The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature

HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK Suppose we could 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 . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye. 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. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.

HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK

Suppose we could 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 . . . discover enlightenment teachings inMacbethThe Catcher in the RyeMoby-Dick, andThe Bluest Eye.

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

Introduction
Let’s Take Our Shoes Off

1. William Blake
Eternity’s Sunrise

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby
Unutterable Visions

3. Frederick Douglass | The Slave Narrative
Tribulation

4. Thoreau, Emerson & Friends
Future Buddhas of America

5. Dr. Seuss | The Cat in the Hat
Have No Fear

6. Virginia Woolf | To the Lighthouse
Plenty for Everybody

7. Ernest Hemingway | A Farewell to Arms
Pebbles and Boulders

8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Kubla Khan
The Milk of Paradise

9. John Donne | A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Let Us Melt

10. Mark Twain | Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
Betwixt Two Things

11. John Keats
Still

12. Edwin Abbott Abbott | Flatland
Upward, Not Northward

13. William Shakespeare | Macbeth
What’s Your Hurry?

14. Samuel Beckett | Waiting For Godot
Thanks For Nothing

15. Rodgers & Hammerstein | Oklahoma!
OK

16. Gerard Manley Hopkins
Flame Out

17. Toni Morrison | The Bluest Eye
Love Nonetheless

18. Herman Melville | Moby-Dick
Whiteness

19. Emily Dickinson
I’m Nobody

20. Walt Whitman
I Am Large

21. J. D. Salinger
Ah, Buddy

22. Key, Rogers & Franklin | Three Anthems
Look Again

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography