The Most Annoying Thing About Books

Well, I've just had that immeasurably unpleasant experience again, while reading Huston Smith's chapter on Buddhism:  the inescapable fact that, due to the profundity of the ideas under discussion and the brilliance of the scholar's exposition of them, I will be obligated to read his book again in the not very distant future.   I might have anticipated this, having only just this evening learned that Professor Smith was far more than merely an instructor in religion and philosophy for a prior generation of MIT undergraduates.  The fact that PBS and Bill Moyers would single him out for a five-part series (http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=1402988) moves him into that select fraternity which includes Joseph Campbell, Niall Ferguson, Jacob Bronowski, Sir Kenneth Clarke, and Mortimer J. Adler:  the public intellectual of scholarly weight, as opposed to the 500-word newspaper and magazine pundits forever mired in the transient political tempests of the moment.

Of course, despite Prof. Smith's newly-established stature, I reserve the right to disagree with him on certain points.  His insistence that Buddhism was a reform movement directed against Brahmanism, while probably true, scarcely justifies his extended analogy between the Buddha and Martin Luther:  describing Buddhism as "an Indian protestantism" (p. 101) seems to go wide of the mark, no matter how pharisaical orthodox Hinduism had become.  And Luther's translation of the Vulgate into German does not brook comparison with the Buddha's teaching in the vernacular:  the Buddha had no particular interest in liberating the Vedas and Upanishads from their Sanskrit obscurity, because his was a path of innovation, not a Lutheran battle for a Pauline primitivism that prefigured the administrative dominance of the Roman curia.  While Luther was nothing if not prolific, the Buddha consigned nothing to writing, despite having received a princely education.  And the Buddha was infinitely compassionate; Luther, in his "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants", went so far as to justify violence on the part of princely rulers to suppress peasant insurrection; this resulted in the killing of 100,000 German peasants in 1525 in the aftermath of the battle of Frankenhausen.

The two men could not have been more different, both in their lives and in the religions they founded.

364 days, 50 novels, 50 books of non-fiction to go.