Grab Your Edition Buddhism: A Concise Introduction Devised By Huston Smith Presented As Copy

first part gives a very clear and well written overview of the different lineages and discussions in Buddhism which I had been looking for for a while, and this was excellent.


Then more and more it start shifting in tone, The chapter on Zen suddenly loses all of the objectivity from before, and things get more and more messy and subjective, all ending in a kind of love letter to one specific lineage.


A pity, because the first half is really good, and I would still recommend it for that reason, Okay book, I guess. It was assigned reading for the worst class I have ever taken so that's clouding my view of it, A fine way to get an overall picture from the "dean of religion studies," and especially including its arrival to the West amp the US in particular.
This is a great introduction to Buddhism, It is very well structured and organized, and it is easy and fun to read, I would have loved a deeper philosophical analysis, and maybe more detailed history, Does a good job at explaining, “Are you a god They asked,
No.
Then what are you
I am awake, ”

If youve been on Goodreads within the lasthours, you can see Ive added about four more books that relate to Buddhism.
So you can say Novak and Smith did their job correctly,

I began this book with pretty basic knowledge of Buddhism, Ever since learning about it, Ive been interested in pursuing this religion further, This book did not disappoint, This book thoroughly dissects Buddhism in a way that anybody can understand, although it is a complex religion like any other,

The first nine chapters themselves garner five, Its intellectually stimulating, knowledgeable, and is readable unlike most books that tackle such complex issues and ideas, That is, until you finish those first nine chapters,

When you reach theth chapter, it starts to become repetitive and contains long winded sentences that make you wonder what you just read.
It begins listing so many names and lineages that its nearly impossible to keep track of who is who, Its not language that should be in a “concise introduction” novel about a religion, It was very disappointing for a book that began so strong to end in such an unsatisfactory way,

Despite the somewhat unfulfilling second half of the novel, this book still deservesstars, It has definitely pushed me to pursue Buddhism further and I am definitely walking away from it having learned a lot, This is surely a book that can model many peoples beliefs and spirituality, including myself, Very informative but difficult to read for long periods of time I thought this was a great overview, It certainly filled in the gaps in my knowledge thus far, I particularly liked the chapters on the evolution of Buddhism in the west,

There were lots of great metaphors and analogies for difficult to explain Buddhist concepts throughout, Its wild how much is fit into this book, and how informative it is, At the end of the book it was mostly filled with different sects of Buddhism and branches and people who helped found it in different areas, so most of it was wordy names and dates, but the essence of what was being taught in that section still stood strong.
A very good book for anyone looking to understand more about the history of buddhism and its many branches This was helpful for me to get a better understanding of the differences between lineages important since I work in a multilineage dharma center!.
Not sure how helpful it would be to get an understanding of the teachings if you were weren't already familiar with them, Partially excellent

Part of this book is an excellent introduction to Buddhism, Part of it is not, The first eight chapters are clear, concise and extraordinarily lucid, I have been looking for a long time for a really good introduction to Buddhism, Most of the books I've read either try to do too much or are too narrowly conceived, Huston Smith not to be confused with Homer W, Smith who wrote Man and His Gods half a century ago and Philip Novak do an admirable job of showing the reader exactly what Buddhism is all about, how it arose, how it developed and splintered.
They make clear the central ideas of Buddhism and how those ideas differ from other religions, These chapters constitute easily one of the best introductions to Buddhism I have ever read,
However in the ninth chapter on Zen Buddhism, written exclusively by Smith, I found myself very much at odds with Smith's interpretation.
He warns us that as a Zen student in Japan many years ago his teacher Goto Roshi considered him too philosophic and not as wellgrounded in the experiential as he might be.
The immediate and experiential, the "be here now" is the essence of Zen of course, And so one might say that Smith was too intellectual, According to a footnote on page, the chapter "received its final shape from six weeks of Zen training Kyoto" inwhen Smith was a young man.
I wonder how thoroughly he reworked this chapter for the present volume copyrighted in, It would appear not much, I should also note that the entire book is a reworking of the chapter on Buddhism from his larger work, The World's Religions.


My problem with his take on Zen is the suggestion, especially on page, that it is the rational mind that is holding the student back.
But it is not the work of the rational mind that Zen wants the practitioner to overcome, The rational mind is merely common sense, It is instead, the intellectualization of the world that is the problem, It is living the verbalizations we invent as though the verbalizations were the world itself, as though the name were the thing itself.
Cooking rice, drawing water, sweeping the porch are events that are preeminently directed by the rational mind, It is rational and logical to eat when you're hungry, to sleep when you're tired, Zen always strives for the concrete, never the abstraction,

I also found myself at odds with Smith's take on the purpose of koan training and how it works toward the aspirant's enlightenment.
Enlightenment comes from living with awareness, Being awake, as the Buddha said, Meditation allows us to become very much aware of ourselves and our place in the world, The koan is actually a device that leads the novice to meditation, If you are sitting down and wrestling with the notion of one hand clapping or are contemplating nothingness, after a while it become obvious that where you are is inside your head.
Once you are able to focus your attention so precisely without distraction, as indeed the Buddha was able

to do, then you are on the road to insight, leading to enlightenment, leading to satori and liberation.


I believe that Smith's understanding of the koan experience is too esoteric and frankly cluttered, He speaks of the mind "working in a special way" on the koan and that "reason, . . must be supplemented by another mode of knowing, " p.This unnecessary mystification strongly suggests that Smith did not get much further in his koan practice than the six weeks he spent with Goto Roshi.


What is really being "upset" and revolted against in koan training is not the rational mind and its logic, but the culturalization that society has imposed on us along with the view of life constructed by the animal mind: that is, the mind shaped by the evolutionary process, a mind that sees everything primarily in terms of its utility to the seer.
Freeing the mind from the prejudices of society and from the limits of the evolutionary mind set is really what Zen is all about.
That is how we achieve freedom, which was the goal of the Buddhafreedom from the shackles of the purely animal existence with its mind clouded by reproductive, social and subsistence needs.
When we are able to do this we become like the Buddha, like the real artist, like the solitary old man of the forest drawing water and stacking wood.
We become knowingly part of the process, not separate from it, and at home in the everyday world in a way that is uncolored by previous notions and the prejudices of society and our evolutionary selves.

There is some extensive discussion in this book about the differences between Mahayana Buddhism, the socalled "great" vehicle and Hinayana Buddhism the "lesser" vehicle, more properly referred to as Theravada, and some hints about the mystical and supernatural Buddhism that is sometimes practiced by the great Buddhist masses.
One can easily see that the further one gets from actual teachings as derived from the Buddha, the more adrift one becomes, Zen is a reaction to the needless elaboration and intellectualizing of the teachings, and is an attempt to bring the practitioner back to the concrete and the actual world of experience.


The value of this book is in the lucid and concise delineation of the Buddha's teachings as contained in the first eight chapters.
The material in Part II "The Wheel Rolls West" is about how Buddhism is influencing and being influenced by its experience in Western cultures, and is of greater interest to established Buddhists that it is to those being introduced to Buddhism.


Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Religion: s, Essays and Commentary”
I had the opportunity to study with both of these gentlemen.

Both were insightful and made their subjects interesting,
My only complaint if you can call it that, is that I would have included a chart denoting the different "schools," leaders, etc.
This is a great little book for those people who are curious about the Buddhist lifestyle, The explanation of the different styles of Buddhism, I found very informative, The afterward deals with Buddhism's Pure Land Tradition, I thought it sound more like a cult then a Buddhist lifestyle, But to each their own, I wish it would have delved a little bit more into the " Buddha from Brooklyn" and her cult following, The book was printed in, so it is a bit outdated, But it is still a great read, A terrific book. The second half is a bit more drab but it's perfectly skimmable, Overall an excellent overview of Buddhism and its evolution, I liked the summary of Buddhist beliefs in the first half of this book, but the second half, especially the namedropping section on lineages, was pretty much a slog to read.
It did reference some of the books on my toread list and give me some perspective on where they come from but otherwise it was a waste of time for a beginner to read the second half of this book.
A concise and uptodate guide to the history, teachings, and practice of Buddhism by two luminaries in the field of world religions, Very good book. The first half is fascinating and you can really learn a lot about the basics of Buddhism, The second part was irrelevant to me as it discusses Buddhism in the United States extensively and its just a really long list of names thats nearly impossible to keep track of.
Maybe those pages could have been used to expand a bit more on the first part Its good as an introduction, This is an excellent introduction to Buddhism by Huston Smith, the author of the wellknown The World's Religions, and Philip Novak, who was one of his students.
The authors have written in a way that I found very accessible, not with the dryness of most textbooks, This small book onlypages contains a brief description of the life and legend of the Buddha, an overview of the important Buddhist teachings, some of the history of the beginnings in India and Asia, description of the kinds of Buddhism throughout the world, and the history of the evolution of Buddhism in America.
The chapter comparing the two largest schools of Buddhism the Theravada and the Mahayana was one of my favorites because there are a myriad of subschools, teachers, and practices that I have previously found very confusing.


The book ends with a quote about Buddhism's future from historian Steven Batchelor: "If Buddhism is to survive in the West, it has to avoid the twin dangers of excessive rigidity, which will lead to marginalization and irrelevance, and excessive flexibility, which will lead to absorption by other disciplines and a loss of distinctive identity.
" And the authors add, "We may be witnessing what may prove to be the besetting issue that multiculturalism is posing for religion at large in the twentyfirst century.
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