Spiritual desires & then some.

The Buddha from Brooklyn
Martha Sherrill
Random House, $25.95, 392 pp.

What is the difference between a cult and a religion? Martha Sherrill gets to this question at the very end of her account of the career of Brooklyn's Alyce Louise Zeoli, also known as Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, founder and guru of a community of men and women who believed that the surest path to their salvation was to give their lives over to her. Sherrill, a reporter for the Washington Post, finally decides that Jetsunma's Tibetan Buddhist center, called Kunzang Palyul Choling (Fully Awakened Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light, or KPC), in Poolesville, Maryland, was a cult. Among this book's achievements are the patient way in which the author comes to her conclusions, the frank way in which she discusses her doubts and misgivings, and the respect and sympathy shown for the spiritual concerns and life choices of Jetsunma's followers.

The Buddha from Brooklyn represents a change in the way journalists deal with disturbing and unusual religious phenomena. However, by surrendering in the end to the pervasive cultural pressure to secure the boundary between "cult" and "religion," Sherrill deprives herself and her readers of the opportunity to think about what Jetsunma's world might teach us more broadly about American religions, and about ourselves.

Born in 1949, Zeoli was raised in Canarsie by her mostly absent mother, a psychotic grandmother, and a drunken, abusive stepfather. In her late teens, Zeoli landed in North Carolina, where she and a new boyfriend, Michael Burroughs, founded the Center for Discovery and New Life. Three patterns emerge in Zeoli's life at this time: A respected religious figure recognizes her as a special being; she begins experimenting with different ways of praying, in search of the most "efficient and powerful" one; and she gains and loses tremendous weight as she moves from depression, boredom, and loneliness to being the object of others' erotic and spiritual desires. It is also here that Zeoli (now Catharine) develops her theology: We have all lived many lifetimes on other planets and lost continents; all souls are connected; God is energy which we share; the most effective response to social problems is prayer. Zeoli is clearly an attractive and compelling woman, with the interpersonal sensitivity of a really talented fortuneteller (which she was): "Our connection," she says of meeting one of her lovers and followers, "was like in the atmosphere," and this seems true of all her relationships.

Shortly after she inscribed the Buddhist prayer "om ah hum" on the vanity plates of her Renault Alliance, an itinerant Tibetan monk appeared at the Center's new location in Kensington, Maryland, collecting alms. Zeoli's life was about to change in a big way. The monk asked her to host His Holiness Penor Rimpoche, a prominent figure among exiled Tibetan Buddhists. Zeoli broke down at her first glimpse of him. "I felt," she remembers, "like I was meeting my mind" (she had no idea who he was). Penor Rimpoche announced to those at the Center, "You are all Buddhists and you are already practicing Buddhism." The fabric of Zeoli's mind, he said, was the Dharma (Buddhist truth). On a visit to India in 1987--where she channeled the prophet Jeremiah, utterly bewildering her hosts--Alyce/Catharine was declared by Penor Rimpoche to be the reincarnation of Ahkon Lhamo, a saint and religious innovator. Hoping for a more exalted past life, of the sort she had enjoyed with Jesus--she stood with him on Calvary--a displeased Alyce/Catharine added that she was the reincarnation of the Buddha and took the name Jetsunma (a reworking of the title of the Dalai Lama's sister, Jetsun).

Back in Maryland, Jetsunma's followers, who included a software engineer, several business people, a solar energy expert, an NBC sound technician, and a Bally fitness trainer, all comfortable enough to fund the KPC out of their pockets and trust funds, began prostrating themselves before her daily. They paid Jetsunma a salary that threatened to bankrupt them, they financed her expensive whims, covered the costs of her failed moneymaking schemes, indulged her in luxury lingerie and vacations, approved her appetite for boy and girl toys (whom she ordered into monastic celibacy when she was done with them), urinated on an effigy of her hated ex-husband, and, when Jetsunma demanded, surrendered their children to her. Sherrill hangs tough through all of this, never turning it into a freak show. Then she panics. Religion is democratic, she asserts, although on what grounds is not clear; maybe someday the KPC will be democratic; right now, it's a cult, she concludes.

Maybe Sherrill should have turned it into a freak show. The appearance of the word "cult" in the text obliterates further thought, making it impossible to see Jetsunma and the KPC in relation to anything else, except other cults (which Sherrill does). "Cult" is best understood not as a descriptor, but as a command, like a law officer's "Halt!" Its purpose is to stop and contain. A more useful heuristic would be to identify precisely the most disturbing practices, beliefs, or incidents in the world of a "cult" (paying careful attention to the personal sources of the fears they evoke) and use them as the occasion for shaping questions of broader application. Jetsunma's proselytizing deployment of her sexuality ("cult!") raises the issue of the interplay of the erotic and the spiritual in religious cultures generally (including the "mainstream" ones). The willingness of KPC members to give Jetsunma their offspring challenges us to think about what use people make of children in any religious setting. Not surprisingly, neither topic has gotten much attention in the study of American religions, except in relation to "cults." If only Sherrill had resisted the impulse to reassure us that they are not we, she could have told us something about the contemporary American religious landscape; as it is, she tells us a very good story about an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn who becomes an incarnated Buddha.

Robert A. Orsi, author of The Madonna of 115th Street, teaches in the religious studies department at Indiana University.