This book is the gathering in of most, or all, of the series of stories referred to as "Tales of Zen Buddhist Scoundrels." It is an attempt at expanding Zen Buddhist mythology into the modern era and into the realm of World Religions.These stories are at odds with Traditional Buddhism in that they wander a bit more squarely into moral neutrality and stray far away from what I call "The Buddhist Work Ethic." While these stories are understandably labeled, from time to time, as Nihilistic by some critics, the author prefers to look at them as propounding "The Samadhi of Absurdism" or "The Way of Divine Agnosticism."One of the many underlying themes that runs counter to Orthodox buddhism is the Pure Land conception of grace, which while not often brought up directly, is often implied throughout the work.It goes without saying, given the aforementioned, that not taking one's self too seriously is a main theme. And in an effort to get this idea across more firmly, I often say to inquirers that my writing speciality is "religious comedy."Over the years that I've been writing these types of works, certain Characters have come to the forefront and they repeat certain themes often enough that the central theme of the larger work becomes evident before long.Basically, and in alignment with the idea of grace, is the idea that "spiritual failures," as we ordinary conceive them, are in no way denied access to the highest states of being or the most profound realizations. On the other hand, as the larger work repeatedly shows through a series of short stories, mere good behavior and hard work are no guarantee of "success" in any realm. (Part of the problem people have with these stories is that they fail, at every turn, to validate their belief that workaholism and goody-good-ism form a kind of insurance policy or warranty of "advancedness." And so the characters in these stories are used to break, bend or explode every kind of supremacy that one could think of.These stories step on some very big psychological toes. Humbleness and compliance are two very sacred cows in Buddhism, as well as in other world religions and secular philosophies. Over the hundreds of pages of this text, the "warranty of validity" that people suppose they have because they have all the outward signs of humbleness and quietness, is shredded in every way. What follows are examples of very loud and assertive people who turn out to be the lovable antiheroes while many of the "insured meek" turn out to be merely annoying ciphers.The book, however, takes many turns at also lambasting secularists, who, like all other groups of people, have many self-righteous members all filled with every sort of pomp and deadly seriousness and contrived earnestness and passive-aggressive meanness. Hence, the work is not merely a kind of assault on the faithful, but does plenty of cross-examination of the faithless, who are shown to often have an equally high view of themselves and their "hard work" as the most pretentious cleric.In short, there is no end to the fun. Another theme that recurs is the status of the mentally ill. One ongoing idea that "the masses" cling to is that once one has a great spiritual life, surely solid mental health is going to follow. This is viewed as almost a kind of spiritual law. Hence, much space is dedicated in this text to "fully-realized addicts" or "transcendent bipolars" and "divine depressives with severe anxiety disorder."And lastly, these stories seek also to disabuse the world of the notion that mythology itself should end, which is often a secular notion. Hence, even as these stories seem to explode all myths, from time to time, they reassert them joyfully.As I have said before, anyone who needs any belief system to be true, would probably be advised to bypass this book and seek safer literature.
About the Author: Mel C. Thompson was baptized in his infancy as a Roman Catholic. Between the ages of 9 and 13 he was a devout Agnostic before converting to Evangelical Protestantism at the age of 14. Although politically progressive, he otherwise championed traditional orthodoxy until the age of 19 when he took his first Philosophy class and saw straightaway that the Bible was pure mythology, mostly of a malevolent sort. He toyed for a while with political Conservatism and was swept up in the Reagan movement. But he was disabled by a mysterious set of muscle ailments at approximately 27 years of age, at which point he slowly became less and less able to engage in conventional employment. This shocked him out of Conservatism. Throughout his life he attempted to be a musician, a painter, an installation artist, a costume artist and a poet, among many other things. His downward spiral included attempts at dozens of occupations, all of which more or less failed, until, at the age of 46, he went on permanent disability. During his early college years, he had adopted various forms of Asian religion, Zen Buddhism being the most consistent of them; but many long years of practicing and studying many forms of Hinduism, Taoism and various indigenous faiths, left him with a very eclectic view. He later came to enjoy Zen short stories, but noticed, after completing a few tomes totaling several hundred pages, that these mythological forms of Zen tales seemed to amount to a rather small canon. And so he, without authorization or approval from anyone, sought to write more of these stories, in a way that was, to put it kindly, more wordy, opinionated, and lacking in humility, that the previous traditional works had been. He graduated with a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in 1982, which was perhaps the only conventional milestone he ever achieved in his life. He is heavily influenced by such writers and Proust, Dostoyevski, Steinbeck, Hardy, Hugo, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Thackeray and Solzhenitsyn. His prose, like his poetry, is confrontative and iconoclastic. Even so, the stories are not without moments of love, tenderness, devotion and open-heartedness. True, the "good" things don't come about in the way people generally insist that they do, but they come about anyway. The author is currently almost fully retired and largely unable to continue work at any pace that would qualify as "working." Most of his present efforts involve financial, medical and psychiatric survival.