The Third Diamond

Fans of the Triple Diamond Sutra had no way of knowing that the third book has been missing from the print version and appears a short chapter in other books. But this is the first full release of all the materials in The Third Diamond. In addition to the infamous characters of old: Sensei, The Dreaded Fujikami and Fu War, we find Christs working retail jobs and Orange County surfers looking for make up for the deficiencies in their lives. At one point the universe appears to be missing a leader and at other points God seems to lose His omnipotence. We stumble into computer rooms that run parts of the universe, deities who have quit their jobs and innocent job applicants forced to rule worlds for thousands of years against their will. All of the poems that appeared in the short version of this book have been converted to prose works and this makes the whole book more readable on various devices. There are plans to get this book in paperback on its own and plans to do a grand reconstruction of what would be a new version of the Triple Diamond Sutra, possibly going over 700 pages. These materials arise in the spirit and ancient Rinzai literature minus the minimalism. And while the short book is open to the charge that there is way too much talking and explaining in there, I defend the work as getting to the essence of the unknowable nature by continually throwing the reader back on his or her own assumptions and even the assumptions of other parts of the Triple Diamond Sutra. The new and complete addition of The Triple Diamond Sutra might not come out till sometime between late 2021 and early 2023, and so, before that time, this short volume is indispensable to the completion of this modern iteration of a very controversial tradition, a kind of Los Angelized combination of Rinzai Zen and Soto Zen hurled into the ever whirling blender of world religions. Some parts of these books are so difficult to accept that I sometimes don't accept them, even though I publish them. No one, not even me, can have any hope of complacency in these pages.