[The Snow Leopard is a kind of book] with which we are becoming familiar lately; it is part travelogue, part autobiography, part historical discourse, and predominantly lay sermon, in the shape of a quest narrative…. [The] bias of the lay sermon is toward Zen Buddhism; and to the eye of a layman, the exposition of Buddhism seems straightforward, nicely written, but not very new. One certainly need not have slogged through the snows of Nepal to discover it. There is of course no reason to anticipate novelty in the explanation of an essentially quietist philosophy which is, by now, at least a thousand years old; but the curious reader might understandably ask whether, if he'd been in full possession of his own philosophical premises, Mr. Matthiessen would have embarked in the first place on such a strenuous and dangerous expedition….

The portion of [The Snow Leopard] describing the expedition itself, it should be said at once, is brilliantly and vividly written. The author has dealt frequently and knowingly with natural scenery and wild life; he can sketch a landscape in a few vivid, unsentimental words, capture the sensations of entering a wild, windy Nepalese mountain village, and convey richly the strange, whinnying behavior of a herd of wild sheep. His prose is crisp, yet strongly appealing to the senses; it combines instinct with the feeling of adventure…. The Zen reflections and discourses on the history of the philosophy are more watery; they often seem to resolve themselves into Sanskrit abstractions like samadhi, sunvata, kensho, satori, and prajna—terms for which evidently no adequate English equivalents exist, though what precisely their special meaning and intensity amount to, the reader must try to guess. The combination of these elements leaves all the more mysterious the explanation of why Matthiessen was present on this expedition at all. People asked him this question, it seems: he always had trouble telling them…. He sought, evidently, some sort of illumination or purification, and seems to have got it momentarily, though it is hard to express. (p. 8)

Because he was seeking, and apparently found, some satisfying spiritual illumination which can best be expressed as ecstatic delight in the rightness of the Now—even, or perhaps especially, when that rightness doesn't correspond with what one thought were one's wishes—Matthiessen takes the snow leopard, which he never saw, as the title of his book and the emblem of his experience…. One can't really describe Matthiessen's moral state after his journey without oversimplifying it, because, as a skilled craftsman, he doesn't try to represent himself as permanently enlightened beyond the limits of everyday humanity. The final phase of his journey included some perfectly understandable surliness and even more understandable nostalgia for the departure of a trusted sherpa companion. But the more an authentically ordinary life asserts its ordinary values (concern over distant kids, desire to be home for Christmas), the more one is puzzled by the status of that Zen philosophy which ought to render one oblivious—or at least eager to achieve oblivion—of such entangling involvements. (p. 9)