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Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma
Winner of the 2023 Gold Prize for Memoir in the Nautilus Book Awards, this luminous spiritual autobiography combines the hardscrabble setting of Appalachia with the wisdom of Shunryu Suzuki's classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind .
"Amazing and intense. A unique, entertaining, and valuable contribution to the Dharma literature, Appalachian Zen addresses a part of the Western Dharma world that hasn't received much class." —Rev. Sumi Loundon Kim, Yale University, author of Blue Jean Buddha and Sitting Together
Appalachian Zen describes a journey we all take, one that Buddhism calls "seeking our true home." Edgy, lyrical, and lovingly rendered, this book recounts how a kid from a Pennsylvania mill-town trailer park grew up—surrounded by backwoods farms and amid grief, violence, and passionate yearning—to become something a Buddhist minister teaching Zen. Author Steve Kanji Ruhl takes readers on an adventure of discovery, roving far from the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania on a footloose Zen pilgrimage to Japan and beyond.
Featuring vivid firsthand accounts of spiritual seeking and teaching in Japanese temples, as well as forays to Tokyo and Hiroshima, the alleys of Kyoto, Amish cornfields near the Susquehanna, and a monastery in the Catskills, Appalachian Zen includes robust historical sketches, rapt nature passages, and cultural references ranging from Proust to punk rock. Throughout the book, Ruhl engages Buddhist themes of awakening and the death of the self by confronting the lives and deaths, including two by suicide, of his loved ones. This provocative memoir tells how it feels to practice Zen, and to move toward a life of hard-won forgiveness, healing, and freedom.
"Amazing and intense. A unique, entertaining, and valuable contribution to the Dharma literature, Appalachian Zen addresses a part of the Western Dharma world that hasn't received much class." —Rev. Sumi Loundon Kim, Yale University, author of Blue Jean Buddha and Sitting Together
Appalachian Zen describes a journey we all take, one that Buddhism calls "seeking our true home." Edgy, lyrical, and lovingly rendered, this book recounts how a kid from a Pennsylvania mill-town trailer park grew up—surrounded by backwoods farms and amid grief, violence, and passionate yearning—to become something a Buddhist minister teaching Zen. Author Steve Kanji Ruhl takes readers on an adventure of discovery, roving far from the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania on a footloose Zen pilgrimage to Japan and beyond.
Featuring vivid firsthand accounts of spiritual seeking and teaching in Japanese temples, as well as forays to Tokyo and Hiroshima, the alleys of Kyoto, Amish cornfields near the Susquehanna, and a monastery in the Catskills, Appalachian Zen includes robust historical sketches, rapt nature passages, and cultural references ranging from Proust to punk rock. Throughout the book, Ruhl engages Buddhist themes of awakening and the death of the self by confronting the lives and deaths, including two by suicide, of his loved ones. This provocative memoir tells how it feels to practice Zen, and to move toward a life of hard-won forgiveness, healing, and freedom.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
356 pages, Paperback
Published December 13, 2022
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67 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 9, 2023
While at times the narrative felt like it jumped around in time too much, I did overall enjoy listening to the authors life journey. The entire book felt intensely personal and revealing, to the point I even questioned some anecdotes being shared.
February 2, 2024
I have known the author for 17 years both as a teacher and a close friend. In his memoir,
"Appalachian Zen", Steve Kanji Ruhl writes with authenticity and courage about the most difficult
of human topics. He encourages us to face the reality of death and our own mortality, as well as
the global issues of the climate crisis, widespread wars and conflicts and the loss of spiritual direction in today's world. Through his memoir, the author brings profound insight to all of these issues
from his perspective as a Zen Buddhist minister, but the insights are universal and indeed timely.
