The Buddha from Brooklyn: A Tale of Spiritual Seduction - Softcover

Buddha from Brooklyn begins like the biographies Crooked Cucumber and Cave in the Snow--a venerated Buddhist teacher from humble beginnings is surrounded by respectable Western students. Unlike the seasoned masters Shunryu Suzuki and Tenzin Palmo, however, Jetsumna Ahkon Lhamo, the red-headed woman from Brooklyn who wore a black leather jacket and stick-on nails, had no Buddhist training. And still she had managed to build up the largest monastery of Tibetan Buddhists in America. Martha Sherrill, a journalist for The Washington Post, introduces us to Jetsumna's monastery outside Washington, D.C., and to the world of Tibetan Buddhism. With a measured hand, she unfolds the life of Jetsumna and her acolytes, revealing the unshakable devotion, the enormous sums of cash, the ostracism, and the mysterious magnetism of the highest-ranked woman in Tibetan Buddhism. Jetsumna joined the illustrious ranks of Tibetan lamas after being discovered to be an enlightened reincarnation by the same lama who would later discover Steven Seagal. As Sherrill learns, Jetsumna did appear to be enlightened, and her students believed in her infallibility. They became model Tibetan Buddhists, doing prostrations, building stupas, saving all sentient beings. So why did the group occasionally seem like a cult? In a narrative of complexity and sensitivity, Sherrill struggles with the answers to this and other doubts even while she is attracted to the religion herself but troubled by its embodiment in this stretch of wilderness outside America's capital. --Brian Bruya

“An unusually clear and close look at all the hazards–and potential–of trying to set up a spiritual community in American.... More than Jetsunma, it tells us about the price of faith.”–Pico Iyer, Tricycle