The current interest in Zen and the popularity of Buddhism in the West are
an understandable reaction to the artificiality and ugliness prevalentin the
world today, and also to various concepts nowadays judged rightly or wrongly as
inoperative. Those seeking an antidote to new age materialism and the empty
claims of pseudo-spirituality will find it in Schuon's incisive discernment of
the intrinsic orthodoxy of Buddhism. Far from discounting the providential
"mythology" of the person of the Buddha, the author relates its historical and
sometimes contradictory phenomena to their celestial roots in the Divine
Qualities and to the human virtues that form the necessary framework for a
spiritual life. Notions crucial to Buddhism such as suffering and its cessation,
void-form, nirvana-samsara are elucidated in the light of the Vedantic
distinction Atma-Maya, providing an important key to understanding the
differences between Western philosophical "individualism" and the serenity of
Eastern metaphysics. Here is a perspective that stands above sectarian
factionalism while at the same opening unique insights into the multi-faceted
spiritual universe that is Buddhism.
"Like a magnet,
the beauty of the Buddha draws all the contradictions ofthe world and transmutes them into radiant silence; the image deriving there from appears as a drop of the nectar of immortality fallen into the chilly world of forms and crystallized into a human form, a form accessibleto men."
Those seeking an antidote to new age materialism and the
empty claims of pseudo-spirituality will find it in Schuon's incisive
discernment of the intrinsic orthodoxy of Buddhism. Far from discounting the
providential "mythology" of the person of the Buddha, the author relates its
historical phenomenon to their celestial roots in the Divine qualities and to
the human virtues that form the necessary framework for a spiritual life
providing an important key to understanding the differences between Western
philosophical "individualism" and the serenity of Eastern
metaphysics.
