Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
I chose this book because she 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.
Tell me about your first choice, Cathy Cantwell’s Buddhism: The Basics.
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.
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After teaching English at secondary level in Jamaica and London, and working for a Christian organisation that encouraged inter-cultural and inter-faith encounter, Elizabeth Harris changed career in 1986 through travelling to Sri Lanka to study Buddhism. She stayed eight years and completed a doctorate in Buddhist Studies. She then worked as a research fellow at Westminster College, Oxford, specialising in Buddhist Studies, and then as executive secretary for inter-faith relations for the Methodist Church of Britain. She is now a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University, specialising in Buddhism. She is a member of the management board of the UK Association for Buddhist Studies and President of the European Network of Buddhist Christian Studies. She uses a form of Buddhist meditation in her own spiritual life and is interested in what Buddhism can offer not only to Buddhists but to the world.
