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Title: Not worth the time
Review: I was disappointed in this book. Although it says the author "is an experienced and respected author on Eastern religion and philosophy," his views on Buddhism are quite outdated and don't reflect the developments in Buddhist Studies over the last twenty or thirty years. To dismiss all of the Mahayana tradition as "a return to many of the theistic and polytheistic beliefs of earlier societies," as the author does, is something no respected scholar of Buddhism of the last thirty years or so would have done. Likewise, to state "only in the Theravada tradition, together with its scion, Zen, that we can be most confident of finding what Buddha originally proclaimed" is laughably amateur. No one who knew what they were talking about would make such an unqualified originalist assertion these days, particularly after Schopen.The chapter on Buddhism deals with the subject with which I am most familiar, but it is reasonable to assume that the rest of the book is as dated and fatuous.
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