Customer Reviews

A New Handbook of Living Religions

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The essays in this book are all very interested reading for someone who's interested in getting a general (but not too general) overview of a religion without going out and getting books on all the topics covered. It's not a "Dictionary of Religion", however--each entry is about 100 pages long. Nevertheless I recommend it to those whose interests in religion are at that point where vague encyclopedia entries etc. give too little information, and detailed, focused studies give too much.

This book gives very good articles on all the world's main religions and they are usually written by practitioner's of these religions who also tend to be scholars. Encyclopaedic, imbued with rigour, candour and a dash of faith which is essential in avoiding an all too objective and critical approach.

The article on Buddhism in this book is one of the best if not the best I've encountered. It does not repeat the date of the Buddha as earlier than the 5th century BC (making Buddhism 2400 years old rather than the oft quoted 2500 years old), and does not begin to talk about Buddhism by describing the 4 noble truths, like lesser books would.

This article should be read, by those who want to have the low down on Buddhism including beginners and those with a deeper interest, and it captures the essence of Buddhism in a hard to beat nutshell.

The author, Mr Lance Cousins was due to write a whole book on Buddhism for Penguin, but this project was scrapped as he was too busy, and had to do an Abhidhamma translation. This is probably the next best thing. His students, Peter Harvey and Rupert Gethin have turned out introductory books on Buddhism which are pretty good, and these testify to the depth of Mr Cousins knowledge on the subject.