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Articles by Brad Warner
PowerUp Data Centers - Investment Special Invitation 2026
By: Brad Warner, Vanessa Richelle Wilson Akin is proud to serve as a Gold Sponsor of Infocast’s PowerUp Data Centers – Investment, taking place on October 27-29 in McLean, Virginia. Projects & energy transition partners Brad Warner and Vanessa Wilson will both moderate dynamic panels. Brad will lead the Real Estate vs.
I See Dead People . . . or Maybe I Don’t
I don’t believe in ghosts. But I have met dead people and communicated with them. As a Zen Buddhist teacher, I shouldn’t be telling you this. The Zen stream of Buddhism is known for a kind of rational mysticism. We don’t generally talk about stuff that would be considered paranormal or supernatural. It’s all about chopping wood and carrying water, ordinary mind is the way, and all that.
Venice Peach By Jessamyn Violet, 286 pgs.
May 20, 2025 Jessamyn Violet is the author of the 2023 novel Secret Rules to Being a Rock Star as well as a 2017 book of poetry entitled Organ Thieves. She’s also the drummer of the band “instrumental psych rock” band Movie Club. Originally from Massachusetts, Violet is now based in Venice Beach, which is the setting for her latest novel.
Euphoric Recall: A Half Century as a Music Fan, Producer, DJ, Record Executive, and Tastemaker By Peter Jesperson, 280 pgs.
Nov 20, 2024 Peter Jesperson has spent his entire adult life working in the music business in some capacity or another. Most well known for discovering, and then managing, The Replacements, he also co-founded Twin/Tone Records, road managed REM briefly, and spent time in an A&R capacity at labels like Restless and New West.
Collapsing Frontier, The, By Jonathan Lethem, 176 pgs.
Sep 19, 2024 PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series is one of the most unique and fun things going on in the publishing world currently. The concept is straightforward: find interesting, thought-provoking, boundary-pushing writers from across the literary and political landscape, and publish their shortform work in a pocket-sized edition.
The Other Side of Nothing by Brad Warner
Nearly everybody I know who’s practiced long enough has had times where they’ve gone through a really dark patch in their meditation. Having come through that, you know how you dealt with it. And you presumably had a teacher you could consult about it. So you have a sense of how to talk another person through it because you’ve experienced that from the side of the person freaking out.
Five sure fire tips to get on the cushion every day | Hardcore Zen Original
So now you’re convinced. You’ve read the Wikipedia page about Buddhism, watched a few videos of famous masters on YouTube, went to the local New Age book shop and bought a couple of Buddhist magazines and now you’re ready to try some meditation for yourself. You visited the local sangha and sat with the group and listened intently as the teacher there told you the secret to practice was to meditate every single day.
Reading for Renewal and Regrowth: 8 Recommended Spirituality Books by Deana R.
Lists Reading for Renewal and Regrowth: 8 Recommended Spirituality Books by Deana R., March 30, 2022 11:25 AM Spring is here, and with it the promise of renewal and regrowth. I feel like it’s also a good time to take stock of oneself and focus on where we want that growth to happen. My favorite way to do this is, unsurprisingly, through books. The following is a collection of eight books that have helped me find rest, healing, inspiration, and nourishment for my spirit.
Zen
Whether a beginner or at the highest level of practice, learn Zen from one of the greatest masters of the 20th century. Why practice Zen? What sets Zen apart from religion? What are its different practices? These questions, and more, are examined and answered by Zen Master Koun Yamada, whose Dharma heirs include Robert Aitken, Ruben Habito, and David Loy. Through compelling stories and a systematic approach, he guides the listener through creating and sustaining a lifelong practice.
Think Not Thinking
magazine InsightsMeditation & Practice Try it. According to Brad Warner, it’s not as hard as they say. By Brad Warner Fall 2007 Photo by Philipp Berndt on Unsplash | https://bit.ly/2MfUpFR People who are new to Zen practice have all kinds of weird ideas about the state of nonthinking. Some people envision it as some kind of trippy spaced-out sorta thing. I’ve even heard the term mushiryo (“not-thinking”) consciousness thrown around as if it was some way-cool and mysterious altered state.
