Sex, Sin and Zen by Brad Warner

Author:Brad Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577319108
Publisher: New World Library

Chapter 17

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Oddly enough, in my interview with Nina Hartley we barely touched on the subject of love. That wasn’t a deliberate omission. It just never came up. But I do get a lot of questions about love, which I’ll try and address. Here’s an email I received that covers an aspect of the topic I often get asked about. I touched on it right at the beginning of this book, in fact.

It bugs me that Gautama Buddha left his family. The message I get from your books (and other Zen writing) is that you don’t need to run away to find enlightenment, the truth, or whatever. If you happen to be a prince with a wife and child, those circumstances are not obstacles to your practice — they are your practice. Also, you shouldn’t hurt or neglect the people and things in your life to pursue some abstract goal. It seems like this part of the historical Buddha’s story is inconsistent with these principles. The way the story is usually told, I get the impression that he wouldn’t have been able to find enlightenment if he hadn’t left his family — in other words, having a family life really was an obstacle to his practice. I’ve also heard stories of others who left their families to join his original group. So here’s the question: How do you think one should interpret the fact that the historical Buddha and others in his group left their families? Also, what would you say to someone today who wanted to leave his or her spouse and children in order to devote more time to sitting?

This is a tough question to answer adequately. Let me tell you a story first. When I took the Buddhist precepts and became a monk through my teacher Nishijima Roshi, he didn’t require me to shave my head. But later on I decided it might be useful and expedient to do the ceremony through the Soto-shu, which is a huge, mostly useless bureaucratic institution in Japan that certifies Zen teachers. I thought it might be nice for my name to be in the official books in their basement, or wherever they keep them. The Soto-shu requires you to shave your head for the ceremony. So I did.*

Afterward I needed to explain to friends and co-workers why I suddenly looked like a reject from the cue ball factory. I still lived in Japan at the time. So I told them I did which is spelled out in Roman letters as shukke — pronounced “shoe-kay.” The two Chinese characters used to spell out this word mean “leave home.”

But I hadn’t left home, in the literal sense. I lived in the same house with the same wife — I was married at the time — and had the same job as before. This is not at all uncommon. Monks in Japan often live at temples but just as often do not. Since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Buddhist Japanese monks have been legally permitted to marry, and most of them do.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.