Typically these sympathizers get their Buddhism, as beat author Jack Kerouac did, from books. Buddhist bestsellers used to come along once a decade: Kerouac's "Dharma Bums" in the '50s, Philip Kapleau's "Three Pillars of Zen" in the '60s and Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" in the '70s. Today they materialize monthly, along with more evanescent titles like "Zen and the Art of Screenwriting" (really). Demand for Buddhist books has turned many teachers into stand-alone brands with remarkable marketing muscle. The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh are the Coke and Pepsi of this Buddhist generation, but homegrown brands such as Jack Kornfield and Lama Surya Das can also move 100,000 tomes without getting off their zafus.

James William Coleman is not a major brand, and his "The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition" is not destined for the bestseller list. It does shed light, however, on today's oddly bookish Buddhist vogue. Coleman is a sociologist and a Buddhist, so it's not surprising that he supports his sympathy for American Buddhism with a survey. His book focuses on a small minority of American-born converts and sympathizers rather than the immigrants and their children who make up three-quarters of American Buddhists.

These "new Buddhists," as he calls them, patronize four types of Buddhist groups: Zen centers, Tibetan Buddhist centers, vipassana ("insight meditation") centers and unaffiliated, nonsectarian centers. Most are baby boomers, almost all are white and all practice meditation, which sets them apart from the members of Sokka Gakkai International-USA (a group that prefers chanting to meditation), the largest Buddhist organization in the United States and the only Buddhist group that attracts significant numbers of blacks and Hispanics.

Coleman identifies some key tendencies among boomer Buddhists, including efforts to make Buddhism more egalitarian, more feminist and more socially conscious. The most audacious of these trends is a drift toward a secularized Buddhism that author Stephen Batchelor calls "Buddhism Without Beliefs" and Coleman dubs "bare-bones Buddhism."

This supposedly revolutionary concept is actually rather old, even hackneyed. The idea is this: Strip Buddhism of what Coleman describes as its "traditional religious trappings -- robed priests, elaborate rituals, sacred images of supermundane figures, devotional practices." What remains is a demythologized practice that is both new and (supposedly) improved: no chanting, no incense, no monks and certainly no bowing. This stealth approach leaves Buddhists with little to do except meditate and read books like "The New Buddhism."

Coleman's book concludes that the new Buddhism is "a profoundly subversive force" in contemporary American society. But what exactly is this kind of Buddhism subverting? Is "Zen and the Art of Poker" subverting American obsessions with money? Is "Zen Sex" subverting American obsessions with sexuality?

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"