In a video entitled, “Japan: The Land of the Disappearing Buddha,” originally issued by the BBC in 1979 as part of the Long Search series on world religions, narrator Richard Eyre remarks that in answer to his question, “Who is the Buddha,” he received all sorts of different answers: “You, me, this stick, nothing, a dead teacher, truth, the ‘thingness’ of a thing, an empty circle, compassion, a shake of the head—until you start to wonder if maybe you’ve asked something silly.”

Ruben Habito’s Experiencing Buddhism: Ways of Wisdom and Compassion, is a readable, well-organized, and enlightening introduction to the incredibly varied ways in which the example and the teaching of the Buddha have entered into and shaped the experience of his followers over the past two and a half millennia. It would serve as an excellent text book for a course on world religions or as a most helpful introduction to Buddhism for the general reader.

The author describes the organization of his book as follows:

This volume introducing Buddhism seeks to throw light on the varieties of Buddhist experience that came forth from the Root experience of Gautama Buddha’s enlightenment. The first part examines the three Treasures that arose from this Root experience, and the second part surveys the varieties of manifestations generated by this experience in their historical and contemporary settings.

In Part I Habito distinguishes two recurrent, intertwining themes in Buddhist views of the Buddha: a paradigm of a perfected being, or a savior to whom on can turn for assistance. He then treats such basic Buddhist concepts as duhkah (not “suffering” or “pain,” but “a kind of experience we humans inevitably encounter at some point of our earthly life—that ‘there is something amiss’ in all this” p. 38), nirvana (“the other side of duhkha or dissatisfaction . . . a state that is attainable in this life, given certain conditions” p. 47), anatman (“rather than being an ontological statement about the nonexistence of the conscious subject, [it] is to be taken as an axiological, or value-oriented, prescription about how one should live” p. 49), and a longer exposition of the ways “emptiness” has been understood and presented throughout the ages.

In Part II, “Varieties of Buddhist Experience,” Habito devotes separate chapters to the history, practice, and experience of Theravada Buddhism, Zen, Tanta and Tibetan Buddhism, Pure Land, and Lotus Buddhism. Concluding each chapter is a short “personal account” in which a contemporary practitioner describes his or her practice and experience of that form of Buddhism. The author is especially attentive to the experience of women in these various Buddhist traditions.

Occasionally the author draws attention to similarities between Buddhist and Christian practices and teachings, but he always does so in a way that respects the integrity of each tradition. I found especially fascinating Habito’s reference to a Pure Land Buddhist’s observation that the 1999 Lutheran/Catholic statement, which says that justification is due solely to God’s blessing and is not attained by good works, “closely approaches the core of Japan’s Other Power Buddhism” (p. 198).

Sometimes, however, intriguing parallels are not pointed out. For instance, writing about Theravada Buddhism, Habito notes that the “sharp divide between monk and laity has blurred in recent years, with the increasingly widespread practice of meditation among the laity” (97). This blurring of the monastic/lay divide is also a contemporary phenomenon in Christianity, as the number of oblates (lay associates of monastic communities) increases and expressions of the so-called “new monasticism” continue to multiply.

A final chapter deals with “Prospects and Challenges for Buddhism in the Twenty-first Century,” among which Habito identifies socio-ecological engagement, gender and sexuality, Western psychology, and interreligious encounters.

A concluding “Bibliographical Essay” highlights especially helpful “titles from among the thicket” of the many contemporary writings on Buddhism.