Every morning for the past month or so, right after I finish my morning zazen, I’ve been following a little ritual. I light a stick of incense, do three full-body prostrations, and recite the Heart Sutra.* I do not do this because I think Buddha or God is up there listening to me and needs to be reminded that I think he’s supercool. I don’t do it because I think bad things might happen to me if I fail to. I don’t even do it because I’m with a bunch of other people who do it and I worry that I might be ostracized if I don’t. No one else is there except for Crum the Cat, who usually sits and watches me. He must think I’m weird. Anyway, the reason I do it is because it feels real good.
When I was in Tassajara, Greg Fain, the practice leader, insisted that I perform the traditional role of a Zen priest and lead some of the rituals. I really didn’t want to. And I probably could have talked my way out of it. But I decided it wouldn’t be a bad thing to do.
In addition to leading some of the ceremonies, I was required to participate in a morning service each day at dawn. This consisted of nine full-body prostrations, group recitation of the Heart Sutra, group recitation of the names of great Buddhist masters of the past — both male and female — more bows, and finally group recitation of one of a revolving group of sutras that changed each day, followed by a few more bows for good measure. And you know what? That felt great too.
In his book Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton argues that atheists can learn a lot from religion. He says that religious institutions are generally better at educating their members about what they feel are important truths than are nonreligious educational institutions. Religions have special days each year when certain significant matters are supposed to be commemorated. They also have rituals in which the major tenets of their creed are repeated daily. Religions involve both the mind and body by integrating their insights with physical practices like baptism or the Buddhist tea ceremony. Religions form communities that support each other in ways that secular communities often fail to. Religious people create works of art intended to express their philosophies. Mr. de Botton asks if we can’t create atheistic versions of these same kinds of things.
I would argue that Zen Buddhism already has what most atheists would define as atheistic versions of some of these same things — that is, if those atheists took the time to look closely into what Zen really teaches rather than immediately dismissing it as a religion and therefore not worth the trouble. Be that as it may, I’m not sure we really can create a perfectly secular version for every aspect of education without ending up with something like Nazism or Soviet-style communism. And we all know how well those worked out. I have, however, seen some stuff that makes me think that something a bit like what Mr. de Botton proposes could work, at least on a smaller scale.
In July 2011 Zero Defex, the hardcore punk band I play bass in, got invited to play at a festival called X-Day held in the Wisteria campgrounds near the southeast Ohio town of Pomeroy. There were naked people all over the place. I watched a guy play baseball using a Ping-Pong ball for a ball and his dick for a bat. There were drum circles and people in tie-dyed shirts. There were pagans and Wiccans and Rastafarians galore. I think there might even have been a bit of illegal drug usage.
X-Day is an annual festival held by the Church of the SubGenius. The Church of the SubGenius was founded by a Cleveland-based artist who calls himself the Reverend Ivan Stang. I stayed in a house just outside the campgrounds with the reverend and his significant other, Connie, for a couple of nights while I was there.
The reverend told me that he started his church basically as a joke. Sometime in the seventies he began making fake religious tracts. He’d Xerox these and put them in the kinds of random places you often find real religious tracts lying around in — Laundromats, bookstores, bus stops. The reverend’s sister-in-law was in the publishing business and insisted that there was potential for a book based on these fake religious tracts. An editor at McGraw-Hill books agreed. He got in touch with Rev. Stang, and they put together The Book of the SubGenius.
The book is full of wonderful weirdness. There are yetis and UFOs and the ubiquitous J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, a pipe-smoking white man seemingly designed by a fifties ad agency whom the then-nonexistent Church of the SubGenius regarded as its prophet. The book became a big hit and is still in print after more than thirty years.
But Rev. Stang had a problem. Although the book was so over the top you’d think that no one could ever miss the fact that it was a joke, Rev. Stang says, “You wouldn’t believe how many people wanted to take that shit seriously!” Rev. Stang put out a follow-up in which he tried to make it even clearer that the whole thing was a big joke. Yet even then certain people still believed. “If I learned to keep a straight face I could be making more money than the Scientologists,” he says.
One of the more blatantly absurd statements Rev. Stang made was that on July 5, 1998, an army of aliens would arrive on Earth to whisk the loyal members of his church away in their pleasure saucers and wipe out the nonbelievers. A big party was held on that day, and when the saucers failed to arrive, the Rev. Stang cited a number of outlandish conspiracy theories to explain why they hadn’t come. He said they would surely show up next July 5. Every year since, the SubGeniuses have gathered on July 5 to await the aliens, and every year the reverend comes up with new excuses for why they didn’t show up.
It’s basically just a big party in the woods, and although there may be a few believers in the crowd, most folks seem to get that it’s a joke. Yet they still play along, giving rousing sermons laced with SubGenius buzzwords and engaging in the bizarre rites and rituals of the church, like a baptism where your old sins are washed away and you receive new ones in return. Yet somehow, this fake church also does a lot of people a lot of good.
A couple of hours before Zero Defex took the stage I met a woman who called herself Susie the Floozy. Susie the Floozy has a condition called prosopagnosia that renders her unable to recognize people’s faces. She told me that if she saw me later that day she’d probably know who I was, but that if we were to meet again in a week she’d have no idea who I was and would probably introduce herself all over again. I kinda feel like I have the same problem sometimes.
Susie the Floozy also told me that the Church of the SubGenius saved her life. At one point her condition, as well as a number of other factors in her life, had her convinced that she might as well just end it all. But then she came across The Book of the SubGenius, and it offered her direction and a kind of peace. She knew the whole thing was a puton. But that didn’t matter. She knew that whoever made it understood something profound. Eventually she hooked up with other members of the church, who took her in and accepted her. Just like a real church, the Church of the SubGenius gave Susie the Floozy a community and a sense of belonging. She found a reason to live.
I found the Church of the SubGenius’s approach to their own teachings to be remarkably similar to the Mahayana Buddhist take on some of its scriptures. Mahayana means “great vehicle.” It refers to a group of Buddhist sects that emerged several hundred years after Buddha died. They often developed their own brand-new sutras that followed the forms of the old ones, such as the Lotus Sutra, which we looked at earlier. They put lots of new words into the mouths of historical figures like Shakyamuni Buddha and his disciples, who had been dead for ages.
We know full well that sutras like the Lotus Sutra, the Lankavatara Sutra, and even the Heart Sutra are in some sense false in that they claim to contain the words of the Buddha and his immediate disciples but were composed hundreds of years after all those people were dead. Yet in spite of the lies contained within them, these sutras are essentially true because they express something profoundly real.
This is why religious people who insist on the supposed “literal truth” of their scriptures have got it all wrong. Scriptures don’t need to be literally true to have deep meaning, the same way that novels and poems don’t need to be literally true in order to affect us.
It doesn’t matter if the stuff recorded in the Bible “literally” happened or not, as long as the messages those stories are intended to convey are true. This whole obsession with the literal truth of scripture is ruining a lot of the good that people might otherwise be able to find in their religions.
This idea of the Bible as literal truth is very much an American phenomenon. But it has spread to other parts of the world, just like many other aspects of American culture. And it’s a silly idea because most of those who espouse it don’t even believe it themselves.
Maybe they believe the Earth was created in six days, that there was a big flood, and that Jesus rose from the dead. But few of them believe that the Earth is flat and held up by big pillars, as it says in 1 Samuel 2:8: “The pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and he hath set the world upon them.” Nor are they likely to take Jesus literally when he says in Matthew 5:30, “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.” Although Leviticus 11 says, “Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you,” they still like their fried shrimp. So it’s a kind of selective literalism. Why not be more like how the members of the Church of the SubGenius are about their book and admit there’s a lot of stuff in the Bible you can’t possibly take literally but that it contains some important truths anyway?
Since you are reading a book called There Is No God and He Is Always with You, you are probably not a biblical literalist. But I think this stuff is worth mentioning because sometimes people try to force the concept of biblical literalism onto Buddhism. Here’s an email I got a while ago:
I studied the Nishijima/Cross translation of Shobogenzo quite a few years ago. Master Nishijima’s attitude toward rebirth/ reincarnation is essentially the same as I hold. However, I took and take objection to his persistent opinion that the teaching of literal rebirth is not Buddhist. I have studied Dogen quite a lot and must come to the conclusion that for Dogen literal rebirth is clearly part of his Buddhist view (it has nothing to do with the Senika view of eternalism). Like I said, my own opinion about this matter is essentially the same as Master Nishijima’s but that view should not be forced upon Dogen; it is not appropriate and I feel that Master Nishijima does exactly that. When reading Dogen we should try to think like an ancient Japanese monk who viewed the world in a Mahayana Buddhist way and take what we can from it in our modern world without trying to alter aspects of it that seem alien or even superstitious to us.
Anyway, Master Nishijima’s persistence on this view somehow put me off his Shobogenzo. It has been years since I have studied his version of the Shobogenzo and I feel I would like to own it again so I was really excited about the Kazuaki Tanahashi’s version until I read your blog. The same things that bother you about this translation would bother me too! So I’m considering buying the Nishijima version again instead. It has been so long since I have studied it so, my real question is: Does the Nishijima version sneak in some of his what I feel are modern views about rebirth/reincarnation, or is the text as literal as possible and reflect Dogen’s teachings purely?
Nishijima Roshi leaves all of Dogen’s references to rebirth within Shobogenzo just as they are in the original. People are getting reborn all over the place in that book! When people questioned Nishijima about this during talks, he always explained that these references were meant metaphorically, not literally. However, within the text of his translation he never alters any of these references, nor does he even add any footnotes saying they are metaphorical.
To me, the more direct questions are 1) “What do we today mean by ‘literal rebirth’?” and 2) “Why does it matter if Dogen believed in it or not?” In the case of the questioner, the answer to #2 is he wants to know if Nishijima’s translation is reliable. The answer to that is, yes, it is. So is Kaz Tanahashi’s fine translation.
But I think for most people #2 is important because we regard Dogen as a religious authority. If Dogen agrees with other religious authorities, like Deepak Chopra, for example, on the question of literal rebirth, we can feel that much more relieved. As Mr. Chopra has learned, people will pay good money to be told by a religious authority figure that they will live forever. People have paid damn good money to hear that from religious authority figures for a very long time, and in cultures across the globe. It is quite a reliable strategy for making a living.
But Deepak Chopra doesn’t know anything more about life after death than you do, dear reader. Dogen didn’t know anything more about life after death when he was alive and writing than you do, either. I also do not know anything more than you. Unlike the “she” in John Lennon’s song “She Said, She Said,” I do not know what it’s like to be dead.*
I don’t necessarily think that Mr. Chopra is cynically exploiting his readers by telling them lies. I think he says what he says to create a reassuring feedback loop from himself to his readership and back again that helps relieve his own fears of death. This is also a time-tested strategy.
But back to question #1. What do we mean today by “literal rebirth”?
A now defunct website called e-sangha said this about me in reference to the above: “Brad Warner is a materialist; i.e., he denies rebirth; and therefore, the only conclusion he can assert is that the mind is merely an epiphenomenon of brain activity. That is principally why knowledgeable Buddhists take issue with him. That being so, he isn’t teaching Buddhism, but instead teaching a Worldly dharma that he and his teacher call ‘Zen’.” Further down in the same post someone adds, “Rebirth is literal in all Buddhist traditions. It is not a metaphor, analogy, simile, or metonymy.”
For starters, I have never asserted that “mind is merely an epiphenomenon of brain activity” because I didn’t even know what the word epiphenomenon meant until I looked it up (it means a “secondary phenomenon”). But I believe that the e-sangha guy is saying that I think that the immaterial something he calls “mind” is just the activity of the material brain. In one sense that is true. But I also think that the material brain is an expression of the activity of the immaterial thing we call mind. Both material brain and immaterial mind are manifestations of something underlying them that is neither material nor immaterial but transcends any distinctions of mind and matter. I do not consider myself a materialist at all.
That’s beside the point. The e-sangha guys believed in literal rebirth, and for them it was very important that others believed in it too. If they thought someone who claimed to be Buddhist denied literal rebirth, they labeled them non-Buddhist and tried to cast doubt on them by using phrases like “that is principally why knowledgeable Buddhists take issue with him.” There is no evidence I am aware of that any knowledgeable Buddhists (whoever they might be) take issue with me about my stance on rebirth. It’s good to be careful of vague, unattributed claims like this in general, by the way.
But still what in heck’s name is literal rebirth? When you come right down to it, I suppose it means, to most people, that someone is telling them they’ll live forever. Literal rebirth means that someday I will actually die as a person in some place, and I will get reborn in another place as another person, celestial being, or animal.
This is not what Buddhism teaches. Well, it’s not what the kind of Buddhism I teach teaches, anyway. There is no “literal you” to get “literally reborn.” And this is the heart of the argument. Dogen is pretty clear that there is no literal you. So the idea that he taught anything like what most people in the Western world mean when they use the phrase literal rebirth is absurd.
Since we’re back on the subject of life after death, let me tell you about the time I encountered a ghost at a Zen monastery and what it means to me in terms of the afterlife.
*A full-body prostration is a really big bow, in which you go all the way down on your knees and bend your neck till your head touches the floor.
*“She” was actually Peter Fonda, out of his mind on LSD, who said this to Lennon while they were tripping together in the Hollywood Hills. I was once in line at Ralph’s grocery store in West Hollywood with Peter Fonda, and he was very much alive. But after Ghost Rider his career was dead. Perhaps that’s what he meant?