"Appalachian Zen", Steve Kanji Ruhl writes with authenticity and courage about the most difficult
of human topics. He encourages us to face the reality of death and our own mortality, as well as
the global issues of the climate crisis, widespread wars and conflicts and the loss of spiritual direction in today's world. Through his memoir, the author brings profound insight to all of these issues
from his perspective as a Zen Buddhist minister, but the insights are universal and indeed timely.
January 24, 2024
Kanji’s story is compelling, and the beauty and power of his prose matches his poetic gift and craft. This memoir is also a profound meditative exploration of class divisions and impacts in this country (rural Pennsylvania especially). Reading his later chapters helped me understand the appeal of Trump for many of the people Kanji grew up with. This is both a deeply personal story AND a description of a spiritual path that could enlighten us to how Zen practice can be liberating. The psychological, emotional, spiritual, and personal depth of understanding and reflection are revealing and moving.
December 29, 2022
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It is a quote attributed to Lao Tzu. It applies to this book, though not in the way you might think.
Appalachian Zen is a book by Steve Kanji Ruhl. Ruhl hails from Pennsylvania, more specifically in the Appalachian Mountains area. A journey to find himself takes him to many places. Eventually, Ruhl becomes an ordained Zen Priest.
The book is part memoir, part Buddhist text. Ruhl doesn't lay it on too thick with his past, but he does have a colorful history growing up in a poor community. It's fascinating to read about the gun violence and horrible things that happen to people around him, and the dentist is a luxury. Ruhl wishes to leave such a place, and I can't blame him.
I am a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee is a poor city in some areas, so I understand some of the themes in the book. I haven't gone to find myself yet, and I probably never will. The central tenet in Zen is being mindful of the here and now, and I know exactly where I am. Maybe I'm just being egotistical, though.
Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
Appalachian Zen is a book by Steve Kanji Ruhl. Ruhl hails from Pennsylvania, more specifically in the Appalachian Mountains area. A journey to find himself takes him to many places. Eventually, Ruhl becomes an ordained Zen Priest.
The book is part memoir, part Buddhist text. Ruhl doesn't lay it on too thick with his past, but he does have a colorful history growing up in a poor community. It's fascinating to read about the gun violence and horrible things that happen to people around him, and the dentist is a luxury. Ruhl wishes to leave such a place, and I can't blame him.
I am a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee is a poor city in some areas, so I understand some of the themes in the book. I haven't gone to find myself yet, and I probably never will. The central tenet in Zen is being mindful of the here and now, and I know exactly where I am. Maybe I'm just being egotistical, though.
Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
September 3, 2023
A twelfth-century teacher of Ch’an—the Chinese precursor of Zen—named Yuan-Wu said: “It is like coming across a light in thick darkness; it is like receiving treasure in poverty…. You gain an illuminating insight into the very nature of things…. Here is shown bare the most beautiful landscape of your birthplace.”
Five years before my journey to Kanegasaki, Japan, when I visited Pennsylvania, I knew only vaguely the definition of kōan, the Zen conundrum, the Zen challenge to a reasoning mind. Yet I see now that my efforts to reclaim an American homeland that defies reclamation, my struggle to understand it, functioned as my elusive and maddening kōan. The question: Where do you find the true place you are born?
As an American practicing within an Asian religion, both here and in the States, I try to stay vigilant concerning issues related to cultural appropriation—especially the purloining of spiritual traditions from foreign nations…Such issues have validity. So do issues relating to spiritual dilettantism, the shallow, selfish dabbling in religious beliefs and practices of other people.
I am acutely aware of the wisdom traditions that are appropriated and reflected through the lens of white American males; reading the amazing Home Is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path by Liên Shutt has been transformative in so many ways; even as a Vietnamese American practicing Buddhism she has been drenched in racism of teachers who are predominantly white, American and male. I want to be very cautious in how I approach reading and understanding this kind of book, which is wise to approach it from the lens of his early life in the Appalachian poverty of the South and how he found his home in religion.
