For comments on the Dalai Lama, see my reviews of other books by him (just click on his name). This book has a fact-filled Introduction by Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche. It is a compilation of selected lectures delivered at annual celebrations in Tushita, India, that includes some Q&A sessions.

Much of the material in this book describing Buddhism was familiar to me from my other readings on the subject (besides books books 4, 5, 29 and 41 by him, these include books 37, 67, 68, 69).

To be concise, Buddhism's Four Noble Truths are true suffering, true cause of suffering, true cessation of suffering, and true path to achieve this cessation. And the goal of every sentient being is to achieve true happiness, which involves a selfless altruism, or a true compassion for all living beings. To achieve such, one must transform one’s mind to achieve the inner mental stability needed for the “right” mental attitude. Thus Buddhism is more about orthopraxy (right practice) than about orthodoxy (right belief). Buddhism says that belief without practice is worthless. Compassion and altruism are the key states the Buddhist strives to obtain. There are many ways to get there, so these goals are free of any specific religious worldviews or faiths. And the overlap between the orthopraxy of Christ and that of Buddha is simply enormous, as the above books testify.

In this review I focus on Buddhist words that often cause great confusion among non-Buddhists. First is “nothing” which, when applied to the ultimate mind-state (or Nirvana) does not mean a void but that the state of mind does not involve any thing, so read nothing as “no thing” - it is well beyond a thing and can be thought as the completely self-less state of mind as being “in” or “with” the mind of God. The word “emptiness” also does not mean a void but rather the state of being devoid of any sense of self – the best Christian word to compare is kenosis – complete emptying of self and complete openness to the divine, or God. One is empty of any worldly attachments, empty of the wrong idea of independence. The idea is “dependent existence” – what we nowadays call “holism” in science or theology. (This has been a key Buddhist concept for millennia.) The materialistic idea of reductionism was rejected by the Buddha in favor of a universal holism where things happen in a “dependent arising” – a holistic view of cause and effect with universal (not isolated) dependencies and universal theological implications.

Buddhists say that there is no such thing as the soul, but I think they mean here soul as a “thing” of a material substance. However, and I found this the most difficult to follow, they speak of a “gross mind” and a “subtle mind.” A gross mind is part of the mind/body holism (no mind/body dualism in Buddhism!) so is dependent upon the life of the body – gross mind dies when the body dies. But subtle mind is eternal and passes on with the new life in their endless cycles of life and death. Thus it seems to me that subtle mind is what I call one’s spirit (or soul, remembering that there is no material body). Finally, Buddhists don’t believe in a Creation but in eternal cycling of life – in his only physics comment the Dalai Lama said Buddhist ideas are in tune with endless cycles of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, but not with the idea of a single Big Bang. I enjoyed this book very much, as I need repeated readings of Buddhist thought (especially on the non-orthopraxy concepts) to help me understand their ideas. This, his latest of many books, may be a great start. As such I give it a very strong recommendation.