The British writer Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun who now
teaches at Leo Baeck College, a seminary for reform Judaism in London,
because she relishes the dialogue and disputation with her
students. Best known for A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of
Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993), a scholarly but inviting
account of the three monotheistic faiths, you could say that the
world's major religious traditions are her beat. Jerusalem: One City,
Three Faiths (1996) and Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1992)
are among the other works that have earned her a wide and distinctly
interfaith readership.Armstrong sees religion as an essential human activity, one we are no
more likely to outgrow than we are likely to outgrow art. Like art,
religion, in her view, demands to be renewed, if not totally
reformulated, in every generation. It is perhaps her conception of
world religions as media for the imagination and vehicles for
creativity, rather than as mutually exclusive bodies of doctrine, that
has made Armstrong's books as popular as they are.
Her new biography, Buddha, just published as part of the Penguin Lives
series, is her first full-length treatment of how a crucial act of
renewal was accomplished in the Eastern tradition. Karen Armstrong's
Buddha is a towering figure of an era (roughly 800 to 200 B.C.E.) that
the philosopher Karl Jaspers named the Axial Age and that Armstrong
characterizes as "the beginning of humanity as we now know it." The
Buddha's Axial Age peers include Confucius, Socrates, and the Hebrew
prophets, all of whom called on their contemporaries to radically
change their lives. Armstrong also shows how the Buddha (traditionally
thought to have died in 483 B.C.E.) drew on the culture of northern
India, where the search for spiritual breakthrough was no less intense
and urgent in his lifetime than the pursuit of technological advance
is in our own.
This similarity may seem trivial, though, when compared to the
fundamental difference between the Buddha's focus and that of
contemporary Western culture. As Armstrong points out time and again
in her book, the Buddha, more than anything else, insisted that human
life be predicated on compassion. And that, rhetoric aside, is not a
value our society can be congratulated for realizing.
