Sit Down and Shut Up

“To start off with, let me give you a little background on Dogen. He was born in 1200 to an aristocratic family back in the days when all Japan looked like the sets in The Last Samurai. His father died when he was just three years old, and his mother died five years later. Having lost the people children believe to be the most reliable, stable things in the world — parents — at such a young age, he started searching for 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 learned that this disease runs in families. So there was a chance that I would suffer from the same illness and linger for years in a pretty miserable condition until the sickness did me in, as had happened to my grandmother and a couple of my aunts.* So I started looking into religious and philosophical matters at a very early age. In Dogen’s case Buddhism was really the only religion he would have encountered. Though Shintoism was around, too, it tends to be confined to rituals and doesn’t really address the deeper aspects of human life. In my case, though, the first religion I encountered was Christianity. And, although I was very intrigued by Christian ideas, they didn’t really address my concerns.

As a young kid Dogen had a similar problem. Although Buddhism offered a lot of valuable things, he found there was one seemingly simple question that none of the old Buddhist masters he encountered could answer to his satisfaction. Buddhism says that all beings are perfect as they are, with nothing lacking and nothing extra. But it also recommends doing a lot of difficult stuff to try and realize this fact. Different sects of Buddhism recommend different stuff to do — some want you to chant, others want you to meditate, others want you to memorize a lot of stuff out of old books — but they all require you to do things, most of which aren’t a big barrel o’ fun. Why? That’s all Dogen wanted to know. If we’re already perfect, why do we need all this Buddhist practice to understand that? Why not just sit around messing with your PlayStation? It doesn’t make any difference anyhow. Right?

In spite of his lingering doubts, Dogen was impressed enough with Buddhism that by the time he was twelve, he became a monk. He studied for a time at a temple called Enryaku, which was part of the Tendai sect, an esoteric line of Buddhism with lots of mudras and mandalas — weird gestures and symbols that are supposed to have mystical meaning and power. He stayed there for three years but eventually found no satisfactory answer to his question. But when he was hanging out at the temple across the street from Enryaku — a place called Miidera (or sometimes Onjyoji for those keeping score at home) — he heard about a teacher in Kyoto named Eisai who lived at a temple called Kenninji.

Kenninji was, at the time, Japan’s head temple of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism. Zen was a sect of Buddhism that attempted to strip away a lot of the elaborate ritual that had grown up around the teachings since Buddha’s death to find the essential practice. Eisai was supposed to be pretty wise. So Dogen went to his place and put his question to him.* Eisai answered, “I don’t know anything about Buddhas of the past, present, or future. But I know that cats exist, and I know that cows exist.” Eisai’s answer struck Dogen as extraordinarily practical.

Now hold up a second,’cuz I know what you’re thinking — they were both nuts! But let’s look at Eisai’s answer again. It’s not just some Monty Python–type wisecrack. Everything else Dogen had heard was all caught up in theory and intellectualization. Eisai, however, answered on the basis of his own experience. Buddhas of the past, present, and future were matters of theory and speculation. But Eisai himself had seen cats. They probably hung around the temple, as cats often do at Japanese monasteries, and he’d seen cows. Those he could confirm. Eisai wasn’t interested in theoretical speculation. He was interested in reality.

This was the same thing I discovered when I encountered my first Buddhist teacher, Tim McCarthy. I came to him with loads of deep questions about the meaning of life, heaven, hell, God, and all that stuff. But he had no answers. Well, I shouldn’t say no answers. See, I had already come across a few dozen sets of answers to my questions, from Christians, from Hare Krishnas, from New Agers, from scientists, from punk rock philosophers.

But none of those answers was any good at all. I couldn’t believe in them even when I tried. Tim, on the other hand, made no attempt to fix reality in place and explain it all away with some formula like those guys had. That, in itself, was his answer — that you cannot possibly nail down the answers to questions like that and that it’s a waste of energy even to try. But he wasn’t a nihilist either. I’d already run into plenty of those, and their attitude of just saying screw it to everything and basically giving up was as unappealing to me as the idea of sitting in church pews listening to a bunch of old stories being repeated over and over and over again. Buddhism was different.

