Sit Down and Shut Up, by Brad Warner ★★★★

The full title of the book is Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye, and true to his irreverent punk background, Warner wastes no time in getting to joking about the Left Dharma Eye before the reader can. This is a good follow up to Hardcore Zen, with Warner’s take on the Buddhist perspective on numerous big philosophical issues.

Warner keeps up the level of clarity from his first book. He does a good job of bringing metaphors that were current a thousand years ago into the present day, and can dig right into linguistic subtleties like kanji choice in a Japanese source text that would be easy to miss in a translation. He gets into some more esoteric perspectives, some of which I didn’t really get— for example, he explained the twelve folds of the Twelvefold Chain well, but utterly lost me on the supposed “therefore” connections between them, and it looks like I’m missing something about the no-ego-all-is-one viewpoint. I suspect this will be worth a re-read after I do more zazen. (A lot more zazen.)