Okay, okay, you can usually tell I’m writing a sermon by how many postings I make to this blog in a single day… Anything to avoid the actual work, it appears. I’ve even cooked up a rationale for this, explaining that this is how it works: A burst of energy! I write a while, fingers dancing across the key board. My brain freezes. I step away for a cuppa or perhaps to surf a bit among my favorite blogs and sites, maybe throw up a random firing of the synapses on my blog, then back to pound out another sentence, two or three on the sermon; before the brain freezes again…
Anyway, one of my favorite meanders is over to Hardcore Zen. Brad Warner is probably Western Zen’s premier bad boy. (Well, maybe not. But of those who put themselves out in front of the world, he is…) He curses in print. He appears to write whatever off the top of his head. And, it is obvious from what he says he has a faulty internal governor. He claims he’s not like this in real life. And I bet that’s true; otherwise he wouldn’t have very many friends.
He occasionally says unkind things about my flavor of Zen. But that’s hardly a novelty at his site. He says unkind things about his flavor of Zen, too. And, lots and lots of other things.
And, he says things that are worth hearing. More often than not, in my estimation.
He’s just fired off a post ostensibly critical of institutional Zen. Actually, by my read, he’s criticising the inclination many spiritual practitioners have to pass on the nitty-gritty of one’s actual life in order to play at something spiritual and otherly…
He picks a sad example that I’ve observed on more than one occasion and runs with it…
Warning: It contains both curse words and crudities:
http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2008/05/fuck-institutionalized-zen.html
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In