Looking Both Ways
Buddhist Scriptures. Selected and translated by Edward Conze. (Penguin Classics, 3s. 6d.) Asia Looks at Western Christianity. By Thomas
Ohm. (Nelson, 25s.) EAST, West, Buddhist, Christian : it is as easy to exaggerate as to minimise the differences. Spiritual values, an Asian patent, offer a useful foil to materialism. Thus, the Buddhist peoples whose representatives seemed so anti-Western at Ban- dung were quick to show their detestation of Chinese Communist aggression. Like Christianity, Buddhism is more widely diffused than statistics might suggest, and its message of selfless compas- sion, too, is not wholly obscured under supersti- tion and verbiage.
Dr. Conze's Buddhism is still in many ways the best general introduction to•an enormous subject. His selection of Buddhist Texts is useful in show-: ing how widely some schools departed from the original path. In what is meant to be a disarming Introduction to his Penguin, Buddhist. Scriptures, he claims for his new translations that they are chosen mainly from early texts, that they avoid hackneyed tracts, and that they are illustrative of 'the central tradition.' The temptation to make Buddhism more attractive than its transmigra- tion gimmick already keeps it has been 'manfully resisted,' and 'obvious contradictions have been faithfully reproduced . . . warts and all.' It is, in fact, a very miscellaneous anthology. But the good things in it, aside from the Shakyamuni legend, and the Heart and Diamond Sutras, seem almost as far to left and right of centre as those in, his earlier collection. True, there are no precepts so peripheral as that of the Left-Handed Tantric sect which enjoins 'daily intercourse in out of the way places with twelve-year-old girls of the Candala caste.' But far too much of the material is merely amusing and curious, angled down to the level of the Dharma Bums. For the rest, we have local monastic rules, doctrinal formulas and so on. Without the aid of Dr. Conze's earlier works, this book is thus rather entertaining than edifying or even instructive.
Father Ohm is a Benedictine who takes a long, not wholly gloomy, look at those Asian wastes in which the clerical salesman, even when his foot gets in the door, takes few more orders. His information is well documented but far from new, with a great deal too much from Tagore. The spirit of his religion is not dead in the East, and he aptly quotes without disapproval a poem of the Zen master Joka : One.moon, and one only Is reflected in all waters. All moons in the water Are one with the one moon.
HUGH GORDON PORTEUS
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