In 2006 His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who calls Lama Surya Das the American Lama, said to an American audience, "It is not enough just to meditate and pray, which are always good things to do, but we also must take positive action in this world."

In the process of awakening, the Buddha realized that all of us, deep within, are inherently perfect and whole, with the capacity to overcome suffering and transform ourselves into forces for good. In this book national bestselling author Lama Surya Das, one of the foremost American Buddhist teachers, offers a thorough, tried-and-true map to the richest treasure a human being can find—Buddha's advice for living to your true potential. By following these guidelines, you will enter into a life of greater joy, clarity, peace, and wisdom than you ever thought possible.

Whether you consider yourself a Buddhist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, or agnostic, Buddha Is as Buddha Does enables you to reflect more deeply upon how you think, speak, and behave in each moment and to explore more intently your relationships with others. Appropriate for new seekers as well as experienced practitioners, and accompanied by lively anecdotes and practical exercises, this is one of the most accessible books to date on the ancient and timeless wisdom of the Buddha. Buddha Is as Buddha Does is for everyone who seeks to become a better person and share in the bounty of true Buddha nature.

Length: 290 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Product details

File Size: 851 KB
Print Length: 290 pages
Publisher: HarperOne; Reprint edition (December 24, 2008)
Publication Date: October 6, 2009
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B001ODEPNU
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

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Not Enabled

Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported

Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #393,678 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #47 in Mahayana Buddhism
- #114 in Tao Te Ching (Kindle Store)
- #251 in Buddhist Rituals & Practice (Kindle Store)

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Bstone

His heart is in the right place, but not the write place. Poorly written.

June 9, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I have a problem with the writing style of this book. Here are just two sentences from the chapter on meditation and mindfulness:

"The more formal act of sitting meditation itself encourages and assists meditation-in-action by stabilizing, balancing, and fueling our overall mental energy, giving us greater clarity, vigilance, objectivity, and discernment in every aspect of our existence. It helps remedy our everyday absentmindedness, scatter-brained thinking, obsessiveness, hysteria, bias, and ignorance."

"stabilizing, balancing, and fueling... greater clarity, vigilance, objectivity, and discernment ... absentmindedness, scatter-brained thinking, hysteria, bias, and ignorance..."

That's three mouthfuls of ideas in just two sentences. It wouldn't be so bad if this stuff wasn't on every page. This points to a lack of focus that makes the book a slogging chore to read. This guy needs an editor, BADLY. It's a bit like listening to a speaker who inserts "uh" every other word. You start counting the "uhs" instead of listening to what they are saying. By the way, the very next sentence after the two I quoted above, he's off and running with "By enabling us to focus more intently on what we are thinking, saying, and doing..."

By contrast I've recently read Chogyam Trungpa's "Meditation in Action" which covers the same ground, the paramitas, and was first published in the 1960s. I would not presume to review such a high and mighty book, but I will say here that Trungpa was a much more focused writer, although more abstract and challenging in his own way. It is concise to the tune of 91 pages. It's the kind of book that's way over my head the first time through, and then starts to make sense as years go by. I had a similar experience with Thera's "The Heart of Buddhist Meditation" which baffled me at first, and then turned out to be a treasure by the third reading.

There are some positive things to say about "Buddha Is as Buddha Does" and first among them is that it helped me better understand what was going on in Trungpa. For that I am grateful and offer thanks to Lama Surya Das.

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E. Frost

Very good, for familiar practitioners

March 7, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I love love loved this book, almost as much as Das's other book, Awakening the Buddha (which I also highly recommend). This book helps a mid-level practitioner understand more fully concepts and principals of Buddhism. Das certainly understands the Western mindset and approach to Buddhism. He doesn't indulge it, but makes it accessible for people who may have come to Buddhism later than others.

It's for someone who more or less knows what's going on, but needs some reinforcement or extra study before heading into the really in-depth commentaries. I think a newer practitioner of Buddhism would be thrown off by the structure (it's spaced out a little more as to be more in-depth than a cursory overview).

Bottom line: love it, but if you've never read anything about Buddhism, check out some simpler books (such as Buddhism for Beginners, or How to Practice) first.

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Craig Shoemake

Bloated feel good pablum with a few instances of gold

October 27, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I had actually looked forward to reading this book. Das is a well-known name in Buddhist circles, and his book Awakening the Buddha Within was promoted by Ken Wilber and even became a best seller. The man apparently also has several (3?) intensive retreats Tibetan-style (living in a shack for 3 years, sleeping upright, the works) so I assumed he must have an abundance of insight to offer.