Dealing with sex & preferences
Zen teacher Brad Warner addresses the notion of preferences. Dealing with them — in bed, and out of it — isn’t, he says, as cut and dried, or difficult, as some would believe. There’s a famous Chinese poem called “Faith Mind Inscription.” In spite of its lousy title, it’s one of the most profound pieces of literature in all of Zen. The first verse sets forth the premise of the poem right away: “The Great Way is not difficult, just avoid preferences.
Five Tips for a Minty Fresh Mind
magazine On The CushionMeditation & Practice Five sure-fire tips to get yourself on the cushion every day By Brad Warner Spring 2012 Image by Yingpis Kalayom | https://tricy.cl/2wFYSuR So now you’re convinced. You’ve read the Wikipedia page about Buddhism, watched a few videos of famous masters on YouTube, gone to the local New Age bookshop and bought a couple of Buddhist magazines, and now you’re ready to try some meditation for yourself.
Practicing in Times of War
I was asked by one of my supporters on Patreon to write something about “how students can remain committed to the precepts and teachings in a politically charged environment.” With all of the stuff going on in Iran right now, this seems like a good time to do that. I was in Japan when the invasion of Iraq happened during the presidency of George W. Bush. Nishijima Roshi occasionally expressed his opinion on that and about the subsequent war, but only when he was specifically asked about it.
Ram Dass is dead.
When someone told my dad that Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone, had died, my dad quipped, “He’ll be back!” I feel like maybe that joke would work for Ram Dass’s death too. Ram Dass was the biggest guy in the American spiritual celebrity business. He was kind of The Beatles of this business — a spiritual superstar of the first magnitude. Like him or not, you had to deal with him if you were in this biz. You couldn’t help but be influenced by him even if you didn’t want to be.
How Good Spiritual Teachers Go Bad
The following is based on the transcript of a video I did a while back. I cleaned it up and rewrote a lot of it to make it sound more like a piece of writing. I want to talk about why good spiritual teachers go bad. This subject is really interesting to me. In the world of commercial spirituality, there are people who are basically just hucksters. They have nothing to offer. They have no insights into anything. They just parlayed a good speaking game and some acting skill into trashy spirituality.
A Letter to a Dead Friend about Zen.
The night that bestselling author and Zen teacher Brad Warner learned that his childhood friend Marky had died of cancer at the age of 48, he had just arrived in Hamburg, Germany where he was scheduled to give a talk to a group of Zen students. It was the last thing he felt like doing.
Extinction Rebellion and Buddhist Ethics
The two biggest Buddhist magazines in America both recently featured articles about a guy named Mark Ovland from the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR).
Peace of Mind | Hardcore Zen
Kodo Sawaki said, “You lack peace of mind because you’re running after an idea of total peace of mind. That’s backwards. Be attentive to your mind in each moment, no matter how unpeaceful it might seem to be. Great peace of mind is realized only in the practice within this unpeaceful mind. Real peace of mind only exists within unpeaceful mind. It arises out of the interplay between peaceful and unpeaceful mind.” Kodo Sawaki was my teacher Gudo Nishijima’s first Zen teacher.
Objective Reality and Stubbed Toes
In an essay called “The Mountains and Waters Sutra” (Sansuigyo), Dogen says, “ways of seeing … water differ according to the type of being: There are (heavenly) beings which see what we call water as a string of pearls… Demons see water as raging flames, and see it as pus and blood. Dragons and fish see water as a palace, and see it as a tower… Human beings see it as water, the causes and conditions of death and life.
Boys Be Ambitious!
Here’s another one from the mail bag: Dear Brad, Since sitting more regularly I have noticed I am absolutely plagued by “if only’s!” And, thinking back, pretty much always have been. Mine revolve around my drive and ambition; if only I had any! I recently listened to a series of talks by the neuroscientist and psychologist Jordan Peterson where he outlines that the chemical basis for happiness is setting goals within goals and reaching them.
