Buddhism: A Journey through History

by Donald S. Lopez Jr.

One of the world’s leading scholars of Buddhism presents the story of its dramatic journey across the globe, from 2,500 years ago to the present day
 
Over the course of twenty-five centuries, Buddhism spread from its place of origin in northern India to become a global tradition of remarkable breadth, depth, and richness. In this ambitious book, Donald S. Lopez Jr. draws on the latest scholarship to construct a detailed and innovative history of Buddhism—not just as a chronology through the centuries or as geographic movement across a map, but as a dense matrix of interconnections.
 
Beginning with the life and teachings of the Buddha, Lopez shows how a set of evolving ideas and practices traveled north and east to China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet, south and southeast to Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and finally westward to Europe and the Americas. He provides insights on questions that Buddhism has asked and answered in different times and different places—about apocalypse, art, identity, immortality, law, nation, persecution, philosophy, science, sex, war, and writing.
 
Vast in its erudition and expansive in its vision, this is the most complete single‑volume history of Buddhism in its full historical and geographical range.

Genres: History, Buddhism, Religion, Nonfiction, Philosophy, India

536 pages, Hardcover

Published January 7, 2025

About the author

Donald Sewell Lopez, Jr. (born 1952) is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures.

Son of the deputy director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Donald S. Lopez.

Reviews

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most Buddhists throughout history have not engaged in meditation. The oldest extant manuscripts of Buddhist scriptures were found in Afghanistan, not India, China, or Sri Lanka. Buddhist monasteries often had serfs (or slaves) to work the grounds since monks were prohibited from doing so. The term “Theravada” was invented in the 1800s by English convert and Buddhist monastic Allan Bennett (whose fascinating life story is told, for the record, in Mick Brown’s romp of a read The Nirvana Express). Buddhist monks, despite their peaceful reputation, have been perfectly capable of warfare and dehumanization; indeed, in the twentieth century alone, they've been involved in the Japanese invasion of China, fighting against Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, and massacring the Muslim Rohingya in Burma. The Buddha himself appears to have weapon-wielding divine enforcers in the Pali scriptures and Vajrayana tradition, who help with intimidating (and occasionally killing, reviving, and converting) his heretical divine and human opponents. The Buddha most people in the West know—iconoclastic, secularizing, a human teacher who offered not a religion but a way of life—was born not in India or Nepal but in Paris. Indeed, it is hard to say for certain that the Buddha ever existed as a historical person, let alone to pinpoint his precise words or timeline. And, assuming he lived (as Lopez charitably—and, I suspect, rightly—does), it's uncertain whether he died in an obscure village from a bout of dysentery from pork or mushrooms, though it's clear he ate meat when offered (a fact later sutras would retcon).

Lopez's book is easily the most interesting, wide-ranging, myth-busting, and international account of Buddhist history I've ever read. Each section is a study of broad themes such as "Incarnation," "Canon," "Persecution," and "Apocalypse" (the Christian ring to many of these is, as the author points out, partly a byproduct of translators borrowing terms from Catholicism; it is also part of Lopez's implicit mission of de-Orientalizing the subject by lingering on sometimes played-down similarities), with framing incidents plucked from vistas as distant in space and time as twentieth-century Colorado and sixteenth-century Korea. In interviews, Lopez, who specializes in Tibetan Buddhism (though all vehicles are consistently represented in each section), discusses how, like many, he was initially a practitioner of sorts, though, with time, his relationship with Buddhist history became "more complicated." This book will show you why, with disquieting example after disquieting example, from every corner of the Buddhist world.

Still, and this is worth underlining, this isn't a hit job. Lopez has no shortage of admiration for the richness of the tradition, though he clearly reserves the better part of his sympathy for those who were marginalized by it in some way, including philosophically sincere and creative groups like the Vātsīputrīyas (the author uses this self-designation for the much-maligned school better known by the pejorative exonym the Pudgalavada, all for daring to posit an "inexpressible self" that is neither the same as nor wholly different from the five aggregates). His late chapters "Self," "Sex," "Society," "War," and "Women" were, for me, where his critical indignation meets his scholarly compassion. In those chapters, we encounter some of the worst parts of the tradition, and yet we also see the moves, minor as they sometimes are, to renegotiate practices and place different emphases. We also meet remarkable individuals like Michael Dillon, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and transgender monk (I only recently learned his story through friend, himself Irish and eager to claim Dillon, who is preparing to take his vows).

