Donald S. Lopez Jr.'s "Buddhism: A Journey through History"

Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author, translator, or editor of more than twenty books, including The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life, The Story of Buddhism, and the award-winning Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism.

Lopez applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Buddhism: A Journey through History, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is the first page of a chapter called “Apocalypse.” It provides a capsule biography of Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965), who served as Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1933 to 1940. When he is remembered positively today, it is for his efforts on behalf of destitute farm families during the Great Depression.

As noble as those efforts were, they would seem to have little to do with Buddhism until the reader turns the page and reads the first paragraph of page 100. There we learn that Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948 was derailed with the publication of a series of letters he had written that began “Dear Guru.” Wallace was a closet Buddhist. He believed that there would soon be an apocalyptic war in which a Buddhist army would sweep out of their kingdom deep in the Himalayas to defeat the forces of evil and inaugurate a golden age of peace and enlightenment. This war is predicted in a famous eleventh-century Sanskrit text called the Kalachakra Tantra, a text that remains of great importance to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In the text, the kingdom of the righteous is called Shambhala, the inspiration for “Shangri-La,” the Himalayan utopia in James Hilton’s 1933 bestseller Lost Horizon, later made into a film by Frank Capra. The Kalachakra Tantra and its fascinating history is the main topic of the chapter.

So, although page 99 itself initially seems to have little to do with Buddhism, that is exactly the point. It demonstrates something that I try to do throughout the book: to show that Buddhism is found in unexpected places around the world over the two and half millennia of its history. After a lengthy introduction that sets forth the teachings of the Buddha and the central doctrines and practices of Buddhism, the book invites the reader to journey across continents and centuries to learn how Buddhism has changed the world.

Learn more about Buddhism: A Journey through History at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Buddhism and Science.

--Marshal Zeringue