S Author:John Updike Author's Note: — Some details of this novel were suggested by reports on Rajneeshpuram in newspapers, Oregon Magazine, and Cities on a Hill, by Francis Fitzgerald; but all characters and milieux are fictional and not meant to resemble any actual persons or places. As to the religious context, much is owed to Mircea Eliade's Yoga and A History of ... more »Religious Ideas, Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, and Ajit Mookerjee's Kundalini; the method of transliterating Sanskrit words in these works, however, has for this book's purposes been replaced by a relatively imprecise style requiring no diacritical marks. A glossary of such words used in the text has been placed at the back.
The quotations from The Dhammapada are from the Penguin Classics edition, translated from the Pali by Juan Mascaro...« less