In the course of my current Zen/Jewish (or Jewish/Zen) explorations I came across Brad Warner, who wrote this and this, and blogs here.
The other day he got a negative review from Budhadharma, which led to this post. It's a blast. Read the comments, too -- all 103 of them as of the moment, including the one that calls Warner a "Buddhist teacher for the PBR drinking, Nascar lovin', Homo hating angry white men of America."
Hey. Spirituality. You gotta love it.
Seriously -- what I like about Warner (a Punk bassist from Cleveland and onetime Ultraman staffer) is the straight talk, the pop-culture American diction, the absolute refusal to dress Zen up in nice exotic robes and ripples-on-the-water cover photographs (by contrast, check out the Amazon link above for the cover of Sit Down and Shut Up -- I've been reading it on the PATH train and it never fails to get a half-dozen doubletakes on the ride into Manhattan). No "let's play Zen." Which is exactly the way it ought to be. Because if you dress it up in nice robes, it's exotic and special and otherworldly and therefore by definition not Zen.
Warner's sensibility reminds me a little of Thomas Merton's comments (in Opening the Bible)about Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew -- notably:
Many Christians who saw the film criticized it, not because it was unfaithful to the Gospel but because it presented a picture of Christ that frightened them. The Christ of Pasolini, young, dark, splendidly aloof, dreadfully serious, was obviously not the sweet, indulgent Jesus of late nineteenth-century Church art. And the apostles were obviously not unreal, shadowy ghosts incapable of understanding a single fact about human existence. These were very real, gnarled, tough men, weather-beaten people who had lived through cruel wars, who had hidden in the mountains from the political police, who knew what the inside of prisons and concentration camps looked like -- in a word, they resembled the actual men Christ chose for his disciples!
Now, I don't want to push the analogy too far because Warner isn't yet Pasolini, or Merton. And maybe "Bite Me" isn't the optimal way to get into Buddhist disputation. Nevertheless -- there's the basic point that the real spiritual experience often isn't pretty, and it often takes place out on the fringes in ugly, out-of-the-way places, among people who are more than a little crazed and more than a little desperate. And if you steer clear of that -- if you prefer a spirituality that's dressed up in nice costumes and good causes, you run the risk of operating in a nice polite proscribed space that never comes to grips with reality. Which, at the end of the day, is what I want my spirituality to do. What keeps me in Judaism is the focus on reality as opposed to next-world theological abstraction (side note -- what drives me away from it is the focus on arcane ritual and tribal abstraction as opposed to reality). And what works for me in Zen is the uncategorized here-and-now craziness, which is sometimes unwashed.
So you go, Zen man. Or words to that effect.
For a contrary view, try this.
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