Lenz wrote a book entitled Surfing the Himalayas.
Look it up on Amazon.
[www.amazon.com]
What you will find interesting is that in each listing there are just a few copies with a promise that more are on the way.
Gotta wonder how many Lenzies buy this for friends.
Two reviewers identified many themes that are not Buddhist at all.
[www.amazon.com]
another reader noted:
Look it up on Amazon.
[www.amazon.com]
What you will find interesting is that in each listing there are just a few copies with a promise that more are on the way.
Gotta wonder how many Lenzies buy this for friends.
Two reviewers identified many themes that are not Buddhist at all.
[www.amazon.com]
Quote
1.0 out of 5 starsCrap
ByDavidon December 10, 2000
Format: Paperback
This national bestseller is written in a flowing, easygoing style and uses readily accessible imagery. Unfortunately, it also throws a bunch of New Age terms out and, although the author does attempt to make some sense of it, more often it just comes out as a jumble of crap.
While reading this book, I felt like I was reading a cross between The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, which I found entertaining and insightful, and The Celestine Prophecy, which I found absolutely detestable.
There are a lot of valid ideas in this book, most of which I've read in greater detail and better description elsewhere, and then there's crap like this:
"...Master Fwap told me that most people who have been enlightened in their previous incarnations would normally begin to regain their past-life enlightenment-if they lived at sea level-at around the age of twenty-nine, when their astrological Saturn return took place. He said that living in or near sacred mountains, because of their beneficial auric influences, often made past-life returns happen even faster."
What?! Sea level? Saturn return? Auric influences? I'm not close-minded, but Lenz makes little attempt to make believers out of non-believers, he throws out jargon like this with impunity.
The quote on the cover by Laurie Anderson says, "A wild ride through the basics of Buddhism." Yet I don't think Buddhism has much to do with Western astrology, Atlantis, and lines of energy.
Furthermore, Lenz doesn't even mention the fundamental Buddhist precepts, the Four Noble Truths. When he does describe Buddhist concepts, I feel more comfortable because I understand, because it makes logical and philosophical sense. It's when he goes off on a wild tangent about how Atlantis sensed the pollution of the world's aura or something like that that I feel inclined to dismiss this book as nothing more than a piece of New Age fluff.
another reader noted:
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A ridiculous hash of Kung Fu and Castaneda
ByA customeron June 4, 1999
Format: Paperback
A young snowboarder carving turns high in the Himalayas runs into (quite literally) a wizened, unpretentious little monk, and the unlikely pair share a philosophical dialogue based on Buddhism and boarding.
It's a clever story line, a potential blend of high adventure, an exotic locale, spirituality, and plenty of comedic pratfalls. In the hands of a competent writer, this could have been the rich little story that I'd hoped for when I opened the cover. But Lenz is not a competent writer, and he has managed to mire a clever concept in pedantics, colorless prose, and all sorts of New Age jibberish. It's a ridiculous hash of Kung Fu and Castaneda, but without the vitality of either. Humor? In Lenz's book, it's strictly unintentional.
I was disappointed right from the first chapter, in which Lenz manages to drain Kathmandu of all color and excitement -- not an easy achievement. Likewise, his plodding prose style flattens the Himalayas themselves. Anyone who loves mountains and snow will be turned off by Lenz's lack of interest in these subjects, which should provide the springboard for all sorts of spiritual musings. Instead, Lenz's idiotic surfer-dude claims to have easily tramped to the top of a nameless and formless mountain peak through "powder" (snow is ALWAYS powder in this book)-- in hiking boots!
This complaint may sound picayune and technical, but it illustrates Lenz's chief deficiency: he is so intent on getting his pedantic philosophical message across that he ignores utterly all story, setting, and style. And without those literary hooks to keep us reading, his book is nothing but a sophomoric and painfully dull treatise on spirituality.
If we want a treatise, we're betting off reading the Dalai Lama. For rich, loving descriptions of the land, culture, people and religion of this region, we're far better off with Peter Mathiessen (The Snow Leopard) and Heinrich Harrer (Seven Years in Tibet). Leave Lenz on the self-help rack where his book belongs.