When Dogen found a different, more satisfying, form of Buddhism, he jumped ship and left the Tendai sect to study Zen at Kenninji. Though he spent nine years there trying to find the enlightenment that the adherents of the Rinzai sect said was supposed to come from hours and days and weeks on end of seated meditation practice called zazen, Dogen never found anything that he felt qualified as the kind of enlightenment they promised. By this time Eisai, who was already an old codger when Dogen met him,* had bit the big one. So Dogen decided to take a trip to China to find a style of Buddhism closer to its Indian source.

Meanwhile, back in my real life, I was about to make a trip, too. In December 2005 a guy named Jim Lanza had the idea of getting a bunch of the old Cleveland-area hardcore bands together to play a one-off show called Cleveland’s Screaming. He worked tirelessly to bring us all together and get it happening. A few people called the reunion show a sham, my friend Johnny Phlegm for one, pointing out that we’d formed those bands as a reaction against fat forty-year-olds dominating the music scene with out-of-date irrelevant nonsense, and here we were, all old and out of shape, playing music that had been cutting-edge twenty years ago but now was the stuff of Pepsi commercials. I tended to agree with Johnny, actually. But I also wanted to rock out with those guys again, so I got me a plane ticket and headed for Ohio.

I also decided I wanted to do more than just play at the show. I wanted to document it. A number of movies about punk rock have been made already. But all of them focus on the national or international scene, the big groups, the movers and shakers. None of those bands mattered much to me. At the time I played with Zero Defects I owned exactly three hardcore punk records, all by bands we’d opened for, all bought from the bands themselves. For me, the hard-core scene was the local scene. I didn’t give a shit about Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys. But I loved Starvation Army and the Urban Mutants. As hard as I looked, I never came across a single film about any of the hundreds of local hardcore scenes that existed in the eighties. I figured if nobody else was gonna make a movie like that, it was up to me. So I wrote up a bunch of interview questions, packed up my little digital video camera, and off I went.

Of course, my trip was nothing compared to Dogen’s. Remember, folks, making a trip from Kyoto, Japan, to China in 1223 wasn’t like it is today, when you can hop on a plane at Kansai International Airport and be in Shanghai in less time than it takes you just to get through traffic on the way to the airport. A trip to China meant a long voyage over the notoriously stormy Sea of Japan in a dodgy wooden ship. In those days lots of people never returned from trips to China. Dogen was willing to risk his life to find the answers to his questions.

But once he got to China, Dogen found the Buddhist teachings he came across there just as unsatisfactory as the ones he’d encountered in Japan. After two years of searching in vain for something different, he was about to give up and go back home when he heard about a teacher named Tendo Nyojo. Actually, his name was pronounced more like Tien-tung Ju-tsing, but in Japan they insist on pronouncing the Chinese characters used to spell out his name their own way; thus he’s known in Japanese as Tendo Nyojo. Tien-tung (or Tendo) is the name of the mountain where he had his monastery, while Ju-tsing was his personal name. Master Tendo was supposed to be really different from the other Zen teachers he’d met, so Dogen figured he’d check the guy out. Turns out that Tendo Nyojo was from a school of Zen called the Soto school and taught a way of doing zazen that was fundamentally different from the style practiced in the Rinzai temples where Dogen had studied previously. Though both schools teach the practice of zazen, the Rinzai school emphasizes the idea that zazen is a way to gain enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the end, and zazen is the means. Clear and simple. But according to Tendo Nyojo, zazen was its own end, and the mere practice of zazen was enlightenment itself. Now, that’s just a weird idea. If you’ve never done zazen, you may picture it as a real mystical thing. You sit there with your legs crossed, in some remote old temple. Incense wafts through the still early-morning air. Chants are intoned, bells ring, and you enter into deep samadhi, plunging through the depths of the universe and experiencing ever-intensifying insights, the mysteries of creation melting away before your continuously expanding consciousness. Unfortunately, the only time zazen is like that is when you’ve taken some heavy drugs before sitting down on your cushion. Those sessions almost invariably end up with the practitioner going nutso squirrelly and having to be forcibly ejected from the zendo. No, mostly zazen is nothing like what anyone would hold up as “enlightenment.” It’s lots of boredom and stiff legs and just trying your best to get through it. Occasionally insights arise, and some of them can be quite amazing. But mostly, your teachers — if they’re any good — will tell you to forget about them. If you believe that at the end of all this pain and boredom you’ll be rewarded with the peak experience to end all peak experiences, maybe you can get through it. But if someone tells you that the practice itself is enlightenment? Come on! What is that?

