Pictures of Scotland.org Canadian Amazon Store

I am personally a Christian but was a seeker for a long time first before the historicity and logic of the Bible made me a convert. I think it is a good thing for people to look at good ACCURATE descriptions of other religions if they are looking to make up their minds about faith. I studied Buddhism in Asia with a teacher who later became a Buddhist nun before I decided that it wasn't for me. From what my teacher taught, and from the intensive reading that I have done on this subject (I teach Buddhism now as history) this book is just not accurate.


This is only about who Buddha was   February 9, 2004
 1 out of 3 found this review helpful

I read this book during my 3 month stay in Bangkok, and found it somewhat useful understanding the culture. The book does great job in connecting the dots. It includes multiple historical facts, interpretations, and comparisons to other religions.

The book became difficult to read after 40 pages. She uses quite a few terminologies (long and hard to remember). It became frustrating to remember their meanings and follow the text.

After Buddha dies, the book ends. I was also hoping to come to the final section and learn more about how Buddhism became a religion, and how Buddha's influence changed overtime and in what ways. This book needs another chapter at the end.


Too compact for such a complicated subject   January 5, 2004
 0 out of 2 found this review helpful

This book was very densely packed, as others of Armstrong's books I've read have been. But it also suffered (as others of her books do) from a certain lack of focus, a lack of central themes pulling the disparate material together, a lack of a lodestar to bring the reader's attention back to the main issues of the book.

I finished the book almost as an afterthought, having learned a good deal on the surface about the Buddha and the society he flourished in, but not having learned all that much beyond that about the religious life he established and extolled.

To be fair, the limitation of the series is that it forces the authors to write about complex and multifaceted lives in a relatively short space -- the books are not only short (this one was under 190 pages long), but smaller in size than the average book.

Having said that, I found myself longing for some kind of thematic cohesion that would keep me from getting lost every time I saw a protagonist's name, or a Pali religious term, or a place name repeated.


Limited   November 7, 2003
 0 out of 2 found this review helpful

Karen Armstrong who obviously has a deep respect for Buddhism and the man who started it all provides a less than reliable analysis of the life, times and teachings of Siddhatta Gotama, Buddha. This may not be her fault as no contemporary written source exists about Gotama's teachings or anything else about him. Gotama's teachings were passed down through oral tradition for centuries until a written language was developed. What IS her fault, however, is that this fact is almost completely ignored by Armstrong who makes only the slightest mention of it about a third of the way into the book. This fact, however, is quite consequential and downplaying it as she has done calls into question Armstrong's integrity as a researcher, scholar and writer of religious histories. She provides no analysis of evidence, not even a disclaimer about the quality or reliability of the information that exists. Instead, Armstrong attempts to bolster her findings (which are largely based on the Pali Cannon written in the 1 century BC) by stating that the monks responsible for verbally passing down Buddha's teachings took great care to ensure accuracy. That's it. End of discussion. I was really quite surprised and disappointed that she did not delve into the issue much more. It is the unfortunate problem with Armstrong's book and, quite frankly, with Buddhism - the vast timeframe for when events took place and when they were written down.

As I read this book I kept imaging how the Jesus Seminar and other biblical scholars would have treated similar evidence about Jesus. The answer: They would have dismissed it outright and left it at that. But then the standard for Jesus has always been quite high.