What Makes You not a Buddhist
— by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
This book is not about meditation. Instead, it looks at everyday life through a Buddhist lens, understanding happiness and suffering from that perspective. Enlightenment ends suffering but also trumps happiness. Khyentse writes persuasively about the importance of understanding emptiness: disappointment lessens, expectations soften, and change is not a shock.
There is much food for thought in this short book for Buddhist students and for anyone interested in the ongoing adaptation of traditional Eastern wisdom into postmodern Western settings.
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So you think you're a Buddhist? Think again. Tibetan Buddhist master Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse - one of the most creative and innovative lamas teaching today - throws down the gauntlet to the Buddhist world, challenging common misconceptions, stereotypes, and fantasies.
With wit and irony, Khysentse urges readers to move beyond the superficial trappings of Buddhism - beyond the romance with beads, incense, or exotic robes - straight to the heart of what the Buddha taught.
With unusual force and originality, he expresses the essence of Buddhism in four simple point, which he presents to the reader a set of challenges:
- Can you accept that all things are impermanent and that there is no essential substance or concept that is permanent?
- Can you accept that all emotions bring pain and suffering and that there is no emotion that is purely pleasurable?
- Can you accept that all phenomena are illusory and empty?
- Can you accept that enlightenment is beyond concepts; that it's not a perfect blissful heaven, but instead a release from delusion?
"You may not have been born in a Buddhist country or to a Buddhist family, you may not wear robes, or shave your head, you may eat meat and idolize Eminem and Paris Hilton. That doesn't mean you can't be a Buddhist."
— From the Introduction
Here at last is a crisp new voice in Tibetan Buddhism. Khyentse, a lama from an influential family and Buddhist lineage in Bhutan, is also a filmmaker, responsible for the sleeper hit The Cup, about a group of Tibetan monks obsessed with soccer. The monk brings the same multicultural fluency to his first book. He can make references to Viagra and Camilla Parker-Bowles as easily as he can tell stories of the Buddha's life. With confidence tempered by wit, he cuts to the core of Buddhism: four 'seals' (truths) that make up a Buddhist 'right view' of the world and existence.
Khyentse writes: "You can change the cup, but the tea remains pure."
— From Publishers Weekly
