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“This book argues,” writes Richard Gombrich in the preface to What the Buddha Thought, “that the Buddha was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of all time.” His aim is to place the Buddha in the same canon as Aristotle or Descartes, rather than Jesus or Mohammed — a philosopher and thinker, not simply a religious figurehead.

This is an ambitious undertaking, and I am happy to report that What the Buddha Thought is not a case of hubris or mislaid ambition. It is one of a number of works that I am tempted to call “revisionist-Buddhist,” works that attempt to wipe away the encrustations of time or the dirt of history from Buddhism and make them not only relevant to the current age but allow us to see more of Buddhism than would be possibly by simply reiterating previous work. Brad Warner and Dzogchen Ponlop have both produced work in this vein for lay audiences, and now I am exploring works of a more scholarly nature that attempt to do the same things.

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There’s been any amount of talk lately about how comics, science fiction and fantasy, movies, and all the rest of pop culture constitute a new mythology for the age. I go back and forth about this one myself, because one of the things a mythology seems to imply is the presence of some larger belief system about what is being mythologized. Maybe it’s a matter of terminology: would a fairy tale for the modern age imply that much less baggage than a new mythology?

It isn’t as if I think fairy tales sit further down the ladder from full-blown mythos — more like they occupy different seats on the same general bus. One thing I can say about Osamu Tezuka is that he seems to have been comfortable in any of those seats, as well as comfortable driving the whole bus. He created works that were not only mythology for the new age (Phoenix) but which dealt with real-world myth figures (Buddha) — and on top of that created a whole slew of manga which we could comfortably call fairy tales without feeling like either his work or the term itself was being demeaned.

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This survey of the intellectual history of Buddhism in the West was not written as a full-blown exegesis, but rather as an attempt to trace the prevalence of a single, common thread of thought: why Buddhism was regarded by many prominent 19th-century intellectuals (and earlier than that as well) as a “cult of nothingness” or a religion whose highest affirmation was nihilism.

The first thing Roger-Pol Droit assumes of his readers is that they understand the general history and conceits of Buddhism. His main audience is not laypersons, although an educated person without a scholarly background can make sense of the book without undue effort and derive quite a bit from it. He speaks most directly to people who have a scholarly understanding of Buddhism — and, most importantly, those who already understand without laborious explanation how Buddhism explicitly rejects nihilism and encourages positive action in the real world. For that reason, there is no general introduction to Buddhism in the book, but rather a direct plunging into the fray.

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Basil Pascali is a spy for the Ottoman Empire, which as of 1908 is well into the terminal phase of its decline. Nevertheless, on the tiny Greek island where he has taken up residency, he has been writing and filing his reports for nigh-on twenty years and being paid just as dutifully for them. The money doesn’t buy as much anymore, and his pleas for a raise have gone unheard, but he knows nothing else other than this life. Companionship is a luxury he can’t afford (in any sense), and trust is for other people.

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Brad Warner’s first book Hardcore Zen was an attempt to bring Zen Buddhism to the very people who might never have bothered with it, but at the same time might benefit most from it. I liked the book because it attempted to undo the decades of pop-cultural manhandling that Buddhism has suffered, often at the hands of its own well-meaning proponents. It was not designed to tie in with the feel-good New Age leftovers that, in Warner’s view, make up too much of the writing on Buddhism.

Sit Down and Shut Up is in some ways even more radical, since it tackles as its subject matter one of the more esoteric, impenetrable, monolithic and challenging texts in all of Buddhism: Dogen’s Shobogenzo, an eight-hundred-plus-year-old text that has appeared in various translations (Warner’s master Gudo Nishijima produced one himself) and attracted only the most, well, hardcore of readers. It is the Being and Time, or maybe the Being and Nothingness of Buddhism: a text more famous for its influence and the shadow it casts than for it having been actually read.

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1.

Ain't it fun when you're always on the run
Ain't it fun when your friends despise what you become
— The Dead Boys, “Ain’t It Fun”

In the second volume of No Longer Human there is a moment when Yozo, the self-destructive and conflicted main character who has spent his whole life keeping the rest of the human race at bay, dismisses the idea that he’s a good person. He’s fooled everyone around him into thinking that, because it’s all he knows how to do. “You are a good person,” says the little girl he’s talking to. “Everyone says so.” She is the daughter of the woman Yozo has shacked up with, used for sex and milked for money, and even she chooses to look the other way.

