Adventures With The Buddha: A Personal Buddhism Reader

by Jeffery Paine

Book Overview

Many books on Buddhism will edify you, but will they entertain you? Here, finally, is a book that yields an understanding of Buddhism; not by its metaphysics or rituals but through real characters and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393059065
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Length: 410 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Entertaining as well as edifying: tales of Westerners who return

"A Buddhist narrative meant to be enjoyed principally for enjoyment," compiling lengthy excerpts from nine Westerners, this reads engagingly often enough. Five adventurers from earlier, pre-countercultural days when Asia still beckoned as exotic and when Buddhism had not spread westwards en masse combine with four representatives from the modern era, when the West found itself coming to a Westernizing Asia, and back to a changing America that welcomed Tibetan lamas and Zen masters. Paine, as with his "Re-Enchantment" (see my review) about the spread of Tibetan gurus abroad, notes how rapidly the shift occurred. He credits Max Weber with the scheme of a magical age followed by charismatic leaders and then bureaucratic rules that both lay and clerical members of a religion subscribe to. Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) spanned the transition from a remote expedition to Tibet to the hippie-era, jet-fueled connections with an Asia far closer and less distinctive. She popularized the sorcerer and yogic adepts of Orientalized lore; Lama Anagarika Govinda (b. Ernst Hoffman in Germany) symbolizes the Westerner who took, as did David-Neel, the guise of the native in a quest to become another. John Blofeld from England and Peter Goullart from Russia show the erudite, if impoverished, adventurer willing to let go of their culture to immerse themselves among the lamas. Janwillem van de Wetering pivots; postwar he left Holland for Japan before it had quite changed, and his stint in a Zen monastery shows his pioneering curiosity that would begin in the 1950s to attract others like him on to what became a well-worn path. Jan Willis left her segregated Alabama behind for academia via the Kathmandu route during the end of the Sixties heyday; she as with Tsultrim Allione and then Sharon Salzberg describe their quests less focused on the novelty or sheer otherness of the Asia of earlier travelers. For, that has receded, and their narratives merge the political with the personal, the psychological with the feminist, ethnic, and progressive identities of their tumultuous times. Michael Roach continues this, and shows again how transformed Americans may become when immersing themselves into Tibetan practice-- and then how that can be brought back into American everyday life. I will cite a sample from each author to give a sense of their range. David-Neel appears more anodyne and detached despite her reputation as a fearless investigator. I was less enchanted by her style, which may have suffered in translation or distance from our own attitudes. On "Tumo/tuomo," or "art of warming oneself without fire," she dryly observes: "To spend the winter in a cave amidst the snows, at an altitude that varies between 11,000 and 18,000 feet, clad in a thin garment or even naked, and escape freezing, is a somewhat difficult achievement." (63) Govinda tells us of his acceptance as a "chela" to a guru, and his message being: "every being carries within itself the spark of Buddha