Practicing Without a Sangha
Try meditating with this going on. I got an email and it went something like this: “I spent the last little while practicing with a sangha at a fairly large Zen temple, but recently I’ve had to move several hours away to help run my family’s farm in a rural area. What is your advice about practicing with minimal support or potentially planting a sangha where one doesn’t already exist.” Practicing with minimal support? I’ve done plenty of that.
The Meaning of Life
The following is an outtake from my forthcoming book Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen. The book is a series of letters written to my dead friend Marky, who I had known since high school. I never told him about Zen and now I want to. Dear Marky, One of your friends told me a story about something that happened maybe a week or two before you died. Things were getting pretty bad by then and you were very sick. Apparently you kept coming in and out of consciousness.
How Can I Join a Monastery in Japan
People often ask me how they can join a Zen monastery in Japan just like I did. First off, I never joined a Zen monastery in Japan. I lived in Japan for eleven years. For ten of those years I worked full-time at Tsuburaya Productions, the company that makes Ultraman. For my first year in Japan I worked as an assistant English teacher at Takaoka Koryo High School. I never lived full-time at a Zen monastery. My teacher, Nishijima Roshi, advised me against it. In Japan, Zen temples are all over the place.
How to Not Waste Time
magazine On The CushionBody & Mind Turns out you can’t waste time if you’re aware of it. By Brad Warner Summer 2012 Illustration by Mike Taylor I hate the phrase “killing time.” No one has an overabundance of time here on this earth—the idea of killing any second of it just makes me cringe. In Zen monasteries you often see an old Chinese poem written on the han, the wooden board that’s hit to call people to meditation.
Love and Gravity
A few weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, author, science communicator, and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City tweeted, “The Universe is blind to our sorrows and indifferent to our pains. Have a nice day!” Comedian and Canadian Norm Macdonald replied, “Neil, there is a flaw in your little aphorism that seems quite telling. Since you are I are part of the Universe, then we would also be indifferent and uncaring.
Transgenderism and the True Self
Last week I put out a video called “Gender, Karma, and Lava Lamps.” Some people thought that I was trying to make a statement about transgenderism in that video. I wasn’t really. But I can see why it seemed that way. I apologize for the confusion. This got me thinking about the current debates raging around the issue of transgenderism. I think that a lot of these debates aren’t really about transgenderism at all. Of course they’re often about people’s various political agendas.
How to Practice with God
magazine Column One teacher’s faith in the underlying reality of the universe By Brad Warner Fall 2013 Kate Woods, Oppenheim, Double Lake, C-Type print, 2010. Courtesy of the artist. One of the very first things I heard about Buddhism, long before I ever became a practitioner, was that it was “a religion without a God.” This continues to be a popular way of describing Buddhism. But I’m not so sure it’s true.
Zen So White | Hardcore Zen
I got an email recently from a person at the Brooklyn Zen Center who objected to some of the stuff I said in my article about Collective Karma. She said, “I understand your point about collective karma and we do not discuss it in such simplistic cause and effect terms.” That’s good to hear.
More Musings on Why Spiritual Teachers Go Wrong
Today someone wrote me an email about some of the stuff I’ve said recently concerning the Noah Levine scandals. I wrote her a long email back. That email is reproduced below for your enjoyment. I won’t be talking about any of this in our forthcoming ZEN & YOGA RETREAT at Mt. Baldy, but I am obligated to plug it every chance I get. *** Thank you for writing. It’s an interesting phenomenon.
Collective Karma?
Shin jin inga, “deep belief in cause and effect” Last week I wrote a piece about our forthcoming Zen and Yoga retreat at Mt. Baldy Zen Center April 5-7, 2019.
Is Consciousness Primary?