I find such sources of inspiration and wisdom in religions and traditions, but know now that is appropriation unless I work hard to respect and credit all the teachers and lineages. It is a fine line, but I am traversing it with as much humility and respect as possible. And I think of the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, who travelled the world and wrote book after book and shared their wisdom without trying to convert. It all makes us better humans, and care more deeply for each other and the earth.
This book was interesting with some deep insights that resonate with me as someone who sought something else besides the place I was born and the family I was born in. The author is attuned to the natural world and thinks and writes some beautiful images but those are much shorter than the dreary depictions of Appalachia, showing the lens is cloudy there in memory. Overall worth a read.
“When we practice looking deeply, we realize that our home is everywhere,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh. “We have to be able to see that the trees are our home and the blue sky is our home. It looks like a difficult practice, but it’s really easy. You only need to stop being a wanderer in order to be at home. ‘Listen, listen. This wonderful sound brings me back to my true home.’ The voice of the Buddha, the sound of the bell, the sunshine, everything is calling us back to our true home. Once you are back in your true home, you’ll feel the peace and the joy you deserve.”
Zen Buddhists extol a life of alert composure, of transparent presence in the here-and-now. This life they call “the true home.” It exists for each of us if we will only awaken to it.
The distance traversed. Beyond the scope of statute or nautical miles, the map’s imposed meridians…. Distance traveled from forebears who strove in daunted hills, in pine hollows…. My passport fails to divulge my place of origin, terrain of recollection…. “The purpose of angya, or pilgrimage, is to convince the monk of the fact that his whole life is a search, in exile, for his true home….
I’m driving across an ocean floor. Four hundred million years ago, during the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic, when crude mosses and ferns debuted on land, and the earliest amphibians, the region now known as Clinton County lay submerged beneath a balmy tropical sea. As a kid playing in our backyard I often discovered fossils from the Devonian: scallop shells intaglioed in rocks, marine trilobites in bas-relief. Thus as I drive across this primordial seabed my car is a combination of time machine and bathysphere. Air through my window sounds like a breaking surf, tidal ebb and flow of centuries.
A heron swoops the water. A princely, primitive bird, each of its enormous slate-blue wings unfolds effortlessly as a chaise longue. The heron foot-drags the stream. Then it sails aloft and, turning, reveals the silhouette of a pteranodon. I like to divine the lasting essence of this place. I like to feel intimations of something akin to those tutelary spirits—near at hand, beyond spectrum of the visible—to whom Celts built menhirs and dolmens; spirits the pagan Romans called genii loci. Thracian shepherds would have known Duck Run inhabited by potamids, nymphs of rivers and streams. Shinto worshippers in Japan paid homage to divine spirits of leaves, to sacred life coursing through roots and bodies of trees, the kami spirits of wind and water. I like to feel what they felt. I like to hear what they heard: the land improvising always—in zephyr, in freshet—its oracular speech, its earth-jazz, its wild glossolalia.
I’m dwelling alone in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts in a tranquil garden paradise amid brooks and woodlands. I live in a single room, a studio apartment with a kitchenette. I’ve come here to heal. I continue to emulate the ancient Chinese literati and wild Ch’an monks who wandered the hills while inscribing poetry, studying, teaching a few students, observing nature, and meditating, living simply while forsaking “the world of wind and dust.” I’m here to get well. In doing so, I distill my Zen practice, as always, to six words: Be clear. Be kind. Be present.
By miracle I seem to have survived into this life of contentments, stripping away, giving up, letting go, while gaining immeasurably at every step. I’ve found a life spare in its delineations, yet rich in amplitude.
Five years before my journey to Kanegasaki, Japan, when I visited Pennsylvania, I knew only vaguely the definition of kōan, the Zen conundrum, the Zen challenge to a reasoning mind. Yet I see now that my efforts to reclaim an American homeland that defies reclamation, my struggle to understand it, functioned as my elusive and maddening kōan. The question: Where do you find the true place you are born?
