cover image SILENCE AND NOISE: Growing Up Zen in America

SILENCE AND NOISE: Growing Up Zen in America

Ivan Richmond, . . Atria, $12 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-7434-1755-6

The "convert Buddhism" of the 1960s has been around long enough to produce a second generation of practitioners. Son of businessman and author Lewis Richmond, Ivan (now 28) spent his childhood years at Green Gulch, the rural San Francisco Bay area Zen monastery. Those silence-drenched early years were spiritually formative, making the younger Richmond a native Buddhist who found, and continues to find, himself out of place in the larger American culture—materialistic, trend-conscious, noisy, Judeo-Christian—to which his parents returned when he was only 10. Richmond writes as a "rank and file Buddhist" rather than a master or teacher, distinguishing his perspective from most authors in the body of American Buddhist practitioner writings. He manages nonetheless to teach about Buddhism by laying out apparent contradictions in his experience and then explaining a Buddhist "middle way" in which he lives with the tensions of being a silence-loving non-materialist in a noisy consumer culture. His unadorned expository style nicely embodies the plain-experience quality of Zen; the lack of unfolding dramatic narrative that conventionally ought to characterize a life story is also distinctively Zen-like. This quiet tale is a good social study of being young, Zen and American. (July 29)