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Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: As an academic and practicing Buddhist, I looked forward to reading Thurmon's book. The early parts were promising. In heartfelt and well-articulated prose, Thurmon discusses the spiritual need that brought him around to Tibetan Buddhism, and how he became the first Western Tibetan monk. It was downhill from there, unfortunately. He goes over the history of Buddhism, its origins and beliefs, and how it came to the isolated Himalayan kingdom of Tibet. Prior to its tragic takeover by China, Tibet truly was Thurmon's Shangri-La: heaven on earth, a utopia fully realized in the clouds, run for the benefit of all by benevolent monks and wise Lamas. And here is where Thurmon's argument falls short of his goal. His writing seems rushed, thrown together, as if he were pulling an all-nighter to get the manuscript to his publishers by the deadline. Careful, thoughtful analysis gives way to blanket generalities and absolute statements (enlightenment is always perfect, everyone benefits and is happy under the Lamas, etc.) With all due respect to the Tibetan people and culture: I'm sorry Professor Thurmon, but nothing could be THAT good. His final section, in which he lays out a sort of Buddhist Platform for running America, is quite transparently Thurmon's own political positions, self-indulgently presented for the reader's edification. All in all this is one of the most disappointing books I have read in quite a while. Don't waste your time here, folks. Pick up one of the Dalai Lama's books, or else something by Thich Nhat Hanh, if you truly want to understand Buddhism.
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Summary: If you believe we are all in this together...
Review: I believe all critic is but a glimpse on how one grasps the world, and in this, I mean we perceive a split image and tainted with our own personal baggage. Some fine things have been said about the author, about politics and about the author's personality, yet very little has been said about the work: the book.This is perhaps one of the finest books to shed light in the dilema of the individual in a complex social matrix and its struggles to break free and achieve some sort of personal mission or calling. The book makes an excellent bridge, analyzing planetary history, describing moments in which the collective need to create new ways to experience and understand, catapulted the planet into a new frequency of understanding; this described in terms of an Axial period in History. Thurman's ability to describe and phrase the very nature of Ego and what we all have collectively come to call "personality" is fascinating. The importance of this book is in its capacity to present a diagnosis of our era and the very things that have held us back: meaning that human beings have a mission or pursuit, that of being happy, of being a better human being and with this intention he is also saying that we, as a society (and very much so the society in power) have created a fractured and very little avenue for human kind to experience itself in a dimension beyond suffering. I can not understand why there is criticism on the book being political, since we all respond to structures of rule and power, if the possibility of all beings achieving happiness is not on our politicians agenda, then who are the serving? Whose interest is it? Inner Revolution is an invitation to remind us of our Human right to achieve happiness for oneself, others and the planet at large. It is a door to glimpse beyond that which we have all in a way forgotten: the freedom to pursue our true nature.
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Summary: Liminal Convolutions = Demagogue's Delight!
Review: In _Inner Revolution_, Robert Thurman emerges as skillful purveyor of well-worn political platitudes designed to exacerbate the guilt of the apathetic, non-voting liberals we all know and love. He also shines as a sublimely oblivious proponent of William James' hyperthymic, hindsight-free "religion of healthy-mindedness": "The great advantage of such [enlightenment-based] platforms is that they can be sold easily to the general public and the world public, since they offer sensible and practical solutions to problems that have been created and maintained for quite a while now by short-term selfishness on the part of the few and by long-entrenched, blind inertia of habit on the part of the many." Easily sold or not, the problem with the basic premise of Robert Thurman's Inner Revolution - that subjective spiritual enlightenment can be brought to bear upon objective or societal enlightenment-is that one can't legislate any new spiritual truth, or "enlightenment", without imposing the requirements of novel beliefs on those who never wished to accept them in the first place. Nobody in the American political spectrum, except maybe a few extremists on the left and right, would agree that such an incoherent, essentially illiberal assumption is really "enlightened". All political animals, winners and losers, are perforce playing the same kind of games with convenient truths, half-truths and untruths. Their theories and strategies may vary from context to context, but their modus operandi in managing public opinion is consistently the same: tell the people what they want to hear, or whatever elicits the desired reaction. In this respect, the belief that a consensual, spiritual truth could play a role in the actual dynamics of realpolitik is unrealistic at best, and self-serving deception at its worst. How to build a viable base of popular support for enlightenment politics is moot. Thurman's career is living proof that ideological vaporware sells like hotcakes. But as a political philosopher, he stinks. What if one country's "enlightened" ideology and social policy ended up being different from another country's? Democracy X might determine that killing and eating pigs is an enlightened policy, while Democracy Y might decide to place its pigs in elective offices. If enlightenment were legislatible, then both policies would be equally correct and "enlightened", and also equally false. So much for legislatable "enlightenment". As "enlightenment", Thurman's "platform" is about as sturdy as a freshly microwaved slice of American cheese. If Thurman's platform is enlightened, then so is David Duke's, Ralph Nader's-who knows, maybe even Dan Quayle's and Ross Perot's! Assuming that all of their positions are electable in the right constituency, and all claim to be acting in the enlightened self-interest of the American people, then all of their positions are virtually and equally enlightened. For our enlightenment platform to succeed, the innumerable Dan Quayles and David Dukes of this world would have to play along with us; and unless they were already enlightened, it seems doubtful that they would. So if the enlightenment platform is so easy to sell and to implement, then all our potential political adversaries must be borderline enlightened personalities, who will fall to our side merely at the sound of empathetic reassurance: "Hey big guy! We're really talking about the same thing!" From one WASP southerner to another, that might just work. At first it's not quite clear where Thurman stands on the issues of tradition vs. innovation, conservation vs. progress, elite vs. popular Buddhism, and so on. He wants us to buy a "liberal" agenda, but without sharing a complexity of opinions. He either wants us to buy an "enlightenment" that would share that claim with racism and other sundry nasties, or he wants us to accept an "enlightenment" imposed upon us by the state, to the exclusion of all else. Thurman's intense, almost child-like devotion to an idealized Tibet-ruled only by compassionate Dharma-kings and all-seeing Dalai Lamas, but never by her own dark passions- has crept up on, and overtaken, his equally fervid (and equally self-serving) rehashing of a relatively mature pragmatism of secular humanism and progressive economic, social and environmental. Thurman whitewashes the complex nature of traditional Tibetan society and sketches out an idealized vision of a Tibetan social "enlightenment", to promote the distorted but ever-seductive image of Tibet as Shangrila. By doing this, he hopes to dupe yet another generation of rock `n' roll naïfs into believing this utopian pipe dream, which we are induced to collectively hallucinate against the backdrop of a well-smudged palimpsest of two millenia of oft-brutal Central Asian geopolitics; meanwhile, the entire spectacle is dreamily narrated by the highly selective memory of hypocritical American idealism. This timeless vision of archetypal ideological and social wholeness serves to distract the latently guilt-wracked liberal reader against drawing any practical lessons through hindsight of our historical failure to implement long-term liberal humanitarian policies at home. Just as we are about to nod off, we groggily consider by the implausible hope that Thurman's haphazardly developed hybrid of Buddhist and eighteenth-century European ideals of "enlightenment" will jump-start our moribund democracy, and also make us good Buddhists in the process. A hypnogogic image dawns, of an America primed for sudden transformation into the contemporary democratic analogue of an idyllic, feudal Shangrila, that was tragically-but, for purposes of Thurman's historical and ideological reconstructionism-conveniently lost. Having swooned from this vision into ordinary slumber, we awake suddenly to a fond, but patently deceptive, memory. Alas, even at its best, Thurmanspeak is no more of a solution for our long-term moral and social degradation, than any of the more common opiates used to perpetuate the uneasy stupor of the masses. On the balance, I'd have to say that this book has less to do with Buddhist enlightenment, than it does with author's ongoing quest to have the third-biggest fan club in Samsara, next to Jesus and the Beatles.
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Summary: Enlightenment technology to change the world
Review: Robert Thurman is indeed a controversial academic figure in that he is amazingly dedicated to the Buddhist way and is no-holds barred excited about what he talks and writes of. I have seen Professor Thurman speak - he is an experience. What is best and perhaps most disturbing about his writing/speaking is his extraordinary attachment to myth as the main teaching tool for Tibetan Buddhist principles, and history. The Inner Revolution is a fine example of his unique style and presentation of ideas. There are many books on Buddhism that can leave a reader high and dry, and grasping for anything material, this is not one of them. The Inner Revolution present a refreshing history of Buddhism's political successes in Indian and early Tibetan societies, its transforming character, and an authentic vision of the world altering Tibetan Buddhist belief system (and one wonderful poem). The last chapter of the Inner Revolution includes ten methods by which to alter the world, changing the material universe into a "Buddha-verse." These transforming ideas may leave readers a little uncomfortable, myself included, but modifying the world from the inside out can do that. I think of Inner Revolution as accessible Thurman, and a good place to start if one desires knowledge of the Tibetan Buddhist system or the book's author. I enjoyed and highly recommend this book. If you have comments or would like to discuss Tibet, or refugee communities please contact me. Thanks.
Rating: 
Summary: Building a Bridge from America to Tibet
Review: Robert Thurman, being the first Westerner to be ordained as a Tibetan monk, has precedent to speak about eastern philosophy like no other American. That said, when I was looking for a connection between eastern philosophy and the world that I live in, Thurman seemed like the best ambassador. This book is largely a history lesson of the last 2,000 years of buddhist philosophy and its stark contrast to its materialistic counterpart lifestyle (capitolism). You're likely to read a lot of hugely profound things in this book, and learn a lot about the history of buddhism from Asoka to Shakyamuni. What I liked best about this book was Thurmans ability to deftly jump from practical contemporary literature to illuminating thousands of years of tradition. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: This is meant to be a basic and popular book.....