As an American practicing within an Asian religion, both here and in the States, I try to stay vigilant concerning issues related to cultural appropriation—especially the purloining of spiritual traditions from foreign nations…Such issues have validity. So do issues relating to spiritual dilettantism, the shallow, selfish dabbling in religious beliefs and practices of other people.
I am acutely aware of the wisdom traditions that are appropriated and reflected through the lens of white American males; reading the amazing Home Is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path by Liên Shutt has been transformative in so many ways; even as a Vietnamese American practicing Buddhism she has been drenched in racism of teachers who are predominantly white, American and male. I want to be very cautious in how I approach reading and understanding this kind of book, which is wise to approach it from the lens of his early life in the Appalachian poverty of the South and how he found his home in religion.
I find such sources of inspiration and wisdom in religions and traditions, but know now that is appropriation unless I work hard to respect and credit all the teachers and lineages. It is a fine line, but I am traversing it with as much humility and respect as possible. And I think of the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, who travelled the world and wrote book after book and shared their wisdom without trying to convert. It all makes us better humans, and care more deeply for each other and the earth.
This book was interesting with some deep insights that resonate with me as someone who sought something else besides the place I was born and the family I was born in. The author is attuned to the natural world and thinks and writes some beautiful images but those are much shorter than the dreary depictions of Appalachia, showing the lens is cloudy there in memory. Overall worth a read.
“When we practice looking deeply, we realize that our home is everywhere,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh. “We have to be able to see that the trees are our home and the blue sky is our home. It looks like a difficult practice, but it’s really easy. You only need to stop being a wanderer in order to be at home. ‘Listen, listen. This wonderful sound brings me back to my true home.’ The voice of the Buddha, the sound of the bell, the sunshine, everything is calling us back to our true home. Once you are back in your true home, you’ll feel the peace and the joy you deserve.”
Zen Buddhists extol a life of alert composure, of transparent presence in the here-and-now. This life they call “the true home.” It exists for each of us if we will only awaken to it.
The distance traversed. Beyond the scope of statute or nautical miles, the map’s imposed meridians…. Distance traveled from forebears who strove in daunted hills, in pine hollows…. My passport fails to divulge my place of origin, terrain of recollection…. “The purpose of angya, or pilgrimage, is to convince the monk of the fact that his whole life is a search, in exile, for his true home….
I’m driving across an ocean floor. Four hundred million years ago, during the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic, when crude mosses and ferns debuted on land, and the earliest amphibians, the region now known as Clinton County lay submerged beneath a balmy tropical sea. As a kid playing in our backyard I often discovered fossils from the Devonian: scallop shells intaglioed in rocks, marine trilobites in bas-relief. Thus as I drive across this primordial seabed my car is a combination of time machine and bathysphere. Air through my window sounds like a breaking surf, tidal ebb and flow of centuries.
A heron swoops the water. A princely, primitive bird, each of its enormous slate-blue wings unfolds effortlessly as a chaise longue. The heron foot-drags the stream. Then it sails aloft and, turning, reveals the silhouette of a pteranodon. I like to divine the lasting essence of this place. I like to feel intimations of something akin to those tutelary spirits—near at hand, beyond spectrum of the visible—to whom Celts built menhirs and dolmens; spirits the pagan Romans called genii loci. Thracian shepherds would have known Duck Run inhabited by potamids, nymphs of rivers and streams. Shinto worshippers in Japan paid homage to divine spirits of leaves, to sacred life coursing through roots and bodies of trees, the kami spirits of wind and water. I like to feel what they felt. I like to hear what they heard: the land improvising always—in zephyr, in freshet—its oracular speech, its earth-jazz, its wild glossolalia.
I’m dwelling alone in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts in a tranquil garden paradise amid brooks and woodlands. I live in a single room, a studio apartment with a kitchenette. I’ve come here to heal. I continue to emulate the ancient Chinese literati and wild Ch’an monks who wandered the hills while inscribing poetry, studying, teaching a few students, observing nature, and meditating, living simply while forsaking “the world of wind and dust.” I’m here to get well. In doing so, I distill my Zen practice, as always, to six words: Be clear. Be kind. Be present.
