Bibliofreakblog

Buddha by Karen Armstrong

When it comes to religion, Karen Armstrong is an expert.  She’s up there with Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Elaine Pagels, and no less prolific.  But while she is an expert, she continues to be criticized for her lack of doctorate.  Nonetheless, I read her many times in my Comparative Religion classes in school, and have since seen her speak.  She may not have a Ph.D., but religion is her life.  She’s an ex-nun, who came back to a religious vocation of sorts, as a writer on religion.  She’s a daughter of Comparative Religion itself, a branch of study that emphasizes theory and cross-cultural analysis.  Armstrong has particularly written about the “Golden Rule”, which she believes is found in all religions.  Thus it is with great pleasure that I review Buddha.

And let me say, to the critics who condemn Armstrong’s lack of formal academic training, that that doesn’t mean that her books aren’t researched, well thought-out, informed, cohesive, etc.  She’s no dummy.

Besides, the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh (among others) do not have University degrees, but we take their scholarly work seriously.  

Now, I know what you might be thinking, because it’s true that I am prone to put a nonfiction book back when I look to the back cover and don’t find the usual credentials.  So, I’m saying, just don’t worry about that with Armstrong.  She knows what she’s talking about.

Now, about the book.

The story of Buddha’s enlightenment is well known in literature.  How many times have his parables been referenced or the story of his moment of clarity under the bodhi tree been told?  Hesse, Kerouac, and Chopra have all written fictional accounts of his life, which stay with the basic story.  But this gives you all of the details that, while their prose may be filled with sensory and emotional details, fiction writers do not offer.

Because despite all you know, really, who was this Gautama (Armstrong spells it Gotama, but that just looks weird to me) guy who spawned a world religion?

Armstrong brings up points often overlooked, glossed-over, or emphasized differently by perpetuators of popular Buddhism–both in the East and West.  For instance, she writes:

“All beings were…caught up in an endless cycle of samsara (’keeping going’), which propelled them from one life to another…it was a serious attempt to address the problem of suffering…The law of kamma was a wholly impersonal mechanism that applied fairly and without discrimination to everybody.  But the prospect of living one life afer another filled Gotama, like most other people in northern India, with horror…But what preoccupied Gotama and his contemporaries was not so much the possibility of rebirth as the horror of redeath.  It was bad enough to have to endure the process of becoming senile or chronically sick and undergoing a frightening, painful death once, but to be forced to go through all this again and a gain seemed intolerable and utterly pointless.”

See what I mean?

Armstrong does a great job of setting the scene in which the Buddha found himself, and gives a background on the culture of the Aryan invaders who had eventually established the Hindu religion.  The only thing I found lacking was the end.  There is no measure to the future of Buddhism after his death as their is to his world before him in the beginning.

On to more books, then, I guess.  At least next time you encounter Buddhism, you’ll be surer to have an understanding of its founder.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (NF) by Karen Armstrong
Living Buddha, Living Christ (NF) by Thich Nhat Hanh
Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (NF) by Thich Nhat Hanh
Master Tang Hoi: First Zen Teacher in Vietnam and China (NF) by Thich Nhat Hanh
Old Path, White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (NF) by Thich Nhat Hanh
Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment (F) by Deepak Chopra
Siddhartha (F) by Hermann Hesse
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (NF) by D.T. Suzuki
Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (F) by Jack Kerouac
Jesus and the Buddha: Parallel Sayings (NF) by Marcus Borg
The Life of Buddha: According to the Pali Canon (NF) by Bhikku Nanamoli
Masks of God Vol. 2: Oriental Myths (NF) by Joseph Campbell
Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (NF) by Joseph Campbell
History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2: From Guatama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity (NF) by Mircea Eliade

Other works by Karen Armstrong*:

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (NF)
The Bible: A Biography (NF)
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (NF)
Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (NF)
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (CNF)
A History of God: the 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (NF)
The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (NF)
Islam: A Short History (NF)
A Short History of Myth (NF)
In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (NF)
Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery (revised) (CNF)
Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (NF) 
Visions of God: Four Medieval  Mystics and Their Writings (NF)
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (NF)
The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity’s Creation of Sex War in the West (NF)
The Case for God (NF)
The First Christian: St. Paul’s Impact on Christianity (NF)
 

*NOTE: This list is not exhaustive.  For the most part it only includes works still in print, though you can still find many of her other works used.

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