From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. "Many Buddhist books will edify you," Paine writes, "but will any entertain you?" Paine (Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West) here offers up an enthralling anthology of nine Western "writer-adventurers" who journeyed to India, Tibet, Nepal, China and Japan to study the various incarnations of Buddhism. The first five writers, including a disaffected Frenchwoman and a Dutch mystery novelist, tell of their experiences in Asia during the first half of the 20th century, when there were still tantalizing unexplored "white spaces" on the map. They reverently describe a wild and woolly land filled with magic: lamas discoursing via mental telepathy; almost-naked gurus meditating in icy caves for years at a time; Shangri-La landscapes filled with clanging processions of gaily-dressed pilgrims. The book's second half features four contemporary American Buddhist writers such as Sharon Salzberg and Michael Roach. To one degree or another, they also share their experiences in Asia, but these writers' main focus is the interior realm: how Buddhism has affected their own day-to-day emotional and spiritual lives—a familiar theme in current Buddhist writing, but one which these writers make fresh. Paine's own contributions are limited to brief introductions, but these are lively and illuminating. Paine's real genius, however, is constructing a cohesive, potent anthology that informs, delights and fires the imagination, a work that both recalls a lost world and illustrates its continued relevance today. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Buddhist books for Westerners abound, but almost all are edifying rather than entertaining. Determined to create a beguiling and pleasurable Buddhist collection, Paine, author of Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West [BKL Ja 1 & 15 04], turned to the personal stories of nine Western pilgrims to Tibet, China, India, Japan, and Nepal to assemble a unique and eye-opening anthology of judiciously excerpted spiritual travel memoirs. Paine's commentary is lively and informative, and his selections are excellent, beginning with the greatest "religious investigator" of them all, Alexandra David-Nell, the first European woman to travel in Tibet. She sets a high standard for courageous quests intelligently chronicled, but the German Lama Anagarika Govinda, who traveled in Tibet in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Russian exile Peter Goullart, who lived in China, are equally compelling. As are the living Buddhist travelers Paine showcases, including popular Buddhist writer Sharon Salzberg and African American Buddhist Jan Willis. These inspiriting adventure stories testify to both personal discoveries and Buddhism's great vitality. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
The flavor, the savor, and the sense of Buddhism as revealed through personal stories of Westerners who lived it. Many books on Buddhism will edify you, but will they entertain you? Here, finally, is a book that yields an understanding of Buddhism—not by its metaphysics or rituals but through real characters and true stories as dramatic as those in the most imaginative novel. Jeffery Paine has assembled the breathtaking adventures of nine Westerners who traveled in China, Tibet, and Japan, in Nepal and India, and in that new Buddhist frontier, America, chanced across Buddhism, and made it an integral part of their lives. Through vivid travel writing and gripping human tales, the reader is exposed not just to the theory of Buddhist philosophy and practice but also to what it looks like from the inside. From enchanting, now-lost kingdoms in Asia to the American workplace where a practitioner is profitably applying the dharma, Adventures with the Buddha is a tour de force across nations, generations, and, ultimately, spirituality.


About the Author
Jeffery Paine is the author of Re-enchantment and Father India and is the editor of The Poetry of Our World. He is the former literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly and lives in Washington, DC.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jeffery Paine has assembled the breathtaking adventures of nine Westerners who traveled in China, Tibet, and Japan, in Nepal, India, and also America, chanced across Buddhism, and made it an integral part of their lives.

Here clairvoyance, hermit-wizards, exorcisms, gilded pageantry, and superhuman kindness are not fairy tales but quite real. Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) learned Tibetan, disguised herself as a beggar woman, and, though already old, hiked six months through the snow to forbidden Lhasa, to discover that Buddhism was the opposite of what the scholarly books said. Whenever Lama Govinda (1898-1985) wanted to ask his Himalayan guru a question, the guru would answer it before Govinda could even open his mouth. Such traveler-writers made Buddhism seem less something you objectively studied than something you subjectively lived, and thus, with them, Western Buddhism ceased to be an oxymoron, an impossibility.

In the more recent adventures, some living practitioners take millennia-old Buddhist precepts and fast-forward them into the modes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century lives. They demonstrate how to fabricate a spiritual life out of the social gadgetry of late modernity and how to integrate Buddhism into make-do existences now. Michael Roach (b. 1952) uses Buddhist principles to start a fledgling business with almost no capital and turn it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. On a tantric retreat, Jan Willis (b. 1948) reveals what it's like to be an ordinary person standing on the edge of enlightenment today. These contemporary pilgrim adventurers represent Buddhism's New Frontier in the West, as in daily life, despite obstacles, without communal support, they attempt to do what only monks and sages achieved in the monasteries of the old Orient.

From enchanting, now-lost kingdoms in Asia to the American workplace, Adventures with the Buddha is a tour across nations, generations, and, ultimately, spiritual landscapes.

FROM THE CRITICS

David Guy - The Washington Post

I was so inspired by these pioneers that I turned skeptically to more current practitioners whom Paine includes, such as Jan Willis, professor at Wesleyan University, and Sharon Salzberg, a founding teacher of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. Yet their stories are in their own way just as remarkable and touching. Willis overcame low self-esteem and the pain of racism; Salzberg transcended a horrifically tragic childhood to become a renowned teacher of metta, or lovingkindness meditation. Even Michael Roach, enmeshed in the cutthroat diamond business of midtown Manhattan, manages to lead a deeply spiritual life in the most materialistic of circumstances.

Publishers Weekly

"Many Buddhist books will edify you," Paine writes, "but will any entertain you?" Paine (Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West) here offers up an enthralling anthology of nine Western "writer-adventurers" who journeyed to India, Tibet, Nepal, China and Japan to study the various incarnations of Buddhism. The first five writers, including a disaffected Frenchwoman and a Dutch mystery novelist, tell of their experiences in Asia during the first half of the 20th century, when there were still tantalizing unexplored "white spaces" on the map. They reverently describe a wild and woolly land filled with magic: lamas discoursing via mental telepathy; almost-naked gurus meditating in icy caves for years at a time; Shangri-La landscapes filled with clanging processions of gaily-dressed pilgrims. The book's second half features four contemporary American Buddhist writers such as Sharon Salzberg and Michael Roach. To one degree or another, they also share their experiences in Asia, but these writers' main focus is the interior realm: how Buddhism has affected their own day-to-day emotional and spiritual lives-a familiar theme in current Buddhist writing, but one which these writers make fresh. Paine's own contributions are limited to brief introductions, but these are lively and illuminating. Paine's real genius, however, is constructing a cohesive, potent anthology that informs, delights and fires the imagination, a work that both recalls a lost world and illustrates its continued relevance today. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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