100 books like My Body, the Buddhist

When I began researching Martha Graham’s multifaceted life, I was intrigued to learn that she spent several summers in the 1930s at the Pueblo communities in New Mexico, where she was fascinated by the ceremonial and ritualistic dance elements of their lives. Entire villages of all generations would gather together on feast days at the center of the pueblo to watch the feather - and shell - and evergreen-costumed pageantry unfold, pounding steps on packed earth, cries to the heavens for rain and good harvests, and prayers for a harmonious year ahead. Graham insisted that she would never “copy” these dances – rather, she took the inspiration gathered in her imagination and mindfully infused it into her own pieces. Thus did Jacqueline Shea Murphy become my very first teacher in the roots and ways of indigenous American dance practices.

In 1946, Sir Robert Paul Cohan CBE (26 March 1925 – 13 January 2021) became one of the first male dancers to join Martha Graham’s company – and stayed for twenty-three years. He went on to become the first Artistic Director of the Contemporary Dance Trust in London and Artistic Advisor to the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel. I had the greatly entertaining privilege of interviewing Sir Robert in the Graham studio at their Westbeth home in NYC, where he regaled me with warm and acerbic vignette memories of “Martha,” her rigorous demeanor, her abrupt critiques, her searching analyses of his movement, her extreme demands as a partner – and her dire yet lyrical sensuality. The book is built around interviews skillfully and subtly conducted by Paul Jackson, principal lecturer in Choreography and Dance at the University of Winchester, UK.

The life and career of Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) fits – sometimes ideally, at others idiosyncratically – into so many appealing categories that I don’t know when to stop: “Our Crowd” Jewish preppie; poetry lover; art connoisseur while still a teenager (favorite: William Blake); hiker; denizen of Harvard Yard and inveterate dormitory “bull session” instigator; literary magazine editor (Hound & Horn) and art gallery proprietor while still an undergrad; cosmopolite and boulevardier of Manhattan; party-giver and goer; sexual experimenter…and, most pertinent to my journey with Martha Graham, he was the discoverer and “importer” to these shores of the genius George Balanchine, and inventor of the American Ballet Caravan, Ballet Society, and the New York City Ballet. A skeptical critic, Kirstein’s first encounter with Graham was somewhat grouchy – however, he came around to accept her new technique, and his seal of approval gave a timely boost to her reputation.… show more.

I am sure many of you already know this visionary philosopher from his ground-breaking The Hero With a Thousand Faces. You may not be aware that Campbell was married to Jean Erdman, one of Martha Graham’s principal dancers in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Campbell’s initiations to modern dance came at Sarah Lawrence College when witnessing Erdman as Graham’s student; and then at Bennington, where Erdman performed with Graham’s company. His own learned background in the archetypal ethos of C.G. Jung made Campbell a prime candidate for Graham’s deeply-digging, Nietzschean/ecstatic archaic/abstract movement vocabulary. The choreographer and the professor spoke the same kinaesthetic language, Erdman remembered. There were many late nights when “Martha would call Joe on the phone” with some arcane question about her mythographic pieces in progress – Night Journey and Errand into the Maze. Many of Campbell’s essays in this book were first published in Dance Observer… show more.

Brian Pinkney’s scratchboard and oil pastel illustrations are full of energy. They capture Alvin Ailey’s movement and grace. Both the art and the text are thoughtful and very well-researched.

The book shows Alvin Ailey leaving Texas as a young man, discovering dance in LA, and creating the first modern dance company that celebrated the heritage of African-American people. I especially love the illustration of Alvin Ailey arriving in New York with the buildings in the background as if “his dreams soared higher than the tallest skyscrapers.”

The book has a beautiful full-circle moment that shows how Alvin Ailey incorporated gospel traditions from his church in Texas into one of his company’s first suite of dances. 

This, the biography of a 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist master, might seem out of place for a list that is about modern-day adaptations of ancient philosophies. However, I wanted to include it as a reminder that while philosophical reform can be all well and good, sometimes the masters of yesteryear are those from whom we still have the most to learn.

I find this book magical: its lucid descriptions of the rich intellectual and spiritual tradition of 14th-century Tibetan culture, its monastic curriculum and debates, and the evident commitment to enlightenment among its many protagonists, all of these things have much to teach us moderns who might just have a tendency to get a little cute when we think that we know best.  

One of the first places I heard about Buddhism was through Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder. The joy of reading Kerouac has worn off a bit, but Snyder and Ginsberg have become lifetime companions and real sources of inspiration for me, not least in their engagement with Buddhism. This collection of poems, essays, letters, and other writings brings them together with a much wider range of writers – Diane di Prima and Philip Whalen, Anne Waldman and Kenneth Rexroth, William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – showing how the best minds of two generations heard, felt and responded to Buddhism in their many different ways. It’s a real treasure-house of words.

I read this book just before I started writing my own book on Buddhism and Ireland. It’s almost an adventure story: there’s Alexander the Great and Aesop’s Fables, Marco Polo and Theosophist fantasies, Christian missionaries to Asia and Buddhist missionaries to the West, Asian immigrants in America, and British spies in Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and today’s western Buddhists. Sutin tells this whole complicated, rambling yarn in an easy-going and enjoyable way, making the book a real pleasure to read.

I love this warm-hearted and rich account of the first Americans to become Buddhist: the romantics who fell in love with Asian cultures, the rationalists who thought of Buddhism as a science or philosophy of human existence, and the esotericists who sought magical powers and powerful initiations. From Lafcadio Hearn’s celebration of “old Japan” to Countess Canavarro who set up a nun’s order in Sri Lanka, via Theosophists, vegetarians, and atheists, this book is a fantastic collection of people’s lives which were both transformed by meeting Buddhism and yet remained distinctively American even in their new form.   

I find the story in Imji Getsul (“English Novice”) incredibly moving. Lobzang Jivaka (Michael Dillon) was an extraordinary human being: the first trans man to have successful genital surgery and a pioneering (anonymous) writer on the subject. Outed by the British tabloid press, this deeply private man fled to India and became a Buddhist novice. In Ladakh he insisted on overcoming his own privilege as a white gentleman, starting at the bottom of the monastic hierarchy in gruelling physical conditions (which ultimately killed him). This book is an honest, funny, and powerful account of personal change and the meeting between cultures.