By A.C. Thompson

IT'S ABOUT 9:30 on a chilly April morning, and the three-week Iraq war is still in full body-dropping swing, with Sherman tanks trundling across the desert and missiles screaming into Baghdad apartment complexes. Here in San Francisco, about 35 antiwarriors are congregating outside the barricaded doors of the imposing federal office tower at 450 Golden Gate Ave. The protesters, mostly white, many of them white-haired, are religious types driven by their respective scriptural traditions to oppose armed conflict and, on this day, to clasp hands and sing a quavering rendition of "Amazing Grace."

It's an austere-looking, über-earnest crowd. Quakers. Members of a group called the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Catholics – Friar Louis Vitale, the bespectacled, robe-clad Franciscan pastor of the Tenderloin's St. Boniface parish, and Father Bill O'Donnell, a Catholic Worker from Berkeley.

Then there's Noah Levine.

He's the young guy puffing on a cigarette, slurping coffee, and cracking jokes. Tattoos crawl down to his fingernails. A black beanie covers his cue-ball head. Dark sunglasses hide his face. Guy looks more like a meth-peddling biker escaped from the state pen than like a religious devotee.

The protesters pass the bullhorn to Levine. He pauses dramatically ... then commences speaking in a calm, practiced voice. "I choose, inspired by Buddhist practice and understanding, not to see war, not to see hatred, but to look out and see ignorance," Levine says. "Caring, compassion, and generosity are the only things that work.... We should be as Mahatma Gandhi said, 'the peace that we wish to see in this world.' "

At 32, Levine is rapidly becoming one of the Bay Area's most sought-after purveyors of Buddhist wisdom, his schedule crammed with speaking gigs and lectures; his memoir, Dharma Punx, a plainspoken tale of spiritual odyssey, was just released by a major publishing house: HarperCollins. Practicing Buddhism isn't exactly radical in California, where Hollywooders like Richard Gere photo-op with Tibetan monks, yoga is practically the state pastime – the San Francisco yellow pages alone lists more than 60 yoga studios – and the Dalai Lama literally plays to sold-out stadia, as His Holiness did a few years back at Mountain View's Shoreline Amphitheatre. But Levine happens to be a card-carrying member of the punk subculture – a scene that generally views all things religious with contempt – which makes him something of an iconoclast both in punk circles and in the Buddhist community. There ain't a lot of punkers with "Wisdom" and "Compassion" inked on their hands. And how many Buddhists have been known to slam dance? Levine, it seems, is a walking paradox, the strange embodiment of two thoroughly incompatible worldviews.

Or maybe he isn't.

"I love being a punk rock Buddhist. I love the contradictions," Levine tells me. "The Buddha said, 'Go forth and speak the dharma [the lessons of the Buddha] in your own idiom.' I know what the Buddha taught, and I phrase it in my own generational perspective."

This intriguing punk-preacher duality has a way of propelling Levine into wildly disparate social settings. One morning the Richmond District resident is hanging with a bunch of people who could be his parents – or grandparents – pontificating about the virtues of behaving gently. That afternoon he'll be locked in a room at San Quentin State Prison teaching meditation techniques to a half dozen stone-faced cons. By night, he'll likely be ripping around town in his pristine 1964 Impala, Rancid cranked to 11 on the stereo, on his way to see some bile-laden three-chord punk band in some dive bar.

All of this begs the question, How the hell did a scumbag punk rocker from Santa Cruz come to be regarded as a serious guide to the metaphysical realm?

• • •

Zen fascists will control you.
Dead Kennedys

Not to do any evil, to cultivate good, to purify one's mind, this is the Teaching of the Buddhas.
The Buddha

Linus had a security blanket. Noah Levine had a metal-handle steak knife. Then five years old, he secreted it in the dirt beneath the wooden steps to his house, a two-bedroom redwood-paneled home in the Santa Cruz mountains ruled by what he describes as a drug-challenged mother and an "evil stepfather."

