The Monks' Secret

About the Book

"Dodo" Dillon, retired diplomat and lover of travel to far-away places, undertakes for a lawyer friend to trace a missing American Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka. He talks to the monk’s father before  leaving Cherry Hill College and finds him a mean old man interested only in collecting on an insurance policy.

In Sri Lanka Dodo follows the trail of the monk, originally known as Roland R. Stafford, now called Pasadena Rahula, through the American Embassy, a cheap boarding house, the Buddhist seminary where he studied and was ordained, and his residence on the beach as a hermit monk. Dodo is almost killed in a terrorist bomb explosion and participates in a bloody clash with insurgents. He finds a book that Pasadena wrote before he disappeared that reveals much about the young man who turned his back on the West.

    More information comes from Diana Haliday, an English woman teacher in the hill town of Kandy who once knew and loved the monk and from a tea planter deep in the central hills. Dodo locates a monastery in which Pasadena has stayed and debates philosophy with the monks. They are strangely reluctant to talk about their missing brother. Finally, they lead him to a remote shrine cave where Pasadena's skeleton lies in a monks’ robe.

     He has starved himself to death seeking nibbana, the Buddhist equivalent of salvation. Remembering the meanness of Pasadena's father, Dodo decides he will keep the monks' secret. He seeks no proof of death even though it will lose him a promised fee of thousands of dollars. Back in the US Dodo discovers that his clever lawyer friend Zeke has figured out a way to collect their fee even though both Pasadena and his father are dead.

Dodo is, as usual, doddering and indomitable, sardonic and devoted, as he works his way through a foreign environment he knows and loves. Although Pasadena Rahulla himself never appears alive in the narrative, the complexities of his character and his search for redemption come through strongly. The calm American woman consular officer, the sad English school teacher, the good-hearted hedonist tea planter, and the tolerant head monk of the monastery are all memorable characters.  

Dodo will have special appeal to senior citizens but all readers who respond to strong action and the quirks of human nature will find them played out dramatically against a background of Buddhism and Sri Lanka in The Monks’ Secret.

About the Author

James W. Spain, born in Chicago in 1926 not far from the Englewood Rail Yards, grew up during the Great Depression, and was educated at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. He spent most of his life as a career diplomat, serving as U.S. Ambassador in Tanzania, the United Nations, Turkey, and Sri Lanka. He is the author of three books on the Pathans of Pakistan; American Diplomacy in Turkey; a diplomatic memoir, In Those Days ; a book of short stories, Innocents of the Latter Day; and several “Dodo Dillon” tales about the adventures of a retired American diplomat in exotic corners of the world.