Buddhism

A Journey Through History

By: Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Narrated by: Christopher Grove

One of the world's leading scholars of Buddhism presents the story of its dramatic journey across the globe

Over the course of twenty-five centuries, Buddhism spread from its place of origin in northern India to become a global tradition of remarkable breadth, depth, and richness. Donald S. Lopez Jr. draws on the latest scholarship to construct a detailed and innovative history of Buddhism—not just as a chronology through the centuries or as geographic movement, but as a dense matrix of interconnections.

Beginning with the life and teachings of the Buddha, Lopez shows how a set of evolving ideas and practices traveled north and east to China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet, south and southeast to Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and westward to Europe and the Americas. He provides insights on questions that Buddhism has asked and answered in different times and different places—about apocalypse, art, identity, immortality, law, nation, persecution, philosophy, science, sex, war, and writing.

Vast in its erudition and expansive in its vision, this is the most complete single-volume history of Buddhism in its full historical and geographical range.

©2024 Donald S. Lopez Jr. (P)2024 Tantor Media

A must listen.

Very informative, and entertaining. As a Jewish Buddhist and former monk I enjoyed the book.

EXCELLENT

I find this book worthy of listening to and reading, which I did .
Unlike an other review, I do recommend investing in the book.
Like anything else one studies, no books is always 100% to your expectations, but each book has something to deliver and pounder upon and open the way to further study.
That is the purpose of studying the same topic by different authors.
The narrator, Mr. Christopher Grove, as always, is a pleasure to listen to.
My thanks to all involved, JK.

This is a Christian's idea of a good overview of Buddhism

This is a Christian's idea of a good overview of Buddhism. And I mean it in a bad way. I don’t know whether the author himself is a Christian, but that is irrelevant; these are not the topics Buddhists would find central or definitive to their history and heritage.

It is deeply imbued with Christian religious concepts, presuppositions, and preoccupations. While it is not impossible to tell the story of Buddhism in those terms, it is certainly partial and awkward, leaving out many much more central cultural and historical aspects. The author is not telling lies, but he's certainly not telling the whole truth, and not even the most central parts. I am not myself Buddhist, but my family members are, and they would find it confusing to find their religion introduced in this way. And I know that such flaws are avoidable because I have read a much better introduction to Buddhism by Kang-Nam Oh, a scholar of comparative religion who is himself Christian. His 2006 book Buddhism as a Neighboring Religion (the book is in Korean) is sort of a “for dummies” type, a much more elementary, popular exposition of Buddhism specifically written for his fellow Christians, and it avoids the shortcomings that I mentioned above.

Also, despite its lip service to the worldwide and local nature of Buddhist practices, this book is highly Indocentric, presupposing the now-lost Indian version of Buddhism as the true, genuine Buddhism worthy of its name, instead of directing attention to living and flourishing varieties of Buddhism worldwide that can now boast histories as lengthy as the one practiced in continental India. The Christian equivalent would be focusing on the first four centuries of its development unfolding in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and then treating the rest of its history as mere consequences or echoes of that period. I mean, of course all Christians often look back to those times as an important, formative period, but modern Christianity cannot be reduced to what happened in those lands in those times.