Dear Brad Warner,
I have a few thoughts about your new book, “Letters to a
Dead Friend About Zen.” (They say that imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery, so I hope you’ll forgive this clumsy appropriation of your letter-writing
style!) The dead friend of the title and the one you write to, Marky,
is---well, was—a punk rocker like yourself, a black musician who died of cancer
at much too young an age. Your
letters build an endearing portrait of the
man—and not incidentally of yourself, the letter writer, Soto Zen teacher at
the Angel City Zen Center in Los Angeles, filmmaker and bass guitarist as well
as an itinerant guest lecturer—and suggest a loving bond between you, an
intimacy that it’s nice to be let in on.
Given this relationship, it’s natural that you’d write to
him with the slangy familiarity of a couple of musician pals. It’s not my
language, so I honestly found it quite difficult to adjust to; I worried, from
the start, that it would prove just too hip, even a bit condescending, at least
for this reader. But don’t worry. I got over it.
And I found plenty of good stuff. (I hate that word, and
wish you wouldn’t use it as much as you do. But then, I use it too, so I’m
hardly in a position to complain.) Anyway, I’d like to thank you for a solid
introduction to Zen—a branch of the Buddhist tree that has attracted me from
afar, but with which I have little familiarity. I did spend a week sitting
zazen on Mt. Baldy in the early days of my own Buddhist education, but that was
long ago. I branched off elsewhere.
What I like particularly is that you do not make it easy.
There are a zillion books out there that make Buddhism in all its forms sound like
an easy answer to life’s many problems—and we have enough of them, in this
contemporary world! Meditation and mindfulness are all the rage, and there’s no
shortage of people—including those in the book-publishing business—who are all
too happy to cash in on it. You make no such promises. On the contrary, you
stress constantly that the practice of Zen is a long, hard road, and one that
requires dedication, determination, and years of hard work. I like that you
revert frequently to the example of your own life and admit freely to your
failings along the way as well as your successes. Buddhism is no sinecure.
I share your distrust of easy answers, and of teachers who
offer them. I share your skepticism when it comes to religions and putative
gods of all kinds. Your practical, no-nonsense approach to the conundrums with
which life and death confront us appeals to my own learned sense of what I hope
is healthy pragmatism. When it comes to the unanswerable questions, you honor
the beliefs of others with the proper respect, but test them out with astute
critical analysis.
I like that you are unafraid to tackle the unanswerable
questions, however, and that you do not make light of the sometimes difficult
and confusing concepts that Buddhism requires us to address. You do so
forthrightly, and with both humility and clarity. Humility when it comes to not
claiming to possess the right, or the only answers; clarity in being able to
write about those concepts so that we can understand them. Most of us have a
hard time with the Heart Sutra, for example: “form is emptiness, emptiness is
form.” A conundrum, if ever there was one, not unlike other widely
misunderstood or easily diluted concepts like no-self.. Rather than offering
explanations, your clarity seems to offer us a way to get in on the secret, helping
us to be comfortable with paradox and contradiction, to be open to meaning even
when it’s hard to come to a rational understanding.
I like that you are knowledgeable about other branches of
the Buddhist tree than Zen, and that you are able to bring that knowledge to
bare sparingly, and appropriately. That you can refer us without pretension to
literary sources and other fields of thought, providing us with historical,
religious and philosophical context. I like that you share your obvious
familiarity with many of the colorful characters who have followed in the Buddha’s
path, and that you write about them with humorous affection for their foibles.
That you make them come as alive for us as they seem to be for you.
I feel obliged to add that there’s some iffy stuff (that
word again!) The big one is the reveal that comes at the end of your book,
where your very last sentence reads, “And I apologize for lying to you.” Yes.
You lied. I won’t be more specific because that would be a spoiler and I want other
people to read your book. But I have to say that your last letter, this one
addressed not to Marky but to your “Dear Readers,” felt like a slap in the
face. You wrote eloquently about the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, one element of which
is Right Speech; and about the precepts common to all branches of Buddhism, one
of the most basic of which is the injunction: “Don’t lie.” So when I read that
you’d been lying to me all along, I was pretty much outraged. Having been taken
in by it all I quite honestly felt betrayed…
But then my outrage made me think again. Perhaps I should think
of this slap-in-the-face as a kind of Zen wake-up call. Do they still use the keisaku
in the zendo, that rod they smack across your shoulders in zazen when you get sloppy
or sleepy? Or do contemporary Western sensibilities forbid that kind of
physical correction? Anyway, that’s how it felt. So maybe I should read your
whole book as a kind of Zen koan, one of those stories you also write about,
the kind that often ends with the teacher rewarding the student with a nasty jab—or
a kick in the pants—as the inscrutable answer to some absurd, unanswerable
question. To jolt him past the quagmire of doubts and questions into
enlightenment. Perhaps I needed this reminder, at the end of your book, of the
Buddha’s injunction not to take anything for granted, to distrust even
teachers, to distrust even his great wisdom, and return to the evidence of my
own eyes, my own tested experience. Perhaps I needed that shock to remind me
that it all comes back to the present moment.
Which is after all why we learn to just sit. So, okay,
thanks, Brad. I enjoyed your sometimes perilous travels in Europe too. And your
book is a good read, a good reminder. So, ta-ta for now. Be well. Your friend,
Peter
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment