Insight Editions · No. 416
Buddhist Book Reviews for Smarties
123 Reviews of Buddhist and Mystical Books
L. Ron Gardner
An opinionated guide to 123 Buddhist and mystical books that grades each against one model of awakening, the Stream of Spirit descending into the Heart, and that mixes sharp arguments and useful reading lists with insults and unverifiable claims.
A study guide to Buddhist Book Reviews for Smarties by L. Ron Gardner. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
CORE CLAIM
Modern Buddhism has lost the Buddha's mystical core: presence and letting go open the Stream of Spirit, which descends into the Heart and reveals Nirvana as Being. Gardner grades 123 books by how well they see this.
SCOPE
123 deleted Amazon reviews (2012-2018) in five chapters: Pali and mindfulness, Madhyamaka and Yogacara, Zen, Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra, and non-Buddhist books; about 95,000 words with a glossary.
KEY FIGURES
Buddhaghosa, Nagarjuna, Huang Po, Chinul, Longchen Rabjam, Namkhai Norbu, Garma C.C. Chang, Keith Dowman, Red Pine, Ramana Maharshi, Adi Da, Ayn Rand, Ken Wilber, Sam Harris.
BEST FOR
Readers who want an opinionated buyer's guide to Buddhist books in English with reading orders for each school; not for anyone seeking balanced scholarship or put off by harsh, personal reviews.
What the book is. Buddhist Book Reviews for Smarties (2022) collects 123 book reviews that L. Ron Gardner posted on Amazon between about 2012 and 2018, all later deleted from the site. Gardner, author of Radical Dzogchen, Electrical Christianity, Zen Mind, Thinker's Mind and Beyond the Power of Now, presents them as a guide for serious readers, a "Dharma sword" against what he sees as watered-down Buddhism. The book is about 95,000 words long, including a glossary.
The structure. Five chapters follow the main branches of the tradition: Pali, Theravada and mindfulness (28 reviews); Madhyamaka, Yogacara and Hua-Yen (26); Zen and quasi-Zen (20); Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen and Mahamudra (34); and non-Buddhist books on Ramana, Adi Da, Ayn Rand and the Perennial Philosophy (15). Two of the "reviews", on Sam Harris and Ken Wilber, are longer chapters from his earlier books.
The verdicts. Gardner is a harsh grader. Twenty-eight books get one star and only fifteen get five, for an average of about 2.65. He warns in the introduction that "Dale Carnegie I ain't." The tone ranges from warm (Huang Po, Ramana, Chang's Teachings of Tibetan Yoga) to scornful, with jokes, nicknames and insults aimed at authors and scholars.
The yardstick. Behind every rating is one model: the Buddha's path is presence joined to letting go, which opens the Stream of Spirit, which descends into the Heart and reveals Nirvana as Being. Gardner calls that Stream the Sambhogakaya and equates it with Shakti and the Holy Spirit. He maps the Trikaya onto the Trinity, reads anatta as "not Self", and translates the eighth limb of the path as Right Contemplation, not concentration.
The targets. His main adversaries are Buddhaghosa and the Visuddhimagga, Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka professors, the "Mind-only as psychology" readers of Yogacara, pop Zen and neo-Advaita, and translators like Keith Dowman and Red Pine. His heroes are the Pali anthologists, Huang Po and Chinul, Longchen Rabjam in Richard Barron's translation, Namkhai Norbu, Garma Chang, and, outside Buddhism, Ramana Maharshi, Adi Da and Ayn Rand.
How to read it. Taken as a buyer's guide, the book is useful: Gardner has read widely, summarizes clearly, and gives reading orders for each school. Taken as philosophy, it argues one consistent position against the modern consensus. Taken critically, it mixes real arguments with ad hominem attacks, astrology, self-promotion of his own Electrical Spiritual Paradigm, and experiential claims no reader can verify. This edition keeps the arguments and flags the rest.
The method of each review. Most reviews follow a pattern. Gardner sets out the book's claims in the author's own words, answers them one by one from his model, and closes with a verdict and a pointer to something better. That makes even the harshest reviews informative: a reader learns what the book says as well as what Gardner thinks of it, and can weigh the exchange directly.
A record of a reader. The reviews also chart Gardner's own path: a Buddhism class in 1970, years of Zen practice, a turn to Adi Da, Kashmir Shaivism and Christian Hermeticism, serious Dzogchen study from around 2000, and a habit of rereading books retrieved from storage. Several ratings change on rereading, and he records the changes.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Jhana Wars | Jhana is Grace descending, not concentration; Buddhaghosa is the villain |
| 2 | Pali Classics and Pop Mindfulness | Read the Buddha's words; distrust secular and brain-science Buddhism |
| 3 | Against Nagarjuna | Emptiness is a non-existent; reifying it is the "Madhyamaka virus" |
| 4 | Mind-Only, Lankavatara and Hua-Yen | Yogacara restores Mind as substance; the Dharma Cloud descends |
| 5 | The Zen Shelf Worth Keeping | Huang Po, Hui Neng and Chinul top a full Zen reading order |
| 6 | Quasi-Zen and Pop Awakening | Pop Zen confuses the momentary now with the timeless Now |
| 7 | Dzogchen: Rabjam and His Translators | Barron's Rabjam five stars, Dowman's two; Norbu is the best guide |
| 8 | Mahamudra, Tulkus and Western Dzogchen | Chang's Tibetan Yoga towers; only Energy can be transmitted |
| 9 | Ramana, Adi Da and Ayn Rand | The non-Buddhist sources of Gardner's Heart, Energy and realism |
| 10 | Perennialists and Theologians | Underhill and Huxley over Schuon, Evola and Otto; the numbers |
Chapter map
Who it is for. The book suits readers who want an opinionated map of Buddhist literature in English, and readers of Gardner's other books who want to see his system applied to dozens of texts. It is less suited to anyone looking for balanced scholarship, and readers should treat its five-star list as one teacher's syllabus, not a consensus.
The Jhana Wars
The book opens in the Pali and Theravada world, where Gardner spends most of his fire on one subject: the jhanas, the four meditative absorptions the Buddha described. Across a dozen reviews of modern jhana manuals he argues that teachers have turned a graced descent of Spirit into a concentration technique, and that the culprit is a fifth-century commentator, Buddhaghosa, whose system replaced the Buddha's own words.
How the book works
The collection. Buddhist Book Reviews for Smarties gathers 123 reviews that Gardner posted on Amazon between roughly 2012 and 2018, all later deleted from the site, plus two longer essays lifted from his earlier book Zen Mind, Thinker's Mind. The reviews are arranged in five chapters: Pali and Theravada, Madhyamaka and Yogacara, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and a final set of non-Buddhist books. He leaves spelling and quality as they were, warns that "Dale Carnegie I ain't", and invites detractors to argue with him.
The yardstick. Every review measures its book against one model. In Gardner's reading, the Buddha taught a path in which mindful presence is joined to letting go, and the result is entry into the Stream, which he identifies with the Sambhogakaya, Shakti and the Holy Spirit. When that current descends into the Heart-center (which, following Ramana Maharshi, he locates two digits to the right of the centre of the chest), it cuts the Heart-knot and the meditator realizes Nirvana as Being, not as blank cessation. Books score high when they point to this descent and low when they flatten it into technique.
The case against Buddhaghosa
A rival canon. The longest-running villain in the opening chapter is Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, The Path of Purification. Gardner gives the Nanamoli translation two stars and, in his chapter list, calls it the most overrated book in Buddhist history. His charge is that Buddhaghosa invented the distinction between access and absorption concentration, multiplied the jhanas into subcategories, and produced a system that is to Pali Buddhism what Mormonism is to Christianity: an add-on that later readers mistook for the original. He also cites, with relish, the tradition that Buddhaghosa hoped to be reborn in a heaven to wait for Maitreya, which in his view shows the commentator had not realized Nirvana.
The Abhidhamma too. Narada Maha Thera's Manual of Abhidhamma gets two stars and the subtitle "The Lower Teachings." Gardner sees the Abhidhamma as a spurious oversystem built by hyper-intellectual monks. It conflates citta, mano and vinnana, invents extra jhana categories, and, worst of all, reads anatta as "no Self." For Gardner, anatta means only that no Self is to be found in the five aggregates. The Self is not denied; it is simply not any of the things that change.
This is the most repeated doctrinal point in the book. The Buddha, Gardner says, pointed at each of the five skandhas (form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness) and said "this is not my Self." That is a method of disidentification, not a metaphysical denial. When Leigh Brasington pressed the matter, Gardner phoned Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who told him the Buddha neither asserted nor denied a Self. Gardner reads that silence as room for the Self that Ramana and the Upanishads describe.
Concentration or contemplation
The eighth limb. The deepest disagreement is over a single word. The eighth factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, samma samadhi, is usually translated Right Concentration. Gardner insists it means Right Contemplation or Right Samadhi. In his scheme, concentration is willed narrowing of attention; samadhi is protracted meditative absorption that happens to you. He points to Patanjali, who lists concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana) and samadhi as three distinct stages, and argues that Buddhist teachers have collapsed the top of the ladder into its bottom rung.
Why it matters. If jhana is concentration, then it is a skill one can train and schedule. If it is samadhi, then it is a gift of Grace, triggered when the Stream descends. Gardner's verdict on almost every jhana manual follows from this. He calls the jhanas "infused contemplation", borrowing the Christian term, and says no one can will how long they last.
The teachers' view. Jhana is a concentration skill. One develops access concentration on an object, waits for a nimitta (a light or sign), then enters absorption. There may be eight or more jhanas, plus "supramundane" variants. Length and depth can be trained.
Gardner's view. Jhana is the descent of the Stream into the Heart. There are four, as the Buddha said; the formless attainments follow as the base loosens. It cannot be scheduled. Bliss (sukha) appears only after a breakthrough to the Stream, and the "lights" are side effects at best.
The manuals
TWIM. Bhante Vimalaramsi and David Johnson's guide to Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation gets two stars as "A Mixed Bag." Gardner likes its unusual thesis that loving-kindness leads to "Tranquil Aware Jhanas", and he agrees with its attacks on the Mahasi and Goenka methods and on secular mindfulness. He rejects the jhana model itself, and says he reread the whole 1,200-page Majjhima Nikaya to check. He also objects when Johnson lumps Ramana Maharshi with Tolle and Adyashanti; for Gardner, Ramana's sahaja samadhi is Nibbana.
Gunaratana twice. Bhante Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English gets four stars as a clear beginner's book in the spirit of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. His follow-up, Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English, gets one star and the title "Trash Can Jhana Guide." The problem is again Buddhaghosa: twelve jhanas where the Buddha taught four, and "supramundane jhanas" that Gardner says are really the four stages of enlightenment relabelled.
Brasington, Catherine, Brahm. Leigh Brasington's Right Concentration becomes "Wrong Concentration", two stars, though Gardner notes that Brasington answered his emails and helped him. Shaila Catherine's Focused and Fearless is "A Jhana Joke Book", two stars: her six exercises are "tortuous", and her teacher Papaji, Gardner says, reduced Ramana to pap. Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond gets two stars for "nimitta nonsense", the claim that jhana arrives only after a light appears, though Gardner enjoys his stories.
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Path of Purification | Buddhaghosa, tr. Nanamoli | 2 | Most overrated book in Buddhist history |
| A Manual of Abhidhamma | Narada Maha Thera | 2 | "The Lower Teachings" |
| A Guide to TWIM | Vimalaramsi and Johnson | 2 | Good critique, wrong jhana model |
| Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English | Gunaratana | 1 | Twelve jhanas, Buddhaghosa balderdash |
| Mindfulness in Plain English | Gunaratana | 4 | Clear guide for rookies |
| Right Concentration | Leigh Brasington | 2 | Should be Right Contemplation |
| Focused and Fearless | Shaila Catherine | 2 | Jhanas are Grace, not a system |
| Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond | Ajahn Brahm | 2 | Zesty stories, nimitta nonsense |
| The Experience of Samadhi | Richard Shankman | 3 | Best of a bad bunch |
| Early Buddhist Meditation Studies | Analayo | 3 | Dry, but one real nugget |
| Mastering the Core Teachings | Daniel Ingram | 3 | Hardcore, not deepcore |
| 7 Treasures of Awakening | Joseph Goldstein | 3 | Mediocre |
Chapter 1, part one: jhana and Abhidhamma books
The best of the bunch. Richard Shankman's The Experience of Samadhi is Gardner's favourite of the jhana books, at three stars. It compares the suttas, the Visuddhimagga and interviews with eight teachers, including Jack Kornfield. Gardner's complaint is that it never integrates the three, and his solution, unsurprisingly, is his own Electrical Spiritual Paradigm. He notes with amusement that Shankman is an electrical engineer.
The scholar's nugget. Bhikkhu Analayo's Early Buddhist Meditation Studies is a PhD-style text, "Dry Dharma Dissection", that sees the tree but not the forest. Still, Gardner prizes one finding: satipatthana splits as sati plus upatthana, "presence of mindfulness", not "foundations." He also endorses the point, credited to B. Alan Wallace, that sati is not mere bare attention. And he uses the review to press his claim that Nibbana is not feelingless: there is an Ananda, a Feeling of Being, that is different from ordinary vedana.
In his three-star review of Daniel Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, Gardner objects to treating the three kayas as three kinds of understanding. They are dimensions of Reality, and they map onto the Christian Trinity: the Dharmakaya is the Father (timeless Awareness), the Sambhogakaya is the Holy Spirit (Clear-Light Energy), and the Nirmanakaya is the Son (the embodied Buddha in whom the other two unite). This mapping recurs in nearly every later chapter.
Hardcore, not deepcore. Ingram's book was sent by a fan. Gardner grants its energy and its maps but compares Ingram to Ken Wilber with models: lots of structure, nothing near Ramana, Adi Da, Kashmir Shaivism or Dzogchen. Joseph Goldstein's 7 Treasures of Awakening gets a "mediocre" three. Gardner is curious that Goldstein's own spiritual crisis drove him toward Dzogchen, yet the book never explains why. Rapture, the treasure Goldstein lists, is for Gardner simply the bliss of the Stream.
The four jhanas in the suttas
The formula. Gardner's case depends on the Buddha's own description of the jhanas, which recurs throughout the Pali discourses. In the first jhana, the meditator, secluded from sense pleasures, dwells with applied and sustained thought and with rapture and happiness born of seclusion. In the second, thought subsides into inner confidence and unification, with rapture and happiness born of samadhi. In the third, rapture fades and the meditator dwells in equanimity, mindful and happy. In the fourth, beyond pleasure and pain, there is purity of mindfulness due to equanimity.
The white cloth. The suttas illustrate the fourth jhana with a man sitting wrapped from head to foot in a clean white cloth, so that no part of his body is untouched by it. Gardner seizes on this simile in his review of Shaila Catherine. Something pervades the body, he says, and that something is the Sambhogakaya, the Light-Energy that has descended. Teachers who read the image as mere concentration, he argues, have no account of what the cloth is.
The attainments by count. Four jhanas in the Buddha's formula. Four formless attainments that follow: infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception nor non-perception. Eight in total in the later lists, which Gardner accepts as states but not as a ladder of techniques. Twelve in Gunaratana's jhana guide, which he rejects. One review headline for the Visuddhimagga: most overrated book in Buddhist history.
The formless states. Gardner reads the four formless attainments not as further stages of concentration but as what happens when the base loosens: as the current settles in the Heart, identification with the body thins, and awareness opens into space, then into consciousness itself. In his reading of the Pali texts, the Buddha learned these states from his teachers, found they did not end suffering, and went on to the Heart-release that did.
Contradictions in the commentary. In his review of The Path of Purification, Gardner also points to internal tensions in Buddhaghosa's text, where the same state is described in one place as measureless and in another as limited. He treats such passages as evidence that the commentator was systematizing from the outside. Scholars would say the Visuddhimagga is a synthesis of earlier commentaries and should be read as such, which is a fair reply. But the gap between its detailed techniques and the suttas' spare formula is real, and Gardner's readers will find it discussed in Shankman's and Brasington's books as well.
Why he cares. For Gardner the stakes are practical. A student who believes jhana is a skill will strive harder, measure progress and, often, grow frustrated. A student who believes it is Grace will practise presence and surrender and wait. His one-star reviews are, in effect, warnings against a method he thinks leads to effortful dead ends.
Reading the jhana chapter
The real target. Read together, these reviews are less about individual authors than about institutional Theravada. Gardner sees a tradition that took a teaching about Grace and turned it into a curriculum of techniques, which can be taught at retreats and measured in hours. His answer is old-fashioned: read the Buddha's own discourses and ignore the commentaries.
What holds up. Several points have scholarly company. The gap between the suttas and the Visuddhimagga on jhana is a real and much-debated topic; teachers like Thanissaro and Brasington themselves divide "sutta jhana" from "Visuddhimagga jhana." The reading of anatta as "not-self" rather than "no-self" is also defended by respected scholars. The leap from there to a Hindu-style Self that Nirvana reveals is where Gardner leaves the consensus behind.
What to take. A reader can use this chapter as a map of the jhana debate, with Gardner's sharp summaries of who teaches what. The star ratings are blunt but consistent: anything that sounds like willed concentration or a light show drops to one or two stars; anything that points to surrender and Grace rises.
Gardner's verdicts rest on experiential claims no reader can check: that the jhanas are the Stream descending, that the Heart-center sits two digits to the right of the chest's midline, that he knows from practice which teachers are realized. He also treats one disputed translation (Right Contemplation) as settled, and the analogy of Buddhaghosa to Joseph Smith is rhetoric, not history. Several reviews dismiss teachers he has never met as unenlightened. Take the map of the debate; test the metaphysics separately.
Pali Classics and Pop Mindfulness
The second half of the Pali chapter splits into two piles. On one side are the anthologies of the Buddha's own words, which Gardner rates higher than anything else in Theravada. On the other are modern mindfulness and secular Buddhism books, from Batchelor to Kabat-Zinn, which he treats as a slow erosion of the teaching into self-help and neuroscience.
The Buddha's own words
Woodward first. The one Pali book that gets five stars without reservation is F.L. Woodward's Some Sayings of the Buddha, an old anthology Gardner first met in a UCSD class in 1971. He calls it "The Best Book" and notes that nobody else had reviewed it. He prizes it for the clearest satipatthana instructions he knows and for one line above all: the Buddha's advice to take refuge in the Self. He reads the Buddha's method of "this is not mine, this is not my Self" as neti-neti, the Jnana yoga of the Upanishads, and he equates Nirvana with sahaj samadhi, the natural, open-eyed absorption Ramana described.
Bodhi and Thanissaro. Bhikkhu Bodhi's In the Buddha's Words gets four stars and a place on Gardner's reading list. It is a large and well-organized anthology, but he faults it for omitting the Buddha's disparaging remarks about women (a politically correct edit, in his view) and for saying nothing about Heart-release. Thanissaro Bhikkhu's The Wings to Awakening gets five stars as "A Buddhadharma Bargain", because it is free online and has the best descriptions of the jhanas he has read. Gardner phoned Thanissaro in San Diego; the monk declined to define Nirvana or equate it with Self-realization. Gardner's own answer is that Nirvana is the bright, infinite awareness of the fourth jhana, lived as Buddha-nature.
F.L. Woodward (Pali Text Society translator): Some Sayings of the Buddha, five stars, his favourite. Bhikkhu Bodhi: In the Buddha's Words, four stars, a reading-list staple. Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The Wings to Awakening, five stars, best on jhana. Nyanaponika Thera: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1962), four stars, "A Classic." Julius Evola: The Doctrine of Awakening, four stars, "Deep-Core Pali Buddhism."
Nyanaponika. The Heart of Buddhist Meditation has three parts: the teaching, the Satipatthana Sutta itself, and an anthology called Flowers of Deliverance. Gardner quotes its passage on the seven factors of enlightenment, where Energy leads to Rapture, and complains that Nyanaponika never asks what that Energy is. For Gardner it is Shakti. The book stays on his list.
Evola's Buddhism. The most surprising four-star rating is for Julius Evola's The Doctrine of Awakening. Gardner calls it "Deep-Core Pali Buddhism" and likes Evola's reading of ascesis as tapas, "intensive concentration, of glowing, almost of fire." He shares Evola's view that early Buddhism had a virile, warrior spirit that later forms lost, and quotes the Buddha's remark about the crowd as "heaps of rubbish." He disagrees on two points: Evola places Nirvana "beyond being", where Gardner says Nirvana is Being (Sat-Chit-Ananda); and Evola's mapping of the Trikaya is, he says, wrong. He adds the book to his reading list.
The old introductions
Rahula. Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught (1959), the standard introduction for decades, was another book Gardner read at UCSD in 1970. He gives it one star: "Oldie but Badie." He points readers instead to Bodhi, to Georg Grimm's The Doctrine of the Buddha, to Hans Wolfgang Schumann and to Ananda Coomaraswamy, all of whom, in different ways, leave room for a Self. Woodward remains his first choice.
Goenka and Dhiravamsa. William Hart's The Art of Living, on S.N. Goenka's method, gets three stars as "Reductive." Gardner commends Goenka's free ten-day retreats but says the Buddha taught satipatthana, which includes and goes beyond both vipassana and samatha, not a branded "Vipassana." The book has nothing on Stream-winning or the jhanas, and it reduces practice to the body-scan. Dhiravamsa's The Way of Non-Attachment is "Vipassana Meets Krishnamurti", three stars: the former Thai monk borrows Krishnamurti's choiceless awareness without naming him, and cuts the Buddha's closing instruction that the meditator "abides detached and grasps at nothing in the world."
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Some Sayings of the Buddha | F.L. Woodward | 5 | The best Pali book |
| The Wings to Awakening | Thanissaro Bhikkhu | 5 | Free, best on jhana |
| In the Buddha's Words | Bhikkhu Bodhi | 4 | Fine anthology, edits out women |
| The Heart of Buddhist Meditation | Nyanaponika Thera | 4 | A classic that ignores Energy |
| The Doctrine of Awakening | Julius Evola | 4 | Deep-core, but Nirvana is Being |
| Mindfulness in Plain English | Gunaratana | 4 | Beginner's classic |
| The Art of Living | William Hart (Goenka) | 3 | Reductive body-scan |
| The Way of Non-Attachment | Dhiravamsa | 3 | Krishnamurti without credit |
| The Heart of Buddha's Teachings | Thich Nhat Hanh | 3 | Buoyant, not deep |
| What the Buddha Taught | Walpola Rahula | 1 | Oldie but badie |
Chapter 1, part two: anthologies, classics and introductions
Thich Nhat Hanh. The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings gets three stars under the headline "Overrated Text by Overrated Teacher." Gardner says he admires the monk, ranking him with Gandhi and the Dalai Lama as a public figure, but finds his Dharma buoyant rather than deep. Unusually, he explains this through the teacher's birth chart: a Libra Sun, Sagittarius Moon and Jupiter trine. He closes with a favourite pairing: Jesus's instruction to worship "in Spirit and in Truth" means, in his scheme, the Sambhogakaya and the Dharmakaya.
Secular Buddhism and the brain
Batchelor. Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism without Beliefs gets one star and, Gardner says, would get "negative five" if Amazon allowed it. The review title, "Batchelorism With Beliefs", makes his point: Batchelor's agnosticism is itself a belief system. Dropping rebirth and Nirvana from Buddhism, Gardner says, is like a Christian saying Heaven is unimportant. His analogy is an atheist priest. The Buddha, who taught four formless states, was a mystic, not a pragmatist, and Batchelor's version is the bottom of the barrel.
Hanson. Rick Hanson's Buddha's Brain is "Hodgepodge Buddhist Pablum", one star. Gardner rejects its premise that "the mind is what the brain does." In his model, samskaras (karmic seeds) are stored in the soul at the Heart-center, the Hridayam, and sprout as vasanas that travel up to the brain as thoughts. Happiness, then, comes from the Heart, not from neurochemistry. He adds that Hanson misreads Ramana's "Who am I?" (the answer is Sat-Chit-Ananda, not a self-image) and that the supplement advice is "toxifying." It will be a "cold day in Hell" before the book reaches his list.
Rosenberg. Morgan Rosenberg's Dark Buddhism, an attempt to marry Zen and Objectivism, should have pleased Gardner, an outspoken admirer of Ayn Rand. Instead it gets two stars as "Butchered Buddhism." Rosenberg is a physicist who recommends pop books like Hagen's; he treats Buddhism as atheistic and scientific, misdefines Right Concentration and confuses Nirvana with satori. Gardner's view is that Objectivists are allergic to mysticism and that Buddhism is ultra-mystical. The second star is a bonus for championing Rand.
Kabat-Zinn. Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are is "Present-Moment Pablum", two stars. Gardner compares its reach to that of Joel Osteen and Justin Bieber. His main point is doctrinal: the Buddha taught abidance in the timeless Unborn, not in the passing present moment. Ramana's "Who am I?" does not end in calm noticing but in Shaktipat in the Heart.
This Is Buddhism by Kiera Goodwin, a Kindle Unlimited title, took Gardner twenty minutes and says nothing about real enlightenment: "Bad-Apple." The Essence of Buddhism by David Tuffley places the Buddha in the "fifth century", misstates karma and swaps Right Contemplation for Concentration. Untangling Self by Andrew Olendzki, blurbed by Batchelor, claims the self "is just a view", skips the jhanas and, in Gardner's words, is "Tangling and Mangling."
The secular turn in context
Where it came from. The books Gardner rates lowest in this chapter belong to a recognizable movement. Jon Kabat-Zinn began teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, deliberately stripping meditation of Buddhist vocabulary so that hospitals would accept it. Stephen Batchelor, a former monk in both Tibetan and Korean traditions, published Buddhism without Beliefs in 1997, arguing for a Buddhism without rebirth or metaphysics. Rick Hanson and others then linked practice to neuroscience. By the 2010s this secular, brain-based mindfulness was the dominant form of Buddhism-derived practice in the West.
Gardner's three objections. Across the reviews he makes three points against it. First, it removes the goal. Without Nirvana or rebirth, the Buddha's teaching becomes stress reduction, which is useful but not liberation. Second, it misplaces the mind: if mind is what the brain does, there is no Heart, no soul and no Self for meditation to reveal. Third, it reduces samadhi to attention, so the deep states of the suttas become either impossible or irrelevant.
Strip away the insults and Gardner's central complaint against secular Buddhism has wide support among traditional teachers: that it keeps the method and drops the destination. Many Theravada and Tibetan teachers, and scholars of religion, have made the same point. Where Gardner parts company with them is in naming the destination a Self.
What he would put in its place. Gardner does not oppose mindfulness itself. He gives Gunaratana four stars and calls the Satipatthana Sutta, read in Woodward's version, the clearest instruction he knows. What he wants is mindfulness that leads somewhere: presence joined to letting go, opening the Stream, deepening through the jhanas, and ending in Heart-release. In his reading this is the path the Buddha taught, and everything secular Buddhism leaves out is the part that matters.
The UCSD connection. One small thread runs through the chapter: Gardner's student years at the University of California, San Diego, where in 1970 and 1971 he first read Rahula, Conze and Woodward in a Buddhism class. The class gave him his favourite book and his least favourite introduction, and his later scorn for "clueless professors" begins there.
A reading order. Pulling the chapter together, Gardner's implicit Pali syllabus runs: Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English for basic method; Woodward's Some Sayings of the Buddha and Bodhi's In the Buddha's Words for the discourses; Nyanaponika for the Satipatthana Sutta in context; Thanissaro's Wings to Awakening for the jhanas; and Evola for the "ascetic", warrior reading of early Buddhism, with the caution given below.
The Buddha on women
Gardner's claim. In the Bodhi review Gardner says the anthology omits the Buddha's disparaging remarks about women for reasons of political correctness, and in the Hagen review he lists the Buddha's views on "sex, women, and numerous other topics" among the things pop books leave out. He treats these passages as part of the authentic teaching that modern editors prefer to hide.
The texts in question. The best-known passage is the account in the Cullavagga of the founding of the order of nuns. The Buddha at first refuses his foster-mother Mahapajapati, agrees after Ananda intercedes, imposes eight special rules placing nuns under monks, and predicts that the true Dharma will now last five hundred years instead of a thousand. Other discourses contain remarks on women's supposed failings.
The scholarly context. Many scholars argue that such passages reflect the concerns of a later monastic community more than the Buddha's own teaching, pointing to tensions with discourses that affirm women's full capacity for arahantship and to the Therigatha, the verses of the early nuns. Others take them as early. Either way, the question is open, and Bodhi's choice to leave them out of a thematic anthology is an editorial decision, not proof of censorship. Gardner's framing gives readers only one side.
Reading the Pali chapter
A consistent preference. Across 28 reviews, the ratings average about 2.5 stars. The pattern is clear. Gardner rewards books that put the primary texts in front of the reader (Woodward, Bodhi, Thanissaro, Nyanaponika) and punishes books that interpret for the reader, especially when the interpretation is psychological, neuroscientific or agnostic. The exception that proves the rule is Gunaratana's beginner book, which he likes because it promises nothing beyond basic practice.
Self, again. The thread joining the two halves of the chapter is his insistence on a Self that Nirvana reveals. This reading has a minority tradition behind it: Georg Grimm, Coomaraswamy and some readers of the Tathagatagarbha sutras make related arguments. Most modern scholars and nearly all Theravada teachers reject it, and Gardner's conviction that they are simply wrong is the engine of most one-star ratings in this chapter.
Practical advice. For a reader starting out, Gardner's recommended order is clear: Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English for method, then Woodward and Bodhi for the Buddha's words, then Thanissaro on jhana. Skip, he says, anything that promises happiness through brain science or Buddhism without beliefs.
Three weak spots stand out. Gardner says Bodhi censored the Buddha's views on women and treats those remarks as authentic teaching, without noting that scholars debate their origin and that they are hard to defend on their own terms. He uses astrology to explain Thich Nhat Hanh's limits, which is not evidence. And he gives a four-star welcome to Julius Evola without mentioning that Evola was a theorist of the Italian far right whose writing on race and hierarchy is the reason many readers avoid him. A reader should know all three before following his list.
Against Nagarjuna
Chapter Two of the source is Gardner's war on Madhyamaka, the "Middle Way" philosophy of Nagarjuna that dominates Tibetan scholarship and Western academic Buddhism. He calls Nagarjuna the most overrated and destructive philosopher in Buddhist history, diagnoses a "Madhyamaka virus" in teacher after teacher, and argues that emptiness, properly understood, has no ontological status at all.
The charge sheet
What Madhyamaka says. In outline, Nagarjuna argues that nothing has svabhava, intrinsic self-existence. Everything arises in dependence on causes, parts and conceptual designation, so everything is empty. Emptiness is not a hidden substance but the absence of one; it is itself empty. Reality is then described in two truths: the conventional, where things function, and the ultimate, which is their emptiness. The Prasangika school, championed by Tsongkhapa, refuses to assert any positive thesis at all.
What Gardner says. Gardner's objection is simple and he repeats it in a dozen ways. Emptiness is a non-existent. A non-existent cannot be the ultimate truth, cannot be "realized", and cannot be a source of anything. Borrowing Ayn Rand's phrase, he calls the move from "absence of self-nature" to "Ultimate Reality" the reification of zero. Real things, he insists, exist independently of thought, and beneath them lies not emptiness but Mind, timeless Awareness, the Dharmakaya.
Madhyamaka. The ultimate truth is emptiness: the absence of intrinsic existence in all things, including emptiness. Liberation comes from seeing through reification. Positing a Self or Mind as ultimate is a subtle error.
Gardner. The ultimate is Being: Mind Itself, Awareness united with Clear-Light Energy. Emptiness is a useful provisional teaching that clears away attachment to objects, but it is an object of knowledge. As he puts it, find out who sees emptiness.
The five-star exception
Buddhist Illogic. The only five-star book in the Madhyamaka section is a demolition of it. Logician Avi Sion's Buddhist Illogic works through Nagarjuna's arguments one by one: the tetralemma (is, is not, both, neither), the claim that things are neither real nor unreal, the dilemmas about motion, causality and co-dependence, and the treatment of karmic law. Gardner says Sion saved him the work of writing the book himself. Sion's thesis is that Nagarjuna's arguments depend on equivocation and false dilemmas, and Gardner adopts the label "Nagarjuna's illogic" for the rest of the book.
Gardner counts four previous Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma: Gautama's original teaching, Madhyamaka, Yogacara and Vajrayana. He says his own planned book on Buddhism will turn it a fifth time. In his telling, Madhyamaka was the wrong turn, Yogacara was the attempt to escape from Nagarjuna by restoring Mind, and Vajrayana, especially Dzogchen, recovered the Energy dimension. The arrangement explains why his ratings rise steadily through the book.
The academics
Garfield's Nagarjuna. Jay Garfield's translation of the Mulamadhyamakakarika, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, gets two stars as "Perversion of Buddhism." Gardner's comparison is pointed: Nagarjuna was to Gautama what Joseph Smith and Calvin were to Jesus. He recommends Avi Sion's work (some at $1.99) and Sion's Essence and Entity. Against emptiness he cites physics: things reduce to Energy, not to nothing, and beyond Energy is a self-existing, self-radiant Self-Awareness.
Hopkins. Jeffrey Hopkins's Meditation on Emptiness, a thousand-page study of Prasangika, is a "Dry, Bloated Tome", one star. Gardner recalls professors at UCSD who were equally lost and says he spent a year on the Prajnaparamita in the 1970s before outgrowing it. He grants Madhyamaka a provisional role and quotes Donovan's song: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is." Read Norbu and Longchen Rabjam instead, he advises.
Newland, Komito, Thakchoe. Guy Newland's Introduction to Emptiness, on Tsongkhapa, is "Buddhism for Empty Heads", one star; Pali Buddhism never taught that the ultimate is emptiness, and the Buddha said to take refuge in the Self. David Ross Komito's Nagarjuna's Seventy Stanzas gets two stars. Gardner credits it with a clear summary (everything exists conventionally; dependent arising is emptiness; all extremes are negated) and then calls the method "context-dropping." His verdict: Yogacara rejected Nagarjuna, and Shankara "kicked Nagarjuna's butt." Sonam Thakchoe's The Two Truths Debate, comparing Tsongkhapa and Gorampa, earns three stars for clarity and fairness, though Gardner says it misfiles Longchen Rabjam and Jaideva Singh into Gorampa's camp.
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buddhist Illogic | Avi Sion | 5 | Definitive deconstruction of Nagarjuna |
| The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way | Garfield (Nagarjuna) | 2 | A perversion of Buddhism |
| Nagarjuna's Seventy Stanzas | David Ross Komito | 2 | Clear, but context-dropping |
| The Two Truths Debate | Sonam Thakchoe | 3 | Fair, but too narrow |
| Meditation on Emptiness | Jeffrey Hopkins | 1 | Dry, bloated tome |
| Introduction to Emptiness | Guy Newland | 1 | Buddhism for empty heads |
| Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies or Rivals? | Garfield and Westerhoff | 1 | Eleven blind men |
| Madhyamika and Yogacara | Gadjin Nagao | 1 | Philological prattle |
| Selected Sayings from the Perfection of Wisdom | Edward Conze | 4 | Mind-bending, once his bible |
| The Heart Sutra | Red Pine | 2 | Prajnaparamita in a nutshell, tiny font |
Chapter 2, part one: Madhyamaka and emptiness books
The basketball analogy. Gardner's real complaint about Thakchoe is scope. Comparing Tsongkhapa and Gorampa, he says, is like a basketball book that compares Kobe Bryant to LeBron James when Wilt Chamberlain and Michael Jordan exist. His Jordans are Abhinavagupta, Jaideva Singh and Adi Da. He challenges the Madhyamaka professors (Hopkins, Garfield, Dreyfus, Newland, Thakchoe) to set their system against Kashmir Shaivism or Ramana's Advaita, and predicts they never will.
Eleven blind men. The edited volume Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies or Rivals? (Garfield and Westerhoff) gets one star and the headline "11 Blind Men." He quotes Garfield's admission that "we don't fully understand" the classical texts, complains about a $20 to $30 Kindle price, and says he has "more respect for toilet paper." The longer point is historical: Western scholarship has declined, he says, since Evans-Wentz, Coomaraswamy and Christmas Humphreys, who at least took mysticism seriously. Gadjin Nagao's Madhyamika and Yogacara is "Philological Prattle", one star, because its accounts of emptiness contradict each other: beyond being and non-being on one page, an affirmative absolute on another.
The Prajnaparamita and its popularizers
Conze. Not all emptiness literature is condemned. Edward Conze's Selected Sayings from the Perfection of Wisdom gets four stars as "Mind-Bending." It was on Ram Dass's reading list in Be Here Now and, for a year or two in the early 1970s, it was Gardner's "Buddhist Bible." He no longer counts himself a fan of the Prajnaparamita, but he respects its power to loosen the grip of objects.
Red Pine's Heart Sutra. Red Pine's commentary on The Heart Sutra gets two stars. Gardner mocks the microscopic font and rejects the publisher's claim that the sutra is "Buddhism in a nutshell": it is the Prajnaparamita in a nutshell, which is not the same thing. He quotes the Chan master Hui Hai, "Prajna, unknowing, knows all", as the better summary, and says Dzogchen goes to the same place more directly.
Gardner's term for a teacher whose talk of awareness keeps collapsing into talk of nothing. Three popular authors catch it. Jonathan Harrison's Ending Stress (one star) prompts him to coin "Bottom-of-the-Barrel Buddhism": Harrison has read Ramana, Jean Klein, Krishnamurti, Norbu and Rabjam and still produces pablum. Gardner's challenge to any teacher who says there is no self: hand over your credit cards. Andre Doshim Halaw's God is Nothingness (one star) is "A Book Worth Nothing": something cannot come from nothing, and Ramana's "go back the way you came" points to Being. Gardner read it on Kindle Unlimited and says it was worth what he paid. Halaw's Neti-Neti Meditation gets one star too; neti-neti strips away what you are not to reveal Tat Tvam Asi, Suchness, not a void.
The older version of this argument
Shankara. Gardner's remark that Shankara "kicked Nagarjuna's butt" points to a real historical debate. The eighth-century Advaita philosopher argued, in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, that Buddhist doctrines of momentariness and emptiness undermine themselves: a series of moments cannot know itself as a series without a witness that endures. Gardner's "find out who sees emptiness" is a compressed form of the same argument. Buddhist philosophers replied, over centuries, that the witness is itself a construction, and the debate has never been settled.
Other-emptiness. Inside Tibetan Buddhism there is a school that makes a version of Gardner's case. The Jonang tradition, systematized by Dolpopa in the fourteenth century, taught shentong, "other-emptiness": ultimate reality is empty of everything other than itself, but is not empty of its own nature, which is luminous Buddha-nature. Tsongkhapa's Gelug school, whose Prasangika reading Gardner attacks through Hopkins and Newland, rejected shentong strongly, and the Jonang were suppressed for a time. Gardner does not mention Dolpopa, but readers who find his position persuasive will find a traditional ally there.
| Position | Main sources | What is ultimate | Gardner's view |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prasangika Madhyamaka | Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Tsongkhapa | Emptiness, itself empty | The "Madhyamaka virus" |
| Other-emptiness (shentong) | Dolpopa, Jonang school | Luminous Buddha-nature, empty of all else | Closest Tibetan ally (not discussed) |
| Advaita and Kashmir Shaivism | Shankara; Abhinavagupta; Ramana | Brahman, or Shiva-Shakti; the Self | His own position |
Three positions on what is ultimate
Where the dispute leads. Gardner's choice between these positions shapes everything in the rest of the book. Because emptiness cannot be ultimate, the summit must be positive, and so Yogacara, Dzogchen and Ramana rank higher than any Madhyamaka text. Because the positive ultimate must include Energy, Zen ranks below Dzogchen. And because the world is real, any school that calls objects mere projections loses a star.
The Kindle prices. A smaller pattern also runs through this chapter: Gardner often notes what a book cost. Garfield and Westerhoff's volume is overpriced at $20 to $30; Sion's books are a bargain at $1.99; Halaw's was free on Kindle Unlimited and "worth what I paid." The price remarks are partly jokes, but they also signal his audience: readers buying on Amazon, choosing what to read next.
What a fair reader keeps
The strong point. Gardner's best argument in this chapter is simple: a teaching that stops at negation owes the student an account of what remains when the negating is done. Nagarjuna's defenders answer that nothing needs to remain, because emptiness itself is empty, and that the demand for a positive ground is the very clinging the dialectic is meant to dissolve.
The weak point. Gardner rarely engages that reply on its own terms. He restates his model of Consciousness and Energy and treats the difference as settled. Readers who want the debate in full should read the Madhyamaka texts alongside his reviews, then decide whether "empty of self" and "empty of other" describe two experiences or two ways of talking about one.
Reading the Madhyamaka chapter
The heart of the dispute. This is the most philosophically serious section of the book. Gardner's position, that emptiness cannot be ultimate because it is an absence, is a version of an old objection: the Yogacara, Jonang "other-emptiness" (shentong) and Advaita critics all said something similar. His addition is the Objectivist claim that existence exists independently of consciousness, which he brings to every review.
Where it is thin. He rarely engages Madhyamaka's strongest reply, that emptiness is not a thing and was never meant to be reified, which is why Nagarjuna calls clinging to emptiness incurable. When Gardner calls emptiness a "non-existent", Prasangika scholars would agree and say that is precisely the point. The real disagreement is whether liberation needs a positive ground, a Self or Mind, and that question cannot be settled by logic alone.
How to use it. For a newcomer, this chapter gives a vivid sense of what is at stake between emptiness and Mind, with a short list of books on each side. Read Conze for the experience of the Prajnaparamita, Komito for a clear summary of Nagarjuna, Sion for the logical case against, and then decide.
This chapter is where Gardner's tone does the most damage to his case. Scholars are called "blind men", clueless and worse, and he compares their books unfavourably to toilet paper. None of this answers their arguments. He also relies on Avi Sion as the final word, though Sion's critique is one view among many and is not widely accepted by Buddhist philosophers. And the claim that physics shows everything "reduces to Energy" stretches the science. The positive thesis deserves a hearing; the insults should be discounted.
Mind-Only, Lankavatara and Hua-Yen
If Madhyamaka is the wrong turn, Yogacara is the road back. Gardner reads the "Mind-Only" school and its key scripture, the Lankavatara Sutra, as an esoteric yoga of universal Mind and descending Light, and he grades its translators and professors by whether they see that. The chapter ends with the Chinese Hua-Yen school, three books on it, and three popular meditation systems he rates in the middle.
Mind as substance
The core distinction. The key move in this section is a contrast between two Sanskrit labels. Cittamatra, "Mind-only", Gardner reads as the claim that Mind is a metaphysical substance, the ground of everything. Vijnaptimatra, "representation-only", the term used by Asanga and Vasubandhu, he reads as idealism: the view that objects are only appearances in consciousness. He embraces the first and rejects the second as another virus, because it denies that the world exists independently of perception.
The Alaya. In Yogacara, the alaya-vijnana or storehouse consciousness holds karmic seeds. Gardner insists it is not a psychological basement. It is transcendental Mind-Stuff, closer to the Samkhya prakriti or to the Mind of Kashmir Shaivism. When Clear-Light Energy unites with the Alaya in the Tathagatagarbha, the "womb of the Buddha" that he places in the spiritual Heart, the result is Bodhicitta, enlightened consciousness.
The Dharma Cloud. The most distinctive element of his reading is the Dharmamegha, the "Dharma Cloud" named as the tenth Bodhisattva stage. For Gardner it is not a metaphor but the Sambhogakaya itself, descending in stages into the Heart and outshining the vasanas, the karmic tendencies, instead of fighting them one by one. In Living Yogacara he finds the scriptural basis for his claim that Buddhas baptize Bodhisattvas, which links Yogacara to the Christian Holy Spirit and Hindu Shaktipat in one move.
The Lankavatara shelf
Suzuki twice. D.T. Suzuki's 1932 translation of the Lankavatara Sutra gets four stars, and his Studies in the Lankavatara four more. Suzuki "gets it", in Gardner's phrase: he reads Mind as substance, in the cittamatra sense. Gardner's headline for the translation, "Invasion of Buddhism by Samkhya", reflects his view that the sutra is a hybrid of Yogacara, Madhyamaka and Samkhya, and that anyone who wants to understand it should study Patanjali. He notes with satisfaction that the Buddha in the sutra calls people "stupid", and that Gardner himself catches hell for doing the same.
Red Pine. Red Pine's 2012 Lankavatara translation is the opposite case: two stars, "Butcher with Large Thumbs." Red Pine reads the text through vijnaptimatra, and Gardner suggests he get a job at McDonald's. Gardner's own gloss on the setting is esoteric: Lanka, the island-fortress where the sutra is preached, stands for the Heart-cave, and the sutra's climax is the descent of the Dharma Cloud. He notes the review drew 36 thumbs-down votes and no rebuttals.
Two Suzuki books, both four stars. One Red Pine translation, two stars, with 36 negative votes on Amazon and no counter-arguments. Three philosophies Gardner hears in the sutra: Yogacara, Madhyamaka and Samkhya. One recommended companion: Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
Sutton and Tagawa. Florin Sutton's Existence and Enlightenment in the Lankavatara-Sutra is "The Jungianization of Yogacara", two stars. Sutton reads the Alaya as Jung's collective unconscious, the Dharmadhatu as cosmic space, and the Atman as the empirical self; Gardner rejects all three, though he enjoys the book's etymologies. Tagawa Shun'ei's Living Yogacara gets one star as "The Perversion of Yogacara": a modern Japanese reading that reduces an ontological yoga to psychology, which Gardner calls the professors' standard mistake.
Lusthaus and Devenish. Dan Lusthaus's Buddhist Phenomenology, a $40 academic study a fan bought him, gets one star and "one star too many." Gardner calls it hyper-intellectual and reductive, says its author is uninitiated, and objects that Ken Wilber's praise sets a low bar. Rodney Devenish's Principal Yogacara Texts gets four stars. It lays out a fourfold path (accumulation, endeavour, development, non-seeking), over-uses jargon like ataraxia and ipseity, and misses the link to the Kashmir Shaivite Pratyabhijnahridayam, but its "Ten Texts" section is first-rate.
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Lankavatara Sutra | D.T. Suzuki | 4 | Mind as substance; Samkhya inside |
| Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra | D.T. Suzuki | 4 | Best Lankavatara studies |
| The Lankavatara Sutra | Red Pine | 2 | Butcher with large thumbs |
| Existence and Enlightenment in the Lankavatara | Florin Sutton | 2 | Jungianized Yogacara |
| Living Yogacara | Tagawa Shun'ei | 1 | Yoga reduced to psychology |
| Buddhist Phenomenology | Dan Lusthaus | 1 | Hyper-intellectual, uninitiated |
| Principal Yogacara Texts | Rodney Devenish | 4 | The Ten Texts are first-rate |
| The Buddhist Teaching of Totality | Garma C.C. Chang | 3 | Best of three, still parochial |
| Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra | Francis Cook | 2 | Cosmotheistic crapola |
| Entry into the Inconceivable | Thomas Cleary | 2 | Deified dependent origination |
Chapter 2, part two: Yogacara, Lankavatara and Hua-Yen
The jewel net
What Hua-Yen teaches. The Chinese Hua-Yen school, built on the Avatamsaka Sutra, pictures reality as Indra's Net: an infinite web of jewels, each reflecting all the others. Every phenomenon contains and depends on every other. Gardner reviewed three introductions and liked none of them much.
Three books, three objections. Francis Cook's Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra gets two stars as "Cosmotheistic Crapola": a universe treated as God without any hypercosmic Mind behind it. Gardner mocks Cook as a "pipe-smoking half-scholar" and rejects his claim that the Hua-Yen masters were not mystics. Thomas Cleary's Entry into the Inconceivable is "The Deification of Dependent Origination", two stars. It ignores Yogacara and omits the prologue by Cheng-kuan that grounds everything in Mind. Gardner's counter-examples are homely: the sun and the air do not depend on you, and a cockroach does not contain the universe. Garma C.C. Chang's The Buddhist Teaching of Totality is the best of the three, at three stars, but "disappointing and parochial." Gardner loves Chang's other books (see Chapter 8) and says Chang equates Nirvana with Being, but here the philosophizing stays inside its school.
Gardner's objection to Hua-Yen restates his objection to Madhyamaka. Mutual dependence describes how phenomena relate, but it cannot be the Source of phenomena. Something must exist that does not depend on anything else. In his system that is the Dharmakaya, the Mind that Cheng-kuan named and Cleary's book left out.
Three meditation systems
Wallace. B. Alan Wallace's The Attention Revolution gets two stars as "Attentional Applesauce." Gardner respects Wallace as translator of Naked Awareness (Chapter 8) and appreciates that he quotes Adi Da on attention. He objects that Wallace misreads sati and that, by his own account, shamatha practice does not reveal emptiness, so it is unclear what the book's ten stages lead to.
Culadasa. John Yates, known as Culadasa, wrote The Mind Illuminated, a ten-stage manual that became one of the most popular meditation books of the 2010s. Gardner gives it three stars after "considerable internal debate." He praises the writing and illustrations and respects the system-building. But the layout copies Wallace's (itself based on the eighth-century monk Kamalashila), the Yogacara-based mind model is flawed, and the method starts with presence and then sends the student on a progressive path that, he says, exploits their seeking. Dzogchen's instruction is simply to remain present.
Bodri. William Bodri's What is Enlightenment? is a 500-page tome with tiny print, which a student lent him. Bodri argues that enlightenment is the same in every genuine tradition, a thesis Gardner shares. It gets three stars: valuable on whole-body enlightenment, Zen, Taoism and Advaita, but repetitive and focused on Zen and Advaita while ignoring what Gardner considers their superiors, Dzogchen and Kashmir Shaivism.
The ten stages and the Dharma Cloud
The bhumis. Mahayana texts such as the Dasabhumika Sutra describe ten bhumis, or grounds, of the Bodhisattva path. In the usual list they are: the Joyful, the Stainless, the Luminous, the Radiant, the Difficult to Conquer, the Manifest, the Far-Reaching, the Immovable, Good Intelligence, and finally the Dharma Cloud (dharmamegha), at which a Bodhisattva receives a consecration from the Buddhas and becomes like a cloud raining Dharma on beings.
Gardner's reading. In his review of Norbu's The Crystal and the Way of Light, Gardner proposes that in some Yogacara schemes the seventh to tenth grounds are simply the progressive intensification of the Dharma Cloud's descent, ending in its full descent into the Tathagatagarbha, the Heart. The result is Bodhicitta, which he equates with Tathata (Suchness) and the Dzogchen Dharmata. The consecration of the tenth ground is, for him, the baptism by which Buddhas initiate Bodhisattvas.
What supports it. The traditional descriptions do lend some support. The eighth ground is commonly described as the point where practice becomes effortless and spontaneous, and the tenth involves a consecration of light from the Buddhas. Gardner's addition is the claim that these images describe the same Energy that Hindu tantra calls Shakti and Christianity calls the Holy Spirit, and that Dzogchen's togal is a repackaging of them. The first part is a comparative reading many perennialists would share; the second is his own speculation.
Why it matters to the ratings. This model explains why Gardner rewards Suzuki and Devenish and punishes Tagawa and Lusthaus. Suzuki reads the Lankavatara as a scripture of spiritual realization in which Mind is real. Lusthaus, a careful historian, reads Yogacara as a sophisticated phenomenology of experience, which in academic terms is a strength. For Gardner it removes the descent, the consecration and the Heart, and with them everything he thinks the texts are for.
A note on Culadasa. The Mind Illuminated is the most widely used book in this chapter, and Gardner's three-star rating is more favourable than his tone suggests. His central objection, that a ten-stage path starts with presence and then abandons it for a sequence of attention exercises, applies to many graduated systems. His alternative is the Dzogchen instruction to remain present and let attention's grip release by itself.
Reading the Yogacara chapter
Ratings tell the story. The 26 reviews in Chapter Two average just over 2.2 stars, the lowest of the book. Yet within it the curve is sharp: Yogacara texts that read Mind as substance reach four stars, while Madhyamaka texts and Yogacara-as-psychology hover at one. The ratings follow a single test: does the author leave room for a Mind that exists in its own right?
What a reader gains. This section is a useful corrective to readers who assume all Buddhism is non-theistic and anti-substantialist. Gardner points to real tensions inside the tradition, the Tathagatagarbha literature and the Lankavatara among them, that lean toward a positive ground. That is a live scholarly debate.
Gardner's esoteric glosses (Lanka as the Heart-cave, the Dharma Cloud as the Holy Spirit, Bodhisattvas "baptized" by Buddhas) are his own readings and are presented as if they were the sutra's plain meaning. Most scholars would not recognize them. He also dismisses reputable academics as uninitiated without addressing their evidence, and the sneer at Red Pine about McDonald's is a put-down, not a review. Use the chapter as a guide to the cittamatra reading, and check its specific claims against the texts.
The Zen Shelf Worth Keeping
Gardner practised Zen for years before moving on, and his Zen chapter contains some of the warmest reviews in the book. Two early Chinese texts, Huang Po and Hui Neng, top his list, and a Korean master, Chinul, joins them. He then lays out a full Zen reading order from Alan Watts to Thomas Cleary, while holding to his verdict that Zen is the poor sister of Dzogchen.
Huang Po and the early masters
The best Zen book. The first Zen book Gardner read, in 1972, is still the best: John Blofeld's translation of The Zen Teaching of Huang Po. He gives it five stars. Of the more than 2,000 spiritual books he says he has read, few match its "non-stop barrage of brilliant, pithy wisdom." He still carries lines from it in his head. His favourite: "There's never been a single thing; then where's defiling dust to cling?" And when people ask him what's happening, he answers with Huang Po: "only the spontaneously arising Absolute."
Hui Neng. The only other Zen text on his Highly Recommended list is The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng, in the A.F. Price and Wong Mou-lam translation, four stars. He notes that these two were also the only Zen texts on Ram Dass's "Books to Hang Out With" list in Be Here Now. He loves the Sixth Patriarch's verse ("There is no Bodhi tree, nor stand of mirror bright"), and reads Hui Neng as describing Enlightenment in Hindu-like terms: the Essence of Mind, a state of Thusness, which he equates with Isness or Beingness rather than bare emptiness. In the famous story of the flag and the wind, it is not the empirical mind that moves but the One Mind appearing as all forms.
Huang Po (died c. 850): Blofeld translation, five stars, "The Best Zen Book." Hui Neng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch: four stars, on the Highly Recommended list. Hui Hai, heir of Ma Tsu: four stars, the teaching of non-dwelling. Chinul (1158-1210), founder of Korean Son: five stars, upgraded to Highly Recommended. Bodhidharma, legendary founder: one star, but the fault is the translator's.
Hui Hai. Blofeld's The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination gets four stars. With Huang Po, Hui Neng and Conze, it was Gardner's "Bible" for a couple of years in the early 1970s. Its one directive is to develop a mind that clings to naught: "When things happen, make no response... keep your minds from dwelling on anything whatsoever." Gardner practised this non-dwelling almost continuously for two years and found it incomplete. A purely via negativa method, he concluded, does not by itself produce Bodhi; that was why he moved to a Siva-Shakti approach and, decades later, built his Electrical Spiritual Paradigm to explain why.
Gardner's Electrical Spiritual Paradigm borrows Ohm's Law (current equals voltage divided by resistance) as a picture of practice. Presence is the voltage, letting go lowers the resistance, and the current is the Spirit, the Sambhogakaya. Hui Hai's non-dwelling works on resistance only. Without the voltage of conscious presence and the reception of the current, Gardner argues, relinquishment stalls in a calm but unawakened state.
Chinul. Robert Buswell's Tracing Back the Radiance: Chinul's Korean Way of Zen gets five stars and a confession: Gardner had placed it only on his "Recommended" list in 2010 and calls that a mistake. Chinul was not just a great master but a penetrating analyst of awakening who taught sudden awakening followed by gradual cultivation, a "Dharma doctor" who prescribed different methods for beginners and advanced students. Gardner quotes his empty-bottle image: "no-mind" means no things in the mind, not that there is no mind-essence, "like speaking of an empty bottle: we mean that there is no thing in the bottle, not that there is no bottle."
Bodhidharma. Against all this, Red Pine's The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma gets one star, "Buddhadharma Butchery." Gardner calls Red Pine perhaps the worst writer on Buddhism he has met and calls the book the most overrated Zen text. The sermons misdescribe the three bodies of a Buddha as rewards for good deeds and wisdom; Gardner restates them as timeless Awareness, Clear-Light Energy and the immanent Buddha in whom the two unite.
| Book | Author or translator | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Zen Teaching of Huang Po | John Blofeld | 5 | The best Zen book |
| Tracing Back the Radiance | Robert Buswell (Chinul) | 5 | Profound and underrated |
| The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng | Price and Wong Mou-lam | 4 | Essence of Mind as Thusness |
| The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai | John Blofeld | 4 | Non-dwelling, but via negativa |
| The Way of Zen | Alan Watts | 4 | Superb prose, fine overview |
| Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind | Shunryu Suzuki | 4 | Delightful Soto classic |
| The Three Pillars of Zen | Philip Kapleau | 4 | Rinzai classic for newcomers |
| Practical Zen | Julian Daizan Skinner | 4 | A spectrum of practices |
| The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma | Red Pine | 1 | Most overrated Zen book |
Chapter 3, part one: the Zen classics
The modern classics
Watts. Gardner still owns his copy of the 1957 The Way of Zen, four stars. He enjoyed reading Alan Watts again partly as a writer: Ken Wilber, he notes, learned to write by copying Watts's texts by hand. The eight chapters move from the Tao through Mahayana to zazen, the koan and Zen in the arts. Gardner quotes Watts's remark that Zen masters fall in love and have human weaknesses, and then tells the sequel: on meeting the teachings of Adi Da fifteen years later, Watts reportedly said, "I have been waiting for an Avatar all my life, and now he has come." Gardner felt the same. "Zen is to Dzogchen what Advaita Vedanta is to Kashmir Shaivism: its poor sister."
Suzuki Roshi and Kapleau. Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind reminds Gardner of Be Here Now: both are circa-1970 classics with "groovy covers" that reached hundreds of thousands. Four stars. He keeps two lines from it, "To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control it" and "if you're trying to get out of the rain, it's raining everywhere", and rejects one: that taking the zazen posture is the right state of mind. Philip Kapleau's The Three Pillars of Zen also gets four: zazen instructions, the Ten Oxherding Pictures, moving accounts of students striving for kensho, and roshi interviews. Read the two together, he advises, to feel the difference between Soto sitting and Rinzai seeking.
Skinner. Julian Daizan Skinner's Practical Zen is a contemporary four-star pick. Skinner spent fifteen years as a Soto monk before turning to Rinzai under Shinzan Miyamae, because passive "just sitting" did not work for most people; they needed a "means of ignition." The book teaches Hakuin's dual system of Rikan (koans, counting and following the breath) and Nikan (practices that ground and energize the body). Gardner likes both the clarity and the honesty about what failed.
Huang Po's One Mind
The text. Blofeld's translation, first published in 1958, gathers two records of Huang Po's talks, compiled by his student, the official P'ei Hsiu. Its theme is announced at once: all the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind is without beginning, neither green nor yellow, neither old nor new, and it cannot be reached by seeking, because seeking is already a departure from it.
Why it fits Gardner. The text gives Gardner what he finds missing in Madhyamaka: a positive ultimate, called Mind, which is not a mental object and not a blank. Huang Po insists that Mind is not emptiness in the sense of nothing, and that it is "the spontaneously arising Absolute", the phrase Gardner borrows for himself. The text also suits his preference for directness: Huang Po dismisses graded practices and urges the student to drop conceptual thought at once. Where Gardner parts from it is the Energy dimension. Huang Po says nothing about a descending current, which is why, for all the five stars, Zen remains below Dzogchen in his ranking.
Soto, Rinzai and the koan
Two schools. Gardner's Zen reviews keep returning to the split between Soto and Rinzai. Soto, brought to Japan by Dogen in the thirteenth century, emphasizes shikantaza, "just sitting", in which practice and realization are one. Rinzai, revived in the eighteenth century by Hakuin, emphasizes the koan, intense questioning in interviews with a teacher, aimed at a breakthrough called kensho or satori.
Gardner's sympathy. He reads Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind as the classic of "passive" Soto and Kapleau's Three Pillars of Zen as the classic of "aggressive" Rinzai, and recommends reading both. His sympathies, though, are with the reasoning in Skinner's Practical Zen. Just sitting, without a means of ignition, rarely works for most people. Something must light the fire, and in Gardner's system that something is the descent of Energy.
Soto (Suzuki Roshi). Just sitting; the posture is the right state of mind; no special state to obtain. Gardner keeps the image of the spacious meadow but rejects the claim that posture equals realization.
Rinzai (Kapleau, Hakuin). Koans, effort and breakthrough, with Rikan for insight and Nikan for energy and grounding. Gardner values the energetic side and sees koan practice as Zen's answer to the limits of pure non-dwelling.
Why koans arose. Gardner offers a historical guess in his Hui Hai review: the koan method developed because early Chan's pure non-dwelling was not, on its own, an integral practice. Historians usually describe the rise of koan study in Song-dynasty China as a response to institutional and literary changes. Gardner's reading is a practitioner's, and it fits his larger argument that letting go needs a counterpart.
The Oxherding Pictures. Kapleau's book includes the Ten Oxherding Pictures, a Chinese sequence in which a herdsman seeks, finds, tames and rides an ox, then forgets it, then forgets himself, and finally returns to the marketplace "with open hands." Gardner mentions the sequence as useful for beginners. It also illustrates his point: the series ends not in emptiness but in a return to ordinary life with the realization embodied.
Chinul's answer. Of all the Zen masters, Chinul comes closest to Gardner's own synthesis. His formula of sudden awakening, gradual cultivation holds that one first sees one's true nature and then spends years integrating it. Gardner's description of the Dzogchen practitioner who has been initiated by the Stream and then "practises effortless abiding while remaining fully present" is very close to Chinul's picture, which may explain the upgrade to five stars.
Reading the Zen classics
A generous Gardner. This is the gentlest part of the book. Seven of the nine classics here get four or five stars, and his complaints are mostly doctrinal footnotes. The reason is partly personal: these were the books of his early practice, and he writes about them with the affection of someone looking back.
The limit he sees. His reservation about Zen as a whole is consistent. Zen, he says, abhors the mind and metaphysics, and so it cannot explain what happens in awakening. It points directly at Mind but refuses to describe the Energy that, in his model, does the work of liberation. That is why later Zen-trained teachers such as Adyashanti and David Hawkins turned to Advaita vocabulary, and why Gardner himself moved on to Dzogchen and Kashmir Shaivism.
What to take. For a reader, the chapter offers a well-tested starter library and a sensible order. Gardner's taste in the classical Chinese texts is mainstream; Huang Po, Hui Neng and Chinul are widely admired. His reading of Hui Neng's Essence of Mind as Beingness has support in the text itself, though Zen teachers would resist calling it a Self.
The praise for Watts's endorsement of Adi Da is presented without the context Gardner gives only later: Adi Da's community faced serious allegations of abuse, and Watts died soon after his remark, before those reports surfaced. The Hui Hai review also slides into self-promotion, presenting Gardner's own paradigm as the explanation the Zen masters lacked. His dismissal of Zen as the "poor sister" is a ranking from inside his system, not a finding; Zen teachers would say the refusal to describe is the method.
Quasi-Zen and Pop Awakening
The other half of Gardner's Zen chapter is the "quasi-Zen" pile: pop Zen, neo-Advaita and the integral reimagining of Buddhism. Here sit most of the chapter's one-star ratings, the two long essays on Ken Wilber and Sam Harris that replaced his Amazon reviews, and a handful of books he read in under an hour. His charge is that modern teachers have turned awakening into a shift in perspective.
Pop Zen
What he means. For Gardner, pop Zen is the teaching that enlightenment is simply seeing what is, here and now, with no metaphysics, no stages and no Grace. It shares this with neo-Advaita, the Western satsang movement that grew out of Papaji. Both reduce the timeless Now to the momentary present and the Self to a shift in viewpoint. He finds it in a run of popular books.
Hagen and Sheridan. Steve Hagen's Buddhism Plain and Simple gets one star: it makes Eckhart Tolle "seem esoteric by comparison." The point of Buddhism, Hagen writes, is "to just see." Gardner lists what the book leaves out: rebirth, the jhanas and the Buddha's teachings on sex and women. Read Bodhi or Woodward instead. Tai Sheridan's Buddha in Blue Jeans is ten pages that took five minutes; Gardner got it free and says it reads as if it was "twittered" rather than written. Its sample line: "You won the lottery, you were born." The title, he concedes, is cool.
Harding. Douglas Harding's On Having No Head (1961), 77 pages that took him forty-five minutes, gets two stars as a precursor to pop Zen and neo-Advaita. Harding taught comparative religion; Gardner links him to Tolle, another Cambridge figure, and says both are superficial. Harding's Eight Stages of the Headless Way (from the Headless Infant to the Breakthrough) are no map of awakening. The parting shot: Harding's "seeing into Nothingness" is what Gardner saw on the pages.
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buddhism Plain and Simple | Steve Hagen | 1 | Pop Zen as Buddhism for Dummies |
| Buddha in Blue Jeans | Tai Sheridan | 1 | Ten pages, five minutes |
| On Having No Head | Douglas Harding | 2 | Pop Zen pablum, 1961 |
| Big Mind, Big Heart | Dennis Genpo Merzel | 1 | Exoteric Zen meets pop psychology |
| The Science of Enlightenment | Shinzen Young | 1 | Great title, grotty content |
| The Ten Thousand Things | Robert Saltzman | 1 | Quit at 20 percent |
| The Third Turning of the Wheel | Reb Anderson | 1 | Three viruses at once |
| Beyond Mindfulness | Stephen Bodian | 3 | Direct path for dummies |
| The Fourth Turning | Ken Wilber | 2 | Integral theory on top of Dharma |
| Waking Up | Sam Harris | 2 | No Spirit in the spirituality |
| Zen Judaism | Avi Sion | 2 | Right on Judaism, wrong on Zen |
Chapter 3, part two: pop Zen, neo-Advaita and integral books
Teachers with credentials
Merzel. Dennis Genpo Merzel's Big Mind, Big Heart has a story attached. Gardner first reviewed it in 2008, deleted all four of his reviews in 2011 on advice that negative reviews would hurt a self-published author, rejected that advice, and wrote a second review when the book came back from storage. Both are one star. The foreword by Ken Wilber calls the Big Mind process "arguably the most important original discovery in the last two centuries of Buddhism." Gardner calls it exoteric Zen meets pop psychology. His wider verdict: Zen, because it abhors the mind and metaphysics, is the most overrated Eastern tradition. His recommended alternatives are Godman's Be As You Are, Nisargadatta's I Am That, Norbu's The Cycle of Day and Night, Krishnamurti, Adi Da and Huang Po.
Bodian. Stephan Bodian has credentials "up the yin-yang": ordained Zen monk, psychotherapist, former editor of Yoga Journal. His Beyond Mindfulness contrasts the progressive path with the direct path ("no effort, no manipulation, no cultivation"). Gardner gives it three stars as "exoteric esotericism." Bodian apes the surface of Zen, Advaita and Dzogchen and cannot explain what lies beneath. Gardner's alternative is a dialectic he attributes to the Buddha.
Shinzen Young. The Science of Enlightenment gets one star: "Great Title, Grotty Content." Gardner read it in half an hour and calls it "the rambling narrative of a fogged-out ex-hippy who got a PhD." Young says enlightenment is "notoriously tricky" to define and treats it as a shift in perspective. Young hopes a science of enlightenment will be developed in his lifetime. Gardner replies that it already exists, in his own Electrical Spiritual Paradigm, and calls the big-name blurbs on the cover proof that the Buddhist establishment is a "buddy-buddy backslapping" club.
Saltzman and Anderson. Robert Saltzman's The Ten Thousand Things was a fan's request. Gardner quit at 20 percent. Saltzman says awakening means the end of "spirituality" and an honest not-knowing; when he jokes that he is a "vegetarian" about the meat on Ramana's bones, Gardner calls him a clown in a spiritual circus. Reb Anderson's The Third Turning of the Wheel, on the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, gets one star. Anderson calls the Sambhogakaya an "experience." Gardner answers in four steps: it is the Clear-Light Energy dimension of Reality; experiences come and go and it does not; it has nothing to do with faith; and emptiness cannot be a "source". Anderson, he concludes, has three viruses: Madhyamaka, Vijnaptimatra and the U.S. school system.
The recurring distinction in this section is between the momentary now, the passing present that pop Zen and mindfulness teach us to notice, and the timeless Now, the Unborn that underlies and transcends it. Saltzman, Kabat-Zinn and Harding, in Gardner's reading, never move past the first. Ramana, Huang Po and Dzogchen point to the second.
The two essays
Wilber's Fourth Turning. Instead of his Amazon review, Gardner reprints a longer chapter from Zen Mind, Thinker's Mind on Ken Wilber's The Fourth Turning (2015), two stars. Wilber, who calls himself a pandit, proposes an Integral Buddhism that updates the tradition with modern discoveries about development. Gardner's summary: it is Wilber's Integral Theory plastered on top of Buddhadharma. Part 3 merely repeats Part 2. He also rejects Wilber's "progressive" politics as a reason not to adopt his model of interior thinking. Wilber, he says, is "in over his head."
Harris's Waking Up. The second essay, on Sam Harris's Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, is equally harsh at two stars. Gardner calls Harris a philosophic "bottom-feeder" and sets out to "behead" him with his Dharma sword. The title is a misnomer, he says, because there is not a shred of Spirit in it: Harris has nothing to say about the Sambhogakaya. He adds that the Dzogchen Semde tantra Harris draws on, the Kunjed Gyalpo, describes a Supreme Source, Samantabhadra, who is also a creator, and that Harris never mentions this.
Zen Judaism. Avi Sion, praised in Chapter 3 for Buddhist Illogic, gets two stars for Zen Judaism. Gardner, Jewish by birth, agrees with Sion's critique of normative Judaism as a "disorderly, rickety construction" and calls mainstream practice a charade. But Sion understands neither mystical Judaism nor mystical Buddhism. Gardner's correction: the "cloud" in Yogacara is the Dharma Cloud, which is the Kabbalistic Supernal Influx.
Big Mind as a method
What Merzel teaches. Genpo Merzel's Big Mind process adapts a Western psychotherapy technique, voice dialogue, developed by Hal and Sidra Stone. The facilitator asks the participant to "speak as" different voices: the controller, the seeker, the skeptic, and finally Big Mind and Big Heart. Many participants report a quick, vivid sense of spacious awareness. That speed is what impressed Ken Wilber and what Gardner distrusts.
Gardner's objection. For Gardner, a glimpse produced by role-play is exactly the kind of mental shift pop Zen confuses with awakening. It involves no initiation by the Stream, no jhana and no Heart-release, and so it cannot be what the Buddha or Ramana meant. Calling it the most important discovery in two centuries of Buddhism, as Wilber did, is to him evidence of how low the bar has fallen. Readers may judge the technique more kindly as a useful introduction; Gardner's point is that it should not be sold as more.
Neo-Advaita and the Zen connection
One lineage. Several of the authors Gardner rejects in this chapter share a lineage. Papaji (H.W.L. Poonja), a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, taught many Western students in Lucknow in the 1990s, and some of them, like Andrew Cohen and Gangaji, became teachers. A parallel line of Western teachers came from Zen: Adyashanti, who trained in Soto Zen, and David R. Hawkins both moved toward Advaita language. Gardner reads this movement as evidence that Zen lacked a vocabulary for what it pointed at, and that the borrowed Advaita was itself stripped of Ramana's esoteric teaching on the Heart and Shakti.
What gets lost. The teaching that survives this double borrowing, in Gardner's view, is "you are already awake; just notice." He does not deny that noticing is a start. His objection is that without Self-enquiry pursued into the Heart, and without the descent of Energy, the noticing stays at the level of a mental shift. That is why he gives Saltzman, Harding and Young one or two stars while giving Ramana six if he could.
Gardner's first book, Beyond the Power of Now, was a critique of Eckhart Tolle, and Tolle is the yardstick for "pop" throughout this chapter. Hagen's book makes Tolle look esoteric; Harding, like Tolle, came out of Cambridge; Cohen is "Tolle-level." For readers who know Gardner's earlier book, this chapter extends the same case to a dozen more authors: that the "Now" of popular spirituality is the momentary present, not the timeless Being that Ramana and the Buddha pointed to.
Integral Buddhism. The Wilber essay raises a different issue. Wilber's Fourth Turning proposes to integrate developmental psychology and states and stages research into Buddhism. Gardner's complaint is not that this is shallow but that it is off-target: the problem of Buddhism, for him, is not that it lacks developmental maps but that most teachers have forgotten what the old maps described. Adding a four-quadrant model does not restore the descent of Spirit.
Harris and spirituality without religion. Sam Harris's Waking Up makes a case familiar from secular Buddhism: that meditation reveals the illusion of the self and needs no metaphysics. Gardner's reply follows the line he took against Batchelor in Chapter 2. A spirituality without Spirit is a contradiction, and Harris's own Dzogchen sources, read honestly, describe a Supreme Source that is very close to a God.
The fair reading. Many traditional teachers would endorse a version of Gardner's critique: that teaching "already awake" to people who have done little practice can produce a conceptual understanding mistaken for realization. That concern is common in Tibetan Dzogchen circles, where teachers warn against "intellectual Dzogchen." Gardner's distinctiveness lies in his remedy, Energy and the Heart, not in the diagnosis.
Reading the quasi-Zen chapter
The charge, fairly stated. Behind the insults, Gardner's argument has a clear shape. Popular Western Zen and neo-Advaita have removed Grace, stages and metaphysics, and what is left is a mood: relaxed noticing in the present. His claim is that this mood is the beginning of practice, not its end, and that books selling it as awakening mislead readers. Many traditional teachers in Zen and Tibetan lineages would agree with that much.
The ratings. The 20 Zen reviews average about 2.6 stars, but they split in two: classics high, moderns low. Only Bodian's book, from the modern pile, reaches three.
This is the chapter with the most personal attacks. Shinzen Young is compared to an imagined Alan Watts with a politician's alleged brain disease, a partisan jab with no place in a book review. Reb Anderson's clarity is likened to Nancy Pelosi's, and Wilber's ideas are dismissed partly for their politics. Gardner also uses two reviews (Young and Hui Hai) to advertise his own paradigm. Strip these out and the argument about pop Zen stands on its own; with them in, it reads as score-settling.
Dzogchen: Rabjam and His Translators
The Tibetan chapter is the longest in the source, with 34 reviews, and its centre is Dzogchen, the "Great Perfection." Gardner treats Dzogchen as the summit of Buddhism and Longchen Rabjam as its greatest voice. That makes the stakes of translation personal: the same treatise can get five stars from Richard Barron and two from Keith Dowman. This chapter covers the lineage texts, their translators, and the Bon tradition.
Dzogchen in Gardner's terms
Two practices. Dzogchen has two main phases. Trekcho, "cutting through", rests in rigpa, the naked awareness that is one's nature. Togal, "leaping over", works with the spontaneous display of Clear Light. Gardner's readings of both are distinctive. Trekcho is the application of rigpa to cut through spiritual materialism to reach Spirit. Togal is not a sequence of visions of spheres and deities. It is the practice of channelling the Sambhogakaya as an unbroken current, and its "vision" is felt as a dynamic, blissful pressure rather than seen.
The Trikaya test. In this chapter Gardner repeatedly applies one check: how does the author define the three kayas? If the Dharmakaya is "emptiness", the Sambhogakaya "clarity" and the Nirmanakaya "compassion", as in Anyen Rinpoche's Journey to Certainty (two stars), he says it is hard to imagine worse definitions. His own are fixed.
Longchen Rabjam's shelf
The five-star treasury. Richard Barron's translation of Rabjam's The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding gets five stars. "What Rabjam is to Dzogchen", Gardner writes, "is what Meister Eckhart is to Christian mysticism, Huang Po to Zen, Abhinavagupta to Kashmir Shaivism, and Ramana Maharshi to Advaita Vedanta." It is not for beginners. It is for "Stream-winners", those already initiated by the Sambhogakaya. Here Gardner also calls Dzogchen "a nondual version of the esoteric Eucharist," the phrase that links this book to his Electrical Christianity. He promises Barron's A Treasure Trove of Scriptural Transmission five stars as well.
