Erik Graff's Reviews > What the Buddha Taught

This book, assigned for a class entitled "Introduction to Eastern Religions" at Grinnell College, was influential, along with Coomaraswamy's Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, in first shaping my sense of what that "religion" was all about. Maintaining, as I recall, that the oldest Pali texts and the Theravada tradition were, if anything, practical and antimetaphysical--as opposed, say, to later Mahayana tendencies, these books disposed me favorably to Buddhism in its supposedly "original" formulation. Concurrently, again in this class, I was also learning to appreciate some forms of the Japanese appropriation of the teachings, particularly Rinzi and Soto Zen schools of thought.

Now, having had years of subsequent study of other religious traditions, I am more suspicious of such interpretations and of my own credulous disposition. It's much like the assumption that Jesus held to values evocative of one's own highest ideals. With Jesus, as with the biblical traditions as a whole, I know a lot more than I do about Buddhism or any other religion for that matter--enough to know that I don't know and probably cannot know what Jesus himself believed and taught. I can make educated estimates based on the evidence and qualified by a healthy caution in the recognition that I will ever tend to impose my own values and worldview on the past, but they are ultimately untestable hypotheses. By extension, and knowing that the earliest Pali texts were neither written by the Buddha himself or even during his lifetime, I am now more suspicious of such attractive formulations as that afforded by this author.