Breakfast with Buddha

Otto Ringling—suburban father, husband, book editor—takes a cross-country trip to his family home, and, via his flaky sister, along for the ride is his sister's guru. Otto is quite happy with his life, his family, his work, but since the sudden and unexpected deaths of his parents, he's had a little nagging voice in his head, and the presence of Rinpoche during the long drive gives him the opportunity to talk out some of the questions pressing on him. Otto gradually moves from a legalistic view of his own spirituality to a more free-flowing view.

“...I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the Poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time we are being arrogant and stupid. I love my country. But I love it the way you love a wife of many years: not because you have some sentimental notion of her perfection, but because you know her thoroughly....”

The scene with Rinpoche giving a blessing to a biker-type in a bowling alley shines for me: “When it was finished, Rinpoche took a step backward and bowed. The man with the snake tattoo stood frozen in place. And then across his jagged features bloomed the smile he must have had as a young boy, before anything had been taken away from him by what he saw and heard, before the world had shown him its teeth and bitten him.”

It's a beautiful moment among many beautiful moments in the book.

It's hard to write good fiction when you have an agenda that is so close to the surface. It seems usually either the fiction suffers or the philosophy suffers. Breakfast With Buddha does a pretty good job though. The story is plausible and engaging and the ideas from Eastern Philosophy are nicely woven in.