Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism

Olendzki, executive director of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and editor of a Buddhist journal, has written a dense book on Buddhist psychology. The book consists of short essays grouped by themes; many of the essays first appeared elsewhere. This gives the book a bit of a sound-bite feel; no one idea is developed for very long, so the reader, given the difficulty of the material, must, like a good Buddhist, pay attention. Olendzki is himself a close reader of Buddhist texts and clearly grounds his reasoning in those texts. His academic prose—use of passive voice, Latinate words—unfortunately compounds the difficulty of comprehension (“If there is no regarding of phenomena as 'mine' then the self who suffers from attachment to phenomena is not constructed”). This is not for the nightstand Buddhist; readers will require some knowledge of the Buddhist understanding of how the mind works, and they will also need some patience with highly abstract prose. (Apr. )