Last weekend I put up a video on my YouTube channel about a TED Talk by a guy named Donald Hoffman. Hoffman is a professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California at Irvine. The TED Talk he gave was called “Do We See Reality As It Is?” In the talk Prof. Hoffman gets into the idea that what we perceive with our senses may not correspond with reality. He compares what we perceive to the icons you see on a computer’s desktop.
Automatic Time Tracking | Feature Requests | ClickUp
We pay our employees hourly. We also track time against projects. However, we don't want two separate time tracking systems - one for payroll and one for projects. There are too many systems and silos in this digital age to remember everything. The Problem: Time doesn't get tracked accurately, doesn't get tracked at all OR there's misallocations in projects/payroll. Alternatives: Now, there are third-party products that attempt to auto-track time across an entire system: Timely, RescueTime, etc.
Gudo Nishijima, Materialism, and the Material World
On this day, January 28thin 2014, my teacher, Gudo Wafu Nishijima Roshi died at age 94. My friend Rob reminded me of this, so I thought I’d try to do something to commemorate him. About a month ago I did a talk at the Angel City Zen Center about Nishijima Roshi’s life. You can listen to it on the ACZC Podcast. Rather than repeat what I already said there, I thought I’d write about what I found to be one of the most fascinating aspects of Nishijima Roshi’s teaching.
Earning a Living Part 2
I got a question in the comments to the video version of yesterday’s blog post. Here it is: I’m confused. I was waiting for you to explain how to do everything as an act of free giving, but the explanation never came. Here’s my answer. I think we each have to find our own way to do this. I am not sure I can explain how I did it when I worked at Tsuburaya Productions. I just sort of began to view everything I did as an act of service. Also, Dogen says that working for a living is originally free giving.
Just Don’t Do It
A guy wrote to me recently saying that he couldn’t understand what to do in Shikantaza. Shikantaza, for those who don’t know the term, is the type of zazen I teach. The word literally means “just sitting.” But the just in “just sitting” is an emphatic just. It’s not like the just in “just sitting around.” It’s more like “DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE OTHER THAN JUST SITTING.” The guy who wrote me was troubled by all kinds of thoughts he was having while trying to do Shikantaza.
Buddhists on the Funny Farm
A bunch of people have sent me an article that appeared recently in Esquire magazine called The Other Side Of Paradise: How I Left A Buddhist Retreat In Handcuffs by Michael Holden. The opening paragraph says, “The police stayed calm and the Buddhists were calmer, but by then there wasn’t much anyone could do.
The Enlightenment Pill
Image by rawpixel on Unsplash | https://unsplash.com/photos/JuKgTqhSS5M Western society is obsessed with medication. Because medical science has advanced so far so quickly, we are prone to imagine that drugs can cure any illness if only we can find just the right combination of chemicals. So naturally when we hear representatives of Eastern religions describe our normal condition as diseased, we wonder what we can take to fix that.
American Buddhism Round-up 2018
Happy New Year. Here’s my annual Year in American Buddhism Round Up! Actually, I’ve never done one before. But it seemed like a good idea. The biggest story in American Buddhism for me in 2018 was the scandal around Noah Levine and the subsequent downfall of Against the Stream and Refuge Recovery.
Have Yourself a Compassionate Christmas
Merry Christmas, everybody! At this time of year I always enjoy seeing prominent Buddhists congratulate themselves on how kind, warm, and generous they have been. I’m on a bunch of mailing lists and stuff, so at year’s end I always get plenty of self-congratulatory missives from “woke” and progressive Buddhist leaders laying out all the worthy, engaged work they and their organizations have done throughout the previous year.
Mindfulness Meditation is Buddhist Meditation
Recently, Lion’s Roar published an article entitled, Conservative Christian Group Launches Campaign Against “Buddhist Meditation” in Public Schools.
Pragmatism and Idealism
There are a couple of people out there in Internetland who are worried that I am cultivating a right wing following. If that’s what’s happening, it’s certainly not my intention. I don’t consider myself “right wing” at all. I don’t have any friends in real life who are right wingers. I have no interest in leading any kind of political movement. It depresses me to see so many Buddhists in America wholeheartedly embracing leftist politics and presenting leftist political ideas as if they were Buddhism.
