Description: For the past two thousand years and more the figure of Gautama, the Buddha has attracted hagiographers and legend-makers whose output has for the most part left readers with a sense of dissatisfaction and frustration. On the other hand, there has been a flood of arcane scholarship on particular aspects of the Buddha's life, times, and teaching which has left the discriminating general reader unmoved. For him this biography, based on very extensive reading and written with rare elegance, delicacy, and verve will serve as an exhilarating breath of fresh air. Rather than treating Gautama as an isolated and prodigious phenomenon, the author views his life in the context of the important, eventful, and colourful age in which he lived. Part I 'The World of the Buddha' thus opens with a vivid account in a rich, descriptive, speculative vein of that wider world, of Greece, Persia, the Levant, China, Mongolia, Mesopotamia, Assyria; of Memphis, Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon. Part II 'Biographical' is the kernel of the book and occupies the greater part of it, progressing from Maya's Dream to the Buddha's death and beyond. Here we have a sensitive and deeply felt interpretation of the Buddha's life with the aim, as the author delicately expresses it, of a shift in 'emphasis from origins to attitudes - and from attitudes to those subtle processes of 'feeling and apprehension' to 'offer an interpretation of the Buddhist legend compatible with common sense'. Part III offers an elegant interpretation of 'The Word of the Buddha', Part IV 'And the Word Was Made Flesh' discusses Buddhist art and iconography, Part V 'The Buddha in a Changing World' examines what subsequent generations made of the Buddha'slegacy. This edition has a new chapter that evaluates subsequent research and writing on the Buddha's life and times, and major developments in the Buddhist world.

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