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"This luminous memoir combines the hardscrabble setting of Appalachia with the spiritual wisdom of Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Appalachian Zen describes a journey we all take, one that Buddhism calls ""seeking our true home."" Edgy, lyrical, and lovingly rendered, this book recounts how a kid from a Pennsylvania mill-town trailer park grew up--surrounded by backwoods farms and amid grief, violence, and passionate yearning--to become something improbable: a Buddhist minister teaching Zen. Author Steve Kanji Ruhl takes listeners on an adventure of discovery, roving far from the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania on a footloose Zen pilgrimage to Japan and beyond. Featuring vivid firsthand accounts of spiritual seeking and teaching in Japanese temples, as well as forays to Tokyo and Hiroshima, the alleys of Kyoto, Amish cornfields near the Susquehanna, and a monastery in the Catskills, Appalachian Zen includes rapt nature passages and cultural references ranging from Proust to punk rock. Throughout the book, Ruhl engages Buddhist themes of awakening and the death of the self by confronting the lives and deaths, including two by suicide, of his loved ones. This provocative memoir tells how it feels to practice Zen, and to move toward a life of hard-won forgiveness, healing, and freedom."

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"Steve Kanji Ruhl, ordained as a Zen Buddhist minister through the Zen Peacemaker Order, is the author of Enlightened Contemporaries and two volumes of poems, The Constant Yes of Things and Paintings of Rice Cakes Satisfy Hunger. He received his Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University and has been a speaker at Harvard's Center for World Religions, Yale Divinity School, the Omega Institute, and elsewhere. A Buddhist adviser at Yale University and faculty member of the Shogaku Zen Institute, Ruhl also teaches independently through his Touch the Earth cyber-sangha. He lives in western Massachusetts. Gabriel Vaughan is an Audie Award-winning narrator and classically trained actor. He grew up without television in western Massachusetts and listened to a lot of ""books on tape"" as a kid, so narrating audiobooks enjoyably feels like coming full circle. He is a founding member of the Tennessee Shakespeare Company and co-owner of Little Town Studios together with his wife and fellow narrator, Piper Goodeve. He has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and studied acting in London at British American Drama Academy."

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