John > Recent Status Updates

While quite dense, it offers quite a lot of wisdom. I think the content of the book itself is wonderful, but when considering how the information is presented (if you strip away Mingyur's personal stories), it can often read like a textbook, both heavily informative, but not always very easy to digest. But again, really interesting! I'm hoping to finish this by the end of the night.

Truly slow-burning, the book feels very dense, but all the same, I appreciate how it doesn't use a lot of jargon. When Buddhist or Hindu jargon is used, it tends to be explained. Relieving, because I find so many books that use their philosophical side as a selling point tend to use so many technical terms. So much so that it can turn off curious readers from wanting to reading it.

I think this book came into my life at a really good time. There's a lot of wisdom in it that I appreciate. It's hard to praise a book about religion without sounding as if you are proselytising, even more so when you start to feel a personal connection with the religion the book concerns. I haven't finished it yet, of course, but I would recommend it to anyone curious about the life and insight of a Buddhist monk.

So far, the book reads like a cross between a memoir (of Rinpoche's journey / experiment outside of his monastery) and a crash course in Buddhist meditation and psychology. I'm not complaining though, because I find it really insightful into how Buddhist monks themselves understand their practice and apply it to everyday life (for other monks such as himself, and for 'Western' readers like myself).