When Levine got anxious or desperate or enraged, he dug out the blade and contemplated its nonculinary applications. He developed two plans: he could skewer himself, punching the knife into his heart, or he could sneak up on his stepfather as he slept and kill him.

The stepfather eventually bailed, escaping with his life. Levine's childhood, though, didn't get any smoother. By the age of 10, he was destroying himself incrementally, getting bent on a regular basis with a friend. "It's kind of tough when you're 10 years old to score drugs, so we resorted to stealing what we could from our relatives and got into stuff like sniffing paint and engine cleaner," he writes in Dharma Punx. "Anything that would make us dizzy would do."

In 1980, at the age of 10, Levine heard a tape of the Sex Pistols. He was sold immediately. It was the Reagan era, when it seemed the cold war would climax at any minute with an apocalyptic exchange of nukes, and Johnny Rotten's "no future" posturing and the band's amusical buzz-saw sonics spoke to the prepubescent shit-disturber. Levine says his attraction to punk was partially fueled by an awareness of "the glaring injustice in the world" and the "hopelessness" of the time. "But more honestly, I was more pissed at my own family situation – a broken home, a dysfunctional and addicted mom, an abusive stepdad."

As a teenager Levine spent his days skateboarding and his nights circle-pitting. He was the guy at the gigs – bands like Corrosion of Conformity, Millions of Dead Cops, and 7 Seconds – blitzed on Schaeffer's or jelloed on a couple tabs of acid, wearing a Magic Markered Postal Service shirt, his hair dyed fire-engine red and chopped into a Mohawk.

In 10th grade he got into slumming with a pack of homeless gutter punks (including a girl gang called the Hell Bitches, who reveled in leaving bloody fingernail marks on the boys they humped, and a heroin-loving guy who proudly sported a tattoo of a syringe), getting wasted and smoking crack.

"I was in pain, and I was angry, and drugs worked to numb that pain," Levine says. "In some ways, drugs propelled the anger, and I acted out violently under the influence. But in another way, drugs were a solution in the beginning. I found that I could drink, or smoke, or shoot dope, and it took the edge off the pain I was feeling."

The guards at the Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall were well acquainted with Levine, who had a penchant for running afoul of the law and once had to be hog-tied while in custody. Over the span of a few years he was popped for weed possession (five times), strong-arm robbery (he nabbed an elderly lady's purse), attacking a jock with a skateboard (he bashed the guy in the cranium), and stealing a car stereo (he was too wasted to run away from the cops).

As a teenage rebel, Levine dutifully rejected the advice of his pop, Stephen Levine, a best-selling Buddhist author who was remarried and dwelling in the granola-ish town of Taos, N.M. The younger Levine despised hippies – his father was a product of the '60s who palled around with New Age icons Ram Dass and Jack Kornfield. Levine didn't want to have anything to do with anything remotely spiritual.

Lockdown changed that. After what he calls a "half-assed" suicide attempt that landed him in a padded cell (he'd tried to slit his wrists with a plastic comb before smashing his head on the jailhouse wall), Levine got a call from his dad. Stephen Levine, Noah writes in his autobiography, "suggested that some simple meditation techniques might alleviate the pain I was feeling. He explained to me that by 'bringing the mind into the present moment, the present experience of being, I may be able to find some freedom in that moment from the regret of the past and the fear of the future.' "

Today this practice of letting go lies at the heart of Noah Levine's lessons. "The basis of what I'm trying to teach is present-time awareness, mindfulness of the present."

• • •

I want his beautiful religion to burn.
Born Against

Happy indeed we live without hate among the hateful.
The Buddha

Like Noah Levine, Siddhartha Gautama wasn't the cheeriest young man. Born to an affluent and powerful family in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas in the sixth century B.C.E., Guatama was haunted by dark thoughts. "When he looked at human life," religious historian Karen Armstrong writes in her bio, Buddha, Guatama "could see only a grim cycle of suffering, which began with the trauma of birth and proceeded inexorably to 'aging, illness, death, sorrow and corruption.' He himself was no exception to this universal rule. At present he was young, healthy and handsome, but whenever he reflected on the suffering that lay ahead, all the joy and confidence of youth drained out of him. His luxurious lifestyle seemed meaningless and trivial."

