Buddha (Penguin Lives) [Hardcover]

Karen Armstrong (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Lives | Publication Date: February 15, 2001

A world-renowned religious thinker contemplates one of the world's most sacred figures.

Karen Armstrong has been acclaimed for her scholarship and vision, in works The New York Times Book Review calls "penetrating, readable and prescient." Her rich, timely, highly original portrait of the Buddha explores both the archetypal religious icon and Buddha the man. Armstrong follows the Buddha-born Siddhama Gotama-as he leaves his wife, his young child, and his prominent caste position for a life of spiritual enlightenment.

Following his quest from renunciation to revelation to a wellspring of wisdom, Buddha expands the focus to meditate on its place in the spiritual history of humanity and its special relevance to our own society, as we again face a crisis of faith. It is a profound blend of biography, religion, history, and philosophy that will engage an audience that continues to be fascinated by Buddhism.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Books on Buddhism may overflow the shelves, but the life story of the Buddha himself has remained obscure despite over 2,500 years of influence on millions of people around the world. In an attempt to rectify this, and to make the Buddha and Buddhism accessible to Westerners, the beloved scholar and author of such sweeping religious studies as A History of God has written a readable, sophisticated, and somewhat unconventional biography of one of the most influential people of all time. Buddha himself fought against the cult of personality, and the Buddhist scriptures were faithful, giving few details of his life and personality. Karen Armstrong mines these early scriptures, as well as later biographies, then fleshes the story out with an explanation of the cultural landscape of the 6th century B.C., creating a deft blend of biography, history, philosophy, and mythology.

At the age of 29, Siddhartha Gautama walked away from the insulated pleasure palace that had been his home and joined a growing force of wandering monks searching for spiritual enlightenment during an age of upheaval. Armstrong traces Gautama's journey through yoga and asceticism and grounds it in the varied religious teachings of the time. In many parts of the world during this so-called axial age, new religions were developing as a response to growing urbanization and market forces. Yet each shared a common impulse--they placed faith increasingly on the individual who was to seek inner depth rather than magical control. Taoism and Confucianism, Hinduism, monotheism in the Middle East and Iran, and Greek rationalism were all emerging as Gautama made his determined way towards enlightenment under the boddhi tree and during the next 45 years that he spent teaching along the banks of the Ganges. Armstrong, in her intelligent and clarifying style, is quick to point out the Buddha's relevance to our own time of transition, struggle, and spiritual void in both his approach--which was based on skepticism and empiricism--and his teachings.

Despite the lack of typical historical documentation, Armstrong has written a rich and revealing description of both a unique time in history and an unusual man. Buddha is a terrific primer for those interested in the origins and fundamentals of Buddhism. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly

Armstrong's esteemed works, including such standards as A History of God and The Battle for God, have primarily focused on the monotheism of the Middle East. Now she turns farther eastward to craft this short biography for the Penguin Lives series. Armstrong carefully ties the Buddha's time to our own and champions his spiritual discoveries with an understated dignity that even the Buddha might bless. While exercising a scholar's restraint, she reveals a detectable compassion for Sidhatta Gotama, the radical who walked away from a pleasure palace because he refused to "remain locked in an undeveloped version" [of himself]. Armstrong overcame peculiar challenges to write about this historical figure who became "a type rather than an individual," as his personality and life particulars evaporated into the power of his selflessness. She turned this lack of details for a conventional biography to our advantage, opting to enhance Gotama's story with the broad canvas of his time and culture, thus making him accessibly human. This handsome and solid portrait is sure to become a classic; it is a refined and readable biography of a pivotal character in human history. It is likely true that when the 80-year-old Buddha died he had, as the sutra says, "gone beyond the power of words," but in this thoughtful and revealing study, Armstrong has come near to proving the scriptures wrong. (Feb.) Forecast: Despite the plethora of Buddhist books on the market, few recent Buddha biographies have been written for a general audience. Armstrong's superb reputation should help sales, and Viking plans a six-city author tour and national publicity.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Viking; 1st edition (February 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670891932
• ISBN-13: 978-0670891931
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (92 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #358,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #23 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( B ) > Buddha

