Somewhere in the territorial tangle involving present day Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Nepal–more than two thousand years ago, took place a prophetic, decisive birth; the birth of ‘the Buddha’. Prince, wanderer, a questioning spirit to the point of inconsolable companion–the Buddha, the Sakyamuni , Gautam , Siddharth , or whatever other name the world will tag on to him–was at the very least, an ‘enlightened’ man but more than that, the ‘god’ whose great teaching was that there is no god. The teaching, its manifest discourse, its ethics, legends and artistic representation recognize in all this and beyond, the civilizational presence of an object of faith, practice and preaching: Buddhism. This book fluently divides itself into the personal story of the Buddha, the import of Buddhist philosophy, the series of orders, their practices, Buddhism’s spread beyond India, intertwined with an attractive packaging–and unpacking–of Buddhist art through the ages. As a special focus, the story of the institution of Dalai Lama is the obvious highlight gilding the textual framework; making it further easy on the eye and the reader’s sensibility are the archival, illustrative, wonderful pictures full of wonder.
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