Buddha Case

Rupert Gethin, author of The Foundations of Buddhism, provides an introductory view to the concepts of Buddhism. In review of two thousand and five hundred years of Buddhism's existence, Gethin examines how Buddhism has become a complex broadly extended set of philosophical and religious beliefs and practices (Gethin 10). The author highlights the shared aspects of traditional Buddhism and draws parallels between understandings, customs, philosophies, and other similar ideas. The Foundations of Buddhism possesses a simple structure, containing a short introduction, and ten chapters, accompanying an arrangement of tables, notes, maps as well as a helpful glossary for better comprehension. Even though Gethin attempts to create a textbook that could be easily understood to the amateur reader, compared to other texts, one must not confuse the straightforward structure as being unworthy to the attention of academic scholars. Unlike the majority of Western books, the introduction portrays Gethin's anomalous way of concentrating on similar Buddhist practices, in comparison to their differences. Gethin covers three different traditions of Buddhism, relating to Mahayana or "Eastern Buddhism", Tibetan or "Northern Buddhism" and Theravada or "Southern Buddhism" traditions (Gethin 19). The following ten chapters then proceed to address key concepts of Buddism: the historical knowledge and legend of Siddhartha Gautama or "Buddha", aspects of the Dharma and Abhidharma, scriptural reciting, the structural way of Buddha's teaching through the Four Noble Truths, the communities that followed Buddha though their social system and monastic beliefs, the Buddhist understanding of cosmology, study of the mind , space, and time, the analysis of the self and dependent arising, the differentiation between peaceful or intuitive meditation and faith, the Abhidharma and Buddhist theology system, the ideal of bodhisattva and enlightenment, and concludes with examining the history of Buddhist schools and their locations.

...