Despite the title of his latest book, Sit Down and Shut Up (New World Library, 256 pp.), with its no-nonsense approach to Zen Buddhism, Brad Warner’s voice is remarkably calm and laid back as he speaks from Los Angeles. The laughing image of a mohawked Buddha, sporting a skull-and-bones tattoo on one arm, being carried on the shoulders of a fire-breathing Godzilla, himself sporting a studded leather bracelet, clearly indicates that Warner is out to confound expectations. There’s also the book’s unwieldy subtitle, Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye to alert readers that this is something different.
Although sprinkled with stories from Warner’s own life, the focus of Sit Down and Shut Up is Dogen, the 13th century priest who wrote Shobogunzo, translated as The Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye. Ignored for centuries, the work of Dogen has grown increasingly popular over the last few decades, but has been largely unavailable in English, and Warner’s work introduces some of the master’s more basic tenets for a general audience.
“Dogen had been a really important thing to me, and his philosophy had been the thing I read the most of as far as Buddhism is concerned. I thought his philosophy was relevant to what’s going on now, even though it had been written 800 years ago. Many scholars have written about him, but a lot of that stuff is very difficult to read, and I don’t think you need to explain him in these very difficult terms. I think what he was trying to say was very simple, and if you could break him down, it would be valuable.”
The teachings of Dogen cover a lot of ground, from the basic practice of meditation (zazen), dealing with emotions such as anger, love and stress, the problem of evil, sex, sin, death and happiness, as well as the Buddhist concept of right action. While many of Dogen’s parables deal with Buddhist monks and situations common in medieval Japan, Warner provides a context for them that comes from working for a Japanese science fiction company, as well as his days in the early 1980s hardcore band Zero Defects. While Sit Down and Shut Up is a followup to Warner’s first book, Hardcore Zen, he has also recently completed a documentary on hardcore in his hometown of Akron and Cleveland, entitled Cleveland’s Screaming.
“It’s funny how that’s become history,” he laughs, explaining his punk background. “When we were doing the hardcore scene it seemed like the end of history — this is going to be the end of the world (the mid-1980s) so we might as well do something really out there before Ronald Regan and Leonid Brezhnev destroyed us all. That didn’t happen, so now it’s become this historical, cultural movement. I got into the hardcore scene because I was looking for something real and the whole culture at that time, the whole wide, mainstream culture in the United States, seemed to be unreal and not interested in anything true. Especially the music, all the music seemed to be made to order, like it was made to satisfy some kind of corporate need.”
Warner was introduced to Zen Buddhism as a student at Kent State, looking to study eastern religions, and Zen Buddhism was the only option. “It had a profound impact on my life. I thought, ‘here’s something that’s taking what attracted me to punk, and the Zen guys were taking that all away.’ They weren’t just questioning society, they were questioning themselves and how they were a reflection of society. I thought if you’re going to do something, take it all the way.
“They were both searching for something that was real,” he adds, when asked about the seeming contrast between his status as an ordained Buddhist priest, and punk’s typical anti-religious stance. “Zen is sort of anti-religious. There are different schools of thought. There are people who’ll say it’s a religion and people who’ll say it’s not. I tend to fall on the side that says it’s not, because it doesn’t emphasize trying to leave behind the material side of life to embrace spirituality. It’s trying to find a balance. I think a religion tries to say there’s only mind, or only spirit or soul, and that’s what’s really important. The body, the things of matter, that’s unimportant. But Zen isn’t like that.”
Fans of hardcore and particularly straight-edge will find much in common with the content of Sit Down and Shut Up, as Warner talks about his early straight-edge leanings stemming from his desire to experience shows with clarity. In Sit Down and Shut Up, he explains how practising Buddhism has brought that clarity and joy not only to his musical performance, but to his daily life as well.
