When a bright-eyed, 17 year-old Michael Imperioli first moved to New York City in the early ’80s, just as he was beginning to find his footing in East Village’s buzzing arts scene, he strolled into St. Mark’s Books and picked up a book that would change his life forever: “The Diamond Sutra.”

The historic Buddhist text, written in India sometime in the 2nd century CE and believed to be the world’s earliest printed books, isn’t exactly the literary fare you’d expect to capture the fascination of a teenager in ’80s downtown New York — a subset more likely to be reading the likes of Bret Easton Ellis, J.D Salinger and William S. Burroughs. But when Imperioli’s favorite writer Jack Kerouac, another rising literary star at the time, announced his dedication to the Sutra manuscript, and even ple

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