this is going to be a rambling talk, is I kind of was out of the American Zen stream at that point. I found a teacher over there. I didn't go to Japan, by the way, to study Zen. I went to get a job. I found a job as an English teacher over there through the JET program, the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, where they basically hire anybody with a pulse. Actually, I think it's changed. But back then I think a pulse and a bachelor's degree in anything were the two requirements. And it was fairly easy to get the gig.

So I was teaching English over there. And then I decided to get a real job in Japan and work for this company founded by the guy who invented Godzilla. And that moved me to Tokyo. And once I was in Tokyo, I found a teacher who taught non-Japanese students.

Now this is another interesting thing. Tim had never lived in Japan, but he told me based on things he'd heard from Kobun that it was difficult to find a Zen teacher who actually taught Zen in Japan. And that is true. I can vouch for that myself.

The first year I was in Japan, I was in a city called Takaoka, which is in Toyama Prefecture, which is one prefecture south of Fukui, which is where Dogen established Eiheiji. So I wasn't far from Eiheiji. In fact, I went and visited Eiheiji at the time when I was an English teacher in Toyama. Some Japanese guy wanted to impress this girl he was trying to impress with his knowledge of English. And that was his pretext for driving, all three of us driving over to Eiheiji and taking a look at the place. So I went to Eiheiji as a tourist. I've never actually practiced there or announced myself as a Zen teacher or anything over there.

But I saw that and you couldn't find a Zen teacher. I think there were only three times I sat in the year that I lived in Toyama Prefecture at a temple. And all three times were organized by other gaijin foreigners who lived over there. I remember one time in particular, we arrived at this temple, there's like five of us, to go do zazen at the temple and we're met at the door by a priest who showed us the zendo and then left. We had expected that we were going to sit zazen with the monks and this guy just kind of said hi and greeted us and showed us where the zendo was and then I don't know where he went, he went somewhere else.

So that ended up being the first time I led zazen, at this temple in Takaoka, I think it was in Takaoka, where the priest just left. And he never came back again. I remember leaving the place going, we could walk off with some of these statues if we wanted I guess, because there was nobody there at all as far as I could tell. He'd gone home, you know, and just left us in the temple alone.

So that is the kind of attitude that one tends to encounter in Japan towards zazen. There isn't a lot of interest in it over there, even among people who are sort of Zen priests and monks. The other two times we did it was almost the same thing. Very similar situation where we gaijin were sitting in the temple but nobody else was bothering with us or trying to talk to us. So it's kind of cooled off over there.

And I was lucky to meet a teacher when I moved to Tokyo, who was interested in teaching Zen. That was Gudo Wafu Nishijima Roshi, and he had translated Shobogenzo into English. So I found him and started practicing with his little group that met on Saturdays at one in the afternoon, and the main reason was because he taught in English, and it was a good schedule.

There was one other person I was aware of whose zazen you could go to and it was... Oh, what was her name? Warner. I think she had the same last name as me. Oh, I'm blanking on it. It's a woman American Zen priest who was over there who since passed away. How was her name? Sorry, this will drive me nuts until I remember it. But anyway, I didn't go to her groups at all because they met at five in the morning on like Thursdays and I was like there's no way I'm going to do that because I worked every day so that was not going to happen.

So it took me a while to really understand Nishijima Roshi because I thought he was quite different from Tim, although they were both in the Soto lineage. His style of presentation was very different. But in both cases... Well, okay, let me tell you a bit about Nishijima Roshi. He was also frustrated by the way Zen was presented in Japan. He was never a formal student of Kodo Sawaki Roshi, but he was a follower and a fan of Kodo Sawaki and when he quoted his teachers he usually quoted Kodo Sawaki. He actually took Dharma transmission from Rempo Niwa Roshi, who was a different person, but it was pretty obvious that he learned most of what he learned from Kodo Sawaki.

Kodo Sawaki, in case you don't know, was very interested in bringing back the practice of zazen, because of the way Zen was in Japan where not even Zen priests were very interested in doing zazen practice. He focused exclusively on zazen practice and so did Nishijima Roshi.

What happened while I was over there... I spent pretty much all of the 90s, I came back in 2004, moved back to the United States so you know, a decade and a year, 11 years over there. And in those 11 years, something happened to Buddhism in America and it became popular, which was slightly shocking to me but it was because it was something I had not expected.

