All Is Change
by Lawrence Sutin
Published by Little, Brown and Company
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Reviewed by Bernadette Cogswell
Subtitled: The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West
All Is Change is a refreshingly Western examination of the East-West philosophical polarity.
Lawrence Sutin traces the migration of Buddhist texts and concepts to the West from Grecian times to the present through the documents and accounts of Buddhism's greatest detractors, champions, and purveyors. Occasionally dry in the early pages, All Is Change evolves into a full historical survey of the connections between Eastern Buddhism and Western philosophy.
Frequent tidbits, such as the origin of Coleridge's "Xanadu" and Marx's "opiate of the masses," enliven the strict chronological structure of the book and a consciously absent authorial voice helps the book adhere to its desire to present an account "'rooting' for neither side."
Sutin's work is a challenging read, even for the courageous, and requires as much patience as any Buddhist meditation practice. The book avoids the mainstream fluff popular in the Buddhist nonfiction genre in two ways:
1. Sutin unabashedly explores the moral, racial, and cultural evolution of Buddhism in the West from a purely Western viewpoint: sexual mentoring among monks, Western appropriation of Buddhist themes for BMW commercials, and missionary zealousness grace the pages alongside the requisite examinations of the development of monasteries, the Tibet-China conflict, and the major lineages of Buddhist practice.
2. Sutin's biographer's eye bestows every personage included in the work richness, no matter how obscure his or her role in popular history. Sutin has a knack for transforming people's souls into nuggets that can be written in a sentence and he liberally peppers his narrative with these nuggets.
The joy of reading this book is the feeling of having waged an intellectual marathon and won when you read the last page. The value is the sophisticated depth that Sutin brings to a subject worthy of the attention.
Armchair Interviews says: Challenging but worth the time and energy.