cover image A Zen Romance: One Woman's Adventures in a Monastery

A Zen Romance: One Woman's Adventures in a Monastery

Deborah Boliver Boehm. Kodansha International (JPN), $25 (0pp) ISBN 978-4-7700-2032-1

When Deborah Boehm struck out for Kyoto as an exchange student in the 1960s, she often told many of her friends who practiced the ""dull and pretentious"" ways of Zen Buddhism that she hoped to ""get away from Zen."" Upon her arrival in Japan, however, she found herself living in a room on the grounds of an ancient Zen monastery. While she at first expresses mild disappointment at finding herself among Zen monks, she is soon won over to their ways, and they to hers, through participation in regular study and communal meals with the monks. Boehm so endears herself to the monks that she is invited to be the first foreigner to participate in the O-Zesshin, a week of intensive meditation. Yet, Boehm is taken with more than the monk's religious ways; she is also attracted sexually to one of the monks, and the book opens with one of her erotic dreams about this teacher. While the asceticism of Zen generally excludes the passion of sex, Boehm transforms her erotic desire into a passionate prose that glorifies the spiritual dimensions of Zen Buddhism. Boehm's memoir is a rich combination of the eroticism of the Thousand and One Nights and the spiritual revelation of a Zen koan. (July)