Since I've enjoyed some of Stephen Batchelor's other writings I figured I'd take a chance on the cat bookstore's copy of his history of "The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture". It's a fairly quick read that delivers on its subtitle by recounting a series of vignettes linking current (as of 1994) Buddhists teaching in the West back to the Eastern teachers that founded these traditions. The result is something more engaging than a dry chronological history of everything that happened between Menander meeting Nagasena and the Dalia Lama showing up at the Berlin Wall. Instead, we get a much better sense of the larger than life personalities involved in each of these living traditions that have enabled them to expand and grow and transcend their cultural roots over the past 2500 years. However, this feature is balanced by a bug (if you can call it that). The book contains so much history in each of its dense, often partly overlapping, stories that there are a bewildering number of names associated with an ever ramifying number of traditions that we have to try and keep distinct. While it's a not a scholarly work and is trying to appeal to a broad audience, it's attempt to touch on everyone who is anyone in the long history of Buddhism sometimes makes it feel a bit exhausting and over-written. So it may not be a good first stop for people who don't at least have some of this history already mapped out.
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