The author demonstrates his deep involvement in every hip trend of the last 40 years. His writing skills can't sustain it. By the time he casually shoos away a mother bear and her cub because they were disturbing his meditation, I was hoping she would bite him. There are much better Zen autobiographies available, such as Thank You and OK! by David Chadwick, and Ambivalent Zen by Laurence Shainberg. There must be better examples of drug nostalgia, too. Also, this guy seems fixated on his bottom. Is that a Zen thing?

The San Francisco/Berkeley world of the 60s provided fertile ground for all manner of spiritual, political, social and artistic experiments. In this book, author Storlie recounts the then-common intersection of drug experimentation and Zen practice, and how the former led to a more lasting embrace of the latter.

The book is in two halves. The first half talks about the author's drug trips and his introduction to Zen. Apparantly, drug experimentation in the 60s happened in a context where it was necessarily seen as a spiritual quest. People who liked reading the "Don Juan" books will enjoy the author's retelling of the high and low points of several drug trips; I didn't, because I've never seen drugs as a spiritual tool, rather the opposite. Once the author finally comes to the same conclusion -- that drugs point to enlightenment but cannot lead there -- he takes up Zen practice more seriously, and becomes a student of Dainin Katagiri and one of the founders of the Minnesota Zen Center. That's the book's second half.

Throughout the book, the author constantly reminds us that, for all his time as a hippie, drug user, and zen practitioner, he is really a very manly hiker and useful handyman. He recounts several daring hiking trips, and the whole book is told from the perspective of a day spent hiking and meditating in the wilderness near his mountain hut. There was a bit too much of this for my taste.

In summary, this book is informative about the establishment of Zen in America in the 1960s through the 80s, but weakened by the author's incessant self-focus and self-promotion.

A valuable first-hand gonzo-historical account of many of the second generation of Zen teachers in America. Read this along with 'How the Swans Came to the Lake', for more nitty gritty detail of what it really takes to get a Zen Center going on a day-to-day basis. Though the author has few dramatic 'Three Pillars' type 'enlightenment' stories to relate, then again, neither do most long-term Zennies! But at the end, equanimity arises nevertheless, amazing! Bodhi, Svaha!