Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma by Brad Warner

From the Publisher

"How Does A Real-Life Zen Master - not the preternaturally calm, cartoonish Zen Masters depicted by mainstream culture - help others through hard times when he's dealing with pain of his own? How does he meditate when the world is crumbling around him? Is meditation a valid response or just another form of escapism? These are the questions Brad Warner ponders in Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate." During a year that Warner spent giving talks and leading retreats across North America, his mother and grandmother died, he lost his dream job, and his marriage fell apart. In writing about how he applied the Buddha's teachings to his own real-life suffering, Warner shatters expectations, revealing that Buddhism isn't some esoteric pie-in-the-sky ultimate solution but an exceptionally practical way to deal with whatever life dishes out.

Publishers Weekly

Zen monk and punk rocker Warner offers a "big snarly ball of confessional vomit" in his third book, following Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up. The snarly ball is his own suffering, fodder for the Zen cushion: his mother's and grandmother's deaths, the dissolution of his marriage and lots of day-job insecurity when the Japanese monster-movie company he works for downsizes and gets sold. As ever, Warner is unafraid to smash idols, including his own celebrity status as a Zen master. "Not only am I not that thing, but no one is," he writes, and that means everybody from the Dalai Lama to fellow students of his Japanese teacher who disliked his being picked as the teacher's successor. Warner is honest-he would say his attitude is seeing things as they are, a Zen bent. Those familiar with his previous work will find this book exceptionally plainspoken and pungent, in keeping with his idiosyncratic vow "to be an a**hole for the rest of my life." That's a lot of honesty. (Mar. 1)

Graham Christian - Library Journal

Sometimes spiritual writers make their mark by demystifying the mystical. Warner's (Hardcore Zen) effort goes beyond rendering Zen Buddhism itself accessible to showing how his own unglamorous and knockabout life indicates that special reverence for Zen "masters" is misplaced. Becoming the Answer is by two Christian activists whose work, together and separately, emphasizes the radical and communitarian aspects of Jesus's message; along the way, they offer new insights into the Lord's Prayer, John 17, and Ephesians 1:15-23.

Fatica, the controversial speaker and focus of the HBO documentary Hard as Nails, espouses a more athletic, theologically conventional Christianity in his ministry. His is an evangelical Catholicism with a hectoring overtone that reinvents "muscular Christianity" for today's adolescents. Here he mixes memoir, story, example, and anecdote to drive his message of heart-conversion home. All are for most collections.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents