Zen and the Poetic Insight of Alvaro Cardona-Hine

Mel Mathews: Having recently published one of your collections of poetry, The Song Less/on (il piccolo editions), undoubtedly I am a big fan of your work. However, today I'd like to learn more about your just published Phantom Buddha (Alba Books). Why the title: Phantom Buddha?

Alvaro Cardona-Hine

Alvaro Cardona-Hine: Phantom Buddha is an autobiographical novel dealing with the time in my Forties when, after reading extensively about Zen Buddhism, I began actual practice under a Japanese Zen Master who turned out to be a womanizer. The woman I was with was lured away from me. It was a painful experience that took me several decades to translate into a novel. There is a blend of reality and dreams I had during those days that accentuates the condition of a man in the most dire of circumstances. My friend Pierre Delattre, author of Tales of a Dalai Lama, consider this work of mine to be a breakthrough into a new kind of literature.

MM: How long has Phantom Buddha been in the making?

ACH: I began to write Phantom Buddha decades ago but, for one thing, the painful nature of the experience made postponing and rewriting a matter of many years. The fact that my wife, Barbara McCauley Cardona and I, have started our own publishing firm, made me abandon any doubts and complete the work.

MM: What impetus fueled the writing of Phantom Buddha?

ACH: Phantom Buddha is essentially an expose of a man who has recently been exposed in the Buddhist community and by the New York Times for the moral fraud that he is. Zen is the clearest, most demanding, and most subtle paths to personal liberation that exists, and there is absolutely no room in it for scoundrels such as Joshu Sasaki who takes advantage of the cupidity of female students.    

I was able to overcome my initial disappointment and went on to study with Prabhassa Dharma Roshi, who some 14 years ago, before she died, named me a sensei, or teacher.

"A male 'Eat, Prey, Love.'"

Man in Search of His Anima, a.k.a. His Soul

Menopause Man-Unplugged 
reviewed by Elizabeth Clark-Stern

It was - in retrospect - a risky thing to do: reading a book written by my publisher. It is fiction, but every writer's soul and character comes through in their work. What if his book revealed a person different from the one I knew through phone calls and emails? What if I didn't like it? All reasonable cautions. But I was curious. As it turns out, so is Malcolm Clay, the protagonist. Curious, rebellious, always drawn to the off-center. Well, so was I, starting with the second book in the series, Menopause Man-Unplugged, after giving the first, LeRoi, to a friend.

"I loved it," he said, "A male Eat Prey Love."

I was intrigued. I learned from reviewing another Fisher King Book, Eros and the Shattering Gaze: Transcending (Male) Narcissism by Ken Kimmel, that a woman can learn a great deal about herself by reading books about men. I was still nervous. I knew Mathews' book wasn't academic like Kimmel's. Mel had to be capable of creating a fictional world I was willing to dive into, get lost in, and enjoy, or would I be lost in a quagmire of words and images I couldn't relate to?

Turns out, my worries were a totally ridiculous spinning out of my own "dark side." I fell right into this book - a true Page Turner. While it is technically fiction, it reads like the journal of a very real man, with all his quirks, complexities, and goofball humor, falling for the wrong women, drawn to the wrong situations while desperately searching for the light. I don't know if this was Mathews' intention, but it reads like a prose version of the goofy guys in movies like Hangover - with a very real quest at its core. He throws in poetic references that belie his superficial kick-back persona, such as a framed copy of 'The Definitive Journey' by Juan Ramon Jimenez, Spain's great poet and author of one of my favorites, Platero and I.