Understanding the Buddha

“Neither a god, nor a guru, nor a savior”: who is Buddha?

This essay sets out to understand this unclassifiable figure by taking stock of the fundamental principles of Buddhist doctrine and unravelling its most famous shortcuts. By following Gotama’s “Spiritual Awakening” step by step, the author offers a stimulating look at the man whose emancipatory quest “heals the whole world”, far from any reductive pessimistic asceticism.

From the Enlightened One’s contemporary Greeks to current scientific research, from Schopenhauer to Einstein, from Nietzsche to Lévi-Strauss, this portrait of Buddha is also an illuminating account of the “elective affinities between Buddhism and the West” and of the constant influence the sage has exerted on our thinking.