Adventures with the Buddha : a personal Buddhism reader / Jeffery Paine.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Paine, Jeffery, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Buddhists--Biography.

Buddhists.

Spiritual life--Buddhism.

Spiritual life.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

410 pages ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton & Co., [2005]

Summary:

Jeffery Paine has assembled the breathtaking adventures of nine Westerners who traveled in China, Tibet, and Japan, in Nepal, India, and also America, chanced across Buddhism, and made it an integral part of their lives.

Here clairvoyance, hermit-wizards, exorcisms, gilded pageantry, and superhuman kindness are not fairy tales but quite real. Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) learned Tibetan, disguised herself as a beggar woman, and, though already old, hiked six months through the snow to forbidden Lhasa, to discover that Buddhism was the opposite of what the scholarly books said. Whenever Lama Govinda (1898-1985) wanted to ask his Himalayan guru a question, the guru would answer it before Govinda could even open his mouth. Such traveler-writers made Buddhism seem less something you objectively studied than something you subjectively lived, and thus, with them, Western Buddhism ceased to be an oxymoron, an impossibility.

In the more recent adventures, some living practitioners take millennia-old Buddhist precepts and fast-forward them into the modes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century lives. They demonstrate how to fabricate a spiritual life out of the social gadgetry of late modernity and how to integrate Buddhism into make-do existences now. Michael Roach (b. 1952) uses Buddhist principles to start a fledgling business with almost no capital and turn it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. On a tantric retreat, Jan Willis (b. 1948) reveals what it's like to be an ordinary person standing on the edge of enlightenment today. These contemporary pilgrim adventurers represent Buddhism's New Frontier in the West, as in daily life, despite obstacles, without communal support, they attempt to do what only monks and sages achieved in the monasteries of the old Orient.

From enchanting, now-lost kingdoms in Asia to the American workplace, Adventures with the Buddha is a tour across nations, generations, and, ultimately, spiritual landscapes.

Contents:

Tibet as it once was / Alexandra David-Neel

A Himalayan guru of the old style / Lama Anagarika Govinda

The lost world of Chinese Buddhism / John Blofeld

Taoism and/or Buddhism? / Peter Goullart

Reality in a Zen monastery / Janwillem van de Wetering

An African-American woman's journey into Buddhism / Jan Willis

In search of women's wisdom / Tsultrim Allione

Suffering and its partial cure / Sharon Salzberg

The Diamond sutra, the diamond business / Michael Roach.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

0393059065

OCLC:

55797905