But Dogen was intrigued anyway. So he checked out Tendo Nyojo and figured the guy was alright. In fact, he ended up canceling his trip back to Japan and staying at Tendo’s monastery for two years. At the end of this time Dogen experienced what he called the “dropping away of both body and mind.” When Tendo Nyojo gave Dogen his permission to teach Buddhism as part of his lineage, Dogen went back to Japan.

When he got there, folks asked him what he’d brought back from China. “Nothing,” he said. Disappointed with this wiseass answer, as well as the fact that they didn’t get any souvenirs, they pressed him for more, and he said that he brought back a soft and flexible mind.*Dogen established a temple in Kyoto. But as his nobullshit style of Zen teaching became more and more popular, the folks at the other temples in town started giving him a hard time. Kyoto was then and still is what you might call a “temple town,” the way you’d call Boston a college town. The temples were the foundation of the economy, and no one liked this new, young troublemaker messing up the status quo. So Dogen moved out to the wilds of Fukui Prefecture far from the big city and set up shop in a new temple he ended up calling Eihei-ji, or the Temple of Eternal Peace. All this time Dogen wrote his little balls off. He produced a huge amount of literature based on his experiences and understanding of Buddhism. The biggest and fattest of all his books was the ninetyfive-chapter monster called Shobogenzo.

To say that Dogen’s book did not exactly catch on like wildfire when it was first written would be a massive understatement. In fact, very few people outside his immediate students and a few later scholarly types who made a point of reading absolutely everything about Buddhism even took a look at it. It wasn’t until 1690, more than four hundred years after Dogen wrote it, that Shobogenzo was actually printed up and distributed outside that very small group of hardcore Dogen fans. And even that edition quickly went out of print for another 121 years. Think of that. It’s as if the book you’re reading right now — not that it’s anywhere near as good as Dogen’s — had to wait till the year 2807, when human beings had mutated into soft-bodied creatures with sixteen tentacles and eyes on stalks living on the moons of Jupiter, before anyone decided it was worth taking a look at. It’s hard to fathom the amount of time that had to pass before anybody was ready for what Dogen was laying down all those years ago.*

All of which avoids the question you’ve probably been asking yourself since you started to plow through this chapter, which is: Why in the hell is this damned Shooby-dooby-whachacallit book by some crazy dead Japanese guy so freakin’ important? I’m getting to that. Every religion has its special books. Even before a true believer reads a word of their chosen religion’s special book, a true believer already assumes that everything inside it is God’s — or Whoever’s — absolute truth. These books cannot be questioned or doubted. Only specially appointed and highly trained experts are even allowed to explain their meaning to the rest of us dunces who couldn’t possibly understand what’s written in them.

But Buddhism does not have any such holy literature. This is not to say that there aren’t a lot of people who consider themselves Buddhists who do treat the words of the Buddhist masters in exactly this manner. But Buddha himself is famous for having said, “Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture. But when you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.” This pretty much removes the whole idea of inerrant scripture from the picture as far as Buddhism is concerned. In fact, if we follow what Buddha’s saying here to its logical conclusion, it’s clear that even the words of Buddha himself cannot be taken as inerrant, infallible, and beyond all question the way the founders’ words of most other religions are treated.

