Dean Sluyter - The Dharma Bums Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics

What a wise and wonderful book, an exploration of some of our greatest writers through the seemingly simplest and most noble questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? What is the nature of consciousness? What energies and forces supersede my transient ones? Bravo!

Ken Burns, filmmaker

The Dharma Bums Guide to Western Literature beautifully demonstrates how inspiration and spiritual insight can be found anywhere, at any time, in any situation. Dean Sluyters unveiling of the sacred within the secular is wonderful to experience, a satisfying feast for the mind and soul. Savor it.

Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder and spiritual director, Agape International Spiritual Center

This book is both wise and funny, inspired and inspiring, delightful and light filled. It opens up whole new ways of seeing.

Connie Zweig, PhD, author of The Inner Work of Age

With sensitivity, humor, and clarity, Dean Sluyter draws out the inner meaning of familiar literature, revealing at its heart the nondual understanding that underlies the worlds great wisdom traditions. He shows us a pathway through the literary past to the recognition of our own essential nature.

Rupert Spira, author of Being Aware of Being Aware

This book holds the magic to convert literary junkies into mystic warriors and the power to turn spiritual seekers into lovers of letters. A must for bookworms and psychonauts, devotees as well as neophytes.

Michael Imperioli, actor-writer-filmmaker

Enlightening! A brilliant and beautifully written tour of the spiritual wisdom in great literature, and an insightful and inspiring guide to bringing this wisdom into ones own life. A delight to read, and witty too.

Peter Russell, author of Letting Go of Nothing and From Science to God

Funny, wry, curious, and wise, The Dharma Bums Guide to Western Literature winds like a lyrical highway through the twists and turns of the life of the spirit. It doesnt just tell us but shows us that reading can be a radical, liberative act that books can wake us up and leave us changed forever.

Willa Blythe Baker, PhD, founding teacher, Natural Dharma Fellowship

Lighthearted original pleasantly breezy. Those with an appreciation of literature and spirituality will appreciate Sluyters fresh takes.

Publishers Weekly

I loved this insightful, compelling, thoroughly original book. Putting aside the bland conventions of mainstream guides, it reveals the perennial wisdom found in all great literature, Western and Eastern. No matter how often youve read these books, Dean Sluyter introduces you to them anew.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent

This is not your ordinary Dharma book or lit book either. Its a brilliant, insightful, playful, sometimes irreverent journey for discovering Dharmic pathways in Western literature. Dean Sluyter is the lit professor you wish youd had, and this is a trip worth taking. The guide is compelling, the company stellar, the view cosmic, and what we take back home is radical hope.

Yogacharya Ellen Grace OBrian, spiritual director of the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment and author of The Jewel of Abundance

This is Dead Poets Society meets the Buddha. Dean Sluyter has a miners gift for extracting nuggets of wisdom that no one else sees. I have no doubt that Blake, Salinger, Dickinson, and the rest of Sluyters all-star authors would be delighted to have their work appreciated from this deep level of enlightened insight and joy.

Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda

This amazing book does it all, providing the back story, the front story, and the over story for more than two dozen masterpieces of English and American literature. Dean Sluyter brings the big picture into focus by juxtaposing the work of perennial favorites from John Donne to Toni Morrison and celebrating the joy and wisdom we receive through fiction and poetry. It will inspire educators and students alike to keep reading, keep reflecting, and keep faith in humankind.

Christopher Key Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University and author of Living Landscapes

Dean Sluyter is a powerful and revelatory writer. In his latest work, he shines his light, his wisdom, and his exuberant wit on the great literary classics of the West. With an ultrawide lens ranging from Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss, he shows us that we dont need to travel far to find the sacred teachings and ancient truths.

Jai Uttal, sacred music composer-vocalist-instrumentalist

A LSO BY D EAN S LUYTER

Why the Chicken Crossed the Road And Other Hidden Enlightenment Teachings

The Zen Commandments: Ten Suggestions for a Life of Inner Freedom

Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies

Natural Meditation: A Guide to Effortless Meditative Practice

Fear Less: Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger, and Addiction

Copyright 2022 by Dean Sluyter

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

The illustration credits on are an extension of the copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

First printing, March 2022

ISBN 978-1-60868-769-5

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-770-1

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

For Charles Genoud

Thank you to Jack Kerouac, from whom I borrowed the first three words of my title, and to Gary Snyder for lending them to Jack.

Theres lotsa keys, but only one door.

J ACK K EROUAC , The Dharma Bums

I found my first guru on the cover of Mad magazine.

I was twelve years old. We were going to see a drive-in movie that night, and my mom had sent me to the garage to clear out the back seat of our Nash Rambler station wagon. Picking through the mess of toys and comic books that my brothers and I had left there, I was in my usual state of vague agitation, a nonspecific