Confessions of a Terrible Buddhist: If You Want to Learn About Zen Don’t Read This Blog, a.k.a The Zennest Shit Ever

One of the best things about living in Portland is day trips to Powell’s City of Books. For the uninitiated, calling Powell’s a pretty-big-book-store is like calling “Confession of  Buddhist Atheist” a pretty good book; in other words, an utterly fail-tastic understatement. This biblio-behemoth spans an entire city block. It’s a veritable literary labyrinth, and practically impossible for a neophyte to navigate without a map and compass. But here’s a tip: If you walk in the front entrance, past the registers, down the hall, up a flight of stairs, and then take a hard left followed by a soft right, you might bump into me. This is the Buddhism aisle.

It seems fitting that this was where I learned an important lesson about Zen. It may be less than fitting, however, that the lesson didn’t come from one of the thousands of tomes of collected Buddhist knowledge throughout the centuries. Nah. My teacher in this instance was just some horned-rim-glassed hipster trying to impress his date.

The two of them casually pretended to look at books while I casually pretended not to be interested in their flirting.

“What do you think about Buddhism?” the girl asked. I nearly snapped my own neck jerking my head to hear the boy’s response. Portland is full of pretentious hipsters who have expert opinions on everything. This kid was about to spew some sophomoric bullshit to save face, rather than admit that he didn’t know the first thing about dharma, karma, anatman, and all the other fancy Sanskrit words I’ve memorized. I couldn’t wait to pounce on him, me a fierce Zen tiger, as he hung dangling from a proverbial vine. I purred. I growled. I listened.

The kid flashed a goofy smile. “I don’t really care for it,” he said.

Hm. Yes. If you can’t say you did it first, deny that it has any value. Go on, tell us more.

“One time I read this book on Zen. Well, I started to read it,” he said. Ah-ha! So he began his studies but just couldn’t wrap his tiny brain around such deep concepts. I patted myself on the back with my mighty tiger claws. He continued.

“One of the first sentences in the book said something like `If you want to learn about Zen then don’t read books about it.’”

Yes, yes… That checks out. I’ve read that. Now go ahead and spout your nonsense interpretation of this complex idea.

Chuck says “Fifty shades of what? Put down that sparkly vampire shit and read these AnattaPunk approved books if you want to live.”
• Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Stephen Batchelor.
• Buddha For Beginners. Steven T. Asma.
• Sit Down and Shut Up. Brad Warner.
• Dharma Punx. Noah Levine.
• Rebel Buddha. Dzogchen Ponlop.

“The first chapter said if you want to learn about Zen don’t read about it. So I didn’t. I took the book back to the library the next day.”

My indignation burst through the roof. How dare this young dumb idiot deny the majesty of Buddhist ideas and just smugly return a book without even reading it? You think you know better than 2,000 years of evolving Buddhist wisdom, kid? Good luck with that. Why don’t you and your girl pants go pay $17 for a venti goat-milk-caramel-macchiato with nutritional yeast sprinkles and soy curls, and get the fuck out of my aisle.

The couple giggled and went on their way, leaving me behind to fume. I couldn’t even enjoy reading at this point. I went outside and stomped down the sidewalk. And then suddenly I realized…

…I wasn’t a tiger. I was a quivering mouse making a tiger shadow puppet and fooling no one.

Anger. Indignation. Pride. These are the things you learn to avoid on day one of Buddhist kindergarten. Fail. Epic fail.

I packed my mousey tiger tail between my legs and crept back home. I thought back on this guy at the bookstore over the next few days. His sentiment echoed back and forth in my skull until I was ready to bash it against the wall. “If you want to learn about Zen, don’t read about Zen. So I didn’t.” Why had this triggered so many harsh feelings in me? Why was I still torturing myself over it? Why am I currently writing about it?

If he was factually wrong in his interpretation or expressed lack of value in Buddhist teachings then it wouldn’t make sense for me to be offended. If I had overheard a child telling another child that two plus two equals five I wouldn’t have reacted with so much venom. I would have laughed it off. I wouldn’t have been upset and I certainly wouldn’t have praised myself for knowing that two plus two is really four.

Fast forward a bit, and here’s me realizing that the dude wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, his statement, his instant returning of the book, was, in that moment, the Zennest shit I could have heard, and a lesson I badly needed. I mentally promoted him from hipster to zenster, the new honorific title I made up.

