Marco Pallis (1895-1990) was widely respected as a teacher and writer of religious and metaphysical works, and was also a musician, composer, mountaineer, traveler, and translator. He wrote Peaks and Lamas (1939), an account of his experiences in Tibet before the invasion of the Chinese Communists, and The Way and The Mountain (1960), a collection of articles on Tibetan Buddhist themes informed by a universalist perspective. In a foreword to this paperback, Wayne Teasdale calls Pallis "a brilliant comparative religionist, who moves back and forth with ease from one tradition to another, seeing the commonalities, parallels, and differences, he is also subtle, wise and committed to an experiential depth of appreciation which is the hallmark of a devoted practitioner."
This volume consists of articles Pallis wrote for the British journal Studies in Comparative Religion. Among the most interesting are "Living One's Karma," "Is There a Problem of Evil?" "Is There Room for 'Grace' in Buddhism?" and "Nembutsu as Remembrance." Pallis is a particularly astute guide to the links between Buddhism and other traditions.
