Dean Sluyter

The Dharma Bum's Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics Dean Sluyter

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

Suppose we could discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, The Bluest Eye, and The Cat in the Hat . . . read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as Buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite.

Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma -- authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening -- and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter.

Sluyter's habit of finding enlightenment in unexpected places started at the age of twelve, when Mad magazine triggered his first glimpse of deep transcendence. He went on to discover how "Eastern" spirituality -- the light of nirvana -- illuminates all the big questions of birth and death, hope and despair, love and fear that Western literature explores.

With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, the Guide unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss. It will inspire readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.