Recommended reading for ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #1
Plato, Nietzsche, Bodhidharma and Zen Buddhism

Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo. Translated from the German by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Though not as famous as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Morals, a "sequel" to Beyond Good and Evil, contains some of Nietzsche's funniest writing and most lucid (for lack of a better word) reasoning. (The guy writes very elliptically.) In this edition you get two books for the price of one. As for Ecce Homo, Nietzsche's auto-history of his own philosophy, how could you not love any book that contains the chapters "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", and "Why I Write Such Good Books"?

Plato and Aristophanes. Four Texts on Socrates. Translated from the Greek with Notes by Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Talk about bang for the buck: three of Plato's most famous dialogues starring his railroaded teacher (Euthyphro, Crito, and of course Socrates' fictionalized defense at his trial, The Apology); and, for the dissent, Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds, a satirical assault on Socrates' ideas that would have made Ayn Rand proud. In the play, Socrates renounces Zeus, takes the ever-shifting clouds as his gods (Get it? You can project whatever forms you want onto them? Get it?) and teaches his neighbor's son that incest and father-beating are terrific ideas. All the Farrelly Brothers need to make it into a movie is Jim Carrey as Socrates.

Morihei Ueshiba. The Art of Peace. Translated from the Japanese by John Stevens. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992.
Though not by or about Bodhidharma, I'm not aware of Bodhidharma having written anything you can order on Amazon. So, in keeping with our theme of the interrelation between kung fu and Zen Buddhism, here's a book of aphorisms from Ueshiba, the inventor of Aikido. Ueshiba was a martial arts master and instructor at Japanese military academies who renounced violence during World War II; the title of the book is a quite conscious inversion of Sun Tzu's militaristic classic The Art of War. A series of simple teachings, in tiny paragraphs or a few lines of free verse, about how the Way of the Warrior is to control aggression, not initiate it. Good stuff.