Bruce Berlin
Memoir
In 1972, Bruce Berlin — a young poverty lawyer from Camden, New Jersey — set off on a journey with no clear destination. What began as a restless escape became one of the most formative adventures of his life. Traveling overland through Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan at a time when those borders were still open to wanderers, Berlin found himself riding across the Afghan desert in the back of a truck with armed men and their rugs, navigating a world that would soon be transformed by war.
In India, something shifted. Visits to the sacred Buddhist sites of Bodh Gaya and Sarnath planted a seed. Then, in Kathmandu, a chance encounter with former law school classmates led Berlin to a month-long Tibetan Buddhist retreat at Kopan Monastery — an experience he would later describe as perhaps the most important month of his life. Guided by Lama Yeshe and Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, Berlin began a practice that would sustain him for the next fifty years.
From Camden to Kathmandu is a memoir about following the open road before you know where it’s going — and discovering that the destination finds you. Written with the documentary authenticity of real letters sent home, it is the story of a restless young man’s transformation into a meditator, activist, and lifelong seeker.
I am in a remote Afghan village on market day. Hundreds of rifle-bearing men on white horses dressed in white robes and turbans surround me. Our vehicle is the only one in this tiny, nameless place in the middle of nowhere. We stopped here for lunch on the second day of a three-day trek through the high desert from Herat to Mazar-i-Shariff in northern Afghanistan. For most of the journey, we haven't even been riding on a road, just following tracks in the desert.
– Excerpted from From Camden to Kathmandu by Bruce Berlin, Our Time Books, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
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