Brad Warner is a Zen priest, Japanese monster movie obsessive and former punk rock bassist. In 2003, he blew the top off the Buddhist book world with his irreverent autobiography/manifesto Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth About Reality. Now in his second book, Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha..., Brad tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo by thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen.
Illuminating Dogen's enigmatic teachings in plain language, Brad intertwines sharp philosophical musings on sex, evil, meditation, enlightenment, death, anger, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the power and the pain of the punk rock ethos. For those who have felt drawn to Buddhist teachings but are scared off by its stiff austerity, Brad writes with a sharp smack of truth, the real heart of Zen, in stories that cut to the heart of reality.
There is even a travelogue of his triumphant return to Ohio for a reunion concert of Akron punk bands, Brad melds the antiauthoritarianism of punk with the antiauthoritarianism of Zen -- with a good dose of pop culture thrown in -- challenging orthodoxy and questioning everything.
Here feminist Crass singer Eve Libertine rails against sexism. "The true romance is the ideal repression, that you seek,/That you dream of, that you look for in the streets,/That you find in the magazines, the cinema, the glossy shops,/And the music spins you round and round looking for the props./The silken robe, the perfect little ring,/Will gives you the illusion when it doesn't mean a thing,/Step outside into the street and staring from the wall/Is perfection of the happiness that makes you feel so small./Romance, can you dance? D'you fit the right description?/Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you want me for your own?/Do you love me? Say you need me, say you know that I'm the one,/Tell me I'm your everything, let us build a home./We can build a house for us, with little ones fellow,/The proof of our normality that justifies tomorrow./Romance, romance. Do you love me? Say you do,/We can leave the world behind and make it just for two./Love don't make the world go round, it holds it right in place,/Keeps us thinking love's too pure to see another face./Love's another skin-trap, another social weapon,/Another way to make men slaves and women at their beckon./Love's another sterile gift, another sh*t condition,/That keeps us seeing just the One and others not existing./Woman is a holy myth, a gift of man's expression,/She's sweet, defenseless, golden-eyed, a gift of God's repression./If we didn't have these codes for love, of tokens and positions,/We'd find ourselves as lovers still, not tokens or possessions./It's a natural, it's a romance, without the power and greed,/We can fight to lift the cover if you want to sow and seed./Do you love me? Do you? Do you? Don't you see they aim to smother/The actual possibilities of seeing all the others?/Do you love me? Do you? Do you? Don't you see they aim to smother/The actual possibilities of seeing all the others?