At the age of 29, he left his wife and child to wander the countryside in search of a spiritual antidote to human misery. This wasn't a particularly revolutionary act – there were swarms of bhikkhus, ascetic Hindu beggar-monks, roaming around India at the time. Guatama, according to Armstrong, "believed that he was setting out on an exciting adventure."

Six years later, after logging countless miles on the road, torturing himself through starvation and dehydration, engaging in extended silent yoga sessions, and doing a whole lot of introspection, Guatama, according to legend, achieved nirvana – liberation from the realm of suffering – while meditating under a tree. Adopting the title Buddha (enlightened one), he proceeded to verbally lay out the route to nirvana, the Noble Eightfold Path – essentially "The Buddha's Guide to Better Living." It includes prohibitions on telling lies and gossiping, a ban on violence, and according to late scholar Walpola Rahula, an instruction to train the mind to abandon "all sensations, even of happiness and unhappiness, of joy and sorrow," letting only "pure equanimity and awareness" remain.

In one semi-enigmatic verse titled "Crossing the Stream," Buddha describes the process of attaining enlightenment like this:

Few cross over the river.
Most are stranded on this side.
On the riverbank they run up and down.
But the wise person, following the way,
Crosses over, beyond the reach of death.
Free from desire,
Free from possessions,
Free from attachment and appetite,
Following the seven lights of awakening,
And rejoicing greatly in one's freedom,
In this world the wise person
Becomes oneself a light,
Pure, shining, free.
(translated by Jack Kornfield)

• • •

I'm a person just like you
But I've got better things to do
Then sit around and smoke dope
'Cause I know that I can cope.
Minor Threat

Whoever is energetic, mindful, pure in conduct, discriminating, self-restrained, right-living, vigilant, his fame steadily increases.
The Buddha

Levine's tentative steps toward the spiritual life didn't translate into instant sainthood. After getting cut loose from an East Palo Alto group home ("a storage facility to keep kids like me off the streets") at 18, he knocked around Santa Cruz, toiling at a pizza place, scamming on girls, brawling, and breaking enough traffic laws to lose his driver's license and get his vintage Triumph motorcycle impounded. He also made the front page of the Santa Cruz Sentinel when he got arrested on a slew of felony vandalism charges for graffiti and was facing more time in the clink, with prosecutors asking for a two-year prison sentence.

Simultaneously, however, Levine was showing some signs of getting his shit together. He'd discovered the straight-edge scene (drug- and alcohol-free punkers inspired by hardcore band Minor Threat) and became a regular at 12-step recovery meetings.

Depressed and waiting to be sentenced on the graffiti charges, he began exploring Eastern religious movements – a decision partially prompted by his experiences with 12-stepping, which pushes the concept of surrendering to a "higher power." (The judge spared Levine prison time but hit him with $10,000 in restitution and 500 hours of community service.) Like everything in his life, Levine's spiritual road trip was a study in extremes. For a while he fell under the spell of a guru who claimed to be an otherworldly incarnation of "pure love" and was eventually busted for child molestation. At 20 he took a two-year vow of celibacy. "That period of celibacy gave me the incredible experience of being with desire and not satisfying it," he told Tricycle magazine in 2000. "I was choosing for the cultivation of my own spiritual practice that I wasn't going to be sexual – no masturbation, no intercourse, complete restraint."

Still, Levine was definitely holding on to his punk surliness. When he went on a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, the famed Vietnamese Buddhist, he found himself dissing the crowd. "My mind tended toward judging and resenting all of the rich, white Buddhists who were there with their brand new BMWs and designer clothes," he writes in Dharma Punx.

