The Dharma Bum's Guide to Western Literature

Reveals the profound, often surprising ways the literature we love conveys the enlightenment we seek

Some of us were lucky enough to have one terrific, passionate English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Throw in a droll sense of humor, a love of quirky tangents, and decades of meditation with lamas and rishis, and you get Dean Sluyter. For thirty-three years, students sat in Sluyter's classroom having their minds opened wide. Now The Dharma Bum's Guide to Western Literature puts you in that classroom.

Sluyter's habit of finding enlightenment in unexpected places started at the age of twelve, when a copy of Mad magazine triggered his first glimpse of deep transcendence. He went on to discover how "Eastern" spirituality - the light of nirvana - shines through Western classics as they explore themes of death and birth, despair and hope, fear and love. With sparkling wit and irreverent wisdom, Sluyter unpacks the Dharma of Blake, Beckett, Whitman, Woolf, Twain, Douglass, and more. His warm, down-to-earth approach will inspire you to deepen your own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.