Buddha
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Average rating5
"Karen Armstrong's 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 comfortable life and eminent social status for an arduous quest for spiritual enlightenment." "Armstrong brings to life the Buddha's quest from his renunciation of his privileged life to the discovery of a truth that he believed would utterly transform human beings and enable them to live at peace in the midst of life's suffering. Buddha also expands to focus and meditate on the culture and history of the time as well as the Buddha's place in the spiritual history of humanity and the special relevance of his teachings to our own society as we again face a crisis of faith."--BOOK JACKET
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Another great book from Karen Armstrong. Ms Armstrong takes an historical approach to the life and times of the Buddha, while also providing a lay-account of key teachings and sharing many of the more apparently mythological tales.
Throughout the book Ms Armstrong manages to be respectful, while weaving the accounts into an easy to follow narrative style.
Excellent.
If a book is called “Buddha”, you kind of expect it to be a biography of, well, the Buddha. Karen Armstrong's Buddha looks like a biography of Siddharta Gautama but is rather a retelling of how Buddhism came to be. (To be fair, there doesn't seem to be enough source material to create a complete biography of Gautama Buddha.)
It's still a good book, but not entirely what I expected. For a biography of the Buddha, I preferred Thich Nhat Hanh's “Old Path White Clouds” more, though due to the “no-sources-issue”, it's more a fictional than factual biography.
