American vitality and openness to “the other” comes in for praise in this review of Nancy Wilson Ross’s illustrated book on eastern traditions whose approach the reviewer, Kathleen Raine, finds refreshing. Condemning her own country’s erstwhile narrowness and impenetrability to the spirituality of India, as well as those purists who scorn American Zen for missing its doctrinal truth, she suggests that Zen’s natural, non-mythological and historical quality may be a door through which America, as a microcosm of the modern world, can approach a more subtle and potentially spiritual view of nature.