PHÁP L’U ’97 Mindful Walking

PHÁP L’U ’97 Mindful Walking

ALUMNI BOOKS

Hiking Zen

172 PP. $18.95

In the spring of 2018, a handful of brown-robed monastics led a 42-day “meditative hike” from the Blue Cliff Monastery in upstate New York to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. That walk—following the Appalachian Trail with a rotating group of laypeople joining in each week, completed mostly in silence—provides a narrative spine and jumping-off points for all kinds of reflections in Hiking Zen.

Coauthored by trip organizer Brother Phap Luu (known as Doug Bachman at Dartmouth), the S^m PaPer^ack is designed to fit in a pack or back pocket. It serves as a guide not so much to hiking as to living a more mindful, self-aware life. E ach chapter ends with a set of practices that flow naturally out of a long backpacking trip: breathing, walking, observing nature, eating, becoming comfortable with discomfort, the power of silence. The call is to pay attention. The publisher calls the book a “mobile monastery.”

The authors braid journal entries, vivid trail descriptions, and personal histories into the lessons. Phap Luu recalls the wild sensation he felt creating a hiking path in the woods near his boyhood home in Connecticut and the pivotal return to Hanover at age 25, when he spent nights camping on the Appalachian Trail and days studying Zen in the Baker stacks. In 2011, he became a dharma (“path of rightness”) teacher, following his Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, an exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk who gained worldwide popularity for his writings on mindfulness. Nhat Hanh’s presence is palpable on every page.

Some of the book’s descriptions will ring true to anyone who has hiked and camped. Leading a group down switchbacks from the long ridge above Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, Phap Luu became engrossed in a conversation about vegetarianism and subsistence hunting. He stopped modeling mindful breathing and silence and setting a steady pace—and got called out for it by a follower. He flushed with conflicting emotions around the responsibility of leading, having his authority questioned. Such vulnerable moments bring a spiritual teacher down to earth and ground Buddhist practices in everyday experience.

Along with the philosophy’s centuries-old history, there’s timeliness in Hiking Zen’s lessons for slowing down and caring for ourselves and the planet. There’s also a sense of profound, mundane repetitiveness—like a mantra or the sameness-but-not-sameness of every step after step of a long walk in the woods.

Jim Collins ’84

EDITOR’S PICKS

ROBERT E. BONNER ’68A

The First Pariah State: How the Proslavery Confederacy Menaced the World

Princeton University Press

The Dartmouth professor of history and biography explores the Confederacy’s failed attempt to gain international recognition and how a transatlantic publicity campaign framed the South’s rebellion as immoral and a global threat. He details how the Union and allies used the Confederacy’s proslavery stance and actions, such as disrupting maritime commerce, to create a “pariah state” through international law and public opinion.

DEVON JERSILD ’80

Luminous Bodies: A Novel of Marie Curie

Paul Dry Books

The tumultuous life of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Marie Curie—from girlhood in Poland, marriage, and death of her husband to her affair with a fellow scientist and subsequent shunning from the scientific community—come vividly to life in this debut novel, which also celebrates Curie’s exhilaration at her scientific discoveries.

NANCY BERNHARD ’84

The Double Standard Sporting House

She Writes Press

Fascinated by how survivors of political and sexual violence heal through storytelling, Bernhard captures the hypocrisies and double standards faced by women of New York City in 1868, including women who worked in a highend brothel.

DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN ’86

This Is Where the Serpent Lives

Knopf

This first novel by Mueenuddin—whose short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist—evokes Pakistan’s contemporary yet feudal countryside. Unforgettable characters on an old farm struggle to survive under the tight grip of caste and class divisions. The four linked stories, layered across several decades, are tied together by an orphan and chauffeur whom The New York Times calls “a live wire.” Publishers Weekly calls it “a masterpiece.”

CURTIS DOZIER ’00

The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate

Yale University Press

Chair of Vassar’s Greek and Roman studies department and host of The Mirror of Antiquity podcast, Dozier examines how some on the right claim the ancient world as historical precedent for violent politics. One critic calls it “the best volume written on the modern far-right’s toxic obsession with our past.”

Additional titles and excerpts can be found on the DAM website.