Oliver Benjamin's consistent argument is that Dudeism is a restatement rather than an invention, and that the film merely made an old position legible again. The Dude De Ching rewrites the Tao Te Ching in the film's idiom, more or less line by line, which is both a joke and a demonstration of how closely the two fit. Beyond Laozi the church claims Epicurus, the Zen masters, Montaigne, Whitman and a scattering of others, and its reading list is longer than its scripture. This is the reason the category is arguable: a body whose doctrine is a genuine and defensible strand of Western and Chinese thought, delivered in the voice of a fictional stoner, is not straightforwardly a parody. Benjamin has said the joke is the packaging and the packaging is what gets people to read Laozi.