“If you want to learn about Zen, don’t read about Zen.”

I know I’d read that sentiment before, and more than once at that. I’d always taken it to mean that Zen was supposed to be something ineffable, something that transcended our languages’ ability to pin down its essence no matter how much we talk about it. I thought it was a cute paradoxical hook for Buddhist writers.

No, stupid. That’s what I get for thinking too hard. One of my first Eastern philosophy professors once told me about the time that he had been laughed out of a Zen monastery after telling the boss that he was a philosopher. Now I get it.

“If you want to learn about Zen, don’t read about Zen.” If you want to learn about baseball, don’t read about it. If you want to learn about the view from Mount Hood, don’t read about it. If you want to learn about writing a poem or riding a horse or tasting a pickle don’t fucking read about it. Don’t think about it, don’t tell your Aunt Sally about it, don’t deliberate plans for it. Go do it. The simplicity was a kick in the teeth. The kick delivered via being punked by some hipster made it a Chuck Norris roundhouse.

So I read too much and practice too little. That, I confess, makes me a terrible Buddhist. But I’m working on it. Now put down the blog, Poindexter, and go do something.

AnattaPunk hipster pins, coming soon to a store near you! Which store? It’s pretty obscure. You probably haven’t heard of it.

[AnattaBlog] Newddhism?

A recent New York Times article [here] discusses the state of Western Buddhism. Some highlights: A claim that Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the United States and that more Americans convert to Buddhism than to Mormonism.

I haven’t been able to find data on the web to corroborate this claim, but:

• [This article] claims Buddhism in the U.S. grew 170% from 1990-2000 and is still growing at the same rate. [This related article] says Buddhism, alarmingly, has the second-lowest retention rate of American religions.

• [This Wikipedia entry] says Buddhism is recognized as the fastest growing western religion (and other interesting tidbits, like Buddhism being the fastest growing religion in British prisons).

• Mormonism is the fastest growing U.S. religion according to this [Huffington Post article] from last May. Mormonism, of course, has come under tremendous scrutiny due to a certain high-profile political candidate being a member of this uniquely American (arguably) Christian sect.

These statistics don’t really mean much. Categorization of Buddhism as a “religion” is controversial to begin with. Buddhist principles just don’t seem to be comparable to faiths for many of us. Then there are the “night-stand Buddhists,” “Jewddhists,” etc., who claim allegiance to another religion while benefiting from part-time study of the dhamma. Altogether it’s a nightmare for any statistician who wants an accurate report of the number of Buddhists in the U.S.

The original article points out that Western Buddhism is often not cased in the cultural leanings of the Eastern cultures from whence it came, which presents an interesting conundrum for the American Buddhist community. Are we going to follow traditional Buddhist paths, dressing in silly costumes and chanting incomprehensible eastern language mantras? Or are we, like every other culture Buddhism has encountered, going to incorporate the dhamma in a way that makes the most practical sense for our day-to-day lives?

I’m obviously not neutral here. Purists (fair to call them fundamentalists?) will argue that Buddhism has been passed down successfully through traditional paths for centuries, and that these time-honored traditions are therefore the best methods for us to adopt. But the fact remains that you can’t take the Japan out of Zen. You can’t take the Tibet out of the Dalai Lama. These methods came from a specific time and place where the dhamma was put into terms that were understandable to the people who lived there. Tibet should have its own style of Buddhism, even if it’s full of Tibetan culture magic and mysticism which objectively contradicts the original Buddha’s teachings in many ways, but nonetheless works as an effective metaphor for Tibetans to understand the dhamma in their own terms. We should also read and interpret the dhamma for ourselves. If we reject the uniforms and rituals of our Eastern Buddhist ancestors does that make us not-Buddhist? Rather, does it make us Newddhists (kudos to the original article for this hilarious moniker)?

In the end, different kinds of Buddhism work for different people. On an individual level it doesn’t matter which kind of Buddhism you subscribe to. All those extra bells and whistles of various cultural interpretations have kept the teachings from dying and disappearing over the centuries. Those cultural artifacts make the teachings seem exotic and exciting to a lot of westerners, but in order for Buddhist ideas to become mainstream (and therefore take up a permanent position in western culture) we will have to cut out the hocus-pocus and find ways for post-modern westerners to see the dhamma at work in the 21st century.