These were the early days of the internet. I mean I didn't have an internet connection until the late 90s myself. I wasn't getting a lot of information about what was going on in America except when I'd go back once a year for a couple of weeks and visit my parents and then I'd see things and go, "Oh, Lisa Simpson's a Buddhist now?" You know, it's like, there's a weird thing that's happening over here.

And it wasn't until I came back and kind of saw the popularization of it that it struck me that this thing that I'd gotten into at a time when nobody was interested in it was something that now everybody was interested in or a lot of people were interested in. And it had become highly commercialized. And when I say that, I don't mean that the Zen centers themselves had become commercialized but it had become a kind of a pop culture thing to talk about Buddhism and to declare yourself a Buddhist and so forth. Like I said, Lisa Simpson was a Buddhist and all these sort of pop culture figures were Buddhists now.

One of the books I wrote was called "Zen Wrapped in Karma, Dipped in Chocolate." And the reason for that title, I didn't just make that up, that came from a Yo Plate Yogurt commercial that I saw when I was visiting my parents. I think it's when I saw it on, it was just on TV and it had these two women sitting in a spa eating some yogurt and one of them says to the other about the yogurt, "It's like Zen wrapped in karma dipped in chocolate." I think it was chocolate flavored yogurt that they were advertising, which sounds like a good idea to me. But anyway, it struck me that oh, this is what it's become in the eyes of the pop culture.

In a way, it was good for me because one of the reasons I am speaking to you here now is because I write books about this stuff. But it was never my intention to become a writer of books about Zen or books about Buddhism. I was trying to be a writer for years, for a long time, ever since high school. And I'd managed to publish a couple of short stories and I was working for Tsuburaya Productions who made this show called Ultraman and I would submit scripts to Ultraman and none of them ever got picked up as such. Recently I bought this off of online.

I bought this book, an Ultraman that came out in the 90s, and I saw some things I'd contributed to the Ultraman mythos were in that book, just minor things like names of things or stuff like that. Every time they wanted to give, it's very fashionable in Japan to give any movie an English title, like it will have a Japanese title and an English title. I would almost always come up with the English titles for the movies. So I'm responsible for "Ultraman Tiga, the Final Odyssey." That's not good. I thought that was good. Anyway.

So it became popular and a bit unrecognizable. Some of the things I saw when I came back were interesting to me. Like one of the first things I did, because I moved to Los Angeles, which I'd never been a California person at all. I was from Ohio and Los Angeles and California in general seemed like another foreign country as far as I was concerned. I'd been to Japan and now here's another. They use the same money as we did in Ohio, but otherwise they were a different country as far as I could tell.

I went and visited the San Francisco Zen Center and I happened to be there on a day when they chanted the Metta Sutra. And I was like, oh, this is not Zen. This is not something we chant in the Zen lineage. It struck me that maybe, and this is just speculation on my part, the reason the Metta Sutra was chosen by the San Francisco Zen Center as something to chant was because of Christianity.

One of the things that Buddhism has had to grapple with in being introduced to the West that it never had to deal with before, I think, are science and Christianity and the concept of God and things like that, which were not part of what Buddhism had been all about. But what Buddhism does when it enters a new culture is it adapts to those things. So we talk in terms of God sometimes. I'm quite fond of doing it because I like bothering people by talking about God in the context of Zen.

Science is an interesting one because there's a book called "The Making of Buddhist Modernism" that I read a few years ago. I've noticed a kind of sense that people think Buddhist modernism, where Buddhism kind of takes on these ideas of science and modernity, is something unique to the West. But it was certainly a part of Nishijima Roshi's teaching, and maybe it's because he was trying to teach Westerners. He would frame things, he liked to frame things in scientific terms, and his favorite go-to thing was to talk about Dogen's dropping off body and mind in terms of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

If there's a few of Nishijima Roshi's lectures and things online these days, every third lecture that I saw about him had something to do with the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. So you'll find a lot of his ideas about that in there. He basically said that he'd read books by Carl Menninger that said that the nervous system was divided in the parasympathetic and sympathetic, and I always get these wrong. I think I've got it right. He identified the sympathetic nervous system as "dropping off body and mind," as body, and the parasympathetic nervous system as mind. And said that when Dogen said he dropped off body and mind, and this is the gesture he always did, it was sometimes the sympathetic nervous system, the matter is ascendant, and sometimes the parasympathetic mind is ascendant, and dropping off body and mind is when the two become absolutely equal so that there's no, you don't notice either of them pulling you in one direction or another. And that was his, he loved that explanation of Zazen. I think part of it was because it bugged people so much because they wanted a more mystical explanation and he loved to give this kind of scientific explanation to get people out of that sort of thing.