By miracle I seem to have survived into this life of contentments, stripping away, giving up, letting go, while gaining immeasurably at every step. I’ve found a life spare in its delineations, yet rich in amplitude.
December 21, 2023
Such an unexpected exercise in grief; what a thorough journey. I was surprised to find a 2020 scathing political rant near the end but it was absolutely warranted and bridged what we don't often think of, the other side.
February 24, 2023
This book is a richly written story of a person's growth stemming from living in an impoverished community with many struggles which kicked off a journey of self discovery, depth, and wisdom. Nestled in Zen themes this autobiography is beautifully written and I highly recommend it.
November 30, 2022
A very powerful memoir. Brilliant use of language, gives English extraordinary life and depth. Dazzling and sparkling! Dashing and spirited. So rich! So deep! Really excellent, and moving.
June 5, 2023
still not sure if a zen memoir is an oxymoron or not, but either way i thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and would highly recommend the story and its beautiful writing
January 4, 2023
Sumptuous prose! A powerful, lyrical journey with fascinating stops along the way. This book isn't only about Zen Buddhism, and it isn't merely Ruhl's own story. It's a story about a particular section of America, seldom described, framed through seven generations of farmers and factory workers. It's about working class Americans. About the struggle of living in two worlds -- a blue-collar one and an elite academic one. About navigating the cultural and political divide in this country. About traveling as both insider and outsider in an Asian culture. About suicide and survival. About spiritual awakening. And love. This book is about what it means to come home. I just bought a second copy for a fellow spiritual adventurer.
January 27, 2023
In reading Steve Kanji Ruhl's "Appalachian Zen" I have been transported into poetic dioramas that anchor the drama and unfolding beauty of the his physical travels across the globe and metaphysical journeys to true home. Steve Kanji Ruhl weaves these poetic and narrative elements together powerfully and seamlessly like a song both familiar and fresh at each turn. His unflinching honesty is cradled in a compassion that widens our view of others, of events, and of ourselves. "Appalachian" Zen" sings into the reader knowledge that all ground can be cultivated, even our ground, the "path that is home." I am so very grateful to be reading this book!
January 5, 2023
Wonderful, insightful memoir!
What an amazing story. Ruhl is a masterful writer and storyteller that takes readers on a ride through often overlooked corners of the world with insightful social commentary and personal confessions of a unique and inspiring life. It is a multi-genre masterpiece that is equal parts self help, history lesson, spiritual teaching and op ed. highly recommend!
What an amazing story. Ruhl is a masterful writer and storyteller that takes readers on a ride through often overlooked corners of the world with insightful social commentary and personal confessions of a unique and inspiring life. It is a multi-genre masterpiece that is equal parts self help, history lesson, spiritual teaching and op ed. highly recommend!
January 24, 2024
Steve Kanji Ruhl has gifted the world an intimate and detailed memoir that stands out among Western Buddhism books. A far-reaching and accessible commentary on growing up in rural Appalachia, coming of age, a string of losses by suicide and his eventual landing in a Buddhist monastery. Kanji's voice is real, lyrical and so engaging. I couldn't put the book down. It's a must-read!
February 5, 2024
This powerful book is both eloquent and refreshingly real. It is relevant to people from all walks of life and spiritual paths. One does not need to be Buddhist to appreciate and benefit from this book. Highly recommended!
August 18, 2023
This meanders along with elaborate metaphors and many cul de sacs. One paragraph we are in high school the next his parents’ childhoods. I kept thinking why can’t we cut to the chase? A tantalising snippet about Zen but no off we go again to the high school reunion, the break up of a relationship.
I gave up, life is too short.
I gave up, life is too short.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews