Hard Road to Sacred Places

After the untimely death of their 21-year-old son, novelist/screenwriter Wurlitzer ( Little Buddha ) and his wife, photogapher Lynn Davis, embarked on a spiritual journey through Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar) and Cambodia, seeking solace and enlightenment from Buddhist sacred places. They found instead a consumer culture in which material desire has displaced the spiritual center with disastrous consequences for the indigenous practice of Buddhism. By the end of their journey, Wurlitzer and Davis have failed to find the illumination and peace they had so desperately sought. Unfortunately, readers will gain as little from this book as the authors did from their trip, for Wurlitzer's style is pretentious, and his questions, for one who claims to have practiced Buddhism, are sophomoric and self-conscious. Had he remembered that in Buddhism enlightenment comes only after one has forsaken all desire, he might have been able to transcend the physical and spiritual exhaustion that dominated his journey. Since he did not however, his readers are left likewise exhausted and without enlightenment. (Aug.)