The Buddha From Brooklyn
by Martha SherrillRandom House, 392 pp., $25.95
The fact that Catherine Burroughs, who was born Alyce Zeoli to an abusive Italian-Jewish-Dutch family in working class Canarsie, Brooklyn, was able to transform herself into a spiritual leader of any magnitude represents a contemporary act of reinvention nearly worthy of St. Paul’s. The future guru spent most of her early years in a spirited, though unfocused, attempt to escape the trappings of her household and her past. She married a couple of times, had a few kids, but never discovered any true sense of purpose until she joined up with a New Age prayer group. Alyce then changed her name to Catherine and opened up a successful psychic consulting and channeling practice in D.C. that eventually developed into a prayer group of its own.
Chances are that Burroughs was not the first to parlay her success as a psychic diviner into a more influential role as high priestess to a colony of truth-seeking acolytes. But considering that, in 1985, the revered Tibetan lama Penor Rimpoche proclaimed Catherine the first female American tulku, or reincarnated Buddhist saint, you have an entirely different matter. This improbable story provides the background for Martha Sherrill’s wonderfully incisive new study of the real-life lady lama and her followers, The Buddha From Brooklyn.
Sherrill, a reporter for The Washington Post, spent several years with the again-renamed Jetsunma Akhon Lhamo at her Maryland monastery and Tibetan center, now the largest Buddhist institution of its kind in the United States. In the process, what she ended up uncovering was a veritable Charles Foster Kane of the New Age set: a young lama who once held great promise and possessed the best of intentions, but whose steady decline into self-absorption and megalomania have ultimately acted as a corrupting influence on all those around her.
“The Tibetan Buddhist world is largely unseen,” Sherrill writes, “the way thoughts are unseen, and ideas. The way love is unseen, and energy.” Most religious cults thrive in this sort of metaphysical ambiguity, and Jetsunma’s sangha, or spiritual community, is no exception. The greater cause of bringing the Dharma to the West is frequently used to justify Jetsunma’s financial, physical, and emotional abuses, as well as her sexual indiscretions. What is perhaps most remarkable about The Buddha From Brooklyn, though, is how Sherrill foregoes the easy target of adversarial tell-all writing and instead focuses her attention on Jetsunma’s followers, and the various circumstances that have led them to the promise of the lama’s ultimate love.
What she comes away with is an impressive snapshot of the contemporary search for spirituality in the West. Sherrill refuses to be mired in journalistic cynicism and is clear-headed and objective throughout. This is partially due to her ability to turn the focus of her account back on her own incapacity to believe, despite her admitted longing to do so. She is able to perform a miracle of sorts, peeling away the veils that obscure the hard truth behind today’s quest for enlightenment in America, just as Jetsunma’s group seeks to peel away the illusion of this reality in order to reach that truth.
This article appears in May 19 • 2000.