stevem's review
3.0
I found much of this book fascinating and much of it frustrating. Batchelor is at his best when he puts a human face on the Pali stories and places them in historical context. He also offers some eloquent readings and interpretations of basic Buddhist concepts. This book is weakest when polemical, which is unfortunately its main purpose. Knowledgeable folks have sharply criticised his Pali translations and philology. More obvious and problematic for me was his tendency to treat sources and texts that support him with nuance and creativity while reading more "conservative" texts and translations tendentiously as manifestly flawed. I had to persevere especially through his truths versus tasks distinction, which is his central claim. And I can't help but wonder in retrospect how much I can trust his historical storytelling, given this manifestly polemical lens.
The overall desire to reclaim a "true" Buddhism from its "origins" is also inherently mythologizing, even though his method claims to be demystifying and demythologizing. If I were more familiar with the kinds of calcification and orthodoxy in Buddhism that are his targets, I might be more sympathetic, and it's unfortunate that he assumes that his readers will agree with a lot of sweeping claims about the ossification of Buddhism in the modern world.
As a Buddhist outsider with an allergy to all things "spiritual" or religious I should be the natural audience for this book. But its nature as a manifesto casts more of a shadow over it than I would like.
The overall desire to reclaim a "true" Buddhism from its "origins" is also inherently mythologizing, even though his method claims to be demystifying and demythologizing. If I were more familiar with the kinds of calcification and orthodoxy in Buddhism that are his targets, I might be more sympathetic, and it's unfortunate that he assumes that his readers will agree with a lot of sweeping claims about the ossification of Buddhism in the modern world.
As a Buddhist outsider with an allergy to all things "spiritual" or religious I should be the natural audience for this book. But its nature as a manifesto casts more of a shadow over it than I would like.
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