Buddha

Another great book from Karen Armstrong. Ms Armstrong takes an historical approach to the life and times of the Buddha, while also providing a lay-account of key teachings and sharing many of the more apparently mythological tales.

Throughout the book Ms Armstrong manages to be respectful, while weaving the accounts into an easy to follow narrative style.

Excellent.

If a book is called “Buddha”, you kind of expect it to be a biography of, well, the Buddha. Karen Armstrong's Buddha looks like a biography of Siddharta Gautama but is rather a retelling of how Buddhism came to be. (To be fair, there doesn't seem to be enough source material to create a complete biography of Gautama Buddha.)

It's still a good book, but not entirely what I expected. For a biography of the Buddha, I preferred Thich Nhat Hanh's “Old Path White Clouds” more, though due to the “no-sources-issue”, it's more a fictional than factual biography.