You might think there isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said about the Buddha, his life and teachings, but this book proves otherwise, offering an insightful cultural history of the impact of the Buddha on culture and religions, Buddhist and beyond.
Philip Almond is that rare sort of scholar — emeritus professor at the University of Queensland — who can synthesize ideas and communicate them in language the rest of us can easily grasp. This is a book written for a broad section of readers interested in religious figures and religious ideas and where they come from.
Almond has written similar books on other “big” and difficult to grasp topics, including about Mary Magdalene, the Devil, and the Antichrist. This book includes illustrations, and they are the old-fashioned kind that are more expensive for a publisher to put in: twenty-four pages of color plates in a special insert of glossy pages in the middle.
The first two chapters, or ninety pages, tell the story of the life of the Buddha as best we know it, focusing on how the life was understood in the original Eastern context. This included the quest for enlightenment, efforts of renunciation, as well as some miracle-working and enchantment. The scene at the Bodhi tree is beautifully told over several pages.
The last chapter, “A Buddha for the West,” is also interesting, with explanations of how the magical Buddha of early Eastern lore and tradition was lost in the West, when the Buddha was transformed into a different figure: atheistic, for example; or spoken of in only ethical teaching terms. It was usually theologians and historians of religion with Christian sympathies who communicated the Buddha in this way. This last chapter also has interesting stories to tell about how Buddhism was made esoteric in the West, and the historical Buddha was transformed, and perhaps co-opted, for instance, by “the Romantic Orientalism of the Theosophists.”
Almond does not claim to identify with any certainty the real Buddha of history. But his insightful book makes for fascinating reading if you are curious to learn about the impact of the history of the Buddha on the world we have inherited.
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