Revenge of the Gamer

I am often asked what it means to be a Zen Buddhist, and I am always happy to answer those questions.  Very few people understand much about the religion, so I decided to write this essay.  I hope it teaches you a bit more about Zen, and about my own personal quest for spiritual enlightenment.  

My Quest for Answers

The great thing about my blog is that I can be as long winded as I want.  So before I tell you about Zen, I’m going to tell you a bit about my quest to find religion.  

When I was six my stepmother enrolled me in Catholic school.  This was the first brush I had with religion, because my father was agnostic and hadn’t addressed the issue.  At first I was both fascinated and excited.  Great, my young self though, I’ve finally found the place with all the answers.  They can tell me everything I need to know, and I’ll finally understand what happens when we die.  

My enthusiasm didn’t last long.  The problem I ran into was that the church didn’t like questions, and I was overflowing with them.  I remember one of the sisters teaching us about the great flood and Noah’s Ark.  I was horrified by the tale, and I made her clarify something for me.   

Did god really wipe out everyone in the world, including all the plants and animals?  The sister told me he had, but that god’s faithful and most of the animals were saved on the ark.  Only the wicked were punished.  

I was silent for a moment while I considered this.  How could animals be wicked?  All the cats and dogs and frogs and lizards had been bad?  That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  

So I started asking questions.  One question led to another, which led to another.  Before long the sister was shaking with rage.  My string of questions looked something like this:   

If god is all knowing didn’t he know that people would be wicked?  And, since god had made people and god was perfect, didn’t that mean he intentionally made us so we’d be wicked?  So why did he punish us for being what he made us to be?  If he was perfect than this was all part of his plan, wasn’t it?   

So he’d planned to murder every living thing on the planet, except for the people and animals that got on one boat?  I was horrified.  God sounded like a pretty vindictive dude.  All those dead children and animals didn’t seem fair and I told the sister that. I was made to sit outside in the hall.   

Two days later I was told the story of Jobe, and once again was horrified by what I heard.  God jacked the man over repeatedly based on a bet with the devil?  Whoah, how messed up is that?  Once again I was made to sit in the hall.  Within a few weeks I was kicked out of the Catholic school, and dumped back into public school.  

Yet the experience stayed with me.  I’d learned the concept of hell, and I was terrified I’d be sent there.  The more I learned, the less god made sense to me.  All the sisters and priests could tell me was that I needed to have faith.  Only, I didn’t know how to have faith.  I really tried, but everything I heard about Christianity sounded like a bunch of made up stories.  It wasn’t any more or less far fetched than Greek Mythology or Santa Claus, so why was one right and the others wrong?  I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.   

Finally I met my first athiest, my fifth grade science teacher.  He told me that Christianity was, in essence, a crock of shit.  He explained that people had made up stories thousands of years ago to help them explain the universe, but that they were nothing more than stories.  He also told me that Christians taught that the world was about seven thousand years old, and pointed out that they couldn’t explain dinosaurs.  

So for a few years I called myself an athiest.  I felt much better, because I was no longer worried about going to hell.  But as the years passed a nagging doubt grew in my head.  How could the athiests be sure there was no god?  There wasn’t any proof of his existence, but there wasn’t any proof he didn’t exist either.   

That’s when I learned the word agnostic, and it made a staggering amount of sense to me.  The fact that I didn’t believe in god didn’t preclude his existence.  It just meant I’d never seen anything to convince me he existed.  I still might find that proof, and honestly hoped I would.  The idea of an all powerful entity watching over the world was comforting, and I had a number of very religious friends.  They took a great deal of comfort from their faith, while I was left with nothing but cold hard reality.  

I called myself an agnostic until I was twenty three, so just over ten years ago.  That was when I discovered Zen.  I worked as the head tech for a computer store, and one of the employees was a guy named James.  James was a Zen Buddhist, and I asked him to tell me a little about the religion.  He was more than happy to teach, and he became my mentor for the next few years.  I owe him a huge debt that I can never fully repay.  

What Zen is Not

Zen is a non-historical religion.  It doesn’t have a timeline of when the world was created, and it has no stance on the existence of god.  It doesn’t teach reincarnation (that’s Tibetan Buddhism).  It espouses no beliefs.  

Most religions try to propagate themselves through conversion.  What I mean by this is that Christians, for example, have a duty to teach other people about Christianity.  Zen has no such tenet.  In fact most instructors will only teach you if you ask three times.  They make you work for it, unlike most religions which have often forced their views on others.  

There are no holy books for Zen, such as  the Bible or Koran.  In fact there are no official books at all.   In Zen we don’t believe in the implied duality of right and wrong.  There are no absolutes.  

So what is Zen?

Zen is a philosophy first taught by a guy named Gotama who lived in or around India about five hundred years before Christ was born.  He was the first Buddha and taught that we are all divine beings.  The path to enlightment lay within each of us, and we can all find Nirvana by practicing a simple set of principles.  

Earlier I mentioned that Zen has no religious books.  What it does have are books written by some of the more prominent Buddhists like Steve Hagen.  My personal favorite is Buddhism Plain & Simple, which was the very first book my mentor recommended I read.  It utterly changed my life.  

As good as the book was I eventually moved beyond it.  One of the teachings of Zen is that any book, no matter how good, is like a raft.  You use it to cross the river on your journey of spiritual enlightenment, but once you’ve crossed you have to leave it behind.  The books are useful as a beginning guide, but after that you have to find your own path.  No book or person can do it for you.  

