this will find elaboration later, but for now, i just wanted to out it here…
making a turn today i saw a homeless man standing on a street corner. he was holding a sign and wearing a blue sweatshirt. i wondered about him. i thought of him as a newborn baby, starting out as a life the same way everyone does. i wondered if his mother and father had dreams for him, for what his life would be like, for what they hoped he might become. or maybe he was discarded from the very beginning, not wanted or cared about, seen as a burden for existing. i wondered if he had any children of his own, a family, had any dreams left, had ever known caring arms. i wondered where he slept, what he ate, whether anyone ever talked to him, or showed any compassion toward him. i wondered if he was sick and in pain.
do we look through invisible people because we are afraid of how we could disappear too, ourselves becoming invisible to those driving by?
i made a lot of assumptions about the man in blue today, all of which could be totally wrong and probably are. i know nothing about him, about any of the circumstances that led him to his place on the corner in his bright blue sweatshirt holding a sign telling the world he was hungry and without a home. i could make up any number of stories about his life that led him to that street corner, none of which approximate the truth. i was merely driving by, sitting in a warm car, full from breakfast, needs having been met (for today), one of hundreds who would drive by him...finding it difficult to really look at him. i felt sorry for him, which felt pretty useless. feeling sorry didn't feed him or clothe him or provide him a home or make anyone care about him. i drove by, just like everyone else, still feeling sorry, and also feeling shame for looking through him too...too afraid of what he represented, the potential to be cast off and thrown away, forgotten and unloved. in the past i have stopped to provide what cash i had on me or purchased a meal and/or a drink, and given it with a kind word and a handshake. did making just one minute different in someone's life make any difference at all, or did it merely make me feel better for the moment?
the man today seemed real in a way others haven't before, closer, more personal. i looked down and realized i was wearing the same kind of sweatshirt as the man on the corner. his was blue. mine was red. his was worn and dirty. mine was clean and bright. our lives may have been very different today, but there we were, wearing the same sweatshirt, intersecting.
i'm inside, sitting at a computer, full now from dinner, comfortable and sleepy, wearing my red sweatshirt.
it's cold and raining tonight...his blue sweatshirt isn't nearly enough to keep him warm and dry.
the experience inspired me to write this to myself:
carry brochures for local homeless shelters, labor-ready type day labor places, free counseling centers, and government welfare offices... if he does not want to remain homeless and begging, he does not have to... if he is stuff in a self-destructive psychological loop, he needs professional counseling... i might go as far, if i felt it was safe, to offer to drive him and walk with him into to any one of the places i mentioned above... sit with him while he waits for the people inside to offer what they can... above all else, help him face the fact that a day labor place will, on most days, offer him more than enough to feed himself, bathe himself, wash his clothes, buy a new shirt, sometimes enough to buy something more, even a room in a boarding house... and the opportunity to regain his self-respect and change his habits if he wants to...
or you could enable his helplessness and assuage your ridiculous learned guilt by giving him a dollar... i think that is a futile and destructive choice, but that's just my opinion based on my experience...
putting a band aid on a broken arm might seem like a moment of kindness and feel good emotionally, but the arm needs a whole lot more to heal well...
same for a broken psyche...
and as for you...
you did not take anything from the man... you did not physically or emotionally destroy his self-esteem or put him on the street... you did not make him give up on himself... your guilt feelings are your choice based on the mixed up psyche and stuff you learned from religion... don't use him to try to put a bandaid on your broken arm, it will not work and only enables the self-defeating emotional habits and mixed-up thinking that somehow has you feeling responsible for someone else's experience and choices...
The Buddha said, "Don't believe me, don't believe anybody, don't accept anything based on tradition. Don't believe anything based on the fact that your community believes this or your country believes this or the people that you are around believe this," another version of Buddha's words: "Do not believe in me; do not believe my teaching. You hear, listen to my talk, and test it by yourself. Appeal to your own experience. And if you find it true, accept it. Don't believe in me just because I have a little more experience than you. Don't believe what I say to you for that reason. Believe in yourself!" and also: Buddha himself said, "Belief is not important. Don't believe what I say just because I said it." These were his dying words.
That's why fucking Buddha was a snake, just like Deepak Choprah, & should have his balls cut out & fed to The Dogs of War [see Pink Floyd et All].
The foolish reject what they see, Not what they think; The wise reject what they think, Not what they see. Observe things as they are And don't pay attention to other people.
I just came back from Miramar Lake where the loop/trail around it measures 5 miles. I ran 3 1/4 miles of it in 26 minutes (no shit coz like that's like what 8 minutes miles, eh?-) & wilson tennis shoes, not shabby for someone who hasn't run distances like that in 4 years if not longer.
You are not my friend and when I am no longer this I will eat you.
It's time we infuse some kick-ass tea writing in here or else?