Dowman, twice. Keith Dowman's versions of the same texts get two stars each. Natural Perfection: Longchenpa's Radical Dzogchen is so bad, he says, that he can hardly read a paragraph without recoiling. Dowman calls pure Mind a "spacious absence"; Gardner replies that Mind is aspatial and atemporal, and absence cannot be spacious or anything else. It is Rand's reification of zero again. Spaciousness, Dowman's rendering of the Treasury of the Dharmadhatu, is "Dzogchen in the Dumpster." Dowman conflates spaciousness with the Absolute and closes with "Space out in mindless, marvelous presence." Gardner's suggested last line: "Space out in Dowman's..."
Richard Barron (Padma Publishing). Five stars for The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding, with five promised for A Treasure Trove of Scriptural Transmission. Exquisite prose, true to Rabjam's meaning, careful with Mind and mind.
Keith Dowman. Two stars each for Natural Perfection and Spaciousness. "Creative interpretation" that Gardner says no poetic licence can excuse; spaciousness treated as the Absolute; Gertrude Stein's attitude to words.
The 1989 pioneer. The Practice of Dzogchen (Talbott and Tulku Thondrup, 1989) introduced Rabjam to the West, and Matthew Kapstein said it "fills a major gap." Gardner finds the writing poor (one subtitle reads "Excercises"), notes that the translator admits he is no Dzogchen authority, and says little of it concerns practice. He raised it from two to three stars in December 2014, because every time he searched Dzogchen topics online he ended up at excerpts from it.
Jigme Lingpa and the Longchen Nyingtig
Mixed results. Gardner wrote his review of Sam van Schaik's Approaching the Great Perfection (three stars), on Jigme Lingpa's Longchen Nyingtig cycle, before reading Rabjam's Precious Treasury of the Genuine Meaning, a book that, he notes, forced him to downgrade his view of Rabjam and fed his 2022 Radical Dzogchen. He finds van Schaik's and Lingpa's writing mediocre and objects to "reflexive awareness" as a rendering of rigpa. Lingpa writes that "the transmission of the truth must descend into one's heart" but never says what descends. Hindu tantra does: it is Shakti that cuts the Heart-knot.
Lion's Roar and ngondro. Nyoshul Khen's The Lion's Roar gets three stars only because of the text at its centre, Lingpa's own Lion's Roar, an excellent trekcho teaching. The rest is hagiography and remedial material, and Nyoshul Khen's claims about the "inseparability of space and awareness" and the world existing only through deluded perception are nonsense to Gardner: awareness is spaceless, and the world is phenomenally real. Lingpa's The Dzogchen Innermost Essence Preliminary Practice, translated by Tulku Thondrup, gets two stars. It is billed as a complete path but is mostly ngondro: prayers, prostrations and visualizations.
| Book | Author or translator | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding | Rabjam, tr. Barron | 5 | Rabjam's masterpiece, for Stream-winners |
| The Cycle of Day and Night | Namkhai Norbu | 5 | Best Dzogchen contemplation guide |
| The Supreme Source | Norbu and Clemente | 4 | Good, demoted from five |
| The Golden Letters | John Reynolds | 4 | Good second text |
| Self-Liberation through Seeing | John Reynolds | 4 | Better than Evans-Wentz, but parochial |
| The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation | Evans-Wentz | 4 | Inspired writing, weak translation |
| The Practice of Dzogchen | Talbott and Thondrup | 3 | Raised from two in 2014 |
| Approaching the Great Perfection | Sam van Schaik | 3 | Lingpa never says what descends |
| The Lion's Roar | Nyoshul Khen | 3 | Three stars for Lingpa's text alone |
| The Crystal and the Way of Light | Namkhai Norbu | 3 | Disorganized talks |
| Dzogchen Teachings | Namkhai Norbu | 3 | Little on practice |
| Wonders of the Natural Mind | Tenzin Wangyal | 3 | Unique Bon material, many errors |
| Practice of Dzogchen in the Zhang-Zhung Tradition | John Reynolds | 3 | Buddhist Dzogchen is superior |
| Natural Perfection | Keith Dowman | 2 | Reification of zero |
| Spaciousness | Keith Dowman | 2 | Dzogchen in the Dumpster |
| Dzog Chen and Zen | Namkhai Norbu | 2 | A 16-page lecture |
| Innermost Essence Preliminary Practice | Jigme Lingpa | 2 | Ngondro, not a complete path |
| Heart Drops of the Dharmakaya | Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen | 1 | Worst Dzogchen text |
Chapter 4, part one: Dzogchen lineage texts and translators
Norbu and Reynolds
The best living teacher. Gardner says no living Dzogchen master really impresses him, but Namkhai Norbu is the best. The Cycle of Day and Night gets five stars as the best contemplation guide in Buddhism; he tells his students to buy it. Its flaws are that it is only a Mind teaching, without Energy, and that Norbu does not fully grasp the Trikaya. The Supreme Source (Kunjed Gyalpo, with Adriano Clemente) drops from five to four stars on a second reading, ten years later; Gardner notes that togal is mentioned once, in a single sentence, in what is supposed to be a tantra. Other Norbu titles fare worse: Dzog Chen and Zen, a sixteen-page 1981 lecture, two stars, and Dzogchen Teachings, three, with the line that "Norbu without John Myrdhin Reynolds is like Sonny without Cher."
Reynolds. John Myrdhin Reynolds, Norbu's editor, is one of the few Dzogchen writers Gardner says can actually write. The Golden Letters, built on the Three Statements of Garab Dorje (be introduced directly to your own nature; decide on this unique state; continue with confidence in liberation), gets four stars as a good second text. Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, a translation of Padmasambhava, gets four, as better than Evans-Wentz's earlier version; but Reynolds is "allergic" to the One Mind and spends too much effort discrediting Evans-Wentz. Gardner's main objection to Reynolds is epistemological: like most "primacy-of-consciousness" thinkers, he will not admit that objects exist independently of consciousness. Gardner's antidote is Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
Gardner bought Norbu's The Crystal and the Way of Light (three stars) to check a claim in Jackson Peterson's book that the Tibetan thigle (drop, sphere, seed-essence) is kundalini. The book itself is a "disorganized jumble" of talks. But it prompts one of his boldest guesses: Dzogchen borrowed the last four stages (seven to ten) of a Bodhisattva's path from Yogacara, the progressive descent of the Dharma Cloud into the Tathagatagarbha, and packaged them as "secret Thodgal teachings."
The Bon tradition
Bon Dzogchen. Dzogchen is also taught in the Bon religion, whose Zhang-Zhung lineage Gardner says predates Buddhism in Tibet. After reading enough of it, he concludes that the Buddhist versions are superior. Reynolds's The Practice of Dzogchen in the Zhang-Zhung Tradition gets three stars. It classifies remedial practices as Dzogchen, misreads the Trikaya, and teaches that "what one sees before one is only created by one's thoughts." Tenzin Wangyal's Wonders of the Natural Mind, three stars, is the Bon book he recommends; it stays on his list despite errors.
The worst. Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen's Heart Drops of the Dharmakaya, with Lopon Tenzin Namdak, is the one Dzogchen text Gardner gives one star: the worst of the couple of dozen he has read. Gyaltsen teaches that trees, mountains and oceans are made by thought, presents forty-two sequential methods where Dzogchen is "the Method of the Buddhas", and reduces togal's final visions to peaceful and wrathful deities instead of the Clear Light as one's True Nature.
How Gardner reads a Dzogchen book
A checklist. The Dzogchen reviews follow a consistent procedure, and a reader can borrow it. First, check the Trikaya definitions: does the author call the Dharmakaya "emptiness" or Awareness? Second, check the capitalization: Gardner complains repeatedly (about Christensen's translation of The Lion's Roar, about Thondrup's Practice of Dzogchen) that failing to distinguish Mind from mind produces unintelligible prose. Third, check what is said about togal: is it a sequence of visions or a continuous current? Fourth, check the epistemology: does the author say objects are created by thought?
| Test | Passes when the author... | Fails when the author... |
|---|---|---|
| Trikaya | Treats the kayas as Awareness, Energy and Embodiment | Calls them emptiness, clarity and compassion |
| Mind and mind | Distinguishes universal Mind from the individual mind | Uses one lower-case word for both |
| Togal | Describes channelling the Clear-Light continuum | Lists visions of spheres, deities and lights |
| Realism | Accepts that the world exists independently of thought | Says objects are only created by one's thoughts |
Gardner's four tests for a Dzogchen book
Applied to Norbu. Norbu passes the realism test better than most, and his Cycle of Day and Night is practical enough that the other tests matter less. But Gardner says he never fully explains the Trikaya and treats Dzogchen as a Mind teaching without the Energy dimension. That is why Norbu, though the best living teacher, still gets criticism in every review.
Applied to Dowman. Dowman fails the Mind test and the epistemology test, and Gardner adds a fifth, literary one: can he write. The Dowman reviews are the most personal in the chapter, partly because Gardner cares so much about Rabjam, and partly because Dowman's free, poetic style is the opposite of his own preference for Rand-style clarity.
A changing mind. The Dzogchen reviews also show Gardner revising his own views. He demoted The Supreme Source after a second reading, raised The Practice of Dzogchen after a few years of using it as a reference, and notes that reading Rabjam's Precious Treasury of the Genuine Meaning lowered his view of Rabjam himself, a story told in Radical Dzogchen. These revisions are a point in his favour: the ratings are not fixed doctrine but a record of a reader's development.
Bon and Buddhism. His comparison of Bon and Buddhist Dzogchen is restrained by his standards. He grants Bon's antiquity, recommends Tenzin Wangyal, and praises Reynolds's clarity, while concluding that the Buddhist versions are superior on the Trikaya and on what counts as Dzogchen practice.
Reading the Dzogchen chapter
Why the grades are higher. The Tibetan reviews average close to 2.9 stars, well above Madhyamaka. Gardner is grading within the tradition he trusts most, so his complaints shift from "wrong path" to "wrong translation", "wrong Trikaya" and "missing Energy". That makes this the most useful chapter for a practical reader: it is, in effect, an opinionated buyer's guide to Dzogchen in English.
The suggested path. His own recommendation is compact. Start with Norbu's The Cycle of Day and Night; go on to Reynolds's The Golden Letters; then read Barron's translations of Rabjam. Avoid Dowman, and treat the Bon material as a side road.
Gardner's corrections to Tibetan masters (that Norbu does not grasp the Trikaya, that togal is "really" channelling Energy, that Dzogchen "borrowed" its stages from Yogacara) are offered as facts but rest on his own practice and reading, with no textual argument a scholar could check. He ranks living and dead teachers he has never studied with by how closely they match his system. The guesses may be interesting; they are not established history, and the Tibetan lineages would reject most of them.
Mahamudra, Tulkus and Western Dzogchen
The second half of the Tibetan chapter moves from Dzogchen's root texts to Mahamudra, the "Great Seal" of the Kagyu school, to the books of modern tulkus such as Chogyam Trungpa and Tulku Urgyen, and finally to Western teachers who borrowed Dzogchen language for their own methods. One book, Garma C.C. Chang's Teachings of Tibetan Yoga, towers over all of them.
The Great Seal
Chang's classic. Gardner first met Mahamudra more than forty years ago in Garma C.C. Chang's Teachings of Tibetan Yoga, and he "fell in love with the Teaching." He gives it five stars and calls it the most underrated of the 2,000-plus spiritual books he has read. Chang presents the Six Yogas of Naropa and, above all, Tilopa's Song of Mahamudra in a translation Gardner calls "absolutely elegant and flowing", supplemented by Lama Kong Ka's Essentials of Mahamudra Practice. He notes that Osho used Chang's text for his own Mahamudra talks, published as Only One Sky.
What Mahamudra teaches. Dzogchen and Mahamudra, Gardner says, are very similar: both emphasize simply being directly aware, present, and not seeking. The essence is effortlessness, letting go and letting be. But in his own reading the "Great Gesture" (another rendering of mahamudra) originally meant a sacrament: Divine Communion, uniting one's awareness with Clear-Light Energy. Effortlessness is then only one third of the equation.
Evans-Wentz. W.Y. Evans-Wentz's Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines also gets five stars, even though Gardner disagrees with much of it. Evans-Wentz had "grand illusions" about yogic powers, such as yogis who study distant nebulae without telescopes or travel faster than light. Yet the book is an "uber-mystical, uber-esoteric" classic. Following Chang, Gardner calls Mahamudra on its own a low-energy practice, which is why Naropa added the Six Doctrines: psychic heat, the illusory body, the dream state, the Clear Light, the after-death state and consciousness transference. His paradigm, he adds, explains why.
Chagme and Namgyal. Karma Chagme's Naked Awareness, translated by B. Alan Wallace, is "a classic seventeenth-century presentation of the union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen", four stars, on his reading list. The first 120 pages are peripheral, but its chapter "How to Follow the Path of the Leap-over" is the most complete description of togal he had read at the time. Dakpo Tashi Namgyal's Mahamudra: The Moonlight gets two stars. Its excerpts are thin, and it quotes Nagarjuna that "no distinction whatsoever exists between samsara and nirvana." Then, Gardner asks, why have two words, and why meditate?
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachings of Tibetan Yoga | Garma C.C. Chang | 5 | Most underrated book he knows |
| Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines | W.Y. Evans-Wentz | 5 | Uber-esoteric classic, despite flaws |
| Naked Awareness | Karma Chagme, tr. Wallace | 4 | Best togal chapter at the time |
| Mahamudra: The Moonlight | Dakpo Tashi Namgyal | 2 | Thin and contradictory |
| Empowerment and the Path of Liberation | Tsele Natsok Rangdrol | 2 | 2,440 empowerments |
| Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism | Chogyam Trungpa | 3 | Good on pitfalls, weak on Dharma |
| Quintessential Dzogchen | Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche | 3 | Saved by its extra texts |
| Rainbow Painting | Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche | 2 | A hokum-filled tweener |
| Journey to Certainty | Anyen Rinpoche | 2 | Worst kaya definitions |
| Essence of Mind | Jes Bertelsen | 3 | Mysticism, not Dzogchen |
| Radical Inclusivity | Jeff Carreira | 3 | Valid, incomplete method |
| Shift into Freedom | Loch Kelly | 2 | Psychologized Mahamudra |
| The Natural Bliss of Being | Jackson Peterson | 2 | Hodgepodge mysticism |
| Dirty Enlightenment | Peter Brown | 2 | Far out, not demystifying |
| The Awakening Ground | David Chaim Smith | 1 | Word salad |
| Mindfulness: Learn from Tibetan Monks | Dr. Evan Gray | 1 | Gets the basics wrong |
Chapter 4, part two: Mahamudra, tulkus and Western Dzogchen
Empowerments and tulkus
One empowerment. Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, a seventeenth-century master, is admired in Tibet for Mahamudra. Gardner bought his Empowerment and the Path of Liberation for the Mahamudra and was put off by the first part. Rangdrol counts 2,440 empowerments and 1,980 deities in a single tradition. Gardner's position is that there is only one real empowerment: receiving Shaktipat, which is the transmission of the Sambhogakaya. His reason is a tenet of his model: only Energy, not Consciousness, can be transferred from guru to disciple. The review is headed two stars, though another review lists it at three.
Gardner's claim is that Consciousness, the Dharmakaya, is already everyone's nature and cannot be "given." What a realized teacher transmits is Energy, the Clear-Light current, which awakens the disciple to what was always present. On this view the elaborate empowerment systems of Vajrayana are, at best, ritual frames around the one event that matters.
Trungpa. Gardner met Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism in 1974 and later sat with Naropa meditation groups in San Diego and San Francisco. He gives the book three stars. It came out alongside Suzuki Roshi's book, Osho's Only One Sky and Adi Da's The Method of the Siddhas, and Gardner says Adi Da was "a quantum leap above" the other three. He is blunt about Trungpa's life: heavy drinking that led to an early death, heavy smoking, sexual excess and abuse of students, rationalized as "crazy wisdom." As for the book, Trungpa denies the One Mind and then describes the ground as "a basic intelligence." Still, it is well written and good on the pitfalls of the path.
Tulku Urgyen. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche's Rainbow Painting gets two stars as a "tweener": too advanced for beginners, too thin for veterans, and full of hokum, such as Padmasambhava appearing in a lotus without parents and living a thousand years in India. Quintessential Dzogchen is better at three stars, but only because of its essays by other masters. Tulku Urgyen's teaching is "two-dimensional" because it leaves out the Energy dimension. When he writes that sense objects do not exist, Gardner notes that the book is a sense object and asks who is reading it.
Anyen and Mipham. Anyen Rinpoche's Journey to Certainty, on Mipham's Beacon of Certainty, gets two stars. Mipham is revered as a polymath; Gardner is unimpressed by him and less by Anyen. He sees no need for a bridge between Nagarjuna's illogic and Dzogchen.
Western borrowings
Bertelsen and Kelly. Jes Bertelsen's Essence of Mind: An Approach to Dzogchen, three stars, is really a general mysticism book, closer to Krishnamurti than to Dzogchen; it never mentions trekcho, togal, the Trikaya or the Three Series. Loch Kelly's Shift into Freedom gets two stars. Its foreword is by Adyashanti and its author's primary teacher was Tulku Urgyen: two red flags for Gardner. It follows the formula of Buddha's Brain, adding neuroscience to surface-level teaching. Gardner notes that it mentions his cousin, the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner.
Carreira and Peterson. Jeff Carreira's Radical Inclusivity teaches one instruction, "Let everything be as it is", taken from an unnamed Dzogchen teacher. Gardner says this method has many names ("Thy Will be done", surrender, no-seeking) and teaches it himself, but on its own it is incomplete. He traces Carreira's phrase "always already" from Andrew Cohen back through Wilber to Adi Da. Three stars, partly because the Kindle edition cost $1.49. Jackson Peterson's The Natural Bliss of Being gets two stars, with a disclosure: Gardner was expelled from Peterson's Dzogchen Facebook group within days of joining. He calls the book "discombobulated, hodgepodge mysticism" and objects that Peterson dismisses astrology as magical thinking.
Peter Brown's Dirty Enlightenment (two stars) describes Reality as a "consciousness/energy field" and advises readers to get drunk now and then and take drugs; Gardner jokes about contacting Albert Hofmann by ouija board for help. David Chaim Smith's The Awakening Ground (one star) mixes Dowman-style Dzogchen with Kabbalah into "word salad." Dr. Evan Gray's Mindfulness: Learn from Tibetan Monks (one star) spells it "Tibetian", credits Tibetans with Theravada's samatha and vipassana, and costs $11.95 for twenty minutes of reading.
The Six Yogas in brief
What Naropa added. Because Gardner treats Mahamudra on its own as a low-energy practice, the Six Yogas of Naropa, which Chang and Evans-Wentz both present, are central to his reading of the Kagyu tradition. In outline, as these classic books describe them:
| Yoga | Tibetan name | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
| Psychic heat | tummo | Raising inner heat and energy through breath and visualization |
| Illusory body | gyulu | Seeing the body and world as dreamlike appearance |
| Dream | milam | Lucid awareness within dreams |
| Clear Light | osel | Recognizing the luminous nature of mind |
| Intermediate state | bardo | Practice for the period between death and rebirth |
| Consciousness transference | phowa | Directing consciousness at death |
The Six Yogas of Naropa, as presented by Chang and Evans-Wentz
Gardner's interest. He has little to say about the dream, bardo and transference practices, which he calls "of interest to many, though not me" when they appear in Bon texts. His interest is in tummo and the Clear Light, because these work with Energy. In his reading, the Six Yogas exist to supply the voltage that Mahamudra's effortless resting lacks, which is the same diagnosis he makes of Zen's non-dwelling.
Chang's place. This is why Chang's book matters so much to him. Chang, a Chinese-born scholar and practitioner who studied in Tibetan monasteries, presents both the Song of Mahamudra and the Six Yogas together, so that the reader gets the effortless view and the energetic methods in one volume. Gardner says no other Mahamudra presentation comes close in poetic quality.
Rangdrol's empowerments, again. The contrast with Rangdrol is instructive. Where Chang offers methods that work directly with Energy, Rangdrol offers thousands of empowerments that, in Gardner's view, ritualize what should be a single transmission. His preference for the direct over the elaborate runs through the whole Tibetan chapter.
Trungpa's generation. The reviews of Trungpa, Tulku Urgyen and Norbu also form a portrait of the first generation of Tibetan teachers in the West. Gardner encountered them in the 1970s, alongside Suzuki Roshi, Osho and Adi Da, and judged them against each other. His conclusion, stated in the Supreme Source review, is stark: he cannot find a single contemporary lama, Zen master or professor who expresses Buddhadharma to his satisfaction. That is the premise of the whole book.
Reading the Mahamudra chapter
Where Gardner is strongest. His enthusiasm for Chang's Teachings of Tibetan Yoga is shared by many practitioners, and his warning against multiplying empowerments echoes Tibetan teachers who say the same. His remarks on Trungpa's conduct are consistent with what Trungpa's own students have published.
Where he is weakest. The pattern in the Western section is that a teacher's lineage counts against him before the book is opened. Kelly loses points for Adyashanti, Bertelsen for Tulku Urgyen, Carreira for Cohen, and Peterson, in part, for expelling Gardner. That is a reading of affiliations, not of arguments.
Practical advice. For a reader, the short list is clear: Chang first, then Naked Awareness, then Evans-Wentz for context and atmosphere. Trungpa's book is useful as a warning about the path's traps, read alongside an honest account of his life.
Gardner reviews Jackson Peterson right after being expelled from Peterson's group, and says so, but a reader should weigh that conflict of interest. In the same review he defends astrology as an "ancient art-science based on sound astronomical principles", which is not a scientific position. His claim that only Energy can be transmitted is a tenet of his system, not something the Tibetan sources say. And the dismissal of Tibetan masters as "two-dimensional" or full of "hokum" ignores that hagiography is a recognized genre, not a factual claim.
Ramana, Adi Da and Ayn Rand
The final chapter of the source steps outside Buddhism, and it reveals where Gardner's standards come from. Six of its fifteen books get five stars, more than any other chapter. Three are about Ramana Maharshi, one is by Adi Da, one is Ayn Rand's epistemology, and one is a history of mysticism. Together they supply the Heart-center, the Energy current and the realist epistemology he has used to grade every Buddhist book before them.
Ramana Maharshi
The best book ever. Gardner's highest praise in the whole collection goes to Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, the record of conversations at Ramana's ashram between 1935 and 1939. "If I could give it six stars, I would." Visitors included Paramahansa Yogananda and W.Y. Evans-Wentz. Asked to compare later Advaita teachers (Nisargadatta, Ramesh Balsekar, Papaji, Jean Klein, Andrew Cohen, Gangaji, Adyashanti) to Ramana, Gardner borrows a line from Sparky Anderson, manager of Cincinnati's 1970s Big Red Machine. Asked to compare other catchers to Johnny Bench, Anderson said: "I don't want to embarrass anyone." When someone insists Nisargadatta's I Am That is better, Gardner says he can only forgive them, "for they know not what they say."
Self-enquiry. What sets Ramana apart, Gardner says, is that he taught Self-enquiry: locating the transcendental "I" by undermining the false "I." None of the later gurus he lists, he says, teach it explicitly. Along with Dzogchen-type contemplation, it is what Gardner teaches his own students. He has a practical warning too: avoid the Inner Directions edition of Talks, which he says has been edited and "de-esotericized", and buy the Sri Ramanasramam edition. For an introduction, start with David Godman's Be As You Are.
Gardner's Ramana sources give him his map of the Heart. The spiritual Heart sits two digits to the right of the chest's centre. Thoughts arise from samskaras in the Heart and crystallize in the brain as mind. Self-enquiry pulls the mind back into the Heart, where the ego-"I" dissolves. On awakening, the Kundalini-Shakti rises out of the Heart as a permanent current, Amrita Nadi, the "immortal nerve", which Ramana says "is not different from the Heart."
Sastriar. Kapila Sastriar's Sat-Darshana Bhashya and Talks with Maharshi gets five stars and a place among the ten best books Gardner has read; he has read it four times. It is the book that first awakened him to the electrical, Ohm's-law nature of practice, the seed of his Electrical Spiritual Paradigm. He quotes it at length: "the ego yields to the pressure of the force of Self-consciousness" and dissolves; on Heart-awakening, "as the light of the lamp pierces through the enclosure of the chimney, this conscious light of life streams out from the Heart through... Amrita Nadi." And he quotes Ramana: "Whoever sees knowledge (Jnana) as divorced from power (Shakti) such an one knows not."
Ramana Gita. Sri Ramana Gita, a booklet of just over fifty pages with the Sanskrit alongside, also gets five stars. It explains what elevates Ramana above Nisargadatta and later Advaita teachers: his teaching on Shakti, the cutting of the Heart-knot and the function of Amrita Nadi.
Papaji's fall. Against this, Papaji (H.W.L. Poonja), Ramana's best-known Western-facing disciple, gets two stars for The Truth Is. Gardner skimmed its 553 pages this time. He finds Papaji "a quantum leap beneath Ramana." When Papaji says that kundalini Shakti, sexual Shakti and Shiva Shakti are "different names for the same thing", Gardner objects that sexual Shakti is not Shiva-Shakti, which is Sat-Chit-Ananda. When Papaji says that anything describable is false, Gardner replies that the taste of sugar is indescribable too. He announces that in any second edition of Beyond the Power of Now he will drop Papaji and Adyashanti from his list and add Jean Klein.
Adi Da and his heirs
The Method of the Siddhas. Gardner read The Method of the Siddhas by Franklin Jones (later Bubba Free John, Da Free John and Adi Da) in 1973. He gives it five stars and calls its first chapter, "Understanding", the single greatest chapter ever written on directly living Truth and obviating the self-contraction. He notes that Adi Da believed his early students would understand easily, that none did, and that before his death in 2008 he lamented that no one had. Gardner says he was never a Daist. He mentions the "crazy wisdom" controversy and Ken Wilber's retreat from his early praise once abuse allegations emerged, and concludes: "don't throw the baby out with the bath water." A used copy, he notes, costs two cents plus shipping.
Cohen. Andrew Cohen's Evolutionary Enlightenment gets two stars as Tolle-level pablum. Cohen's Dharma, Gardner says, is exoteric Daism in "Da-speak": the ego as the avoidance of relationship, with the always-already condition realized when that activity stops. Gardner uses Da-speak himself, he admits, but Cohen never mentions the esoteric side: no Heart, no Amrita Nadi, no Shaktipat. His "new path" is a recycled Bodhisattva vow. Gardner, who holds a degree in sociology, adds that Cohen's social theory is laughable.
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi | Munagala Venkataramiah | 5 | Best spiritual book; six stars if possible |
| Sat-Darshana Bhashya and Talks with Maharshi | Kapila Sastriar | 5 | Top ten; seed of the ESP |
| Sri Ramana Gita | Ramana Maharshi | 5 | Shakti, Heart-knot, Amrita Nadi |
| The Method of the Siddhas | Adi Da | 5 | Greatest chapter ever written |
| Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology | Ayn Rand | 5 | Changed how he thinks about everything |
| The Truth Is | Papaji | 2 | A quantum leap beneath Ramana |
| Evolutionary Enlightenment | Andrew Cohen | 2 | Exoteric Daism |
| Refuting the External World | Goran Backlund | 1 | Kant redux, uncredited |
Chapter 5, part one: Ramana, Adi Da, Rand and their rivals
Rand against Kant
The epistemology. Gardner's five-star review of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (about 120 pages, plus a 150-page appendix of workshop exchanges with professors) explains the realism behind the whole book. Rand claims to have solved the problem of universals: only particulars exist, and concepts are formed by measurement omission, abstracting from measurements that differ. After protracted thought, Gardner concluded she was right. He praises Leonard Peikoff's chapter dismantling Kant's analytic-synthetic dichotomy, and quotes Rand's view of Kant as "the most evil man in mankind's history." The book, he says, "changed the way I think about everything."
Backlund. The counterpart is Goran Backlund's Refuting the External World, a 37-page ebook at $9.99, which gets one star. Backlund argues, in a Socratic dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor, Walt, that we never experience anything but our own consciousness, and concludes he has unveiled "the Tao." Gardner calls it Kant redux without credit to Kant. His key reply is one line: there is no seeing without a Seer. He says he would give the book five negative stars if Amazon allowed it.
Primacy of consciousness. Kant, Backlund, Vijnaptimatra Yogacara and much of Tibetan Dzogchen: what we know is only appearance in mind; the external world is constructed or doubtful; liberation is seeing that objects are mind.
Primacy of existence. Rand and Gardner: existence exists independently of consciousness; concepts are formed from real particulars; mysticism adds a Divine Mind as ground, but never denies the world. Nothing unreal comes from the Real.
The Spiritual Reading List
A list in every book. Gardner includes a Spiritual Reading List in each of his books, divided into Highly Recommended and Recommended categories, and many reviews in this collection end by saying whether a book is on it. Read together, the reviews also record a series of revisions to that list, which shows how his judgments moved over the years.
| Book | Change | Reason given |
|---|---|---|
| Tracing Back the Radiance | Raised to Highly Recommended | Profound and underrated on rereading |
| The Supreme Source | Lowered to Recommended | Rereading after ten years; togal barely mentioned |
| The Doctrine of Awakening (Evola) | Added | Deep-core Pali Buddhism |
| The Wings to Awakening | Added | Best descriptions of the jhanas |
| The Way of Non-Attachment | Under review | Borrows Krishnamurti without credit |
| Papaji and Adyashanti | To be removed (Beyond the Power of Now) | Beneath Ramana; pop Advaita |
| Jean Klein | To be added | A teacher Gardner likes |
| Rainbow Painting | Kept off | Mediocre, hokum-filled |
| Wonders of the Natural Mind | Kept on | Unique Bon material despite errors |
Changes to the Spiritual Reading List announced in the reviews
The upper tier. The books he names as Highly Recommended or among his very best, across the collection, are a short list: Woodward, Huang Po, Hui Neng, Chinul, Rabjam in Barron's translation, Norbu's Cycle of Day and Night, Chang's Teachings of Tibetan Yoga, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sastriar, and Adi Da's Method of the Siddhas. A reader who wanted to test Gardner's system against its sources could do worse than read those ten.
What the list shows. Two things stand out. First, most of the top tier are classical texts or translations, not modern interpretations; the moderns who make it (Norbu, Chang, Adi Da) are teachers who wrote from their own practice. Second, the list is eclectic by design: Pali, Chan, Korean Son, Dzogchen, Kagyu and Advaita sit side by side. That fits Gardner's description of himself as an "esoteric eclectic" who has studied Theravada, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Raja Yoga, Advaita and Kashmir Shaivism, Daism and Christian Hermeticism.
Rand on the list. Rand's epistemology is the odd one out, a philosophy book among mystical ones. Its presence explains the realist edge of Gardner's reviews: every time he objects that trees and mountains do not depend on our thoughts, he is applying the primacy of existence he learned from her. Few spiritual teachers would put Rand and Ramana side by side. Gardner does so without apology, and the combination is the most original thing about the book.
