First thing is, I just added a bunch of new dates to my 2010 World Domination Tour.Second thing is if you're in or near Oakland you are hereby ordered to come see my book signing and talk tonight at Diesel Books at 7 pm.
Third thing is, as some of you have already discovered, my talks at Tassajara are now available on line. Here's where you can find them:
OMG: Dogen's Concept of God
Understanding the Shobogenzo
Fourth thing is, there are now some very nice reviews and excepts from my new book SIN SEX AND ZEN on line. Here's where some of them are:
Review by Violet Blue on SF Appeal's website
Review from Full Contact Enlightenment
Review on Pop Matters
Review on Wandering Dhamma
Review on Wild Fox Zen
Review on Cheerio Road
Review on Metal Buddha
Excerpt on Reality Sandwich
There are probably more I don't know about. My publishers say they've never seen the blogosphere so abuzz about a book. Cool!
Fifth, back to the new tour dates, please note the inclusion of definite dates for my jaunt to NYC. They are as follows:
Oct. 15th Talk and Book Signing at the Interdependence Project.
Oct. 16 and 17 -- Two-day Non-residential Zen Retreat at the Interdependence Project
It's probably a good idea to sign up early for those.
Those were the plugs, so what can I tell you that's interesting?
It's been really interesting so far promoting the new book. After leaving the isolation of Tassajara I find myself full-on "returning to the marketplace" as the old Zen sutras say. I'm out there meeting people and getting interviewed and selling the book and myself to them, as one does.
This is really the first book of its kind. I keep telling people it was one of those ideas one sometimes get where you go, "Aw, someone certainly must have done that already." But when I looked it up I found out nobody had. There have been some good books about how Buddhists in ancient India, Tibet, China and Japan dealt with sex. But there hasn't been anything much about how present-day Buddhists in the West deal with it. While I may not be the best person to write that book, someone had to and I did it. At least the first one. If this sells we'll probably see a whole genre emerge of imitations, some of which will almost certainly be better or at least illuminate areas of the Buddhist sexual experience that I'm unaware of or unable to articulate.
It's an important area to discuss because we present-day Buddhist practitioners are not ancient Indians, Tibetans, Chinese or Japanese. Even those of us from those countries are living in a very different world from the one the ancient masters inhabited. Even if we say that their ways of dealing with sexuality were better than ours, we cannot ever live in their world. So what can we do?
This is the question I'm still asking myself. How can I uphold the precept of not misusing sexuality if I live in 21st century America as a non-celibate Buddhist monk? Some have said already that they feel I'm violating that precept by writing for the Suicide Girls website or by engaging in the kinds of relationships described in my previous book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. But I don't think so. And anyway, you cannot know my life even if you read every word I write about it. The precept is about you, not about me.
Anyway, I think a lot of us are asking ourselves these questions. I don't claim I have the answers. But I've been talking to lots of people who have made their own tentative inroads towards answering these questions for themselves and I have a few ideas of my own.
One thing that's already kind of intriguing about the book is the responses I've been getting to the rather liberal views I've taken about non-traditional forms of sexuality. I've tried to be as open as possible to the ways people these days are handling their sex lives. I guess people must have expected a Buddhist monk to be more closed-minded about some stuff. Although I'm not really down with all the crazy stuff kids these days are getting into, I don't want to condemn anybody's lifestyle out of hand.
So there you go. Just a snapshot view of some stuff I've been thinking about as I begin promoting the book. Now I gotta go. I'll leave you with a scan of a page that's been added to the new edition of the book American Hardcore: A Tribal History (I believe this link takes you to the old version of the book, which does not refer to 0DFx, so please make sure before ordering). Look who finally got a mention! You can see us on September 25th at the Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio!
See you later!