Okay, so one of these days I'll sesshin with this Brad dude from hardcorezen.blogspot but I swear to all fucking Buddhas of 58 directions if he tells me how I should clasp my hands, I will shove his Mudras up his ass and take his heart out through his arsehole, fucking AssWipe!
*** I caught up with Brad Warner, in San Francisco. I was very pleased to discover a calm, genial, gentle, warm, wise young fellow, whose unassuming manner would easily lose him in crowd, but whose natural gift for dialogue revealed a very apt, genuine calling as a teacher.
I began by asking him to define what DIY means, for those just tuning in.
Brad Warner: DIY = do it yourself. It's just the idea you don't wait around for a record company to sign you, you put out your own record. You don't wait for a magazine to commission you to do an article, you publish it yourself. ... It's a kind of an attitude....
Q: Is that similar to the teachings of the Buddha?
A: I think it's similar, 'cuz if you think about the idea of working thru your own salvation ... I don't like to put it in those terms ... a lot of religions you give this idea that some god or savior over there is going to help you [gestures] over there in sky. Whereas Buddhism has this idea that, no, you're not waiting for God to help you. You're going to have to work it for yourself. So there's that connection. For sure.
Q: And when you write that the Budha's last words, "Be a lamp unto yourself" is similar to the punk motto "Question authority"...?
A: It's the same sort of stretch. It means you're not waiting for someone else to show you the way. You have to be the lamp. So "question authority" works into that ... but I admit I did stretch it a bit ...
Q: I noticed too that you had a different way of expressing the Zen motto, "Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form."
A: Someone was asking me about this yesterday, but he was objecting. His take on it was that he always translated it as "Matter is immaterial, and immaterial is matter." But it's most always widely translated "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form." And my first teacher's teacher translated it this way.
But they didn't like the way I was talking about the way emptiness is the mental side of reality ... and form is the material side of reality (computers, chairs, things you can touch and feel). Buddhism has the idea that these are one and the same. That the side of reality that we know exists all the time but we can't put our hands on, and the side of reality we can put our hands on, that our hands are a part of ... are the same thing.
Q: In your new book, you set forth four levels in the Shobogenzo. Is that Dogen's idea?
A: That's Nishijima's interpretation of Dogen ... based on the Four Noble Truths ... that's also his unique take on the Four Noble Truths ... what he sees is a parallel between the Four Noble Truths and these four ways of expression that Dogens hits on over and over in Shobogenzo.
It took me a while to see that. It took me a few times reading Shobogenzo to understand what the hell Nishijima was talking about. But after working at it for it a while it makes sense and it makes the whole Shobogenzo make sense. So I find it really useful.
Of course, you can't put words in the mouth of a guy whose been dead 800 years and say that's what he really meant, but i think that 's what he really meant.
Q: I'd like to ask you something I'd asked John Cage, after I heard him perform 45' for a Speaker: "If everything is the way you say it is, then why are you up there, doing what you're doing?"
A: Somebody asked me that yesterday, and it was weird ''cuz I never really thought about it. I write 'cuz I like writing.
And I'm not really trying to influence people or anything like that.
Someone once told me, "You're saving all beings," as a means of encouragement, a kind of Buddhist cliche, and I was thinking , "I'm not saving all beings, I'm just writing a book."
I never think of it in those terms. I just write 'cuz I like to write.
It might be useful to somebody or at least they might enoy reading it.
Does that sound pretentious? I'm just doing what I do.
There's tendency to try to make Buddhism into a business or ... to make it quick and easy. That's the thing that bothers me.
People will take this thing called "enlightenment" (in quotes) and, "Ok, here's the easy way to get enlightenment, and you can do it a week, or a day" or whatever they promise. And it's ridiculous.
It's like if a yoga teacher told you, "I'm going to teach you this special yoga position, and you're going to put your leg up behind your neck by the end of the day." You wouldn't want to go to yoga teacher like that ... it's definitely not healthy.
And I think it's like a lot things I see that are being pushed, that are the same kind of thing. It's not good for you. You don't want to have that experience quickly, 'cuz you'd break your leg, to stretch the metaphor ... beyond the point of breaking ...
Q: I noticed that your new book has way more footnotes than your first one. What's up with that?
A: I wanted this book to be more loose. I always like when I listen to someone and they go off on a tangent. That's always the best part. So my way is just to go off on tagnents. I wanted to have a footnote that would go for a couple of pages. I'm working my way up to that.
Q: Where can people find you on the web?
A: Suicide girls and my blog. My website hasn't been updated for two years, it's a precursor to the blog. Technically, a blog is easy to do, 'cuz you just type it up and it just goes, whereas with the website I had to figure out all the bits to make it work.