Later, embarking on a five-month pilgrimage to Asia, Levine planned to wrap himself in the robes of Buddhist monkdom. At one temple in Burma he was baffled to find the monks training cats to jump through hoops rather than meditating or studying scripture. At another, a monk who had a long-running grudge against Levine's dad gave him grief. After several aborted attempts at ordaining, he found he couldn't commit and returned to the states.

In the opinion of Vinny Ferraro, a close friend who accompanied him to Asia, "he was taking himself too fucking seriously. He was all suped-up on ordaining."

When the monk thing didn't work out, Levine moved to San Francisco and hooked up with people at the opposite end of the spectrum: convicts. He started working for the Mind Body Awareness Project, a small nonprofit that offers free – nonreligious – meditation classes for state prison inmates and juvenile offenders at Alameda County Juvenile Hall. It was a natural move for Levine: if he hadn't gotten clean, he probably would've wound up living in a cage, a fate that had befallen a good number of his comrades. Levine, who is currently pursuing a master's in psychological counseling at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a small San Francisco school focused on Eastern philosophy, also leads a therapy group for prisoners grappling with drug addiction and does one-on-one psychotherapy sessions.

Ferraro, who volunteers with Levine at San Quentin, says close contact with cons keeps Levine from slipping into a "soft-core, Marin County" state of mind. ("All that workshop language is too cosmic," he gripes.) In prison, Ferraro notes, "either the guy is gonna dig you, or he's gonna bust you in the mouth."

San Quentin inmate Jarvis Jay Masters explains the value of meditation from a prisoner's perspective. "Having a meditation practice helps me tremendously," says Masters, a convicted murderer who converted to Buddhism. When meditating, he says, "I don't feel like I am on death row or in the hellhole of the Adjustment Center [the solitary confinement unit], but in a very real way I'm connected to others."

Ron Johnson, the assistant director of Alameda County's juvenile lockup has praise for the Mind Body Awareness Project, which works with serious offenders, including teens accused of homicide. "It's an excellent program. Teaching children to control their emotions through meditation helps them to adjust to life in our facility," Johnson tells me, adding that it seems to cut down on the general aggression level.

• • •

Let us stand and activate for the living, to rescue those about to die at the hands of bullshit politicians.
Propagandhi

The wise let go of the "self" and being free of attachments they depend not on knowledge.
The Buddha

Religion and punk "are a strange fit," argues Dan Sinker, the editor of Punk Planet, a Chicago-based bimonthly magazine. "Organized religion, no matter how groovy, is a weird thing to shoehorn into or around punk."

In a certain regard, punk and Buddhism are underpinned by a similar premise: both acknowledge that the planet is brimming with unhappiness. The question is how you confront that misery.

Punkers, by definition, buck the status quo. That could mean running amok, as Levine and company did. But for a lot of punks, it means trying to uproot the establishment by becoming a hacker or a zinester or a pirate radio DJ or a hardcore activist – like the hordes of punkers who paralyzed the S.F. streets during the antiwar uprising, and the streets of Seattle during the anti-World Trade Organization protests.

It's easy to read the Buddha's prescription as a surefire way to keep people from challenging real-world inequity and evil; India during his day was rived by a gaping chasm between rich and poor, a situation worsened by the immutable caste system. So what did the wise one say? Yeah, the world is fucked up. It's always going to be that way.

Still, there's another take on Buddhism, one that's gaining increasing acceptance, especially among Western Buddhists. In the eyes of "engaged" Buddhists, the enlightened one wasn't an apologist for business as usual, but a veritable insurrectionist who'd exhort the faithful to actively respond to injustice if he were around today.

This incarnation of Buddhism appeals to some of Levine's students. "Why are the Dharma Punx attracted to this way of life?" asks one pupil, a woman named Bodhi. "For me, what the Buddha was teaching was really revolutionary. It's commonly referred to as 'against the stream'; it invites people to go a different way, to cultivate wisdom and compassion. Since I was a girl, I've been disturbed by the stupor I see around me. Most people are checked out, going along with traditions – the traditions of family, of their country, of whatever."

