Theos-Talk Archives (May 2001 Message tt00012)

I was so impressed by Karen's talk broadcast on cspan2 last night, I 
searched the web and found a good review. It is at www.salon.com.
The book published couple of months ago has made it to NY Times Best Seller 
list and the 2nd best seller in San Franciso Bay Area.
Hope some of you will like it.

___MKR____

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"Buddha" by Karen Armstrong

A former Catholic nun's short biography of the Buddha explains the elusive 
Eastern sage in terms that even drama-hungry Westerners can understand.
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By Laura Miller

April 18, 2001

Of all the biographers enlisted to write for the successful and acclaimed 
Penguin Lives series, none could have faced a harder job than Karen 
Armstrong. It's not just that Siddhartha Gautama -- known after his 
enlightenment as the Buddha -- lived at a time when literacy was uncommon 
in his native India and thus left behind, as Armstrong puts it, "very 
little information that can be considered historically sound." It's not 
just that the most authoritative of the orally preserved scripture that 
does describe a bit of his life, the Pali canon, wasn't written down until 
the first century B.C.E., hundreds of years after the Buddha's death. 
Armstrong's greatest challenge is the fact that everything the Buddha 
believed in and taught is utterly opposed to biography itself.
The very impulses and notions that make us read biographies -- curiosity 
about the individuals who shape historical events and a belief in the 
significance of their personal dreams, loves, flaws, disappointments, 
passions and intimate relationships -- all of this the Buddha considered 
not just irrelevant to human happiness but inimical to it. As some 
observers pointed out when the Taliban destroyed two monumental statues of 
the Buddha in Afghanistan last month, the spiritual leader would have 
considered both the effort to erect the sculptures and the fight to save 
them (as well as, mostly likely, the crusade to annihilate them) sadly 
misguided; he himself was not the point. A faithful biography of the Buddha 
would have to be a kind of anti-biography in which everything that we in 
the West consider "interesting" about the man eventually falls away like, 
to use his own metaphor, the discarded skin of a snake or the scabbard of a 
sword, leaving behind a being who is serenely "impersonal."
Nevertheless, Armstrong ("A History of God," "Jerusalem: One City, Three 
Faiths"), a former Roman Catholic nun and arguably the most lucid, 
wide-ranging and consistently interesting religion writer today, manages to 
pull it off. And she does it so successfully that "Buddha" is the first 
book in the Penguin Lives series to make the New York Times bestseller 
list. Buddhists will probably find this book sketchy and overly detached 
(Armstrong clearly isn't a believer), but they aren't its intended 
audience. Instead, Armstrong has set herself the task of explaining one of 
the East's most enigmatic spiritual figures to a Western audience 
accustomed to encountering the divine with an entirely different set of 
cognitive tools. She places Gautama in his historical context (the most 
exciting, earthshaking few hundred years in religious history) and deftly 
compares his teachings with those of more familiar Western sages: Jesus and 
the authors of the Gospels, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates and Mohammed. She 
unpacks some of the more baffling Buddhist concepts, elucidates aspects of 
the religion that Westerners often find off-putting and, where earthbound 
reason can't take us, attempts to suggest an outline of the ineffable.
It can't have been easy. Unlike, say, the New Testament, in which the story 
of Christ's life is the heart and soul of the scripture, Buddhist holy 
texts don't focus much on Gautama's life or offer a continuous narrative of 
it. Scattered fragments of his biography appear in various texts whose 
status is often disputed. And, among these, there are "almost no details 
about the forty-five years of the Buddha's teaching mission, after his 
enlightenment." What does matter about his life, the Buddha insisted, is 
that it was entirely human. The gods who populate some Buddhist tales -- 
holdovers from the Vedic cult that would evolve into Hinduism -- were 
fallible and mortal despite their powers. The Buddha himself did not 
believe in a Supreme Being. "He confined his researches to his own human 
nature and always insisted that his experiences -- even the supreme truth 
of Nibbana [or nirvana; Armstrong uses the Pali spellings of Buddhist 
terms] -- were entirely natural to humanity."

To a casual Western observer, Buddhist doctrine can seem maddeningly 
complex and vague, a kind of bureaucratic filing system composed of dozens 
of lists like the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the five "yama," 
the five "khandhas" and so on. Armstrong stresses that, as bewildering as 
all these quadruplicate and quintuplicate concepts may be, Buddhism is at 
heart a do-it-yourself religion, and one that was founded by a confirmed 
skeptic. "He always refused to take anything on trust," Armstrong writes of 
her subject, "and later, when he had his own sangha [order], he insistently 
warned his disciples not to take anything at all on hearsay." While it 
isn't easy to master the necessary yogic disciplines, the Buddha said, they 
are available to everyone, and anyone who pursues them devotedly can attain 
nirvana.

The Buddhism that Armstrong describes, then, is a kind of cosmic 
instruction book. The principles and procedures come first, with anecdotes 
from the Buddha's life used as occasional illustrations. Perhaps the second 
most familiar story about the Buddha's life concerns his "Going Forth." The 
son of a powerful aristocrat in northern India, Gautama left a life of 
ease, pleasure and family (he had a wife and son) to wander as a homeless 
mendicant begging his meals from laypeople and seeking a spiritual path 
that transcended samsara, the endless, painful cycle of earthly existence. 
The most famous Buddha story relates his enlightenment, years later, as he 
meditated under the "bodhi" tree. It's worth noting that the Christian 
scriptures culminate in what we call the Passion of Christ, events of 
searing emotional power, while Buddha, having after years of questing and 
study achieved nirvana, that state of inviolable peace, cried out, "It is 
liberated!"

