In 2016, Brad Warner published his Don't Be a Jerk, his first book paraphrasing The Shobogenzo: The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, an 800-year-old classic of Zen Buddhism, written by the Japanese monk Eihei Dogen. Warner's attempt to put Dogen's writing into more modern, understandable, at times even funny, English, while at the same time staying faithful to more exacting translations, struck a chord with Zen Buddhists and beyond. Now, Warner has completed his second volume of paraphrasings, It Came from Beyond Zen
The Shobogenzo explains the philosophical basis for Soto Zen, one of the largest and most influential sects of Zen Buddhism. It's one of the great classics of philosophical literature, revered by people all over the world. Like many revered philosophical classics, however, it's rarely actually read, even by those who claim to love it. That's because, as Zen priest and punk blogger Brad Warner writes, "Dogen tends to be presented either as an inscrutable ancient speaking in riddles and rhymes, or as an insufferable intellectual making clever allusions to books you're too dumb to have heard of. Nobody wants to read a guy like that."
Like Don't Be a Jerk, It Came from Beyond Zen presents spiritual wisdom from one of Zen's most revered works in plainspoken language that's also funny and entertaining. The book includes chapters that paraphrase specific sections of the Shobogenzo (such as "Don't Be Half Assed," Warner's paraphrasing of the chapter Tenzō Kōkun, or Instructions for the Cook") as well as chapters that riff on ideas raised in Dogen's writing, such as "Does Life Exist?" and "Compassion and Zen Buddhist Ethics."
Sure to please longtime Brad Warner fans, and maybe even get people to get past the first ten pages of Dogen's writings, like Don't Be a Jerk, It Came from Beyond Zen is another of Warner's irreverent, hilarious, and philosophically astute Buddhist books.