Book Reviews

Printed in the  Winter 2026  issue of Quest magazine. 

Zen at the End of Religion: An Introduction for the Curious, the Skeptical, and the Spiritual but Not Religious
by James Ishmael Ford reviewed by Dhananjay Joshi
Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Monkfish, 2025. 188 pp., paper, $19.95.

I get strange looks from my friends and acquaintances when I talk about Zen practice. (The brows are raised even higher when I mention koans.) At the slightest hint of curiosity, I have pointed them to classics in Zen practice such as Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki Roshi. Zen at the End of Religion by James Ishmael Ford offers a wonderful alternative.

 “We’re in a liminal moment, when the grip of our old religions has loosened,” Ford writes. The first part of this book delves into questions: What is religion? What is spirituality? And where does Zen come in? One could say that religion is that part of a culture associated with meaning and purpose. Spirituality answers to the “why” of our lives, however elusive that quest may be.

Ford explains that there are three groups within the “spiritual but not religious” category. The first is deeply suspicious of religious institutions but interested in alternative approaches to spirituality as well as health. The second group is also suspicious of institutions but is drawn to mystical traditions seeking and seeing common elements of wisdom in Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, Hasidic Judaism, and the Kabbalah as well as the writings of the fourth- and fifth-century Christian Desert Fathers. This group sees spirituality as a unifying force in religions. The third group carries a belief that the traditional religions can be transformative. As Ford writes, “They want to drink from the ancient well and know for themselves whether the waters are cool or warm.”

These questions are a personal matter for Ford. He himself is a Unitarian Universalist as well as a Zen Buddhist. Zen practice is the core of his inner life. He is in touch with the spiritual within religion.

There is a chapter titled “Why Zen?” The answer here is that Zen puts us in touch with the spiritual core of ancient religions. We all have heard the term “buddha nature”: realizing that is waking up.

Ford concludes part 1 by introducing us to three varieties of Zen: secular Zen (Zen stripped of religious content), often associated with Western psychology; Jewish Zen (Zen practitioner and psychotherapist Brenda Shoshanna says, “These practices are like two wings of a bird, both are needed to fly”); and Zen Christianity.

Part 2 is titled “The Secret Teachings of the Zen Way.” This part is most useful for those who want to know more when they hear, “Zen is about Awakening. Always.” This is where we first encounter the koan—a direct pointing to reality with an invitation to our own demonstration of understanding. In an intimate way, everything is connected, everything counts, every action matters, and every thought has consequences. Zen is also an invitation to pay attention.

No discussion of Zen teachings is complete without mentioning The Heart Sutra and its core: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Ford gives us another view: “You are not it, but in truth it is you.” He writes, “I am not it. My ideas. My desires. My hurt. My longing. My joy: I feel I own them. But I’m wrong. In another sense they own me. These things, ideas, desire, hurt, longing, joy all play out as me, and my part of the great web of things. Now this. Now that.”

Ford gives out a secret: “Form is boundless. The boundless is this particular thing. We are not it. But in truth. It is us. It is you. It is me. The secret teachings of the Zen way. In the palm of a hand.” The spiritual within religions is Zen in our every breath, meaning found in a meaningless world.

 One of the most important aspects of every teaching is how one can make it one’s own. Part 3 offers specific tools for practice. Zen is a way of awakening by means of practices. The chapters on “Koan and Huatou” and “Great Doubt, Faith, and Energy” are to be read slowly and with attention. Chapters on “Ritual and Liturgy” and “Lovingkindness” are enlightening. The chapter “Retreats and a Note on What to Do When You Can’t” is a must-read, as retreats are a core of Zen practice today. “Waking Up in the Kitchen” is a lesson in simplicity in cooking and eating.

Part 4 is titled “Direct Pointing” and takes you on a journey with koans. It is intensely individual. I will leave the reader alone with it.

Part 5 brings all this material together. In a world of chaos, where it is hard to find meaning and direction, Zen is a way of awakening, like a poem that touches and transforms. It is a guidepost.

Is this book enough for the new seeker? Not really. Find a sitting group or practicing community near you and then “sit and become Buddha.”

Dhananjay Joshi

Dhananjay Joshi is a regular reviewer for Quest.

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Printed in the  Winter 2026  issue of Quest magazine. 

The Mother of All Religions: The Genesis of Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Ancient Theology, Orientalism, and Buddhism
Urs App
Wil, Switzerland: UniversityMedia, 2025. xii + 460 pp.; hardcover, $48.90; paper, $39.40.

