Follow the hapless, feckless, neurotic Sensei and other mad masters through their blasphemous, heretical adventures as they attempt to teach the unteachable and speak the unspeakable. Prepare to travel through time and space with a cup of sake in one hand and a sword in the other as our lecherous, antinomian purveyors of enlightenment befuddle, outrage and illuminate the willing and the unwilling alike. Come on the ultimate journey with these anti-doctrine saints as they perplex and awaken both the earnest believers and earnest non-believers who seek them out. Factional fighting, physical battles, sexual irregularities and heavy drinking are all facts of life as our grab-bag of protagonists pass through monasteries, psychiatric hospitals, jails and heavens. Reach out for liberation with them, even as the world around them sinks into the tepid gloom of prudish vegetarianism, clammy celibacy, frigid sobriety and cloyingly-inoffensive speech. True freedom only comes when there is no safe resting place for the mind in search of ideological security; and our heroes tunnel through every continent, rooting out false certainties, pretentions of authority and the false advertising inherent in every philosophical and theological system. This book can't help you hold any fragile belief systems together and it can't help you hold on to things you need to be true. It single object is to leave every possibility open until openness becomes a way of life; and our Zen Buddhist scoundrels aren't above kicking in a few doors and smashing in a few windows if that what it takes to get the philosophical air circulating again.
About the Author: Mel C. Thompson is a former Born Again Christian who got his degree in Philosophy in 1982 and fell in with unsavory lots of substance-abusers, blasphemers, sex-addicts, psychiatric patients, poets and religious lunatics of all kinds. Along the way, he tasted the offerings of conventional religion in all its forms and still dabbles with organized religion from time to time. After writing Christians songs and being a youth minister, he went on to develop a habit of sitting Za Zen and reading the Tao Te Ching and following the thinking of all of the most discredited gurus and teachers. He later wrote Buddhist hymns and Nerd-Core rap and became a part-time radio personality. He mingled with the stars and fraternized with world-class failures. There was more than a good share of dashing about the planet, searching all corners of the cosmos. The results were simple enough. 99% of what is presented is sheer fraud, the other 1% is accidental lies. In any case, this did not disillusion Mel C. Thompson, but amused him as he continued to write little aphorisms and short stories attempting to get at the marrow of our silly journey on this fleck of rock spinning around a fly-by-night sun. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a good bottle of sake and a good woman from the escort service. All that being said, Mel C. Thompson never equalled Bodhidharma's saying that, "If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him," but could only get as far as, "If you see a preacher that takes himself seriously, give him the finger."