A story about someone so despicable should not be so absorbing. But that was one of the paradoxes of the original 1949 Osamu Dazai novel: it was about someone we ought to hate, who engages in things we find revolting, but all the same we cannot look away because he exposes himself so completely. The face he presents to the world is not the face he presents to the reader, and out of that dichotomy comes all the energy and fire of this story. The same has happened here in Usamaru Furuya’s adaptation, with the split between the Yozo we know and the Yozo the world sees widening all the more precipitously.

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Zen Buddhism is about, among many other things, paradox and contradiction. Likewise, Zen masters have a history of being iconoclasts, which is a contradiction right there: how can one be an iconoclast and yet at the same time a proponent of a tradition? Maybe the best way to avoid that dead-end is not to think of Zen as a tradition, but rather an evolving continuum, the way rock’n’roll is at least as much about paying your dues as it is about killing your idols. The expression flowers differently in each soil and from each planting, but the colors and scents are always vivid and fragrant, and nobody would ever want to confuse Bob Mould with Bob Dylan anyway.

That brings me to Brad Warner — an American Zen master, emphasis on American. Not just in the sense that he was born here, but in the sense that his approach to Zen is unmistakably a product of Life In These Here United States, and that such a transformation is positive and crucial, not an affliction he needs to rid himself of. He is also funny, and not merely in the sense that he does eccentric things for attention: he understands humor is powerful and uses it well. He was also, and still is, a rock star, albeit a minor one, but he’s evidently more famous as a Zen master than as a rock star — something he’s himself as amused about as we might be.

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The penultimate Black Jack collection still sports some of the same hit-or-miss flavor of all the volumes since #11 or so, but the standouts this time around are as good as anything ever created for the series. Most striking is the last story in the volume, “A Passed Moment”, which runs for almost a hundred pages — an epic-length production compared to the usual 16- to 24-page stories that made up the series. It opens with a young taxi driver who has a taste for embroidery and other decidedly nonmasculine things, and then works its way by various Byzantine degrees to a country in revolution where said young man died once … or did he? It’s a dizzying achievement, one of the sorts of things Osamu Tezuka fans will most likely point to as an example of how uninhibited and absorbing his imagination could be; spun out a little longer, it could have become a self-contained epic in its own right on the order of MW or Book of Human Insects.

The rest of the book is no slouch either: I particularly liked a story about Black Jack’s assistant Pinoko becoming the object of a crush by a man who never sees her face (they share the same bathhouse), and there’s a remarkably cynical skewering of Hollywood (and, by extension, inequality in America) in a chapter where Black Jack’s skills are to be captured on film against his will. And in “Miyuki and Ben”, there’s the recurrence of a theme which has pervaded Black Jack since its inception (and which also appears in “A Passed Moment”): how body and spirit are interwoven, and how the death of one can mean a new lease on life for another. It’s always amusing how Black Jack — and Tezuka, too — can see organ and tissue donation as something inherently romantic instead of, as most of us do, something quite a bit icky.

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Always nice to see a series continue to fulfill and surpass the promises laid down in its first volume. Here, in the second installment of this minutely-detailed look at life amongst the 19th-century nomads of the Silk Road (distant ancestors of mine!), Amir, the bride of the title faces down the threat of violence aimed at her and her young husband; develops friendships with both older and younger women via two different domestic crafts (baking and embroidery); and learns a little more about what drew the mysterious Englishman, Mr. Smith, to her corner of the world.

The detail on the page isn’t just limited to Kaoru Mori’s illustrations, although that’s where the reader encounters it first: it’s also in the web of relationships that binds both Amir and her young groom Karluk to people both close and far. The only thing that seems slightly out of place is the action-movie heroics that Karluk uses to protect Amir when her family attempts to steal her back away. So much of what Bride’s Story special had nothing to do with such things in the first place, so it’s distracting to see such flashy theatrics shoehorned into something that revolved mainly about not just whether or not this young couple would remain together but whether or not they deserved to.

But forget the quibbles. If you haven’t started picking this one up, go back to the first volume and see firsthand why it’s such a standout title; it’s a beautiful series in more senses of the word than one.

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1.

I am surrounded by psychotics. Often I suspect I am one. Then certain records come out and I know I am not alone. — Lester Bangs

I’ll start with the soundbite. No Longer Human may be the single finest manga adaptation yet produced of any Japanese literary work. It stays faithful to the original in the ways that matter, it breaks free and finds its own idiom in ways that pay off, and it remains one of the most devastating stories committed to paper in any language. It is nothing short of Japan’s Requiem for a Dream, manga-style, with all the emotional ferocity implied by such a comparison. I remember a record review (for the Firesign Theatre, I think) that read, simply, “Horrifying, death-dealing, life-enhancing.” Those words fit here as well.