But think the articles I do for the Suicide Girls is enjoyable 'cuz it's an audience that isn't self-identified as Buddhist. So it's kind of fun to write for that audience ... 'cuz they don't have any background at all. They're a really receptive audience. I get really good response from the people that read it. It's cool 'cuz i get to be the calm stable person, whereas if you put me in a group of Buddhists, I look like the crazy one, altho' I don't think I am, sometimes I think they're all nuts ... ... I shouldn't say or I can get in more trouble.
I spend more time writing than people realize. Occasionally i put something up on the blog that I type up and send, but generally I work on it. It takes forever. I always think it's going to take an hour but then nine hours later I'm still looking at it and doing [makes sound, like "HHhhghghghhs" ... (how do you write " "HHhhghghghhs" ...?).
Q: So you do a little revision ...
A: I do work it out but then Dogen did too. He did multiple drafts and some of the earlier drafts have been discovered and some of the later chapters were never completed but his successor copied tham out. And then he'll write a little note of apology on the bottom, "This is as he'd written it."
It's interesting to think of this Zen master who had done multiple drafts as a writer, which is something i can kind of identify with ...
You'll find Dogen's books include poems and some are transcripts of his talks and some are comments that he made to his disciples working on them.
Nihshimima has translated him into in modern Japanese. Even Japanese have a hard time with Dogen. So Nishijima wrote a 12-volume edition, with the original and the modern colloquial Japanese facing each other. Then he he did an English version, more or less based on that and work of a student of his named Mike Cross.
Q: So you've read the Japanese?
A: I lived there for 11 years, and I could look up the words I don't know. Actually, whenever I could, whenever I quoted Dogen, I tried to look it up in Japanese, for myself rather than depending solely on the English ...
Q: And so the reason you include Japanese [kanji] in the text is ...
A: ... 'cuz that's way i learned it.
Q: Interesting. You also studied with Gyomay M. Kubose. What were your impressions of him?
A: He was a nice guy. He was pretty old when I knew him, 20 years ago. I lived in Chicago for three years. During those three years, it almost an interruption. I still did the zazen practice, but didn't have a teacher. Kubose, who I liked, wasnt a Zen teacher. He was Pure Land, but he did zazen.
He was recommend to me by Tim McCarthy. They were located in a bad part of Chicago, but they held service on Sunday, and Sunday is really mellow in that part of Chicago 'cuz you'd see people all passed out and trashed out from partying; the kind of area you wouldn't to be walking on.
Q: American Zen owes a great deal to Hakuun Yasutani Roshi (1885-1973), who taught Robert Aitken and Philip Kapleau, among others, but you're not in that lineage, correct?
A: The whole San Francisco Zen Center is not. I don't think I'm the only one, but I'm one of the few. The Yasutani line in Japan is extremely small ... over here, they're big. So it's kinda weird in that they're largely unknown.
Q: What's your favorite film by [B-movie filmmaker]?
A: It Conquered the World ... Corman directed it himself. He produced Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women which is my all-time favorite. It was the first movie Peter Bogdonavich directed. It's taken from a Russian science fiction film that Corman acquired the rights to [editor's note: Pavel Klushantsev's Planet of Storms (Planeta bur), which Corman used in two other movies, as well.]. In order to jazz it up, Peter Bogdonavich was hired to basically go out to Malibu to shoot a lot of girls on the beach in seashell bikinis.
Q: Why do like that one?
A: I saw it was I like six years old on tv late at night. My dad stayed up with me. I liked dinosaurs, the title implied dinosaurs, so I watched it
Decades later, I tried to find it; I wondered if I'd imagined it. Finally, in the early 2,000s I found a list of bootleg videos. It was on the list. "Ah, that film really does exist!," I thought. So I saw it again and I still thought it was great. I was worried. I thought it was going to be lousy but I still liked it.
Q: What's your favorite Godzilla movie?
A: There are 20. My favorite has always been Monster Zero. Nick Adams is in that. He does such over the top acting and he's Ghidorah, the three-headed monster in it. He was really good. It's kinda too bad, no one knows if he commited suicide or if it was an overdose ... some people think he was murdered ...
* * * At this point, my recorder ran out of tape. We continued to talk, anyway. Then we went for a walk, to City Lights Bookstore. In the basement, we found Sit and Shut Up! filed in the music section, near a biography of Frank Zappa (that, strangely enough, had a book inside of the book). Afterwards, we walked through Jack Kerouac Alley, connecting Italian North Beach's Columbus Avenue with Chinatown's Grant Avenue. As I walked with Brad back towards the apartment where he was staying, we passed a green dinosaur, sticking its head out of its foot-long box. Brad and the green dinosaur shared a quick glance of mutual recognition. Sweet.
Back home, I wondered: Does a green plastic toy dinosaur have Buddha nature? Right then, outside my window I saw a cow grazing in the pasture look up and murmur, "Mu ... !" ***