Levine himself seems torn on the issue of societal engagement. On one hand you'll find him at the No War demo, on the other he says he has no interest in affecting widespread social change. "My perspective is that the system is totally fucked. Always has been and probably always will be. And I don't think I can change it.... I believe totally and completely in personal transformation. I don't have a lot of hope for systems to change."

Buddhism, he says, is a somewhat "exclusionary thing. I don't think everybody can get it. Only the wise are gonna get it, but I think punks are wise."

• • •

We don't follow any rules or laws.
The Casualties

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. This is an eternal Law.
The Buddha

The "Urban Dharma" group taught by Levine meets every Wednesday in a well-maintained brick building on the corner of Fulton Street and Third Avenue, just across from Golden Gate Park. It's an April night, and Levine sits cross-legged before a group of perhaps 40 people, most of them outsider types: burly dudes with neck tattoos, women with tricolored hair and spiky clothes. Next to Levine sits a white plastic statue of a skinny Buddha adorned with a Mohawk.

Topic A is annica, the elementary concept that everything in life is transitory and fleeting. "Nothing is solid. Nothing is unchanging. Nothing externally, nothing internally," Levine says. "You can't hold on to pleasure, and you can't get away from pain." Personal suffering is generated by "trying to hold on to something you can't hold on to."

Levine's lecture moves on to the Noble Eightfold Path. The Buddha, he tells the group, counseled "avoiding that which is unwholesome" by restraining ourselves "from activities that are unwholesome, activities such as violence, such as greed, such as hatred." The prohibition on bad behavior extends to the mental realm – just thinking about kicking someone's ass is verboten. "It's pretty hard to avoid unwholesome feelings and thoughts, maybe even impossible, I think. I haven't been able to get there, that's for sure," Levine relates, giggling; the room erupts in laughter.

This sort of casual explication of the dharma has had a gargantuan impact on people like Mike Haber. Haber, who skateboards to our interview in a ripped denim vest and a black Hunns T-shirt, was virulently antireligious as a younger punk. The oxish character was also the wrong guy to fuck with and once bit off part of a dude's ear during a fight. These days you can find a remarkably tranquil Haber meditating daily and volunteering at the Zen Hospice Project, a San Francisco nonprofit that cares for the terminally ill. Last week Haber spent 48 hours at the bedside of a man in the final throes of brain cancer. He intends to move to Thailand to become a monk.

"Noah's been a really good teacher for me because he's not perfect and he doesn't claim to be," Haber tells me.

Eric Rodriguez geysered the first time he meditated with Levine. It was a session aimed at generating feelings of forgiveness. Rodriguez says, "I started thinking about my dad and just broke down crying. I hadn't cried for years."

• • •

I will not bow down.
Hatebreed

The fault of others is easily seen; but one's own is hard to see.
The Buddha

One of Levine's friends says Levine is "so charismatic and real that people look into his eyes and fall in love with him."

Riding shotgun in Levine's thunderous deep red Impala, I ask if he's worried about becoming a guru, about getting weird and creepy and somehow exploiting the people who show up to hear him talk dharma. He says no. I ask him about his material life – the full-sleeve tattoos, the slick car, the gold teeth. Aren't serious Buddhists supposed to live simply and renounce worldly possessions? "I don't care about any of this stuff," he says. "It's not important to me."

Later we come back to the guru subject. With his autobiography hitting store shelves and a major book tour about to jump off, Levine is poised to become a media darling. Salon.com has already run a lengthy feature, and NPR called today. "When I get attention, I have this ego that really likes it," he admits, quickly pointing out that "it's not about Noah. It's about the dharma.

"I'm working on maintaining humility in this life of mine that seems to be going more and more public."