Buddhism for export

Press, 30 May 1981, Page 17

Buddhism for export

Buddhism: A Way of Life and Thought. By Nancy Wilson Ross. Collins, 1981. 208 pp. $17.95. (Reviewed by J. G. Jones)

It can hardly be said that this is a necessary book since there is nothing in it which has not been said before, sometimes by the present author in her earlier, very popular, "Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen." Two of these faiths, Indian Buddhism and Zen, reappear here, with Tibetan Buddhism as a new ingredient. Nancy Ross writes extremely well. Her latest book is assured of a good sale because, unlike many of its kind, it is attractively produced’(provided one is not allergic to’ sepia print), with a beautiful Japanese Amida Buddha on the jacket and a number of well-chosen illustrations inside. The book is thus always a pleasure to read, never crowded with indigestible detail or too many exotic terms. Miss Roos’s approach is a good example of what Winston King has called "export Buddhism.” Mildly polemical in tone, it is written by a believer for Westerners with an Eastward-directed will to believe. Most of the authors quoted are recent Western converts or monks who have recently "come in from the heat.” The Dalai Lama's visit to America, coupled w-ith the arrival of other "transplanted rinpoches,” seems to have been a major reason for

the inclusion of the chapter on Tibet. Very little is said about Buddhism as it actually exists in Asia. The writings of such observers as Spiro. Ekvall, Gombrich and Tambiah are conspicuously ignored in the book and in its bibliography.

All references to the early Buddhist scriptures are taken from brief anthologies, never from the translated canon, much less from the original Pali or Sanskrit. The emphasis is always on the sweetly reasonable, never on the mythological or obscurantist. No fundamental questions are asked about basic Buddhist assumptions regarding the need to escape the suffering implicit in samsaric existence or the path of studied withdrawal and detachment which such a need is believed to require. These gaps result from a selectivity amounting to distortion.

This book will appeal most to those who share Nancy Ross's enthusiasm for Antoine de Sant-Exupery's words, quoted at the outset: "If orange-trees are hardy and rich in fruit in this bit of soil and not that, then this bit of soil is what is truth for orange-trees. If a particular religion, or culture, or scale of values . . . brings self-fulfilment to a man. releases the prince within him unknown to himself, then that scale of values, that culture, that form of activity constitute his truth."