Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma

In this incisive memoir, Zen Buddhist minister Ruhl (Enlightened Contemporaries) reflects on his tumultuous relationship with his Appalachian Pennsylvania roots. He recounts his poverty-stricken adolescence, when he bristled against the toxic masculinity and anti-intellectualism of his peers. Under the tutelage of Bruce Bechdel, Ruhl’s high school English teacher and father of Alison Bechdel, Ruhl took to classic literature and came to see education as his ticket out of Appalachia. He left to attend college in Amherst, Mass., where he wrote poetry and discovered Zen Buddhism. However, he found that leaving home came with complications, and he returned after the suicides of his sister and ex-girlfriend. Ruhl muses that Zen’s challenge to look directly at the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence affirms life in its variety and unpredictability, and his Buddhist practice leads him to conclude that home is found in the search for itself. Though Ruhl’s prose is sometimes overwrought (he describes the Susquehanna River as “a haze of liquid twilight, flowing through twilight of summer foliage”), his meandering narrative cleverly embodies the Zen spirit of wandering. Readers will find this a powerful if at times overwritten synthesis of American Zen philosophy and cultural analysis. (Nov.)