Maybe he does. I've now read the book, but I'm still not entirely sure. You see, the first thing that hit me when I started it was that it felt like a self-improvement tract, ala Anthony Robbins. There is the relentlessly exuberant optimism that pervades much of the more lightweight self-improvement books, and the saccharine prose was freighted with the sort of populist, feel-good catch phrases of American Buddhism that I've really become tired of-"we're all Buddhas" filled with "Buddha-nature" if only we could see into our "inner being" yada yada yada.

The book is about the paramitas ("perfections") as they are described in Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. Contrary to the subtitle, though, the practices described here are in no way "original." The oldest texts (the Pali) also describe ten perfections, but they are a different ten. (See Acarya Dhammapala's little gem of a work A Treatise on the Paramis for more about this.) The later traditions (Mahayana and Vajrayana) compiled a different set of practices (also ten), but even there the Mahayana initially had only six, and these form the core of the list Das describes.

This kind of loose "scholarship" (if that's the right word for it) is evident also in his frequent quotes from Buddhist literature and sutras. He may be quoting the Buddha or some text, but a reference is never offered, and in more than a few instances where he quotes the "Buddha" I know the quote-which is probably his reworded version of it-is not from the Pali but a Mahayana or tantric text. Someone of Das' stature ought to know better than to pretend those passages, however edifying, come down to us from the Buddha.

The above traits mark this work out as a "popular" text. Indeed, Lama Surya Das is a no-holds barred propagator of marketable American Buddhism, i.e. Buddhism as politically correct, feel-good pablum. One manifestation of this is his relentless ecumenicism. Stories from any number of traditions are bandied about freely, with the impression that everyone's religion is equally filled with enlightened masters and sages. I do not have any problem with ecumenism per se, so long as accuracy and depth are not sacrificed. But what I've noticed about this style of thinking and writing is that it tends to dilute the depth and subtlety of the tradition on hand, in this case Vajrayana Buddhism. The uniqueness of the tradition is disguised behind the attempt to make it seem that its truths, whatever they may be, are universally known and understood. Yet I would wager there are many insights the Tibetans have which, for example, the Muslims do not. (Actually, I can easily think of several. But I digress...) However, you will never learn that with a book like this. Other examples that mark this out as populist fodder are: endless stories that obscure what could be meaningful points, the author's seeming to be old buddies with every well known lama in the country, the minimal use of appropriate technical terminology (you don't even learn the Sanskrit for several of the perfections), and the abundant use of feel good jargon.

Das also displays some serious problems of judgment. For example, Lance Armstrong is repeatedly cited as a hero and bodhisattva. This, of course, is terribly unfortunate (for Das) because only three years later Armstrong's reputation totally unraveled under the weight of a doping scandal. Of course there was no way for Das to know this at the time, but reading it now does nothing for the author's credibility. A worse error is citing Muhammad Ali (p. 65) as an exemplar of the first precept (not killing) because Ali refused to go to Vietnam. This is truly PC run amok-anyone who takes up a livelihood of beating strangers' faces to a pulp can hardly be considered a practitioner of "non-harming," the real intent of the first precept. Finally, offering the Vietnamese monk Quang Duc's self-immolation (p. 42) as the act of a bodhisattva is highly questionable, as I've never come across anything in the entire Pali Canon to indicate the Buddha would espouse dramatic public suicide for the sake of a socio-political cause.

If my review seems relentlessly negative, I am sorry. I actually felt embarrassed reading the book on the train, and tended to hide the cover from my fellow riders. But this is not to say it was a complete loss. Compared to Sylvia Boorstein's Pay Attention for Goodness' Sake Das is actually profound. In a number of places he gives quite meaningful and helpful advice (p. 77 is particularly excellent), and offers some very good insights (e.g. on p. 19 where he notes that the first six paramitas are bodhisattva character traits while the last four are active expressions of those traits). In fact, I am convinced that if Das had a hard nosed editor (perhaps he'd be willing to hire me!) who could cut through the rubbish and lay bare the intelligence and experience he so plainly possesses, this book-and probably every book he ever wrote or will write-would be vastly improved. I'm not sure if they'd sell as well, though, and that may be the catching point: like so many popular Buddhist authors, he has a foundation to support, and those things need MONEY.

I've given this book three stars. There are certainly a lot of people out there who will enjoy and benefit more from it than I have; Das is not writing for curmudgeons like me.

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Artful 1

Five Stars

May 24, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

such illuminating wisdom the kind of read that will give one clarity.

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seal

Very special book!

November 26, 2010

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This book means alot to me on a personal level because of its message. Most Buddhist practice Buddhism but don't live it. This book tells you in very easy to understand ways how to do just that. Lama Surya Das is one in a million when it come to explaining things in language that everyone can understand. I would recommend this book to any Buddhist and non-Buddhist that wants to learn how to be a better person!!!

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