Tao and Zen
Shawn Cartwright, March 2009
Legend
has it that when Bohdidharma brought Buddhism to China, it was
heavily influence by Taoist thought and became what is known as Zen
(Chan in Chinese). When you strip all the religious trappings out of
Buddhism you get ‘real’ Zen – and you get something very close in
outlook to what the Taoists call Xing, or Essential Nature.
It can be hard to find ‘real’ Zen in the United States. Brad Warner is one of the few published writers who presents Zen the way it was meant to be, Hardcore Zen! An ordained Buddhist monk, punk rocker, and movie maker, Brad will be joining us for a special lecture on Zen’s Chinese connection later this month.
Read about Brad Warner's DC Detour
Here are a few
of the things that Brad has to say:
On
Money and Success
When you hear about these famous people who
have a lot of money and a lot of power killing themselves or doing some
crazy thing it's because they have realized that their dream is just a
dream. When it's a dream it seems wonderful. When it's your reality it's
something else entirely.
I used to have
this idea that if people had a lot of money they could become more secure
and this is the reason to have money because you want security and a
stable situation. And because I was in the entertainment business I would
encounter people who were extremely rich and who should be very secure and
very happy and they weren't. In fact they were struggling even more than
the ordinary people I knew because they were always trying to prove who
they were. They were expending tremendous energy all the time just to let
everyone they encountered know they were important or rich or whatever. It
looked exhausting!
On
Knowing What to Do
There's a kind of an illusion that some
people know what to do at every moment and there are people who are
extremely confident and act like they know what to do. But they don't know
what to do any better then you do. It’s just a pose. That’s all. Doesn’t
matter who. Great politicians, great philosophers, great Zen masters. They
don’t have a clue.
So not knowing
what to do is a perfectly fine situation. I don't know what to do so I'm
just going to do something. And if your action is sincere and not
motivated by some kind of greed or anger or some other negative quality or
emotion then what you do will be right. It may not be perfect. It'll never
be perfect. It can't be perfect. But it won't be the wrong thing to
do. You just do something that's not motivated by greed or anger or ego,
for want of a better word.
On
Knowing Yourself
Be honest and be sincere and look at what you
really are honestly and sincerely, which is something quite difficult. I
think most of us miss that and I think a lot of the trouble in the world
is because people can't look at themselves honestly. They have a lot of
illusions about themselves and they have a lot of illusions about other
people and those illusions are in conflict. And when those illusions are
in conflict people fight with each other over nothing, over what in the
end is just two different interpretations of the of the exact same
reality. They’re fighting over the interpretations — which is a silly
thing to fight over. It's a lot better to just look at the real situation
and deal with the real situation than to fight over various
interpretations of it.