Chinese Buddhist Master Sheng Yen has hardly led a charmed life. As he recounts in his new memoir Footprints in the Snow, he grew up poor in rural China, was conscripted to fight communists in the nationalist army and lived homeless on the streets of the Bronx, N.Y.
Nonetheless, Sheng Yen, a master of Chan Buddhism (more commonly known in the West by its Japanese name "Zen") has become one of the most influential contemporary Buddhist masters, with such luminaries as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh singing his praises.

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