Overview
I am an accidental Buddhist. I never intended to find a new religion, I was just passing curious. I started to notice Buddhism everywhere. BUSINESS WEEK was writing long articles about meditation sessions in major corporations and on Wall Street. Schoolchildren and cops on the beat were being encouraged to breathe as a way to fight stress. Buddhist monasteries and retreat centers were flourishing in out-of-the-way places, and NEWSWEEK declared that America may be on the verge of Buddhadharma" I wanted to know what was going on, so I went on retreats myself and interviewed the key players. Before long, I, too, was hooked. I hadn't counted on actually liking it." -- Dinty W. MooreSynopsis
Packing a blessedly down-to-earth sense of humor, Dinty Moore is the perfect scout for the new frontiers of American Buddhism. (Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus)
Buddhism is on America's mind. TV commercials embrace it: Michael Jordan runs to the top of a Tibetan mountain to find the true meaning of sports drinks. A hillside of Buddhist monks meditates on hard drives. The famous (like Richard Gere and Tiger Woods) fight stress with it. From coaches to cops, from stockbrokers to schoolchildren, Americans are learning to love the lotus position.
But many of us are more curious than we are committed. Dinty Moore was, too. So he decided to find out what exactly was going on. Are we becoming Buddhists behind our own backs? Why is this ancient, Asian religion suddenly such a big part of American pop culture?
Moore set out to see Buddhism for himself by attending Buddhist retreats, meeting the monks face to face. Before long he was hooked on breathing. And what the Buddhist monks were telling him was starting to make good sense.
With humor and humility, Moore takes us into the physical and spiritual geography of Buddhism American-style: from Change Your Mind Day (a sort of annual Buddhist Woodstock in Central Park), to a weekend at a mountain retreat for corporate executives earning effective ways to cope with stress, to a visit with a Zen teacher holding classes in an old Quaker farmhouse, to a meeting with a Catholic priest who's also a Zen master.
Too timid to dip your own toe into the still waters of Zen? Dinty Moore does it for you in THE ACCIDENTAL BUDDHIST, an utterly engaging book by a writer who started out wanting to chart cultural change and ended up changing his own life.
Publishers Weekly
Moore (The Emperor's Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth About Internet Culture) offers a lighthearted account of how, in 1995, he set out to find out why Buddhism seemed to be taking America by storm. Along the way, he becomes a practicing Buddhist. With good humor and a penchant for not taking life too seriously, Moore travels to a variety of locations in the U.S. where Buddhism has thrived and become a part of the culture. In a chapter titled "Buddha 101: Stumbling Up Monkey Mind Mountain," Moore describes his weekend at a Zen monastery in upstate New York where he and other participants learn the basic lessons of mindfulness and sitting meditation. Other chapters find Moore discovering key principles of Buddhism, such as the struggle to give up attachment to material things ("Why Do Tibetan Buddhists Have Such Trouble with Their Vacuum Cleaners?: They Lack Attachments") and zazen, or sitting meditation ("Eat Your Rice, Wash Your Bowl, and Just Sit: Studying with the Seven-Year-Old Master"). In a final chapter, Moore remarks that his Buddhism, even though he calls himself a "fairly lousy Buddhist," has made him aware that he should "live my life according to the principles of kindness, compassion, and awareness." Moore's hilarious and sometimes irreverent look at Buddhism is a perfect primer for the budding Buddhist.