Despite Lopez's understandable dissatisfaction with the trope that the Mahayana are more tolerant and liberal than their Theravada counterparts, there is often some truth to this (there's a reason the Tibetans, not the Sri Lankans, agreed to ordain Dillon). "The cosmology is just so big," as my friend pointed out. And so, when our Chan meditation group here in Taiwan was visited recently by a particularly beloved and mischievous nun, who exercises considerable leadership over the spiritual community with which I'm affiliated, I asked her what she made of Buddhism's unfortunate history with gender, sexuality, and science, the sorts of subjects Lopez broaches here. Her answer, unsurprisingly, was pastoral rather than academic. She winked and said that plenty of the monastics she knows are gay, and to note how the monks and nuns we encounter are basically equal, as her own day-to-day roles and responsibilities make clear. As for gender, there is no distinction in essence, only in societal concessions. "Look at Guanyin," she said, in a by-now familiar refrain, referring to the wildly popular white-clad, motherly patron of compassion and succor. "She used to be a man!" She then smiled and reminded everyone that she is always available to those with questions or in some kind of need. This gloss of the tradition is far from comprehensive, as this book makes clear, but it is deeply principled and pragmatic.

Everyone, I think, has a responsibility to face up to the unsavory aspects of their inherited or adoptive religious traditions. Luckily, Buddhism: A Journey through History makes this immensely fun and thought-provoking. I don't think Lopez would be surprised by that venerable monastic's words and demeanor. After all, compassion is seeing pain and exclusion, and wisdom is finding the right words and resources to combat them. Still, it's good to know just what we're getting ourselves into, even if what others have at times made of the Dharma is not the path we moderns hope to walk.

In the Pali canon, the Buddha (at least as ventriloquized by later monastics) lays down the following principle: "Do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of texts, by logic, by inferential reason... [etc.]," but, rather, only ask of one's values and beliefs, "Undertaken and practiced, do they lead to welfare and happiness or not?" Regardless of who it was that first spoke this utterance—and it seems from the Agama scriptures that the Indian Buddha really did have somewhat of a practical and earthbound streak at times, albeit less so than his Parisian doppleganger—they are well said, and that, more than historicity, many Mahayana thinkers have argued, makes them buddhavacana: the word of the Buddha.

[History Today]

Early on in this masterful account of Buddhism’s emergence and spread throughout the world, Donald S. Lopez cautions his readers that the very existence of a historical Buddha remains subject to debate. The first references to him do not appear until the era of the Indian emperor Ashoka, in the mid-third century BC. This is two centuries after the period in which the Buddha is generally believed to have lived, around the fifth century BC, though there is wild variation in these estimates, with some Tibetan sources suggesting that the Buddha died in 2420 BC. Lopez tells us that, in deference to Buddhist belief, he will assume the existence of the Buddha. Readers should, however, ‘bear in mind what an ephemeral, even phantasmagoric, figure he sometimes seems to be’.

What follows in Buddhism: A Journey Through History bears this out. Readers hoping for a deeper and more scholarly telling of a story whose outlines they already know – an Indian prince embarks on a mission to understand suffering and discovers a practical path to enlightenment – will find themselves challenged to rethink. That story, we discover, is a blend of ancient events, legends, and teachings ascribed to the Buddha with newer elements designed to answer the spiritual needs of modern westerners. Most lay Buddhists, across most of history, would not have meditated. Nor would they have been aware of the Four Noble Truths, regarded in our own time as Buddhism’s philosophical core. It would have been news to them that Buddhism is atheistic. And their hope, in practising Buddhism, was not for a permanent end to death and rebirth but rather happiness in a heavenly hereafter.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Christopher Harding’s most recent book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024).

[GJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title and cover of this book probably don’t do any favors for this book finding its audience. This is maybe the best single volume book in Buddhist Studies, containing an encyclopedic breadth of the most strange and beautiful details from the history of Buddhism within highly readable short essays. Happy there’s finally a book by Lopez that can stand as the one book by him to recommend to anyone, like history nerds and nonfiction readers who haven’t read much about the Buddhist world. He’s a great story teller and you can really tell how stylistically inspired he is by Borges. This book is kinda a late-career masterpiece in its own eccentric way, comparable to Strong’s Buddhisms and Doniger’s The Hindus in its originality.

[Marc Merlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had an on-an-off Buddhist meditation practice for years now, more off than on I'm sorry to say. Now that I've returned to the fold, so to speak, and am investing a lot of my time and myself into daily practice, I thought it would be useful to have a better historical overview of Buddhism and a clearer understanding of how it originated and where its multiplicity of traditions come from. As anyone who has had to pick and choose between the variety of approaches to meditation practice knows, the process of selecting one can be daunting and it's very helpful to be able to put them in a historical context.

