This book has been many years in the making and it is impos-
sible to mention here all those who have obtained merit by
assisting me to make myself clear.

The most important acknowledgment goes to my students at
Duke University, for it was due to my attempt to teach an intro-
ductory course on Buddhism, and my frustration at the standard
approach of the introductory textbooks, that I began what
turned out to be the long drawn out project of writing this book.
I developed a course called "Buddha and Buddhism" in which I
tried out the idea of discarding history as the framework and
using the model of the life of the Buddha. The undergraduates
who signed up for the course found an experiment in which I
invited them to participate. Throughout successive offerings of
the course they patiently waited while I developed handouts,
scribbled outlines, drafts of this and that chapter, and finally, an
entire book. The responses of these students to what I gave them
has been invaluable. As any teacher quickly realizes, we do not
know whether we understand something until we try to teach it.
My students made me see, repeatedly, that what I thought I
remembered having meant to say was not what they believed

-xi-