Turtle Feet: The Making and Unmaking of a Buddhist Monk by Nikolai Grozni

From the Publisher

Nikolai Grozni was a music prodigy, a jazz pianist training at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, when suddenly he decided to transform his life. He moved to India to become a Buddhist monk—shaving his head, learning Tibetan, and donning long traditional robes. In the Himalayas—living in a hut a stone's throw from the Dalai Lama's compound— Grozni became entrenched in a sometimes comical, sometimes reverent, always intriguing community comprised of feisty nuns, bossy monks, violent chess players, demanding teachers, and a spectacular friend called Tsar, a fallen monk from Bosnia.

Grozni went to India in search of knowledge, but learns that the people who can teach him the most are not wearing uniforms and following special diets, but rather those who, like him, struggle with doubts and cannot accept an established system of faith. Instead, he journeys with his colorful cast of friends to a new understanding of himself and his place in the world.

Like Anne Lamott or Elizabeth Gilbert, Nikolai Grozni offers the insights of a religious pilgrim from the inside—in his case, from a male, Buddhist perspective. Thoughtful, funny, and elegantly written, Turtle Feet details the reality of a world much mythologized in the West and tells a wonderfully bittersweet story of a spiritual journey.

Anne Lamott

This is a rare and wonderful book, unlike anything I've ever read before. Rich in detail and humor, with a quirky and exotic cast of characters, it's an exquisitely written journey through life in a Tibetan monastery and village, where a brilliant young Western monk encounters discipline, freedom, Buddhism and himself. (Anne Lamott, author of Grace (Eventually))

A. J. Jacobs

Turtle Feet is a remarkable book. Yes, it's a spiritual journey filled with beautiful insights – but it's also a funny and gritty tale of dysentery, stoner roommates, cranky monks and flirty nuns. I felt enlightened for having read it. (A. J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically)

Publishers Weekly

This book about Tibetan monkhood certainly fits the description of the "extreme" memoir. Written by a Bulgarian novelist who was educated in the United States (Brown University) and India (down the street from the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala), this book takes a long time to get good, but it does get there. The most fascinating character is not the narrator, an archetypal youthful apprentice figure. That honor is reserved for a fallen, stateless monk from Bosnia who is a Zorba figure, enticing the narrator not to lusty appreciation of the world's wonders but to what Buddhists call seeing things as they are?enlightenment that is ultimately no big deal. There are passages of beauty about the nature of the mind and existence that few books about Buddhism can rival, because few books about Buddhism are written by authors with creative training. But a good editor should have reined in the author's disproportionate focus on the main character's excesses; it would have helped pacing and made a shorter and more convincing read.
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Kirkus Reviews

Join a spiritual seeker on his journey to becoming a monk. A promising jazz pianist, Bulgarian native Grozni came to the United States to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Soon fed up with the course his life had taken ("I'm angry at the world!" he yells at one point. "And I'm getting out."), he moved to the Himalayas to study Buddhism. Aided every step of the way by a tiny Tibetan nun named Ani Dawa, Grozni assimilated into life at the monastery, but he possessed a rebellious streak that often made it difficult for him to become at one with himself. Eventually he came to the realization that a life in which you're expected to quietly contemplate all the time wasn't for him, so-spoiler alert-he shed his robes and fulfilled a teacher's prophecies that one day he would disrobe, fall in love and write silly books. Well, the teacher was almost on target: This book isn't the least bit silly. Much of the narrative is a trifle mundane, but that's to be expected-to a Westerner the daily life of a monk is in many ways as mundane as it gets. But readers who take a Zen approach to the text will probably get sucked into monastic simplicity and Buddhist philosophy. And things definitely liven up whenever Grozni's charismatic, profane, cigarette-sucking pal Tsar comes on the scene. The hyper, loopy yin to Grozni's mellow (or at least attempting to be mellow) yang, Tsar helps turn what could have been a staid memoir into something original and special. Zen and the art of writing a pretty cool book.

Product Details

• ISBN: 159448984X
  
• ISBN-13: 9781594489846
• Format: Hardcover, 336pp
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
• Pub. Date: May 2008
• Sales Rank: 30,468