Also, I have been traveling a lot, not in the past year, but from 2009 until 2019, so for 10 years I was, and I hope I'm going to be going again, making these trips to Europe every year, and getting to see what was going on there because that's also interesting. They got into the game a little later than us. So the first sort of European Zazen people, Deshimaru went over there to France and created a pretty big movement in, I think he got there in the mid 70s, I'm guessing, somewhere around there. And so a little bit after our movement started, so they're always lagging a bit behind the Americans.

It's been kind of interesting because there are fewer sort of fixed opinions I find among European Zazen practitioners. The Americans kind of, we tend to want to figure out something right away and become experts in it very quickly. So there are a lot of experts about Buddhism in the United States, even among not just ordained people, just anybody, everybody thinks they understand what it is or it seems I encounter a lot of people who think they got it. And they ought to tell me what it's about because I'd be interested to know if they got it that quickly. But you find less of that in Europe and the centers are smaller and people seem to be more open to trying to explore the thing.

I don't know where we're going with this. I think it is inevitable, given the growth rate of Buddhism in America that it is, if it hasn't already become, it is going to become one of the significant religions in the United States. I think Buddhism is going to become very significant for Americans. But I wonder where it's going to go because I see a lot of people trying desperately to slot Buddhism into Western categories. So, you know, is it a religion? Is it a philosophy? Is it a self-help movement?

I got into an argument with somebody on the internet a few years ago about whether Zen Buddhist priests were in the helping professions because he was very insistent that we were in the helping professions. And I was like, oh, you know, when I hear that phrase, helping professions, I don't know if I'm part of the helping profession. But there's kind of a push in some circles to kind of, it seems like the Americans want to box it in, you know, and box it in according to their categories.

So a lot of people want to have more regulations, for example, on Buddhist priests. And there's a lot of movements to try to make organizations that will establish and enforce rules that we have to follow. I was invited to join one of these organizations, and I looked at what their qualifications were for being a Zen priest. And they were kind of like, I was like, well, I don't really meet these qualifications. You know, I mean, I was legitimately ordained and given Dharma transmission by Nishijima Roshi, but he had a kind of a different way of doing things. And they said, oh, that doesn't matter. And I thought, well, if that doesn't matter, then I don't want to join because you're being hypocrites about your group. You know, I guess they wanted me in because I have a name, I suppose. But I was like, wow, I'm not qualified.

I've been kind of personally resistant to that sort of thing because I think we may be trying to kill it by boxing it in to our categories. And that makes it a little bit more difficult. But I think it's inevitable that it is going to be boxed in and that there are going to be regulatory organizations around it, and that we're going to decide what it is and try to get everybody into a kind of a uniform way of teaching. So this is what we teach. This is what we do. These are the ceremonies and make it all kind of boxed in, which would be unfortunate.

But, you know, that kind of Zen is going to become significant and that kind of pop culture of Zen, the mindfulness movement and all this stuff. When I go to, well, I live in Los Angeles, you guys know California. Sometimes when I'm talking to people outside of California, they're surprised. But, you know, you go to the checkout stand at certain supermarkets and they're just doing Buddhist magazines and stuff sitting there. And I'm going, oh, this is what people think it is. You know, we've got our Dharma celebrities and all this stuff. And there's always a danger for somebody like me, just the position I have in the whole thing, to become one of those. I don't want to enter into the Dharma celebrity business, so I'm constantly doing little things to undercut my popularity. If I think I'm getting too popular, I'll put a blog out or a video out where I'll say something unfashionable and try to cull the herd a little bit.

But I think we've got to watch out for that because there have been a few cases already where it's been pretty evident that celebrity has caused significant problems for a Buddhist teacher, and getting caught up in the trappings of celebrity has been their downfall. So I see a lot of that happening.

I guess I got through most of my notes here, and it's exactly the time I was supposed to finish anyway. So maybe we can have a conversation about this or about anything else. I'm willing to talk about anything. I hope I didn't offend anyone.