 

Urs App states the central thesis of his book by saying, “Whatever [H.P. Blavatsky] knows appears to be drawn not from native teachers and texts but from Western printed sources that she often criticizes and reinterprets to fit into the Procrustean bed of her ideological framework.”

App argues that everything Blavatsky wrote and thought came either from books she had read or her own imagination. He devotes the entirety of his work to proving this thesis. Nevertheless, its errors in both logic and use of evidence, as well as significant omissions, leave it as a pretentious but unconvincing analysis of HPB’s thought.

App argues correctly that one of Blavatsky’s prime objectives was to prove the existence of a primordial esoteric tradition that underlies all world religions. But his attitude toward this tradition is peculiar: he repeatedly connects it with orientalism (a somewhat discredited scholarly approach from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) as if the idea had never appeared anywhere else: “The present work—focused as it is on the idea—of a unique primeval wisdom-religion presented as the esoteric mother of all world religions—is more deeply connected with the construct of a single ‘Oriental philosophy’ than it may seem at first glance. In fact, both ideas are intimately connected to the Western discovery of Buddhism and, more particularly, to the idea of an ancient ‘esoteric Buddhism’” (vi).

App virtually ignores the fact this idea of a primordial tradition goes back in the West long before orientalism was ever thought of—for example, in the philosophia perennis or “perennial philosophy” of the fifteenth-century savant Marsilio Ficino.

Sometimes App does not even appear to understand what Blavatsky is saying. For example, Blavatsky mentions that “the ‘Stan-gyour’ is full of the rules of magic, the study of occult powers, and their acquisitions, charms, incantations, etc.” (221).

App upbraids her: “What she appears to ignore is that the Bstan-’gyur is not a single text but a huge collection of Tibetan Buddhist sacred scriptures containing more than 3,600 texts filling some 225 volumes.”

The Tangyur (so pronounced: Tibetan is neither spelled nor transcribed phonetically) is the second part of the major Tibetan canon (the first being the Kangyur) and is indeed voluminous. But what in Blavatsky’s statement implies that she believes it is a single text? All she says is that it is filled with spells and incantations, which it no doubt is.

Sometimes App’s own errors are comical. Blavatsky mentions a “Svabhavika” school of Buddhism. “Now,” writes App, “the trouble is that such a ‘Svabhavika’ Buddhist school . . . has never existed except in the imagination of some Western occultists” (215).

It took me fifteen seconds of Internet research to find a Wikipedia article on the Svabhavika school: “Dvaitadvaita Vedanta, also known as Svabhavika Bhedabheda and as Svabhavika Bhinnabhinna, . . . romanized: Dvaitādvaita Vedānta, Svābhāvika Bhedābheda, Svābhāvika Bhinnābhinna) is the philosophical doctrine of ‘natural identity-in-difference’ or ‘natural difference cum-non-difference’” (emphasis in original).

Of course Blavatsky used the published sources available to her. But App consistently argues that if she cites one of these sources, she could have only gotten this information from this source and no other.

Take the etymology of the name of the Master Koot Hoomi. HPB replies to the criticism of an orientalist that this could not be a Tibetan name, citing one Mr. Lillie, “an expert at the British Museum,” who “ransacked the Tibetan dictionary for the words ‘Koot’ and ‘Hoomi,’ and found no such words.” HPB retorts, “I say, ‘buy a better dictionary’ or ‘replace the expert by a more expert one.’ Let Mr. Lillie try the glossaries of the Moravian Brothers.”

Blavatsky is alluding to a Tibetan dictionary compiled in 1866 by a Moravian missionary named Heinrich August Jäschke. Here App finds that “ku” is “an honorific prefix, while “thu-mí” is “an inhabitant of a neighboring country. Koot Hoomi thus means ‘honorable inhabitant of a neighboring country’” (267).

App erroneously concludes that because Blavatsky refers to Jäschke’s glossary, she must necessarily have learned it from that glossary and in no other way. It is as if I cited a dictionary definition and you immediately concluded that I could only have learned this word by finding it in that dictionary. Such shoddy reasoning appears on practically every page of this book.

Similarly, App contends that Blavatsky got the idea of the tripartite human entity of spirit, soul, and body from Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s occult novel Zanoni (77). App does not say that this idea of the tripartite human entity goes back to the earliest days of Christianity, as I have shown in my book Inner Christianity. There is no reason to blindly assume that HPB got it from Bulwer-Lytton.

