Brad Warner - Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master

DONT BE A JERK

Also by Brad Warner

Hardcore Zen

Sex, Sin, and Zen

Sit Down and Shut Up

There Is No God and He Is Always with You

Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate

Copyright 2016 by Brad Warner

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Warner, Brad, author.

Title: Dont be a jerk and other practical advice from Dogen, Japans greatest Zen master : a radical but reverent paraphrasing of Dogens Treasury of the true dharma eye / Brad Warner.

Description: Novato, CA : New World Library, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015050026 | ISBN 9781608683888

Subjects: LCSH: StshDoctrines. | Dgen, 12001253. Shb genz.

Classification: LCC BQ9449.D657 W37 2016 | DDC 294.3/85dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050026

First printing, April 2016

ISBN 978-1-60868-388-8

EISBN 978-1-60868-389-5

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

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CONTENTS

IT USED TO be that nobody outside the worlds of stuffy academics and nerdy Zen studies knew who Dgen was. And while this thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master and writer is still not one of the best-known philosophers on the planet, hes 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 worlds most important philosophical thinkers.

Unfortunately, in spite of all this, Dgen 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 youre too dumb to have heard of. Nobody wants to read a guy like that.

You could argue that Dgen really is these things. Sometimes. But hes a lot more than that. When you work with him for a while, you start to see that hes actually a pretty straightforward, no-nonsense guy. Its 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 whats in the Bible but cant deal with actually reading the whole darned thing, its a very good way to begin.

After shed 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 Shbgenz: The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. This eight-hundred-year-old classic, written by the Japanese monk Eihei Dgen, expounds on and explains the philosophical basis for one of the largest and most influential sects of Zen Buddhism. Its one of the great classics of philosophical literature, revered by people all over the world. However, like many revered philosophical classics, its rarely read, even by those who claim to love it.

I immediately thought it was a cool idea to try to do this with Shbgenz, but I didnt know if it would work. Ive studied Shbgenz 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 Shbgenz, called Sit Down and Shut Up (New World Library, 2007), and had referenced Shbgenz extensively in all five of my other books about Zen practice.

My attitude toward Shbgenz is somewhat like Mark Russells attitude toward the Bible. I deeply respect the book and its author, Dgen. But I dont 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 Dgen taught. In Dgens 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 Dgens masterwork didnt feel at all blasphemous or heretical to me.

But Shbgenz presents a whole set of challenges Russell didnt 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. Shbgenz, on the other hand, has just a few narrative storytelling sections, and these are usually very short. Its mostly philosophy. This meant that Id have to deal extensively with the kind of material Russell generally skipped over.

Still, it was such an interesting idea that I figured Id give it a try. My idea was to present the reader with everything important in Shbgenz. I didnt summarize every single line. But I have tried to give a sense of every paragraph of the book without leaving anything significant out. While Id caution you not to quote this book and attribute it to Dgen, I have tried to produce a book wherein you could conceivably do so without too much fear of being told by someone, Thats not really what Dgen said! Obviously, if a line mentions Twinkies or zombies or beer, youll know Ive done a bit of liberal paraphrasing. I have noted these instances, though, so that shouldnt be too much of a problem.

In a sense, with this book I am following a time-honored tradition of misquoting Dgen. When the first teachers of Soto Zen Buddhism showed up in America and Europe, there were not yet any translations of Dgen in English or other European languages. So these teachers would just quote things from memory and translate them into English or French or whatever other foreign-to-them language they were attempting to communicate in on the fly.

Several well-known examples of this occur in the book Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. That book was compiled from transcripts of lectures Suzuki Roshi, who was then head of the San Francisco Zen Center, gave in the late 1960s. In it he quotes Dgen a number of times, but most of these quotations are wrong.