By 1982, Richard Baker had become the Zen master with the BMW. Not to mention the high-end art collection and the array of beautiful young women with whom he committed marital infidelities even as his students worked for poverty-level wages. By 1983 — after a weekend of very public displays of affection with the wife of garden-catalogue magnate Paul Hawken, of Smith & Hawken fame — Baker had been kicked out of the San Francisco Zen Center, a development that disrupted the crucial lineage of " dharma Transmission " and endangered the future of Buddhism in the West.

It could be a tawdry story, with its almost 400 pages in which Baker’s former disciples rattle off the ways in which he seduced them with his vision and then betrayed them. But Michael Downing — a Cambridge-based novelist who became interested in the group after a 1997 visit to their Marin County farm — wanted to present a more complex picture, and so he interviewed 80 persons who had been involved with the Zen Center since its 1962 inception. The result is a more " Zen " book that’s told in a pastiche of anecdotes while scrupulously avoiding chronological order. It’s also a confusing, repetitive tome that sucks the life out of the juicy material, and in the end it fails to explain why the San Francisco Zen Center was any different from the many groups in the 1970s and 1980s — from the Hare Krishnas to Jim Bakker’s PTL — who were done in by fallen leaders.

The Zen Center’s story begins in 1959, when Zen master Shunryu Suzuki emigrated from Japan with the mission of spreading Buddhism to the Occident. San Francisco denizens — from beatniks to hippies — responded enthusiastically. When Suzuki died, in 1971, the mantle passed to the charismatic Richard Baker, who wooed such prominent supporters as California governor Jerry Brown, Laurance Rockefeller, and Ned Johnson of Fidelity Investments.

Eventually, however, Baker’s lavish lifestyle and womanizing caught up with him, and he was forced out, an event that shook many members’ faith in Buddhism. Some have reached a détente with him; others, it seems, will never forgive him. As for the Zen Center itself, though it lacks the glittery trappings of yesteryear, it finally seems to have achieved an even keel.

As the world’s first Buddhist monastery outside Asia, the Zen Center occupies a crucial place in the history of American Buddhism, but you’d barely know that from this insular portrayal. Aside from one former member who’s now an anthropology professor, there are no scholarly voices to comment on the meltdown — or on Buddhism’s current trendiness in mainstream culture, from The Tao of Pooh to the ubiquitous miniature Zen primers for sale at bookstore cash registers. Downing also fails to put the time period into context. He insists on comparing the Zen Center practitioners to the American Shaker movement, about which he’s previously written, when a far more apt analogy would be the Hare Krishnas, who also had a compelling Eastern guru come West, and who self-destructed in a much grander fashion, done in by the sex-drugs-and-armament-loving Americans who inherited his teachings. Downing throws in the obligatory paragraph about Jim Jones, but more background was needed about how the Zen Center was a part of the era’s spiritual quest, and how it differed from its rivals.

Downing does capture Baker’s outsized ego and bundle of self-deceptions — simply by letting him speak for himself. At times the literary style can be questioned — a quotation that goes on for more than a page? — but by the end, you have some idea of the fallen master’s many contradictions. And Suzuki is lovingly recalled by his former disciples. Yet other players — even those who recur repeatedly — remain cardboard figures. As if in acknowledgment of this failure, Downing keeps invoking his identifying tags: he describes one character as Baker’s " young Dutch student " on page 335, even though the same Dutchman first appeared on page 10. As for his fragmented style, it would probably work better in a novel, where it could unravel the world into moments of truth and revelation. In a non-fiction work, his über-Zen prose ( " The spirit of the place is not not friendly " ) interferes with the transmission of basic facts. But the effort, at least, is worth a round of applause — with one hand clapping.