Of course App regards the Masters and ancillary figures—along with their teachings—as complete fabrications by Blavatsky. Yet sometimes he cites material that contradicts his own thesis. He refers to a period when Blavatsky, at a retreat, attempted to explain occult teachings. A.P. Sinnett, who was present, reports: “The situation was curiously embarrassing. Madame Blavatsky in spite of all her shortcomings was our only channel of communication with the occult world. At first, crediting her with more knowledge than she actually possessed we endeavoured to extract specific teachings from her . . . I have the M.S. book in which I recorded the results, which were of a very unsatisfactory character” (277).

Blavatsky, the sole source and font of all her ideas, according to App, could not even provide a coherent account of the occult teaching when left to her own devices. App writes:

When faced with the accusation that Blavatsky had invented the Mahatmas and that they are “men of straw,” Blavatsky resorts to an argument she had frequently made, namely, that her works as well as the Mahatma letters are proof to the contrary because she was not clever enough to have authored them. Thus, she argues, the charge of her having invented them would amount to “the greatest compliment that could be paid to her.” 

App is willing to pay her that compliment, although he cannot make it convincing.

If Blavatsky were the sole source of the Mahatma Letters, what are we to make of passages like this? K.H. writes:

Another fine example of the habitual disorder in which Mrs. H.P.B’s mental furniture is kept. She talks of “Bardo” and does not even say to her readers what it means! As in her writing room confusion is ten times confounded, so in her mind are crowded ideas piled in such chaos that when she wants to express them the tail peeps out before the head. (305)

By App’s theory, HPB here is writing about herself.

App implies, as he must, that all of the Masters and similar figures—and the Brotherhood of Luxor to boot—were concoctions of Blavatsky’s imagination. Yet this would require superhuman machination that neither HPB nor anyone else could pull off, even granting the unlikely possibility that all her associates were either dupes or confederates.

Furthermore, there is a long tradition in many esoteric lines of hidden or unseen Masters, the maggid or “teacher” of the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Joseph Karo being only one example. App does not even try to relate HPB’s Masters to this tradition.

Tracking down Blavatsky’s sources, App naturally focuses on nineteenth-century works. But he appears to be oblivious to later scholarship on Hinduism and Buddhism: his bibliography makes virtually no mention of authorities from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He does not mention one single authority on Hinduism or Buddhism, from either an academic or a traditional perspective, who attempts to debunk HPB’s views. Nor does he even try to assess the degree to which, in instances where HPB upbraids the orientalists of her day, she was later vindicated.

Here is one example. App writes: “We . . . learn from Blavatsky’s ‘Tibetan friend’ that around the first century BCE the Buddhist refugees from India met representatives of a pre-Buddhist Aryan esoteric doctrine who had never left Tibet, and that the Indian Buddhists were surprised that the Aryan esoteric doctrine and our [Buddhist] Arahat doctrines are found to be almost identical” (323; bracketed insertion App’s).

All very fanciful—but perhaps not. In his monograph Dzog Chen and Zen, Namkhai Norbu, an authority on the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, observes, “In the period before the introduction of Buddhism, there already existed a type of Zogqen [Dzogchen] teaching.” After Buddhism was brought to Tibet in the eighth century AD, Dzogchen, the “Great Perfection,” was incorporated into the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Dzogchen consists in part of a meditative practice of resting in “pure awareness” and resembles Buddhist meditation. But Norbu and other authorities agree that Dzogchen antedates Buddhism in Tibet and was originally connected with Bon, the indigenous Tibetan religion. If we set aside the term “Aryan”—which today is as meaningless as it is prejudicial—we can see that Blavatsky’s “Tibetan friend” may have been right. App does not know this.

App’s work, like much of this type, rests on one unstated assumption: that anything that smacks of the paranormal is categorically false and must be the result either of fraud or delusion. But this thesis cannot be sustained, because it leaves a garment so full of holes that it could not be put on a body. Even App, despite his debunking, has to speak of the Masters as if they are actual men: the narrative would not be coherent otherwise. All this apart from eyewitness testimony of appearances of the Masters. HPB’s creation of K.H. would be a particularly spectacular feat inasmuch as he wrote a letter to Annie Besant in 1900, nine years after HPB’s death. (This is reproduced in the fall 2025 issue of Quest.) App evidently regards such evidence as unworthy of his attention.