More About the Author

Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs-including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation-and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. She has addressed members of the U.S. Congress on three occasions; lectured to policy makers at the U.S. State Department; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordan, and Davos; addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to be signed in the fall of 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

124 of 141 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Remember me as one who has woken up.", April 15, 2001

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Buddha (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

You will be disappointed if you read this 187-page biography expecting Karen Armstrong to bring Siddhartha Gotama to life, or if you are hoping to understand the man in the Buddha. She acknowledges that the Pali canon and other Buddhist scriptures leave the biographer with "little to work with," and the last twenty years of her subject's life "are almost entirely unrecorded" (p. 122). My criticism with this biography is not that Armstrong fails to reveal any "controversial new facts about the Buddha's life" (p. xxi), but that she treats her subject with distance.

Few Buddhists would disagree that any history of the Buddha's life is irrelevant (p. xix). "He who sees the dhamma (the teachings) sees me" (p. xx), the Buddha said. He preferred only to be remembered "as one who has woken up" (p. 161). Despite its shortcomings, Armstrong's biography succeeds in showing us that any attempt to examine the Buddha's life "can help us all to understand the human predicament" (p. xxi). As one would expect, she follows Siddhartha Gotama's life from his birth in 563 B.C.E, to his decision to leave his wife and newborn son at age 29 in search for liberation from the suffering of the world. Armstrong observes that in repudiating the "meaningless and trivial" (p. 3) life of a householder, Siddhartha also renounced the life of "the married man [who] kept the economy going, produced the next generation, paid for the all-important sacrifices and took care of the political life of society" (p. 28). After his "six year quest" (p. 85), resulting in Siddhartha's enlightenment at age 35 under a bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, Armstrong follows the Buddha to Deer Park, where we find him beating "the drum of deathless Nibbana" (p. 97), committed to saving the world through his teachings. Before he died at age 80, the Buddha offered final words to live by: "All individual things pass away. Seek your own liberation with diligence" (p. 187).

Armstrong's biography succeeds in putting the Buddha's life into its historical context. Siddhartha lived during the Axial Age (800 to 200 B.C.E.), which also produced Confucius, Lao Tzu, Socrates and Plato. It was a pivotal time for humanity. We also learn that Siddhartha was born into a "violent, ruthless society," not much different from our own, in that "the economy was fueled by greed, and where bankers and merchants locked in aggressive competition, preyed upon one another" (pp. 22-23).

I finished Armstrong's book in a single sitting today. (Noticeably missing from its final pages is a bibliography, or a suggested list of dharma books for further reading.) Although Armstrong's biography provides interesting reading, it is not as engaging as Walter Nelson's BUDDHA: HIS LIFE AND TEACHINGS (2000).

G. Merritt

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Biographer of the Divine, March 10, 2001

By 

matthew osborne - See all my reviews

This review is from: Buddha (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

Karen Armstrong has made quite a career out of writing biographies, not only about manifestations of the divine, but the early history of the movements they inspire. If the potential reader is looking for esoteric tracts on yogic practice (and the Buddha would have abhorred such fascination) then this is not the book they need.

Rather, this delicious and brief treat of a book explains what Buddha and Buddhism meant in the context of their early history. India had become a place where great business republics were involved in rapid economic growth (like today's global economy) and were being consumed by the new monarchical states. A huge middle class was emerging that could not be pigeonholed into the old caste system, and therefore rejected it; life had become overly materialistic and people were desperately turning to anything for a sense of spiritual well-being (sort of like today.)

What Armstrong does simply and wonderfully is reveal this worldwide phase of history and the contribution of the Buddha in meeting its challenges. His teachings are decidedly NOT the mysterious, esoteric bunk that priesthoods of every religion have invented to maintain their exhalted position, but were in fact very practical means for bringing the unhappy people of the age into enlightenment-- sort of like what people are looking for today.