Inclusivity in Zen
American Zen people enjoy wringing their hands about inclusivity. The demographic at Zen centers in America tends to skew mostly white. This leads some people to make the absurd assumption that white people dominate Zen. In fact, white people are a tiny minority of Zen practitioners. The vast majority of Zennies are Japanese, Korean, Thai, or Chinese. White folks are the newcomers worldwide. Only in America and Europe are they the majority.
Retreating from Judge Kavanaugh
Someone brought up the Judge Kavanaugh hearings during the talk and discussion period after zazen at our Zen thing at Angel City Zen Center this past Saturday. I wasn’t the speaker that day. I don’t remember who brought up Kavanaugh. But I was there, so I used my veto power and said, “Uhhh… I think we’d better talk about something else.
It’s the Journey, Not the Trip
Trike Daily Drugs Psychedelics aren’t a shortcut for Buddhist practice, because practice involves every moment of life—especially the boring ones. By Brad Warner Sep 07, 2018 Photo by Rodger Evans | https://tricy.cl/2MWKdU7 People get mad when I say it’s not right for drugs to be promoted as Buddhism. But that’s OK with me. Sometimes you have to make people mad.
Addendum to “Noah Levine (is What This Article is About)”
This is an addendum to the article Noah Levine (is What This Article is About). Sometimes I think certain things are so obvious that they don’t even need to be said. But sometimes I’m wrong and I find out I need to say things that, to me, are obvious. And if that sounds snarky, I’m sorry. I actually feel bad that this was not apparent from my other writings. So here goes.
Sex and Drugs and Buddhism
Lion’s Roar has not killed Buddhism. That was hyperbole. Obviously. I was mean to those guys and I hurt some people’s feelings apparently. I’m sorry for that. A guy I know at Lion’s Roar said he was hoping for a public apology from me. But that’s the best I can muster right now. I still think that publishing articles promoting drug use as a form of Buddhist practice is incredibly irresponsible.
Getting High | Hardcore Zen
After seeing some of the reaction to my previous blog post, I thought I ought to make my position a bit clearer. One Zen practitioner on Twitter defended his use of opioids prescribed for a torn rotator cuff as consistent with his practice. Another asked my opinion on the use of antidepressants or if a doctor prescribes psychedelics for PTSD. Someone else called me a “Buddhist fundamentalist.” A Buddhist fundamentalist would probably condemn even such uses. I do not.
Lion’s Roar Has Killed Buddhism
Buddhism in America is over and Lion’s Roar has killed it. I hate to sound so pessimistic, but right now it’s hard to see it any other way. Lion’s Roar, a huge, wealthy and supposedly “Buddhist” website, recently published the most pro-drug article I have ever seen in any Buddhist publication. I’m not even going to link to it, it’s such a piece of shameful garbage. It’s entitled “The New Wave of Buddhist Psychedelics.” Look it up yourself if you want to waste your time.
The Center of a Universe With No Center
I flew to Ohio on the 4th of July. Adriana came with me. We had to change planes in Atlanta. During the flight from Atlanta to Akron, we could see fireworks displays going on way down below. We stayed with Jeff Hardy, aka Jefferson Hardship, aka Jeffro Smull, guitarist of Zero Defex at his new apartment in Cuyahoga Falls. Actually, the apartment belongs more to Princess Buttercup, his cat friend. She allows Jeff to share the place in exchange for food and scratching.
Hitler Sells But I’m Not Buying
Around seven or eight years ago, an online Buddhist magazine asked me to contribute articles. At first I was pleased. Then I heard the terms they were offering. I would be paid according to the number of views and shares my articles got. If they got less than a certain number of views, I would not be paid at all. After the pay threshold was reached, I’d be paid in increments representing each thousand views above that amount.
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