Reading the non-Buddhist chapter
The hidden key. If a reader wonders why Gardner keeps faulting Buddhist authors for denying the Self, denying Energy or denying the external world, this chapter answers it. His three standards come from outside Buddhism: Ramana for the Heart and Self, Adi Da for the self-contraction and Energy, and Rand for realism. Every Buddhist book is graded against that composite.
An unusual synthesis. The pairing of Ramana and Rand is rare. Most of Rand's admirers reject mysticism outright, and most of Ramana's readers are indifferent to epistemology. Gardner's synthesis holds that the world is fully real and that Being-Consciousness underlies it, which is close to the realist reading of Kashmir Shaivism he also favours.
The five-star review of The Method of the Siddhas handles the allegations against Adi Da in one sentence. Those allegations, made by former members of his community, were serious and widely reported. "Don't throw the baby out" may be fair for the teaching, but readers deserve the full picture before buying in. Gardner's praise of Rand also leaves out how contested her solution to universals is among philosophers, and his own sociology degree does not settle Cohen's social theory either way.
Perennialists and Theologians
The last group of reviews deals with the Perennial Philosophy, the idea that all great religions share one mystical core, and with the scholars and theologians who have tried to describe it. Gardner is a perennialist himself, so the question in each review is not whether there is a common core but who describes it best. The English writers, Underhill and Huxley, win. The Traditionalists, Schuon and Evola, and the German theologian Rudolf Otto lose.
The English mystics
Underhill. Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism (1911) gets five stars. Bernard McGinn, the leading historian of Western Christian mysticism, called her prose "florid", her argument "loose" and her style "journalistic." Gardner turns each of those into a strength: her fluency let a vast knowledge reach readers that academic scholarship would have kept out. A hundred years on, he says, it remains the most engaging general book on mysticism he knows. He tells students to read it together with McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism.
Huxley. Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy (1944) gets four stars. Huxley seeks the "Highest Common Denominator" of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism and Islam, and finds it in "the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all Being." Gardner applauds the effort and the constant pointing to a God of Being rather than becoming. His reservations: the thesis is "Vedanta-ized", flattened under one staid umbrella; Huxley misses the parallel between the Trikaya and the Trinity; and his line that love becomes "unitive knowledge" and "infallible" is wrong, since love is a mode of feeling, not knowing. It is a fine book for novice and intermediate readers.
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941): English mystic and writer; five stars. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963): novelist turned anthologist; four stars. Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998): leading Traditionalist; two stars and one. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Islamic scholar and Schuon's editor; praised for his introduction. Julius Evola (1898-1974): Italian Traditionalist; four stars on Buddhism (Chapter 2), two on Hermeticism. Rudolf Otto (1869-1937): German theologian; two stars. Ilia Delio: Franciscan theologian; two stars.
The Traditionalists
The Essential Schuon. Schuon was the foremost voice of the Traditionalist School, alongside Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Titus Burckhardt, and was admired by Huston Smith, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton and D.T. Suzuki, among others. Gardner tried The Essential Frithjof Schuon (500-plus pages) in 2007 and gave up. On a second attempt he read the 63-page introduction by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, was impressed enough to order another Schuon title, and then found Schuon himself as ponderous as before. The chapters on religions stay on the exoteric surface: Hinduism without Tantra, Buddhism without Dzogchen and Mahamudra, Judaism without Kabbalah. And there is no index, which Gardner compares, crudely, to a man without gonads. Two stars.
The Transcendent Unity of Religions. The book he ordered gets one star. Its only virtue, he says, is its length: 155 pages, two chapters of which he had already read. It has three-page paragraphs and hundred-word sentences. Huston Smith's introduction calls it "superlative." Gardner's objection is to its argument. Schuon holds that people need traditional, exoteric religion as a foundation for esoteric spirituality, and also that traditional religion conditions the mind in ways no one can set aside. Put together, Gardner says, that means one must be brainwashed before one can be free. He started writing the review intending two stars and dropped to one.
Traditionalist (Schuon, Guenon). The unity of religions is transcendent: real only at the esoteric summit. Below it, each tradition must be kept intact. The seeker should enter one orthodox religion and follow its forms.
Gardner's esoteric eclecticism. The unity is practical: the same Heart-awakening, the same descent of Energy, described in Pali Buddhism, Dzogchen, Kashmir Shaivism, Kabbalah and Christian mysticism. The seeker can take from any tradition what works.
Evola on Hermeticism. Julius Evola's The Hermetic Tradition gets two stars. Gardner received it free, quit halfway and skimmed the rest. The prose is stilted academese, the cosmology and symbolism are surface-level, and the author is "a pretentious, elitist" scholar without real gnosis. A curious complaint: the heavy astrology in the book became "obsolete with the discovery of the outer planets", and a true Hermeticist would have considered alchemy in the light of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. He promises to read one more Evola before dismissing him, as he has dismissed Schuon, Franz Bardon, Samael Aun Weor and Rudolf Steiner.
Theologians
Otto. Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, the 1917 book that gave religious studies the word numinous and the phrases "Wholly Other" and mysterium tremendum, gets two stars as "Difficult, Dry, and Deficient." Gardner admits a disaffinity for German philosophers (Heidegger, Hegel, and Herbert Marcuse, under whom he studied) and an affinity for English spiritual writers like Evans-Wentz, Watts and Huxley. Otto's definition of mysticism as religion with a preponderance of non-rational elements misses the point for Gardner, who sees mysticism as the rational core of religion. He ends by fetching a Schneider Aventinus: he prefers German beer to German philosophy.
Delio. Ilia Delio's The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, a fan's recommendation, gets two stars. Delio, a Franciscan theologian, builds on Teilhard de Chardin, Raimon Panikkar, Paul Tillich and Ken Wilber to argue that "love is the fundamental principle of evolution" and that God is not separate from the cosmos: "God does not transcend order." Gardner calls this anathema. If God were not hypercosmic, he argues, there could be no Heaven and no domain of eternal life. A God inseparable from the cosmos is cosmotheism, the same charge he laid against Hua-Yen in Chapter 4.
| Book | Author | Stars | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mysticism | Evelyn Underhill | 5 | Most engaging general book on mysticism |
| The Perennial Philosophy | Aldous Huxley | 4 | Noble, but Vedanta-ized |
| The Essential Frithjof Schuon | Schuon and Nasr | 2 | Great intro, ponderous author, no index |
| The Transcendent Unity of Religions | Frithjof Schuon | 1 | Brainwash first, then be free |
| The Hermetic Tradition | Julius Evola | 2 | Stilted, no real gnosis |
| The Idea of the Holy | Rudolf Otto | 2 | Difficult, dry and deficient |
| The Unbearable Wholeness of Being | Ilia Delio | 2 | God reduced to the cosmos |
Chapter 5, part two: perennialists and theologians
The whole collection in numbers
The distribution. Across all 123 reviews, Gardner gives 28 one-star, 37 two-star, 23 three-star, 20 four-star and 15 five-star ratings, an average of about 2.65. Nearly 53 percent of the books get one or two stars. By chapter the averages climb: about 2.2 for Madhyamaka and Yogacara, 2.5 for Pali, 2.6 for Zen, 2.9 for Tibetan, and 3.2 for the non-Buddhist books.
Five-star books by chapter. Pali (2): Woodward's Some Sayings of the Buddha; Thanissaro's The Wings to Awakening. Madhyamaka and Yogacara (1): Avi Sion's Buddhist Illogic. Zen (2): Huang Po; Tracing Back the Radiance. Tibetan (4): Rabjam's Way of Abiding (Barron); Norbu's The Cycle of Day and Night; Chang's Teachings of Tibetan Yoga; Evans-Wentz's Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines. Non-Buddhist (6): Talks with Ramana; Sastriar; Sri Ramana Gita; The Method of the Siddhas; Rand's epistemology; Underhill's Mysticism.
What the numbers show. The most generous chapter is the one about books that are not Buddhist, which says a great deal about where Gardner's own centre of gravity lies. His Buddhism is Buddhism read through Ramana, Adi Da and Kashmir Shaivism, and the closer a Buddhist book comes to that reading, the higher it climbs.
The review as a genre
How the reviews were made. The collection also documents a way of reading. Many books came from fans and students who asked Gardner to review them; several were free or on Kindle Unlimited; many came back after years in storage in Texas and were reread. He notes when he quit early (Saltzman at 20 percent, Evola halfway, Papaji skimmed) and when he read a book three or four times (Evans-Wentz, Sastriar). He changes ratings in the middle of reviews and records later upgrades with dates.
The Amazon setting. The reviews were written for Amazon's review pages, and the format shows. They are short, built around quotations and rebuttals, and aimed at a buyer deciding whether to spend money. Gardner tracks the thumbs-down votes on his harshest reviews and notes when nobody offers a rebuttal. He explains in the Merzel review that he once deleted his reviews on advice that negative reviews would harm a self-published author, then returned to reviewing "with a vengeance." Amazon later deleted all of them, which is why this book exists.
1970-1972: Buddhism class at UCSD; first reads Rahula, Conze, Woodward and Huang Po. 1973-1974: reads The Method of the Siddhas and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Early 1970s: two years of Hui Hai's non-dwelling practice. Around 2000: serious study of Dzogchen begins, about fifteen years before the Dzogchen reviews. 2008: an early Amazon review of Big Mind, Big Heart. 2011: deletes his early reviews. 2012-2018: writes the bulk of the 123 reviews. 2022: publishes them as a book, alongside Radical Dzogchen.
What the style costs. The Amazon format rewards punchy verdicts, and Gardner's are memorable: "Butcher with Large Thumbs", "Dzogchen in the Dumpster", "11 Blind Men." The cost is that a reader who disagrees with his system has little to engage with except the verdicts. A review that calls a scholar uninitiated gives that scholar's readers no reason to reconsider.
What it gives. The format also has virtues. Each review is short and quotable, with the author's own words set beside Gardner's reply, so a reader can judge the exchange directly. Taken together, 123 such exchanges amount to a map of the English-language Buddhist bookshelf from one consistent point of view, which is more than most balanced surveys provide.
Reading the final chapter
A fair perennialism. Gardner's critique of Schuon is worth taking seriously. The Traditionalist demand that seekers first submit to an orthodox religion is a real and contested position, and his objection that it amounts to conditioning has been made by other critics. His praise of Underhill over McGinn's academic caution is a defensible preference.
The limits. Calling Otto's book deficient because Otto treats mysticism as non-rational is to fault Otto for not sharing Gardner's view. The same is true of Delio: rejecting panentheism is a theological choice, not a refutation.
Gardner treats astrology here as a science that the discovery of the outer planets "updated", which no astronomer would accept. Across the collection he is also silent on Julius Evola's politics, praising one Evola book and faulting the other only for style and gnosis. Evola was an influential theorist of the radical right, and readers following Gardner's list should know that. Finally, the crude jokes (the "man without gonads", the beer) are entertaining but stand in for argument at exactly the points where an argument was needed.
Master Takeaways
- One model grades every book. Presence plus letting go opens the Stream, which descends into the Heart and reveals Nirvana as Being. Ratings track closeness to this.
- Anatta means "not Self". The Buddha denied that any of the five aggregates is the Self; he did not deny the Self.
- Jhana is Grace. The four absorptions are the descent of Spirit, not a concentration skill, so the eighth limb is Right Contemplation.
- Read the suttas, not the commentaries. Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga and the Abhidhamma are later systems mistaken for the original.
- Nirvana is not blank. It is the end of becoming and the realization of Being, with its own Feeling of Being (Ananda).
- Emptiness is provisional. It clears away attachment to objects, but as an absence it cannot be ultimate; reifying it is the "reification of zero."
- Find out who sees emptiness. Every negation leaves a Seer, and that Seer is the point.
- Mind is a substance. Yogacara's cittamatra (Mind-only) is right; vijnaptimatra (representation-only) idealism is wrong.
- The Trikaya is a Trinity. Dharmakaya as Father (Awareness), Sambhogakaya as Holy Spirit (Clear-Light Energy), Nirmanakaya as Son (embodiment).
- Interdependence is not a ground. Something must exist that depends on nothing; Hua-Yen's net needs a Mind behind it.
- Letting go is not enough. Non-dwelling lowers resistance, but awakening also needs presence and the reception of Energy.
- Two nows. Pop Zen teaches the momentary present; the Buddha and Ramana point to the timeless Now beneath it.
- Dzogchen is the summit. Trekcho cuts through to Spirit; togal channels it as a continuous current, felt more than seen.
- Translators matter as much as authors. The same Rabjam text gets five stars from Barron and two from Dowman.
- Only Energy can be transmitted. Real empowerment is Shaktipat; thousands of ritual empowerments add little.
- The world is real. Objects exist independently of thought; Rand's epistemology is the antidote to idealism in Buddhist dress.
- Ramana is the benchmark. Self-enquiry, the Heart on the right, and Amrita Nadi supply Gardner's anatomy of awakening.
- Perennialism, practically. The same Heart-awakening appears across traditions; the seeker may borrow from any of them.
- Credentials do not decide. Monks, professors and tulkus are judged by what they explain, not by robes or degrees.
- Use the reading lists. Each chapter ends with a clear order of study, which is the book's most practical gift.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Stream descent | Mindfulness plus letting go opens the Sambhogakaya, which cuts the Heart-knot | Evaluating any claim about how awakening happens |
| Not-Self reading | Anatta negates the aggregates as Self, not the Self | Reading Pali texts on self and non-self |
| Contemplation vs concentration | Samadhi is graced absorption, distinct from dharana | Judging jhana manuals and retreat methods |
| Reification of zero | An absence cannot be given qualities or made ultimate | Testing talk of emptiness, spaciousness or Nothingness |
| Cittamatra vs vijnaptimatra | Mind as substance vs mind as mere representations | Reading Yogacara and Lankavatara commentaries |
| Trikaya as Trinity | Awareness, Energy, Embodiment as Father, Spirit, Son | Comparing Buddhist and Christian mysticism |
| Electrical Spiritual Paradigm | Presence as voltage, surrender as lowered resistance, Spirit as current | Diagnosing why a practice stalls |
| Two nows | Momentary present vs timeless Unborn | Assessing mindfulness and pop-Zen claims |
| Primacy of existence | The world exists independently of consciousness | Reading idealist claims in Dzogchen or Yogacara |
Frameworks
The book's strengths and weaknesses come from the same source: one confident reader grading a whole literature against his own system. That gives clarity and consistency, and it gives reading lists a newcomer can use. It also produces ad hominem attacks on scholars and teachers, partisan political jabs, astrology offered as evidence, a review written after a personal conflict, repeated promotion of his own paradigm and books, and corrections to Tibetan masters that rest on experience no reader can check. The claim that the Buddha's remarks on women were censored, the silence on Julius Evola's politics and the brief handling of the allegations against Adi Da all need outside context. Read the arguments; verify the history; discount the insults.
- AI: Gardner's distinction between translators is a lesson for machine translation and summarization of sacred or technical texts. The same source can be rendered faithfully or "creatively", and evaluation needs domain experts who know which terms carry the meaning.
- AI: His "reification of zero" test is a useful check on model outputs and on vendor claims: attributing properties to something that does not exist is a common failure in generated text.
- Enterprise architecture: The Trikaya mapping works as a model of layered systems: an invariant core (Awareness), a runtime layer that carries change (Energy), and the deployed instance where both meet. Reviews that judge only the deployed layer miss the other two.
- Banking: Gardner's habit of grading every book against one model resembles a single-factor credit score: consistent and fast, but blind to what the factor leaves out. Good review processes combine one clear model with independent challenge.