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(More customer reviews)A friend loaned me this book, and from the notes in its margins, it looks like it has passed through many hands before mine. "It's Epstein's best book," my friend explained, "and it changed my life." Mark Epstein is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and this book is his result of twenty years' experience in both Western psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation (p. x).
In the Dalai Lama's Foreward to Epstein's 1995 book, and in his own more recent books including THE ART OF HAPPINESS (1998), STAGES OF MEDITATION (2001), and AN OPEN HEART (2001), he tells us the "purpose of life is to be happy" (p. ix). However, as Epstein reveals in his insightful book, clinging to the self causes suffering. Whereas attachment, aversion, delusion, and faulty perceptions not only cause suffering, they also offer the potential for "release" (p. 16). "We are locked into our minds," Epstein writes, "but we do not really know them. We are adrift and struggling, buffeted by the waves of our minds, having not learned how to float" (p. 17). (Perhaps this is what my own Zen teacher meant when he once told me that I "think too much.")
To find enlightenment, the Buddha encouraged us to become as lamps unto ourselves (p. 40), and Dogen observed that, "to study Buddhism is to study the self" (p. 20). This is also the premise of THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER. Epstein has organized his book into three parts, the Buddhist psychology of mind (pp. 11-102), meditation (pp. 103-155), and therapy (pp. 157-222). In Part I, he demonstrates how Buddhist teachings are the key to understanding the psychology of mind (p. 41), and how those teachings are "less about religion (in the Western sense) than they are a vision of reality containing a practical blueprint for psychological relief" (p. 45). In Part II, Epstein examines the basic Buddhist meditation practice of "bare attention." Meditation, he explains, promotes the therapeutic goals of integration, humility, stability and self awareness (p. 129). In Part III, using non-technical terminology, Epstein integrates Freud's practice of psychotherapy into Buddhist teachings. In the end, Epstein's book is not so much a "feel-good" book about finding happiness in our lives, as a feel-real book well worth reading.
G. Merritt
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