So I was gratified to attend a talk by Donald Lopez Jr., the author of Buddhism: A Journey through History, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art in late April. I understood that he was a respected authority on matters of Buddhist history, and so I had confidence that his book - all 536 pages of it -would be worth my time. This turned out to be very much the case.

I feel that I now have a much better understanding of how, over the past 2,500 years, Buddhism came to be the variety of practices that exist in the world today. Although some people have criticized Lopez for his debunking of certain myths surrounding Buddhism, for me it was nice to have an assessment grounded in the reality of historical context, especially as it pertains to its position on caste and its treatment of women. I would rather have this flesh-and-blood version of Buddhism than an idealized one intended to mesh better with modern sensibilities.

I'll close by saying that I really appreciated Lopez's organization of his book by chapter topic and not as an extended chronological slog across more than two millennia of Buddhist history. Since the chapters stand largely independently, this gives the reader much more flexibility in working his or her way through the book. This kind of organization does mean that some information is repeated from chapter to chapter, but I found this to be particularly useful: there is so much to learn here, that it's nice to be reminded of important ideas and stories here and there.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a somewhat helpful collection of lectures on Buddhism, with a firm emphasis on the cultural and historical development of the movement; don't expect to find some deep insightful commentary of the teachings of Siddharta Gautama Buddha, but rather a anthropological and historical exploration of the roots and later branches of Buddhism.

[Kai Waluszewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE book to read if you want to understand Buddhism. It humanizes the religion—the author pulls no punches, and you learn things you wouldn’t have reading The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh or Pema Chödrön.

The structure of the book is innovative—not chronological at all, with the author instead grouping together anecdotes on topics like “self”, “women”, “food”, “writing” etc. Sometimes the lack of chronology can be annoying (you were only just reading about the Zen monks’ support for Japan’s XX century imperialism, and now it’s back to Bronze Age sutras) but the stories are engrossing and you learn a ton.

Beware—it's a highly caloric 450+ pages. By the end, I was honestly tired of reading about Buddhism—but I finally feel I gained a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

Most interesting takeaways below:

1. PHILOSOPHY AND DOCTRINE
In Buddhism, suffering comes from clinging to a “self,” which fuels ignorance, craving and aversion. Wisdom is to realize the three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering, and selflessness. The Buddhist canon is divided into three “baskets”: sutra (teachings), Vinaya (monastic rules), and Abhidharma (philosophy). For enlightenment, virtue is insufficient; meditation is required. Buddhism loves lists—Four Seals, Eightfold Path, 40 meditation topics... Nirvana is can be of two kinds: “with remainder” during life, “without remainder” at death. The Buddha rejected speculative questions about the universe, the afterlife, and the soul as irrelevant, leaving them “unexplained.” His final words were: “All conditioned things are subject to decay. Strive diligently.” Buddhist teachings were preserved orally for centuries, producing the plain style of the Pali canon. Jataka tales of Buddha’s past lives show examples of radical self-sacrifice, like giving his body to feed a tigress. “Skillful means” allowed the Buddha to sometimes teach what was not ultimately true to guide others, according to their needs.

2. THERAVADA, MAHAYANA, HINAYANA, VAJRAYANA
The first schism concerned scripture: early Buddhists rejected Mahayana sutras, which exalted themselves and promised blessings for reciting or copying them. Some critics dismissed them as fabricated or demonic. “Theravada” was not a designation until 1907. Some in Mahayana disparaged early schools as “Hinayana” (lesser vehicle), preferring its own “Great Vehicle.” Mahayana exalted the “bodhisattva” over the “arhat”, with some sutras claiming all beings would attain Buddhahood. Most famous Mahayana texts include the Heart, Diamond, and Lotus Sutras. Vajrayana (tantric Buddhism) developed later, emphasizing mantras, mandalas, visualizations, and rituals. It claimed enlightenment is achievable within one lifetime. Vajrayana spread widely: Tibetan Buddhism, Japanese Shingon, and Mongolian Buddhism all combined Mahayana philosophy with esoteric techniques.

3. SPREAD
Throughout history, most lay Buddhists did not meditate. Their main religious act was donation, bringing karmic benefits such as good rebirth. Many sutras spread rapidly because they promised extravagant rewards to anyone who copied, preserved, or recited them. In colonial Burma, monks started teaching meditation to the laypeople as resistance to British influence, creating the seeds for the global mindfulness movement . In the West, Theravada was first imported. After WWII, Zen gained influence, linked with Japanese arts and simplicity. Tibetan Buddhism rose after the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet and especially in the 1990s, promoted by the Dalai Lama’s charisma. In recent decades, mindfulness has overshadowed all other forms, often stripped of ritual or doctrine.

