It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) Audiobook by Brad Warner
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Title: It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye)
Author: Brad Warner
Narrator: Brad Warner
Format: Unabridged
Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
Language: English
Release date: 01-02-18
Publisher: Brad Warner
Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 5 votes
Genres: Religion & Spirituality, Buddhism & Eastern Religions
Publisher's Summary:
Volume two of Brad Warner's radical but reverent paraphrasing of Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye
In Japan in 1253, one of the great thinkers of his time died - and the world barely noticed. That man was the Zen monk Eihei Dogen. For centuries his main work, Shobogenzo, languished in obscurity, locked away in remote monasteries until scholars rediscovered it in the 20th century. What took so long? In Brad Warner's view, Dogen was too ahead of his time to find an appreciative audience.
To bring Dogen's work to a bigger audience, Warner began paraphrasing Shobogenzo, recasting it in simple, everyday language. The first part of this project resulted in Don't Be a Jerk, and now Warner presents this second volume, It Came from Beyond Zen! Once again, Warner uses wry humor and incisive commentary to bridge the gap between past and present, making Dogen's words clearer and more relevant than ever before.
Members Reviews:
Five Stars
Awesome experience receiving an awesome book in this series. Thank you!
How to make Dogen Understandable, Applicable to Life and Also Entertaining? Brad Warner can do it.
I'm a middle aged, Midwestern American who practices Soto style Zen and have been studying Dogen for the last year or two (though as a practitioner rather than academic). While I have the Tanahashi and Nishijima translations already, I found Brad's first book "Don't Be a Jerk," as well as "It Came From Beyond.." probably more useful than the translations, because he has united understanding of the text with understanding how to convey it to modern people. Modern laypeople. And he's funny.
PS, I enjoyed Brad's own narration of Don't Be a Jerk even more than the book. If you are interested in Shobogenzo seriously, listening to the audio book in the car is helpful AND entertaining. I hope that he records an audiobook of "It Came from Beyond" as well.
Falls short of "Sit Down and Shut Up" and "Don't Be a Jerk"
I'm a huge Brad Warner fan, and I've read all of his Zen books. This one fell short of the other two in which he takes a similar approach of making Dogen digestible to contemporary readers who are not proficient in Buddhism or in Japanese. The other two books, "Sit Down and Shut Up" and "Don't Be a Jerk," were among Warner's best. "It Came From Beyond Zen" had an off-putting justificatory and rationalizing voice, as though Warner was constantly trying to prove himself to an audience of Dogan scholars who probably wouldn't be interested in this sort of book anyway. He assiduously compares his word choices to those of other Dogen translators, all of whom had more scholarly aims and thus were focused on a different project. As such, his commentary sections were more focused on his rationale for his translations rather than explaining the given Dogen passage. The reader who sincerely cares about his word choices would have to constantly flip back and forth between the translation and the commentary with a pretty reliable memory, as his justifications do not refer back to any sort of page or line numbers.
