In the spring of 2018, a handful of brown-robed monastics led a 42-day “meditative hike” from the Blue Cliff Monastery in upstate New York to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. That walk—following the Appalachian Trail with a rotating group of laypeople joining in each week, completed mostly in silence—provides a narrative spine and jumping-off points for all kinds of reflections in Hiking Zen.
Coauthored by trip organizer Brother Pháp Lưu (known as Doug Bachman at Dartmouth), the slim paperback is designed to fit in a pack or back pocket. It serves as a guide not so much to hiking as to living a more mindful, self-aware life. Each chapter ends with a set of practices that flow naturally out of a long backpacking trip: breathing, walking, observing nature, eating, becoming comfortable with discomfort, the power of silence. The call is to pay attention. The publisher calls the book a “mobile monastery.”
The authors braid journal entries, vivid trail descriptions, and personal histories into the lessons. Pháp Lưu recalls the wild sensation he felt creating a hiking path in the woods near his boyhood home in Connecticut and the pivotal return to Hanover at age 25, when he spent nights camping on the Appalachian Trail and days studying Zen in the Baker stacks. In 2011, he became a dharma (“path of rightness”) teacher, following his Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, an exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk who gained worldwide popularity for his writings on mindfulness. Nhat Hanh’s presence is palpable on every page.
Some of the book’s descriptions will ring true to anyone who has hiked and camped. Leading a group down switchbacks from the long ridge above Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, Pháp Lưu became engrossed in a conversation about vegetarianism and subsistence hunting. He stopped modeling mindful breathing and silence and setting a steady pace—and got called out for it by a follower. He flushed with conflicting emotions around the responsibility of leading, having his authority questioned. Such vulnerable moments bring a spiritual teacher down to earth and ground Buddhist practices in everyday experience.
Along with the philosophy’s centuries-old history, there’s timeliness in Hiking Zen’s lessons for slowing down and caring for ourselves and the planet. There’s also a sense of profound, mundane repetitiveness—like a mantra or the sameness-but-not-sameness of every step after step of a long walk in the woods.
