Nothing Holy: Tales of Zen Buddhist Scoundrels

Publisher Marketing: Follow the hapless, feckless, neurotic Sensei and other mad characters from many sects and religions through their blasphemous, heretical adventures and teachings. The book focuses on mostly fictional Zen teachers, such as Master Sensei, The Dreaded Fujikami, and Sister Dharmastream, and winds its way through assorted realms and dimensions as these anti-doctrine Saints tease and torment the mundane minds of earnest believers. Factional fighting, physical battles, sexual irregularities and heavy drinking are all a part of these short quips and short stories that pass through monasteries, psychiatric hospitals, jails and heavens. If you are a naughty Buddhist, this is just the book for you. If you are a fundamentalist bore, this may not be your cup of tea; and anyway, the tea is laced with sake. Also, if you are a gentle soul just barely holding your precious belief system together by a thread, this volume may not be for you. These pages are meant for those who find themselves ready to let go of all beliefs and dive in head-first into the messy ocean of birth and death and chaos. If you are wandering through the three worlds looking for a conceptual resting place, you will not find it here. Contributor Bio:  Thompson, Mel C The author got his B. A. in Philosophy at Cal State Fullerton in 1982. He was born in Downey, California, in 1959 to a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and a hard-drinking aerospace executive father. At birth he was seen immediately to have many complex birth defects, which, throughout the years became more evident in their scope and severity. The author was a promiscuous deviant in early childhood and grew to be a church and temple hopper, eventually landing a "steady gig as a born-again Christian" in the Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa mold. He went on to become a paid youth minister at an Evangelical Southern Baptist Church where he wrote Christian folk rock and preached sermons, and, most critically, brought with him many converts and employed his seemingly innate ability to raise money and work every publicity angle. After five years he became a notorious apostate, heretic and blasphemer. To complicate matters, he ended up as a badly-behaved Buddhist given to writing Buddhist hymns and Buddhist comedy. His legal and political antics were the stuff of news stories for many years; and his odd conceptual art even now appears in newspapers and magazines. In addition to running his own small publishing companies, he has managed to get his own work published in magazines and anthologies around the globe. His largest audience ever was at KMEL Radio in San Francisco, where he was paid to air a short segment on every morning show in which he taunted the rap world with parody. In each and every venue he remains a lark, a crank, a prankster a man with his eye on money and skirts. He defies all classification, except psychiatric classifications, several categories into which he fits most snugly. At this writing, he is 54 year old and in rapidly-declining health, wondering if the time remains to even proofread the errors in the text, and further wondering if he should have to simply put the book to print lest his own end-of-the-world should come. Currently, he, predictably, lives alone and has managed to evade institutionalization up to this point, though he is ever aware that the genetic time bombs that appear to be just going off in him, make the continuance of ordinary life and freedom a largely remote possibility. Even so, Revelations II itself was not written in haste, and is the author's only 200-page novel, and the only novel about which he says he fells "truly complete." The only work of his that he feels may surpass this is his koan book called "Nothing Holy."