CONVERSATIONS: CHRISTIAN AND BUDDHIST

In 1963, Father Graham published Zen Catholicism, a book proposing that the Christian churches, and especially Catholicism, investigate the religions of the Orient with a view toward borrowing. The present work is a sequel to that, and contains the results of the author's own investigations in that direction. The thirteen chapters are indeed ""conversations"" between Graham and representatives of Japanese Buddhism, and they cover various subjects of middling interest: the scope of Zen, use of ""mind-expanding"" drugs, the applicability of Zen principles in Occidental life, prayer, etc. The book does little to dispel the myth of intellectual impenetrability that surrounds the East; the dialogues, though they are appropriately Platonic in concept, are multidirectional, rambling, inconclusive and, in many respects, appallingly naive. All of which illustrates, perhaps inadvertently, certain practical difficulties of which the author did not take sufficient cognizance in Zen Catholicism.