Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Guide to Sexuality from Celibacy to Polyamory - Explore Relationships & Spiritual Growth in Modern Life

It's always interesting and entertaining to watch how people's expectations of what a zen teacher should be match up with who Brad Warner is. I can't imagine anyone coming de novo to him, or this book, expecting to find what they end up finding. I have been sitting daily in the Soto zen style for six years, and I was doing something else I called "meditation" before that, since high school in the mid 1970's. I've never met Brad, though I expect we will run into each other some day since we darken a lot of the same doorways, but he writes books like I would write them, and he says the things I would say.The interviews with Nina Hartley are worth the cover price of the book alone, and there's a lot more to it than that. What Brad does here is bring the insight he has realized from sitting zazen and studying zen writings for decades to the questions of sexuality today for people like him, i.e., middle-class Americans born in the middle of the 20th century. Those who expect religious edicts and hard/fast rules will be disappointed. Those who expect to have their own ideas about the third precept confirmed will find it lacking any particular certainty about what sexual misconduct really means.What you will find is an honest reflection upon these issues by a daily practitioner committed to genuine zen practice. It is rare to find something so ordinary in modern Buddhist books, they usually have the stink of zen about them--that pious, pretentious, self righteousness that sets the author apart from the reader. Brad has none (well, very little) of that. His farts stink and he doesn't pretend otherwise. He is as hot for cute Japanese women as I am. He finds titty bars as sad as I do, even though he likes naked boobies very much.While I hope a lot of people read this book, I think it is best suited for people like me--regular Joe's who sit zazen and think about boinking the new girl in the Sangha, who check-out asses during kinhin, and similarly just live the life that we are coming to know as American lay zen practice. There's nothing special here, which is exactly what makes the book so valuable. If you want to know what sitting facing a wall every day can do for you, Brad's a good example.We are very fortunate to have a teacher like Brad so available to us, I bow in deep gassho.