Reading Armstrong's "Buddha" prompts such comparisons, and makes it easier 
to see why Buddhism can strike those steeped in Western culture as either 
opaque or, conversely, tremendously appealing. The New Testament has been 
cheesily nicknamed "the greatest story ever told," but even a non-Christian 
must admit that it is a terrific story, as is much of the Old Testament. 
Both books have drama, tenderness, pathos, tragedy and redemption as well 
as vividly drawn characters. As Armstrong wends her way to the end of the 
Buddha's biography, she grapples with the very lack of these enthralling 
elements in Buddhist texts. The Buddha, she writes, "owed his liberation 
precisely to the extinction of the unique traits and idiosyncrasies that 
Western people prize in their heroes." And so, "with our Western love of 
individuality, we can feel dissatisfied" with his tale. Once the Buddha 
achieved enlightenment, he became someone to whom nothing further of 
significance could happen. One of his titles, "Tathagata," means something 
like "gone."

Buddhist scriptures mostly, then, outline the steps one must take to follow 
him. Looking for a profane metaphor, I thought that while the Bible is like 
an episode of "ER," some of the eminently "pragmatic" Buddhist ideas that 
Armstrong describes remind me of an episode of "Martha Stewart Living," a 
show I used to watch in the mornings for its soothing effect. "ER," like 
the Bible, is full of the dramatic stuff great stories are made of: blood, 
fury and tears. "Martha" is serenely procedural as it takes us through the 
steps of sewing a pillow cover or roasting a rack of lamb -- even the 
demure little smile its host wears recalls certain statues of the Buddha. 
And yes, the hospital drama can be exciting, but the time comes when you're 
sick of blood, fury and tears and you just want dinner.
That's a bit like how Gautama felt at his "Going Forth," and it's no doubt 
what draws so many Westerners to follow the Easterners of generations 
before into the faith that the Buddha and his disciples characterized as a 
"cool refuge" from the heat and dust of samsara. For the Indians of the 
Buddha's time, reincarnation wasn't an opportunity to reap attention by 
going on low-budget TV shows about "the paranormal" and claiming to have 
been an Egyptian princess in an earlier life, or a chance to reunite with a 
lost true love. The Buddha and his contemporaries saw reincarnation as 
shackling them to an endless cycle of loss, pain and death: "The prospect 
of living one life after another filled Gotama, like most other people in 
northern India, with horror." As Armstrong explains, Buddha's teachings 
offer step-by-step instructions on how to get off this hellish hamster 
wheel and pass into the indescribable state of nirvana.

In some of the most fascinating passages of "Buddha," Armstrong relates how 
northern Indians responded to a remarkable revolution, one that "marks the 
beginning of humanity as we now know it." Between 800 and 200 B.C.E., 
during a time now called the Axial Age, old ways of understanding the world 
and our place in it were transformed by people determined "to seek the 
highest goals and an absolute reality in the depths of their being." The 
towering figures of this period -- "remarkably contemporaneous" according 
to Armstrong -- included the composers of the Hebrew Bible, Socrates and 
Plato, Iranian prophet Zoroaster, Confucius, Laotzu and the Buddha. "The 
Axial Age remains mysterious," Armstrong writes. "We do not know what 
caused it." Nevertheless, it was a time when "it was felt that only by 
reaching beyond their limits could human beings become most fully themselves."

Armstrong describes a northern India in which the traveling "bhikkhus" 
(almsmen) were seen as "heroic pioneers ... When the leader of one of the 
sanghas arrived in town, householders, merchants and government officials 
would seek him out, interrogate him about his dhamma [doctrine], and 
discuss its merits with the same kind of enthusiasm with which people 
discuss football teams today." Once he had discovered his own dhamma, the 
Buddha became a kind of celebrity and led a life that was surprisingly 
urban and social; he had set aside his initial plans to retreat into 
solitary contemplation because devoting one's life to the service of others 
was a key principle of his dhamma. This was often trying; in perhaps the 
book's most charming anecdote, the Buddha becomes so distressed by a schism 
among his followers that he goes off to live alone in the forest, 
befriending an elephant who was similarly exasperated with his own species.

The Buddha's rejection of family life (it prevents you from achieving the 
detachment necessary for nirvana) and his troubling attitude toward women 
(he initially wanted to ban them from the sangha, presumably to avoid 
tempting the male monks, but was talked out of it by an attendant) will 
alienate some readers. On the other hand, the absence in Buddhism of a 
concept of sin -- with all the twisted self-loathing the term implies -- 
seems blessedly sane. The Buddha defined such behavior and thinking as 
simply "unskillful"; it doesn't get you where you want to go. To the 
instinctive Western terror at the idea of abandoning all personality and 
self ("I am going to be annihilated and destroyed; I will no longer exist!" 
is how Armstrong characterizes it) he offered a simple argument: "When 
people lived as though the ego did not exist, they found that they were 
happier."
While "Buddha" doesn't pretend to offer a comprehensive introduction to the 
Buddha's thought, there's a surprising quantity of information and insight 
in its 200 pages. Armstrong makes this extraordinary man, one of the most 
influential who ever lived, and his ideas more understandable by letting us 
see, for example, how his emphasis on using questions to seek the truths we 
already know mirrors the techniques of Socrates. And yet Armstrong doesn't 
shrink from defining the gulf between Buddha's spiritual vision and the one 
that saturates Western culture. This scintillating interplay of similarity 
and difference makes for fascinating, fertile reading. For a biography of 
someone who wasn't there, it's quite an achievement. Or, as a very 
different kind of sage would say, it's a good thing.
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About the writer
Laura Miller is Salon's New York editorial director. Sound

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"Buddha" by Karen Armstrong
By Laura Miller

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/04/18/armstrong/index.html