I was especially happy to read this book because of these larger, "global" contexts that are expressed or implied. Buddhism belongs in the hall of great world religions, as Buddha belongs among the great manifestations of the divine. Armstrong has delivered a fine portrait of the Buddha's life that puts them both in their proper place, yet she avoids the trap of making them such objects of adoration that the text would become a mere tract.

I sincerely hope that Karen Armstrong will see fit to examine other religions and manifestations like this. I would particularly like to read anything she has to say about Zoroaster or Baha'u'llah.

127 of 148 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not a book for buddhists, April 2, 2001

By 

David Cortesi (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Buddha (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

In summary, Armstrong's "Buddha" is a brief, sympathetic account of the life of the Buddha in the context of his time. It is marred by brevity and by a distanced, clinical treatment of the Buddha's dhamma that makes it seem little more than an antique, cultural artifact, not a relevant way of life.

I am guessing that the format for the Penguin "Lives" series accounts for some of the shortcomings of this book including: its brief length (less than 200 rather small pages); its lack of illustrations; its rather abrupt end with the Buddha's death (not a word of how one teacher's words grew into a worldwide religion); the absence of a guide to the pronunciation of the many Pali terms; and the omission of an index.

These lacks show the book is not intended as a definitive biography; nor it is it intended to have theological depth that would challenge a well-read Buddhist. This is a popular "life" intended to give a broad picture of the Buddha's life and dhamma to a curious non-Buddhist reader or to a student.

Within the scope of this limited goal Armstrong has done a reasonably good job. Certainly it could not have been easy to shape a conventional, biographical tale from the Pali canon and other Buddhist scriptures. Armstrong stresses that an integral part of the Buddha's teaching was the unimportance of the ego, and for that reason the Buddha's personal attributes virtually disappeared, both from his teachings and from his disciple's accounts. Little is left but the suttas themselves, and some highly-colored legends surrounding the key moments of the Buddha's life.

Armstrong is particularly good at taking the legends and drawing out their inner meaning. She recounts a legend sympathetically; then shows how it make clear sense, not as history but as a statement of belief in the context of the time, or as an archetypal portrait of the human condition. For example, she notes how Mara, Lord of Illusion, "represents ... all the unconscious elements within the psyche which fight against our liberation."

In large measure Armstrong explains the Buddha's dhamma clearly and sympathetically. Yet she always seems to handle it with metaphorical tongs, like an interesting specimen -- not as if it were a living tradition the reader might enter. Part of this impression comes from her consistent use of the perfect tense when describing the dhamma. For example, she writes "The purpose of both mindfulness and the immeasurables was to neutralize the power of that egotism that limits human potential." In this and many similar sentences, she uses the perfect ("was") or the conditional ("would"), as if the dhamma was a teaching that existed only long ago and among distant people. There is no hint that mindfulness IS used for the same purpose by people today.

This is a subtle matter of diction and tone; but its effect is to transmit an unspoken message that Armstrong herself has not entered into the Dhamma, and probably wouldn't care to recommend it to her reader, either. If you think of yourself as being in some degree "buddhist" you may find this air of faint praise makes you uncomfortable.

A less subtle problem is Armstrong's repeated insistence that the Dhamma "could not be understood by rational thinking alone. It only revealed its true significance when it was apprehended 'directly,' according to yogic methods, and in the right ethical context." By "yogic methods" she means the disciplines of mindfulness and meditation. By "ethical context" she means principly the practice of metta, empathy.

Armstrong seems sure that the dhamma is not capable of being defended or supported by discursive argument. Or at any rate, she does not even attempt to sketch its philosophical underpinnings. This is strange. Armstrong is certainly capable of dealing with abstracts and logical argument. And Buddhism is quite respectable as a philosophy, as coherent and complete in its account of the universe and the human condition as anything produced by Plato or Aquinas. Armstrong completely neglects this aspect of the dhamma, leaving the impression that it can only be entered through "yogic methods." In short, she writes as if the dhamma is unapproachable unless you are ready to enter into dubious Eastern practices.