So Shobogenzo is not a holy book of any kind. It’s just a book, and Dogen was just a guy. What makes Shobogenzo important to me is not its status as some infallible work of God. It is the actual contents of the work itself. Shobogenzo is simply the single most reliable written interpretation of Buddhism I have ever come across. Dogen’s writing is direct and clear and brutally honest in a way I’ve never seen matched by anyone else. It’s a damned good book. I first heard about the book from Tim. He used to quote it sometimes, and when I moved into his zendo in Kent, there was a tattered copy of the then-standard English translation by Kosen Nishiyama and John Stevens on the shelves. I used to leaf through it from time to time. But it never made a huge impact. It seemed too old and weird and abstract. It was like looking at some piece of surrealist art that everyone says is great but that you just can’t quite get. I was much more affected by a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki. But Suzuki also quoted Dogen a lot. So I kept Shobogenzo on my “things to read one of these days” list for a long time.

It was when I ran into my current teacher, Gudo Nishijima, that I decided I had to read the darned thing for myself. Nishijima is practically obsessed with Shobogenzo. To hear him talk, you’d sometimes think it was the only book he’d ever read. He’s read it over and over and over for the past sixty years and produced a complete English translation, while also overseeing editions in German, Spanish, and Korean. Some people are football fanboys; me, I’m a monster movie fanboy, and Nishijima is a Shobogenzo fanboy of the highest order. It was his enthusiasm for the book that finally got me to decide I was gonna sit there and make my way through the whole ninety-five chapters, even if it killed me.

What surprised me is that I really enjoyed it. In fact, I read it all the way through again. And then again. In the end I became a Dogen fanboy too. But when I quote Dogen, I’m not doing it the way most religious guys quote their favorite holy books. I’m not saying, “Here is what the voice of ultimate authority says on the subject.” I’m saying, “Here are the words of a person who put this difficult subject into words very well.” As a writer, no one yet has even come close to matching Dogen’s ability to express the inexpressible. Of course, he failed. What he was trying to put into words cannot, by its very nature, be put into words. But in this he failed knowing full well he could not possibly succeed. Yet he tried anyway, and that’s what makes Dogen a genius and makes his writing so valuable even eight hundred years after he wrote it. He expressed himself perfectly, even to the point of expressing his own limitations with absolute clarity. Dogen did not tolerate bullshit of any kind, even when it was his own. There are very few, if any, like him.

So what’s Shobogenzo all about? The best way to find out is to go through all ninety-five chapters yourself. But the best way to understand it is to use the formula Nishijima gives in his introduction. In a nutshell Dogen establishes four basic principles for Buddhist study. The first principle is what he calls “establishing will to the truth.” In Sanskrit this is called Bodhicitta, with the last bit pronounced “cheetah,” as in Tarzan’s best friend — though I could never understand why he was named Cheetah when he wasn’t a cheetah but a chimp. Anyhow, Bodhicitta means you have to regard the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as your ultimate criterion or goal. You have to be willing to accept what is true, whether or not you like it. It’s way tougher than it sounds.

The second principle is what he calls “deep belief in the rule of cause and effect.” Most of us don’t really believe in cause and effect in a very deep way. Oh, we believe in it. But we always imagine there might be some exceptions. We tend to believe we can get something for nothing, or that the things we do to others will never come back to us. Or we believe in a God who can somehow transcend the law of cause and effect by his magic powers. But Dogen didn’t accept that kind of thinking at all. He believed that the whole universe — God included — follows the rule of cause and effect without exception.

Dogen’s third principle is that our life is just action at the present moment. The past is nothing more than memory, and the future is nothing but dreams. At best, past and future are no more than reference material for the eternal now. The only real facts are those at the present moment. You cannot go back and correct the mistakes you made in your past, so you better be very careful right now. You can dream about your future, but no matter how well you construct that dream, your future will not be precisely as you envisioned it. The world where we live is existence in the present moment.

The final principle is the practice of zazen itself. Buddhism is not a philosophy you just read about. It is a philosophy you do. So the principles of Buddhism include actual action, which cannot be put into words. In Dogen’s view the best way to learn how to truly experience the world just as it is, is through the daily practice of zazen.”

~ Brad Warner, Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye