Article based on the book Don’t Be a Jerk ©2016 by Brad Warner. Published with permission of New World Library. http://www.newworldlibrary.com

By Brad Warner, author of Don’t Be a Jerk

I discovered the 13^th Century Japanese Zen Master Eihei Do-gen when I was an 18 year-old punk rock bass player. Now I’m a waaaayyy-more-than 18 year-old punk rock bass player and I’m still trying to understand his philosophy and practice.

Do-gen is unusual in the realm of Zen Buddhist thinkers in that he wrote his own stuff and he was pretty young when he did so. Mostly when you read ancient Zen philosophy, you’re not only reading the words of a very old person, but you’re reading those words as interpreted by their students since few of the old Zen Masters (male and female, see below) were writers.

Do-gen was a writer and what’s more, he started writing very early in his career. Most of his writing was done when he was in his 30s and 40s. He became a monk when he was just 12. So while he’s very wise, he’s also young and fired up and often kind of ornery. Just the kind of thing a punk rock kid like me needed.

But Do-gen wrote 800 years ago in a time and a place very unlike ours. So he’s not that easy to understand. Still, if you work with him, and if you do the meditation practice he keeps recommending, it gets a little easier.

Here are a few things I learned from Mr. Do-gen.

1. Sit Down and Shut Up — Do-gen taught a style of meditation called Shikantaza, which means, “just sitting.” It’s meditation without any goal. You’re not trying to become more balanced or more in touch with yourself or more mindful. You’re just sitting with yourself exactly as you are. On one hand it’s dirt simple. You can learn all there is to know about the technique in a couple of minutes. But you can spend a lifetime on it and never exhaust what you can learn from it.

2. Don’t Be a Jerk —There’s a misconception that Zen is all about self-improvement and has nothing to do with ethics. But Do-gen says that the very essence of the practice can be summed up as “Don’t be a jerk.” Actually, that’s my paraphrase. In the original it’s more like, “Just avoid doing wrong.” Ethics isn’t about memorizing a set of supposedly universal moral standards because every situation is a little different. No set of rules can ever cover every situation. It’s about sitting down and shutting up and allowing what the Old Testament called the “still small voice” we all possess show you what the right action is in this specific situation.

3. Keep Your Bum Clean — When people translate Do-gen, they generally choose the juicy philosophical parts. But Do-gen also wrote some very nuts-and-bolts pieces about how to practice in a Zen monastery. My favorite of these pieces is the one in which he gives extremely detailed instructions about how monks should clean themselves after using the toilet. It’s really TMI! But Do-gen’s teaching isn’t just about high-minded philosophical ideals. It’s about every little thing you do. It’s what my teacher called a “philosophy of action.” It’s not a philosophy you read and memorize. It’s a philosophy you do.

4. Women and Men Are Both Just as Stupid — In the year 1240 CE, Do-gen wrote a sermon called Prostrating to That Which Has Attained the Marrow. You wouldn’t guess from the title, but the sermon is mostly about how men and women should be regarded as absolutely equal when it comes to their capacity to understand the deepest truths of life. In Japan in the 13^th Century that was revolutionary.

Remember that women couldn’t even vote in the USA until 1920. In Japan in Do-gen’s day the spiritual inequality of women was taken for granted. There were temples that all women, including Buddhist nuns, were forbidden to enter that any man could walk into any time he pleased. Do-gen denounced that practice in no uncertain terms and went on to say that anyone who held the view that men are superior to women is an idiot. I already believed that before I read Do-gen, but it was amazing and inspiring to read words like that from a man who lived when he did.

5. You Are Not Your Self and Neither Am I — The Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion is one of the trickiest aspects of the philosophy. You can tell me the Loch Ness Monster and the Easter Bunny aren’t real, but if you say that my self is unreal that just sounds crazy. I know I have a self because here I am!

But Do-gen isn’t saying that all those things you include within the concept of “self” are unreal. You have a personality and an individual history, you have your credit cards and I can’t use them, that’s all true. It’s just that when we combine this stuff into something called “self” — and then believe that this “self” we have created is a real thing — that’s when we get into trouble.

We waste our time, energy and effort building up something that doesn’t even exist. Then we defend this imaginary concept against imaginary attacks. We hold this “self” — that doesn’t even exist except in our minds — to be the single most important thing in all the world. And because of that, we suffer.

It takes more to get past this than simply acknowledging that we understand the self to be unreal. But that’s a very good first step. I know it’s made my life a whole lot better.

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Brad Warner is the author of Don’t 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.

Based on the book Don’t Be a Jerk ©2016 by Brad Warner.  Published with permission of New World Library. http://www.newworldlibrary.com

The ones who hurt Jordan go on, while his days with us slip farther and farther into the past. What was the plan, the purpose, in his leaving so early, in the middle of a passionate life?

In the beginning I tried to explain that rendezvous — between Jordan and his murderers — as chance, as a random convulsion of fate where men who are prone to violence happened to cross his path. And I have imagined them as victims too, poured from families and neighborhoods that breed trauma. I have imagined them, impoverished of other opportunities, using violence as an instrument to prove themselves or meet basic needs.

I have tried to explain violence — and the moment Jordan died — as the poet W. H. Auden did: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”* But while that statement is absolutely true — as I know from my own work with trauma victims — I less and less believe it as the reason for losing my son. That’s because the matrix of cause and effect is only the most obvious explanation for events.

If I let go of my pen, the force of gravity will make it fall. Cause and effect. If a child is raised in a brutal, treacherous environment, attachment theory predicts he or she will struggle with emotion dysregulation, as well as with aggressive or impulsive behavior. Again, this would appear to be cause and effect. However, falling pens don’t make choices. Our human ability to choose — through some degree of free will — tangles the web of cause and effect. Causes become harder to trace.

To understand why Jordan was killed I’ve had to go back to the question of why we are here. In fact, I’ve had to go even further, to the purpose of the material universe.

Jordan tells me this:

The purpose of matter — whether in the form of circling planets or the human body — is to help consciousness grow. All of physical existence serves this purpose. Consciousness creates matter and the laws of the universe. Then it manipulates and lives in physical worlds in order to learn and evolve. So every event is an opportunity for souls to grow.

There is no tragedy; there is no loss. There are just events we learn from.

We select lives based on what will probably happen in that life, and what those experiences will teach. So our lesson plan determines the body, family, and environment we enter — including major relationships, challenges, and crises. But things don’t always go according to plan, because of choices — our own and those of the souls around us. The possibilities at the moment when we select a life are often changed by the counterforce of free will.

The matrix of cause and effect, stretched over time, collides with hundreds of choices by dozens of nearby souls. As a result, what we signed up for may look very different thirty, forty, or fifty years into a particular life. To add to the uncertainty, lessons that go unlearned must be presented again in new circumstances. And karmic challenges that have finally been faced and surmounted will be dropped from the lesson plan, with new learning opportunities to replace them.

How much, I ask Jordan, of the lesson plan for a life actually happens?

The big challenges and major events usually occur. This is because the waves of probability are so strong and because they intersect from multiple sources. But events with a lower probability are often erased by decisions we make. For example, souls born in the 1920s and 1930s had an almost 100 percent probability of facing World War II. Where they lived and how the war might touch them wasn’t likely to change. But choices they made responding to countless life events could change their circumstances — even to the point of altering the likely span of their lives.

In short, the big stuff is set. But as the force of probability diminishes, our individual wills have more effect on what happens. This much is always true: whether events occur as planned or are affected by choice, the purpose of everything is to learn.

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Matthew McKay, PhD, is the author of Seeking Jordan and numerous other books. He is a clinical psychologist, professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA, and founder and publisher at New Harbinger Publications. Visit him online at http://www.SeekingJordan.com.

Excerpted from Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe. Copyright ©2016 by Matthew McKay, PhD. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com