The current interest in Zen and the popularity of Buddhism in the West are an understandable reaction to the artificiality and ugliness prevalent in the world today, and also to various concepts nowadays judged rightly or wrongly as inoperative. Those seeking an antidote to new age materialism and the empty claims of pseudo-spirituality will find it in Schuon's incisive discernment of the intrinsic orthodoxy of Buddhism. Far from discounting the providential "mythology" of the person of the Buddha, the author relates its historical--and sometimes contradictory--phenomena to their celestial roots in the Divine Qualities and to the human virtues that form the necessary framework for a spiritual life. Notions crucial to Buddhism such as suffering and its cessation, void-form, nirvana-samsara are elucidated in the light of the Vedantic distinction Atma-Maya, providing an important key to understanding the differences between Western philosophical "individualism" and the serenity of Eastern metaphysics. Here is a perspective that stands above sectarian factionalism while at the same opening unique insights into the multi-faceted spiritual universe that is Buddhism.

"Like a magnet, the beauty of the Buddha draws all the contradictions of the world and transmutes them into radiant silence; the image deriving therefrom appears as a drop of the nectar of immortality fallen into the chilly world of forms and crystallized into a human form, a form accessible to men."