Enlightenment depends on seeing, on waking up, on the visual insight. This practice uses illumination via the mind's eye to the spirit. Its editor, featured on the recent video at PBS "The Buddha," compiles what's designed to appeal to the eye as text and as image.
It's accessible yet scholarly; a timeline, glossary, and an academically oriented reading list append short articles ranging across the spectrum of what may attract the gaze of the curious investigator. Todd T. Lewis joins Trainor in discussing origins, in the Hindu and ancient Indian contexts, which precede a life of the Buddha. Then, the principals and practices, doctrines and philosophical schools follow. Mark L. Blum and John Peacock add chapters. Holy writings as the sutras and pitakas find elaboration, a feature often skimmed over in introductory texts. Finally, the adaptation of Buddhism across first Asia and then the world gains treatment. Art, ethics, and cultural impacts all gain coverage. It's all presented efficiently, with terms explained and cross-references helping one's own orientation.
As for the illustrations, they can dazzle, as in a two-page sleeping Buddha figure from Burma. The concept of emptiness gets the simple circle from a depiction of the famous Ox-Herding Zen sequence; it matched well the description of what on pg. 140 I spot-checked as a test case of how well the text managed to convey for me a difficult to summarize concept, that of "dependent co-origination." Try this and see if it works: the teaching concludes that "all known realities are constructed realities whose identities are merely intellectual conventions used to order the world so that it can be understood."
It did for me. Kevin Trainor and co-contributors probably faced severe editorial constraints to fit some complicated explanations into short sections on these lively pages. Such topics as the role of women get brief but thoughtful comment, and the links between sections I found especially helpful to connect ideas that otherwise might not have been threaded and enriched. One cross-reference was inaccurate, and the elegant pages can be hard to read in the Oxford UP reprint in paperback as the text falls towards the gutter of the center spine. But these are minor flaws.
The team that produced this guide did so well. I recommend this as a portal into the realms that the Buddhist texts and commentaries and studies in the references at the end continue to elaborate. It's an affordable, engaging, and intelligently sequenced overview that can serve well for a classroom or for one's own study. (Posted to Amazon US 4-21-10)