{"id":12348,"date":"2016-05-14T16:39:28","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T21:39:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/?p=12348"},"modified":"2016-05-14T16:39:28","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T21:39:28","slug":"dont-be-a-jerk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/?p=12348","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Be a Jerk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brad Warner is one of my favorite authors on the subject of Zen and I loved his latest book \u201cDon\u2019t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from D\u014dgen, Japan\u2019s Greatest Zen Master\u201d, which is his interpretation of D\u014dgen\u2019s \u201cSh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d\u201d. This is a book that has greatly influenced all of Warner\u2019s writing and I assume his practice. I found \u201cDon\u2019t Be a Jerk\u201d interesting and inspiring. I\u2019m happy to get to share an excerpt from the book\u2019s introduction with you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t Be a Jerk<\/strong>
\nAn Introduction from Brad Warner<\/center> <\/p>\n
It used to be that nobody outside the worlds of stuffy academics and nerdy Zen studies knew who D\u014dgen was. And while this thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master and writer is still not one of the best-known philosophers on the planet, he\u2019s well-known enough to have a character on the popular American TV series “Lost” named after him and to get referenced regularly in books and discussions of the world\u2019s most important philosophical thinkers.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, in spite of all this, D\u014dgen still tends to be presented either as an inscrutable Oriental speaking in riddles and rhymes or as an insufferable intellectual making clever allusions to books you\u2019re too dumb to have heard of. Nobody wants to read a guy like that. <\/p>\n
You could argue that D\u014dgen really is these things. Sometimes. But he\u2019s a lot more than that. When you work with him for a while, you start to see that he\u2019s actually a pretty straightforward, no-nonsense guy. It\u2019s hard to see that, though, because his world and ours are so very different. <\/p>\n
A few months ago, my friend Whitney and I were at Atomic City Comics in Philadelphia. There I found “The War That Time Forgot”, a collection of DC comics from the fifties about American soldiers who battle living dinosaurs on a tropical island during World War II, and Whitney found a book called “God Is Disappointed in You”, by Mark Russell. The latter was far more influential in the formation of this book.<\/p>\n
The publishers of that book, Top Shelf Publications, describe “God Is Disappointed in You” as being \u201cfor people who would like to read the Bible…if it would just cut to the chase.\u201d In this book, Russell has summarized the entire Christian Bible in his own words, skipping over repetitive passages and generally making each book far more concise and straightforward than any existing translation. He livens up his prose with a funny, irreverent attitude that is nonetheless respectful to its source material. If you want to know what\u2019s in the Bible but can\u2019t deal with actually reading the whole darned thing, it\u2019s a very good way to begin.<\/p>\n
$\"\"$ After she\u2019d been reading “God Is Disappointed in You” for a while, Whitney showed it to me and suggested I try to do the same thing with “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d: The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”. This eight-hundred-year-old classic, written by the Japanese monk Eihei D\u014dgen, expounds on and explains the philosophical basis for one of the largest and most influential sects of Zen Buddhism. It\u2019s one of the great classics of philosophical literature, revered by people all over the world. However, like many revered philosophical classics, it\u2019s rarely read, even by those who claim to love it.<\/p>\n
I immediately thought it was a cool idea to try to do this with “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d”, but I didn\u2019t know if it would work. I\u2019ve studied “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d” for around thirty years, much of that time under the tutelage of Gudo Wafu Nishijima. Nishijima Roshi was my ordaining teacher, and he, along with his student Chodo Mike Cross, produced a highly respected English translation that was for many years the only full English translation available. I had already written one book about “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d”, called “Sit Down and Shut Up” (New World Library, 2007), and had referenced “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d” extensively in all five of my other books about Zen practice. <\/p>\n
My attitude toward “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d” is somewhat like Mark Russell\u2019s attitude toward the Bible. I deeply respect the book and its author, D\u014dgen. But I don\u2019t look at it the way a religious person regards a holy book. Zen Buddhism is not a religion, however much it sometimes looks like one. There are no holy books in Zen, especially the kind of Zen that D\u014dgen taught. In D\u014dgen\u2019s view everything is sacred, and to single out one specific thing, like a book or a city or a person, as being more sacred than anything else is a huge mistake. So the idea of rewriting D\u014dgen\u2019s masterwork didn\u2019t feel at all blasphemous or heretical to me.<\/p>\n
But “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d” presents a whole set of challenges Russell didn\u2019t face with the Bible. The biggest one is that the Bible is mainly a collection of narrative stories. What Russell did, for the most part, was to summarize those stories while skipping over much of the philosophizing that occurs within them. “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d”, on the other hand, has just a few narrative storytelling sections, and these are usually very short. It\u2019s mostly philosophy. This meant that I\u2019d have to deal extensively with the kind of material Russell generally skipped over.<\/p>\n
Still, it was such an interesting idea that I figured I\u2019d give it a try. My idea was to present the reader with everything important in “Sh\u014db\u014dgenz\u014d”. I didn\u2019t summarize every single line. But I have tried to give a sense of every paragraph of the book without leaving anything significant out. While I\u2019d caution you not to quote this book and attribute it to D\u014dgen, I have tried to produce a book wherein you could conceivably do so without too much fear of being told by someone, \u201cThat\u2019s not really what D\u014dgen said!\u201d Obviously, if a line mentions Twinkies or zombies or beer, you\u2019ll know I\u2019ve done a bit of liberal paraphrasing. I have noted these instances, though, so that shouldn\u2019t be too much of a problem.<\/p>\n
$\"\"$ About Brad Warner:<\/strong>
\nBrad Warner is the author of Don\u2019t Be a Jerk and numerous other titles including Sit Down & Shut Up, Hardcore Zen, and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. A Soto Zen priest, he is a punk bassist, filmmaker, Japanese-monster-movie marketer, and popular blogger based in Los Angeles. Visit him online at www.hardcorezen.info<\/a>. <\/p>\n
Excerpted from Don\u2019t Be a Jerk \u00a92016 by Brad Warner. Published with permission of New World Library. http:\/\/www.newworldlibrary.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What’s the deal with “Don’t Be a Jerk”? We’ve got an introduction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themagicalbuffet.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}