Regrettably, one cannot be a mainstream academic scholar today without being in thrall to a naive secular materialism, even though this stance has been dismissed by practically all serious philosophers and scientists. Paranormal phenomena have to be dismissed out of hand, usually (as here) without any attempt at refutation. This position is particularly embarrassing when studying occultism and esotericism, which are precisely concerned with such phenomena.

App’s work has some value in citing a number of sources that Blavatsky used. But its logic and use of evidence are so weak, its assumptions so tenuous, and its erudition so shoddy that it cannot be taken seriously as a critique of HPB.

There is no authoritative study of HPB and Theosophy in its earliest years. Efforts toward that end have been hampered by hagiography on the one hand and oafish debunking on the other. Blavatsky is an equivocal figure and cannot be taken purely at face value: she often contradicts herself and talks out of both sides of her mouth. But she cannot be dismissed as a mere fraud, however ingenious and well intentioned.

We cannot say where further studies of early Theosophy will lead. But we can say with confidence that the secular materialist assumptions of current academic scholars of Western esotericism will not take us where we need to go.

Richard Smoley

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Printed in the  Fall 2025   issue of Quest magazine. 

Samkhya Karika: A Yoga Practitioner’s Guide to Overcoming the Three Causes of Suffering
Srivatsa Ramaswami
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2025. 206 pp., hardcover, $25.

Six principal schools of Hindu thought are reckoned as orthodox in that they acknowledge the scriptural authority of the Vedas.

Three of these schools—the Nyaya, Mimamsa, and Vaisheshika—deal with subjects such as logic and natural philosophy and are virtually unknown in the West. Two of them—yoga and Vedanta—are comparatively well known here. The third is the Samkhya, which may be the oldest of them all.

The Bhagavad Gita would appear to differ with this distinction between yoga and Samkhya when it says, “Children, not the wise, speak of Samkhya and yoga as distinct; he who is truly established in one obtains the fruit of both” (5.4). Indeed much of the Gita consists of an intertwining of the teachings of Samkhya and yoga, which are extremely similar. The title of the second chapter of the Gita is “Samkhya Yoga.”

Samkhya is usually translated as “enumeration”; yoga, as “union.” Much of the obscurity is dispelled if we translate these terms more idiomatically: samkhya as “analysis” and yoga as “integration.” We can then see that these two are different aspects of an identical process.

As with many other aspects of Hinduism, the origins of the Samkhya are remote and obscure. But it is frequently cited, even by Buddhists, as an influence on the Buddha. Since the Buddha lived in the sixth century BC, the Samkhya must go back at least to the seventh century BC, making it the oldest philosophical school known today.

The principal text of the Samkhya is the Samkhya Karika, a collection of aphorisms that set out the main body of the doctrine. It is much more recent than the Samkhya philosophy as such and is usually dated to the fourth century AD; its author is the otherwise unknown Ishwarakrishna.

The fundamental doctrine of the Samkhya is the distinction between purusha and prakriti—terms which have been translated in a variety of ways. To understand the distinction simply, we can think of purusha as that which perceives and prakriti as that which is perceived.

Purusha, as we learn in this new translation of the Samkhya Karika, is “the Self . . . pure, unvarying consciousness.” It is the primordial witness and may be identified with what other Hindu schools call atman. Prakriti is manifest reality at all levels. In its primordial, undisturbed, unmanifest state, it is called mulaprakriti.

In this state, the three gunas—or primal principles, which we may define as the active, passive, and equilibrating forces respectively—exist undisturbed and in perfect balance. “Mulaprakriti does not change; it has existed forever,” writes Srivatsa Ramaswami in his commentary on the Samkhya Karika.

 But in the manifest state of prakriti, the three gunas—rajas, tamas, and sattva—are no longer in balance, and their disequilibrium gives rise to existence as we know it.

Herein lies the problem. In ordinary existence, the purusha, forgetting its own incorruptible nature, identifies with prakriti—the ever-shifting contents of its own experience. This causes duhkha, or suffering. The Samkhya sets out the path of liberation, which it calls kaivalya or “isolation.” In this perfect state, the purusha is fully freed from identification with its own experience and exists in eternal and uninterrupted bliss.

The Samkhya enumerates twenty-five tattvas or principles of reality. The first two are purusha and prakriti. The third is mahat (“greatness”) or buddhi, which is both “cosmic intelligence” and “universal intellect.” From this proceeds ahamkara, “I-ness,” or egohood, and from this, manas, or “mind.” From manas in turn arise the five sense organs; the five motor organs; the tanmatras or “subtle elements or sensations”: sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch; and finally the five gross elements: fire, air, water, earth, and akasha, or “space.”

