Buddhism

"I chose this book because Cathy gives a fantastic overview of the whole tradition of Buddhism . Cathy is a scholar as well as a Buddhist. She has done a lot of fieldwork among Tibetan communities and in this book she writes for students and for anyone who is quite new to the tradition. What I think is good about it is that Cathy doesn’t write from a Western perspective, because she has knowledge of Buddhism on-the-ground in Asia. So she brings in the diversity within Buddhism, within the devotional practices and ritual, for instance, as well as attitudes to texts. She gives helpful guidelines about how Buddhism is split up in terms of tradition. She speaks about Southern Buddhism which some people would call Theravada Buddhism, the Buddhism in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Laos, Burma and Thailand, East Asia Buddhism which is the Buddhism in China, Japan and Vietnam and then Northern Buddhism, in countries such as Bhutan and Tibet. Buddhism is tremendously various and can be very confusing and I think Cathy has done a very good job in a fairly short book. Hers is definitely one of the books I would recommend for giving people a good grounding in this diversity."