There are the general tenets that we follow though:  

The Four Noble Truths

Truth #1- Life pretty much sucks.  

Truth #2- Life sucks because of attachment.  We either want to get things, like a new car, a better job, or a gorgeous spouse.  Or we want to keep things away, like old age, death, or poverty.  

Truth #3- You can end this suffering.  

Truth #4- This is the meat of the religion, and is called The Eight Fold Path.  It gives eight specific ways you can improve your life and end your suffering.  

   

   

The Eight Fold Path

Right View- In a nutshell right view means seeing the world the way it really is.  It begins with understanding the four noble truths, but progesses to an understanding of all things the further along the path you go.  This is difficult to put into words, and the journey is different for each person that undertakes it.  

Right Intention- Simply put right intention means that everything you do should be done for the right reasons.  It’s a commitment to ethical and moral self improvement.  Basically, you should be a better person for no other reason than to be a better person.  Not because you fear hell, or because you want people to see you as a good person.  

It means resisting desire in all forms, avoiding both anger and aversion, and avoiding cruelty, violence or aggression.  Note that it doesn’t say any of these things are wrong, or that you’d never do them.  Violence might make sense if you’re defending your home.  

Right Speech- Avoid lying or telling falsehoods.  Avoid slanderous speech and don’t talk smack about others.  Abstain from harsh words that will hurt others wherever possible.  Avoid idle chatter that serves no purpose.  Don’t gossip.  Simple stuff, but very powerful.  

Right Action- Avoid hurting sentient beings including yourself.  Try to avoid stealing, deceit or dishonesty.  Basically, try to be a moral person who doesn’t harm others.  

Right Living- Right living teaches that your job should allow you to sleep at night.  If you’re swindling people, killing bunnies or doing something else that feels wrong then you should get another job.   

This particular one has a lot of meaning for me, because I was making six figures in LA.  I quit that job because I was hurting a lot of people by allowing them to get bad mortgages.  Now I work for a credit union helping people recover financially, and its much more rewarding.  I find I sleep much better at night.  

Right Effort- This precept teaches that when you know something is bad, put it aside.  When you know something is healthy, do it.  This includes things like avoiding drugs or alcolhol, and working out to keep yourself healthy.  It’s basically channeling your efforts into positive pursuits that will better yourself.  

Right Mindfulness- This one is all about perception, and is also called true seeing.  We have a tendecy to make assumptions and correlations about things when we see them.  For example if you see a person you will immediate make judgements based on their clothing, ethnicity and sex.  Right mindfulness teaches you to avoid doing that, and to simply observe rather than categorize as we so often do.  

Right Concentration- This precept is also called meditation.  Meditation is something I’ll delve into in a longer article, but I can tell you from experience that meditating daily will make you calmer, happier and more in tune with your surroundings.  

   

   

Some notes about Zen

Thoughts on Belief- Zen teaches that you shouldn’t believe anything, instead you should perceive without judgement.  What does that mean exactly?  I’ll give you an example stolen from Steve Hagen.  Let’s just say I hold out my hand in a closed fist.  I might have a quarter in the palm of my hand, but you don’t know whether I do or don’t.  

You can believe I do, or believe I don’t but you don’t know.  You might be right, or you might be wrong but have no way of knowing for sure.  However, as soon as I open my hand the need for and the usefulness of belief vanish.  You can see whether I have a quarter or not, so what you believe is irrelevent.  

In more practical terms instead of having beliefs, like a belief in god, we have ideas or theories.  I might think something is a certain way, or have a theory about what happens when I die.  However, if I turn those into beliefs I’m closing my mind to the possibility that I’m wrong.   

It was exactly that sort of mindset that had Gallileo imprisoned in a tower for years because he said the sun was the center of the solar system.  Because they believed the earth was the center of the universe, people were not receptive to such a radical new idea even though it was true.  

Right and Wrong-  In religions like Christianity you are taught that certain things are always right, or always wrong.  For example one of the ten commandments is Thou shall not steal.  Stealing is wrong, period.  But what if you need to steal to feed your family?  What if someone had a gun and you knew they were going to use it to kill someone you loved?  Would stealing that gun be wrong if it saved a life?  

Zen doesn’t believe in absolutes.  You should generally avoid stealing, and generally avoid lying.  However, since the universe is fluid you never know when it might make sense to lie or steal.   Imagine you are in Nazi germany and the gestapo is at your door.  If you were harboring Jews would it be wrong to lie about them being in your home?  

Of course you’d lie, because in that instance lying is the compassionate right thing to do.  This is why we don’t believe in absolutes.  You should do the right thing in every situation, but ultimately only you can decide what that right thing is.  

In Conclusion

There’s a lot more to the practice, of course.  The more you learn the more truths become evident over time.  It’s a never ending struggle, but the longer you go the easier things get.  Learning Zen has vastly improved my life, and every time I stray and stop practicing for any length of time I regret it.  

I began my practice in earnest again about two months ago, and have seen a tremendous difference in my quality of life and mental well being.  I can’t believe how much I missed it, and am so thankful to have rediscovered my path.

If you are feeling lost spiritually, have tried other religions and they just don’t fit, or are simply curious I encourage you to pick up Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen.  It gives a wonderful overview of Zen, and it changed my life.  I hope it has the same impact on yours.