I just finished Brad Warner’s Sit Down & Shut Up. I enjoyed it, as I did Warner’s first book, Harcore Zen. Warner is a Zen Buddhist monk who played bass in a hardcore punk band in the early ’80s, then released 5 neo-psych solo albums, moved to Japan, and worked in the Japanese monster movie industry. Now he’s living & working in LA, & teaching zazen, Zen meditation.
Warner is a Zen Buddhist monk who played bass in a hardcore punk band in the early ’80s, then released 5 neo-psych solo albums, moved to Japan, and worked in the Japanese monster movie industry. Now he’s living & working in LA, & teaching zazen, Zen meditation.
I do have some criticism. Warner likes to make blanket statements (that are wrong or only partially right): Buddhists believe such-and-such, people always suffer when they harm others, every time someone gets angry it’s because he enjoys getting angry, individual people don’t really exist, etc. He also claims repeatedly that Zen meditation leads to increased insight (though not Enlightenment). There’s probably something to this, but in a limited way. When I read Shoes Outside the Door, about the abuse of power by the leaders of the San Francisco Zen Center, it seemed to me that the champion meditators had less than average ability to detect and resist predatory behavior. Roshi Richard Baker’s sex and money controversies were followed by the weird behavior of his successor, Reb Anderson. Police caught him waving an unregistered handgun in a housing project. The gun had killed a man in Golden Gate Park a few years earlier. Anderson claimed to have found the gun near the corpse, taken the gun from the crime-scene, never reported the corpse, & carried the gun around with him for years. The police eventually “lost” their records regarding the politically-connected sect’s leader.
Baker was chosen to be the SFZC’s leader by the Center’s founder, Shunryu Suzuki (author of the influential Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind). I read Crooked Cucumber, a biography of Suzuki, written by David Chadwick. Though Chadwick defends the SFZC and Baker, and admired and, it seems, loved Suzuki, he’s admirably honest. We learn, for example, that Suzuki allowed Baker to inaccurately describe him, in print, as an opponent of Japan’s aggression during WWII. Suzuki’s teacher is described as a hard-drinking philanderer who engaged in what would currently be considered illegal child abuse.
And speaking of WWII, there’s Zen at War. Turns out that a whole organization full of meditators didn’t include even a visible minority of war opponents, and, on the contrary, actively supported military aggression.
As someone (Suzuki’s wife, I think) said in Cucumber, Suzuki supported the war but so did all of Japanese society. But that’s just the point, the Zennists did no better than anyone else. Bringing it up-to-date (and not to pick on Warner, who seems like a sincere guy, and who’s probably an excellent meditation instructor), look at Warner’s most recent Suicide Girls column, “Buddhism Through Violence.” Warner argues that Buddhists should reconsider their pacifism, which is fine, but also their opposition to Bush wars. He seems to be oblivious to the difference between aggression and defense, writing, for example, that Buddhists “need a big bully on our side.” It may (or may not, considering retaliation) be useful to have a bully’s support but it’s unethical to support a bully.
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Also, I recently read 4-Hour Workweek (previously mentioned here). Some of Timothy Ferris’s advice seems ethically questionable but the book strikes me as a good step-by-step primer if you’re interested in setting up an online sales company, test-marketing online cheaply before investing much in the project, & then offshoring and outsourcing the business, & then offshoring your life.