In the Samkhya, kaivalya is achieved when one thoroughly comprehends these twenty-five tattvas, not only theoretically, but through experience and insight. Ramaswami, citing an ancient text, says: “The one who thoroughly knows all the twenty-five tattvas, the aspects of human reality, becomes free.”

Ramaswami continues: “Samkhya is a thorough and unique evidence-based philosophical system, and Yoga further develops on the Samkhya framework to accomplish the goal of liberation.” Indeed, as he repeatedly shows, the analogies between the teachings of the Samkhya Karika and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are many and exact. Knowledge of the Samkhya philosophy can be construed as a kind of jnana yoga, or yoga of knowledge.

In the present time, yoga has proliferated throughout the Western world, but practically all of its familiar forms fall under the rubric of hatha yoga, with its asanas or postures. Yet the postures, however beneficial, are mere preliminaries to the real point of yoga, which as Patanjali wrote, is the “cessation of the oscillations of the mental substance”—the perfect equilibrium of the mind, which parallels the state of mulaprakriti and leads to liberation.

It is strange that the Samkhya and the yoga philosophy are so blatantly neglected in the West. Although they have been praised by some of the highest luminaries of Western philosophy, the mainstream of that philosophy has degenerated into a colorless secular materialism, which can give no real or lasting answers and as a result is increasingly ignored. It may be past time to revisit the knowledge of the Samkhya.

This fine new edition of the Samkhya Karika, accompanied by Ramaswami’s able translation and commentary, may open up the window of jnana yoga to at least a few people in the West who are capable of grasping its true depth and wisdom.

Richard Smoley

 

           

           

           

           

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Printed in the  Fall 2025   issue of Quest magazine. 

Life-Changing Synchronicities: A Doctor’s Journey of Coincidence and Serendipity
Bernard Beitman, MD
Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2025. 226 pp., paper, $18.99.

In Life-Changing Synchronicities, Bernard Beitman blends autobiography and intellectual exploration into an engaging narrative documenting his encounters with extraordinary coincidences and synchronicities throughout his life. Beitman invites readers to examine how these seemingly random events can shape a life, providing a compelling “soundtrack to a life well lived.”

The book details Beitman’s journey, from his early sporting achievements and lucky breaks in medical school to his time in the sixties counterculture before embarking on a successful academic career. He vividly describes himself as “swinging from vine to vine in the coincidence jungle,” illustrating his lifelong fascination with these phenomena.

Beitman writes that even as a child, he possessed the ability to observe his own thoughts, which set him on a path of greater awareness. This awareness, he argues, is crucial for critically examining the events in our lives.

Beyond personal anecdotes, Beitman subtly emphasizes the importance of embodiment—the idea that a well-lived life involves active participation rather than passive observation. Having moved beyond the confines of academia, he has become increasingly engaged with nature, dance, and people, always navigating by coincidences. Like other collectors of coincidences, he has observed that these occurrences seem to proliferate with study, leading to the profound question of what kind of universe and mind allows for such meaningful events. He rejects the simplistic notion that these are “just one of those things,” suggesting instead that their existence offers a glimpse into a deeper, yet-to-be-understood reality.

Beitman approaches the study of coincidences with a scientific mindset, systematically collecting observations to determine if they constitute data beyond mere anecdotes and if patterns emerge. He introduces his model of a psychosphere: a realm that deals with information received by the brain both through the five senses and through psi. It surrounds all of us and includes the collective unconscious and is the source of meaningful coincidences like simultaneous discovery. A particularly valuable aspect of the book lies in the practical insights it provides for becoming more aware of, and even increasing, meaningful coincidences in one’s own life.

Life-Changing Synchronicities is not merely about strange coincidences: it delves into the deeper themes of meaning, awareness, and the realization of our interconnectedness. Beitman does not offer definitive answers but rather shares stories, research, and reflections that encourage readers to explore for themselves. The result is a guide for recognizing, understanding, and harnessing these significant moments to foster deeper meaning and purpose. Whether one approaches synchronicity from the perspective of science, spirituality, or simple curiosity, this book offers a fresh perspective and encourages readers to view the world, and their place within it, in a new light.

Peter Orvetti

Peter Orvetti is a writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C.

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