by Brad Warner

Zen Master Genpo Roshi has announced that he is disrobing. To “disrobe” as a Buddhist monk means that you formally quit the Buddhist order and give up your status as a priest and/or monk. Ironically, it was disrobing that got him into trouble in the first place. It seems that Genpo, who is married, had an affair with the woman he was grooming to be his successor.

I never even knew or cared about any of Genpo’s sex scandals (this is not his first) until this one broke. But I have been highly critical of a scam he’s been running for a number of years called Big Mind(r).

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by Brad Warner

A couple weeks ago when I was in Durham, my friend Catie showed me an episode of the TV show Family Guy called “Brian Writes a Bestseller.” Hulu has the full episode up so you can take a look for yourself by clicking on the link at the very end of this article.

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by Brad Warner

I’ve been included in a Facebook group made up of people who are trying to plan my high school class’s reunion. I’ve never gone to any of the others – if there even were any others. I was living in Japan when they would have happened.

So last week on this FB group someone posted: “It’s Friday night, what would you have been doing on a Friday night in January back when we were in high school?” And people are posting stuff like they would’ve been out at a party at someone’s house, or with a bunch of friends doing donuts in the school parking lot or cruising by McDonald’s, which was the closest thing Wadsworth, Ohio had to a hang-out spot after the local Red Barn closed down (a prize to anyone who knows what a Red Barn was).

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by Brad Warner

I received two closely related questions via email this week, and I’d like to share my answers. I’ve rewritten these, so they’re not word-for-word the responses I sent.

The first person asked me a general question about how to deal with depression. So I wrote back something like the following:

I am a depression sufferer. I really don’t know how mine scales up next to anyone else’s. My one suicide attempt was half-assed (you can read about it in my book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate). Although I’m not as suicidal as I used to be, even now I go through troughs of depression and inevitably start thinking of doing myself in. This seems to be a deeply ingrained mental response to depression.

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by Brad Warner

Only a few more days before the annual War On Christmas ends! So get your shots in quick!

Ever since returning to the United States after spending eleven years of my life in Japan, the furor over Christmas has been especially amusing to me. Add to this the fact that I’m a Buddhist and not a Christian or an atheist – those being the two groups who are most upset about the matter – and I find it extra double-double hilarious (with whipped cream on top).

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by Brad Warner

I first got interested in spiritual practice when I was a teenager and my parents sat me down and told me about the horrible disease that runs in our family. It was, at the time, killing two of my aunts. This disease, they told me, usually begins to manifest when a person gets to be in his mid-thirties. The symptoms get progressively worse and after a while you lose your ability to physically function, your brain deteriorates, you go crazy and then you die.

As if my life weren’t already shitty enough, being an uncoordinated nerd who couldn’t play sports, was shy around girls, and had zits and braces. Now I was going to die a horrendous death before I had time enough to get over this stuff.

Wonderful. Just super.

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On Sunday Nov 14th SG Radio’s special guest will be punk rock Buddhist and Hardcore Zen master Brad Warner. A beloved columnist on SG, Brad contemplates the big questions in life and comes up with some surprising answers.

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