All Is Change: The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West

In the tradition of Karen Armstrong, Jack Miles, and Thomas Cahill comes a magisterial history of the coming of Buddhism to the West.

How did Buddhism — long regarded as a nay-saying Eastern cult that rejected the notion of a transcendent God — come at last to have so pervasive an incluence in the West? In an age when the Dalai Lama has become a prominent figure on the bestseller lists, the impact on the West of key Buddhistic ideas such as karma and rebirth, the healing power of compassion, and the fundamental interconnectedness of all life cannot be overstated. The modern-day creation of a distinctly Western Buddhism is arguably the most significant spiritual development of our time — but as Lawrence Sutin masterfully demonstrates in All Is Change, the West's embrace of Buddhism happened not overnight, but over more than two millennia.