Book Review of The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons - Henry Steel Olcott
Henry Steel Olcott's Life of Buddha and
Its Lessons is a little book/essay with a good strong half but which falls
quite short in its delivery thereafter. At first, Olcott writes of the misfortune
that so many people deify, or practically deify, a normal person thought to
have spiritual powers, which, Olcott argues, denigrates the ordinary lives that
other people experience. Then Olcott writes briefly about the Buddha learning
about human suffering and being a model for dealing with human suffering. But
surely, as would be consistent with Olcott's earlier sections, the Buddha was
just a person too, and one who suffered from back pain later in his life and
died of food poisoning at that. I am not saying that the Buddha cannot be a
model for how to live but rather that Olcott was not careful enough in his
essay to avoid the trappings of practically deifying someone, a position he so
acutely militated against. To me, the best part of the book is the chapter
called "The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons" (end of the book).
In this chapter, Olcott writes about how people make up their own stories. He writes about how some people believe in stories they find on television and books and others believe in their own stories. Olcott describes experiments to show this. Then Olcott writes about how we can't know what stories we should believe just because we want to be certain and believe in them, and that the best way to be certain of a story is to ask someone else. He writes about how it is better not to believe in everyone's stories but rather what one knows through experience. He writes, "It is futile respecting the spirit of religious belief without respecting the spirit of religious practice."
This book was written by Henry Steel
Olcott (1832-1907). Olcott was influential in the foundation of the
Theosophical Society. Olcott was an Ohio-born lawyer who worked for a time as a
judge in southern Ohio before moving to New York City to be part of Free-thought
Movement. It was here that he first encountered Spiritualism, which spurred his
interest in Hinduism, Buddhism, and mystical Christianity. He became an
independent scholar and travelled widely through Sri Lanka to study Buddhism
under Buddhist monks. He co-founded the Theosophical Society with Helena
Blavatsky.
Review by: 05, Arlene Bose.
Bibliography
Henry Steel Olcott's Life of Buddha and Its
Lessons/ website
https://www.classicly.com/the-life-of-buddha-and-its-lessons
Henry Steel
Olcott's Life of Buddha and Its Lessons/ apple book store
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=510923214
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