Essential Buddhism
A Complete Guide to Beliefs and Practices
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Four hundred million people call themselves Buddhists today. Yet most Westerners know little about this powerful, Eastern-spawned faith. How did it begin? What do its adherents believe? Why are so many Westerners drawn to it?
Essential Buddhism responds to these questions and many more, offering an accessible, global perspective on the religion's past, present, and future. It identifies how the principal concepts and practices originated and evolved through diverse cultural adaptations into three basic formats:
* Theraveda (including Vipassana, brought from Vietnam in the 1960s and including such practitioners as Jack Kornfield and Jon Kapat-Zinn)
* Mahayana (including Zen Buddhism, originally brought to America by Japanese teachers after World War II and popularized by Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton)
* Vajrayana (including Tibetan Buddhism, from the teachers who fled the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s as well as the Dalai Lama, and embraced by Allen Ginsberg, Richard Gere, and countless others)
Essential Buddhism is the single best resource for the novice and the expert alike, exploring the depths of Buddhism's popularity and illuminating its tenets and sensible approach to living. Written in the lucid prose of a longtime professional storyteller, and full of Buddhist tales, scriptural quotes, ancient stories, and contemporary insights, Essential Buddhism is the first complete guide to the faith and the phenomenon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maguire, a monk of the Mountains and Rivers Order in New York, begins this primer with a narrative of the Buddha's life, followed by a commentary that compares Buddhism to other world religions and explains a few key terms. From there he elucidates the three branches (or "vehicles") of Buddhism, finally getting to key Buddhist beliefs in chapter three and to practices in chapter four. While the beginning and ending chapters might interest those who are curious about the cultural implications of Buddhism, those seeking the "complete guide to beliefs and practices," as promised, will be disappointed. The book is smoothly written, but poorly organized. Maguire doesn't fully explain key concepts, like the Four Noble Truths, the first time they're introduced, but devotes full pages to them later. The book is most engaging when it relates anecdotes that illustrate Buddhist teachings and when, at the end of some chapters, it answers questions non-Buddhists often ask, such as, "Isn't the doctrine of karma fatalistic?" One learns, for example, that "technically, there's no such thing as 'good karma'" and that such an attribution violates the non-dualistic nature of Buddhism. This teaching is then illustrated by a Zen poem from the seventh century and by excerpts from other modern Buddhist authors. Readers can gain a definite sense of what Buddhism is about from this book, but they will have to be patient with its disjointed structure.