Review: Showing my hand, first, I studied religion under Thurman as an undergraduate at Columbia. Nevertheless, both sets of reviews (they seem on here to be divsible into two camps) have grains of truth to them; some, to me, seem a little too hero-worshipping (either of the man or of the Dharma) and others a little bit too harsh (crushing Thurman for the inclusion of a political agenda in this work).... First, this was meant to be a popular, non-academic book and not a treatise entirely on the history of Tibet or an analysis of its culture. Thurman's 'Central Philosophy of Tibet' is near as dry and distant as books come; he had a reputation as a translator before he had one as a popularizer. Which no doubt he is-- his hand is laid bare in the fact that he's chosen to spend his life educating people in the West of Dharma, of trying to protect and help the Tibetan people (whom he thinks were special, unique, and good....), and achieve some kind of an enlightened polity.... He IS trying to change the world with this book. Necessarily, when you introduce a child to America, you don't always tell ALL of the truth (which is a tough thing to do anyway); when you teach a child about Christianity, you tell of the Gospels and NOT of Revelations, the anti-Semitism of Luther, or the excesses of many of the Popes-- and no one says that these are bad things. Thurman is introducing a culture and an idea-- him having been a monk it's going to be a bit of a polemic (which if you ever read a lot about Tibet most of it is.... strangely only excluding much of what the Dalai Lama has written..... and 'The Dragon in the Land of Snows'-- a history of Tibet...) It's preachy and it is a polemic..... Perhaps the book would have been left better off without the political agenda added at the end. You could say that it helps people to think about WHAT would be good; how could they change their world toward some kind of Shambala BUT it provides a huge way for people to slam this text. Buy this if you want (albeit a bit polemical) an introduction into Buddhism and what went on in Tibet-- it's a fun, easy read. It's worth your time. Then, though, read other books.... to find out more.... cause this one in places IS NOT a strict, hard, grey work of 'Truth'....
Rating:
Summary: The Road to Enlightenment
Review: The Inner Revolution is a helpful aid to the individual. It urges us to search for that "I" beyond the senses. This might be a hard process when your essentially telling yourself to find yourself. But its really telling "yourself" to find your true Self. Once you've been enlightened and seen who you really are behind the external descriptions (and even challenge Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"), only then will you see yourself as one with all of life, rather than your own sensory awareness standing alone against the material world of other sentient beings who possess isolated realities. Whenever a reaction occurs to something as a thought in your mind, even that is usually not your true Self. Your spontaneous thoughts belong to a pool of the actions of people that you experience most in your life- friends, family, peers, etc. When you quickly come up with a response, that originated from hearing it somewhere else. It is key that we have the proper insight of interconnectedness to generate compassion towards all. Therefore, the woes of society must begin with the Self, and cannot be fixed by mending the external features. As Shantideva's shoe-leather analogy expounds, "Who doesn't want to hurt his feet when he walks the rough and brambly earth has two choices; either cover the earth with leather or make himself a pair of sandals." When we come to the realization of truth, we wish to bring that enlightenment to all others. This is the only hope, what he terms as a 'buddhaverse', to ending the sufferings which we inflict on one another. This book is also helpful in destroying the negative misconception of the Buddha's teachings. Some people seem to think it is a philosophy of total apathy. Quite the opposite, rather it believes that perfection comes from the self up (to the whole) and not the other way around. Ascetism can be as dangerous as hedonism. Buddhism finds the middle way with only what is ultimately important. When the interconnected beings are enlightened, then there shall be true Unity. And this is feasible because he doesn't identify enlightenment as an esoteric state of mysticism, but awareness of complete reality, that is for everyone. Above is what I personally gained from "The Inner Revolution". However since it has to do with all peoples as well as your own self, there is alot of political material present as well. But, as I have said, such should come after enlightenment of the Self.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambitious, but...boring
Review: This book was written by literally America's first Tibetan Buddhist monk, Robert Thurman. It has the "scholar's edge", which makes it probably more accessible to those involved in academic Tibetan studies; that's certainly not to say everyone cannot learn from this, but the writing style and the massive amount of material covered borderlines "saturating" the readers mind. This was a sincere book, full of high hopes I'm sure, and for that we can cut him some slack I suppose. After all, it's not as though this is an entirely bad book. However, as a previous reviewer pointed out, Thurman does seem a bit rushed here. As with many of Roberts' other books, the book covers a lot of both history and dogma. Tibetan Buddhism is extremely esoteric and all too often inaccessible to many practitioners. One criticism I make is that history (Tibetan or otherwise) doesn't really have anything to do with the Buddha's Dharma; what was taught is most important! And yes, Thurman does touch on "non-historical" points, such as learning from the practice of the Bodhisattva ideal, et cetera. But I must say, this book was actually, to be frank, rather boring. I concur with our reviewer from Pennsylvania below: Maybe buy a different book. Truthfully there are certainly much better works out there by much more "with both feet on the ground" style teachers. Now Thurman's book, Infinite Life, is by FAR a much more insightful book and I recommend it 10 fold to this one. In Infinite Life, he's matured a bit more if you ask me; perhaps he realized that many of his books are constantly reviewed as being boring. Who knows? This work was ambitious, but gets only 3 stars from me. Take care!
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