4. VIOLENCE
Buddhism’s history is not purely peaceful. In Burma, Buddhists persecuted the Rohingya Muslims. In Sri Lanka, monks justified war against Hindus. Korean kings used Buddhism to legitimize conquest. In Japan, monasteries like Mount Hiei raised warrior monks who fought for power, until Nobunaga destroyed them. Worshippers in China sometimes mutilated themselves before relics as acts of devotion. The Lotus Sutra consigned its critics to the worst Buddhist hell—Avicii. The Kalacakra Tantra envisioned apocalyptic war against Islam. Korean monks formed militias; Japanese temples supported imperial wars with doctrine and chaplains. In Tibet, some monasteries clashed violently, some feared the brutality of dop-dop “bodyguard monks”. One Sri Lankan king was told by monks killing non-Buddhists was acceptable. Over centuries, monks sometimes took part in wars—including against fellow Buddhists.

5. ZEN, JAPAN, KOREA
Zen, the first Chinese school to achieve fame, came to Japan in the 7th century. Dogen taught “just sitting” meditation, founding the Soto school. Nichiren exalted the Lotus Sutra, blaming natural disasters on its neglect. After WWII, D. T. Suzuki popularized Zen in the West, linking it to Japanese arts like calligraphy, haiku, and tea. Later, Tibetan Buddhism eclipsed Zen internationally, but Zen remained iconic. In Japan, Buddhism suppressed Christianity in the 17th century. During the Meiji era, the government destroyed temples, seized land, and elevated Shinto, persecuting Buddhism (almost Cultural Revolution-style). Today, most Japanese Buddhist clerics are married—contrasting sharply with early monastic rules.

6. BUDDHISM IN INDIA
India, where Buddhism started, produced little Buddhist historiography. Unlike in China, few records survive. The first solid evidence is Ashoka’s 3rd-century BCE edicts carved on stone. The Buddha did not speak Pali—this was later standardized as a unifying monastic language. Indian Buddhist philosophers developed complex thought; Candrakirti used vivid allegories, like the parable of a king forced to drink madness-causing rainwater to survive, illustrating delusion. Over time, Buddhism declined in India, leaving its greatest legacy abroad.

7. BUDDHISM VS. CHRISTIANITY
In 1894, Nicolas Notovich claimed Jesus studied Buddhism in India during his “lost years.” Buddhist confession in of broken vows in monastic assemblies resembled Christian confession, but aimed at purifying the sangha. Buddhism taught that even gods are subject to rebirth, making the Buddha higher than them. In Sri Lanka, a manuscript portrayed Jesus as a henchman of Mara, demon of death and desire. Interactions between the two religions often emphasized opposition, but striking parallels were noted too.

8. TIBET, DALAI LAMA & PANCHEN LAMA
The Dalai Lama is believed to be an incarnation of Avalokitesvara (Bodhisattva of Compassion); his second-in-command, the Panchen Lama—an “emanation” of Buddha Amitabha. Their teacher–disciple line was formalized in the 17th century. Tibet created the tulku system of reincarnated lamas. To curb corruption, the Golden Urn was later introduced to choose them (by the Chinese Qianlong Emperor). Mongol patronage in the 1600s made the Dalai Lama Tibet’s ruler. In the 19th century, many Dalai Lamas died young, increasing the Panchen Lama’s authority. Conflicts with China often revolved around recognition, taxes, and politics. Tibet never developed full nun ordination; women had to seek it abroad. Tibetan Buddhism entered North America when Kalmyk refugees from Russia built its first temple.

9. WOMEN
The Buddha allowed women to ordain only after Ananda’s requests, and imposed Eight Heavy Rules subordinating nuns to monks. Nuns must also observe far more vows than monks. Some old Buddhist scriptures portray desire and death in female form. Some suggest monks should avoid conversations with them. Some claim women must be reborn as men before Buddhahood, or reaching the “Pure Land” in Pure Land Buddhism. The Chinese Blood Bowl Sutra taught that menstrual and childbirth blood created karmic pollution, punishing women in hell.

10. MYTHOLOGY
Buddhist myths abound. Jataka tales recount the Buddha’s past lives. Hells are depicted in vivid detail. The Buddhist “origin story” of humanity describes sky-beings falling to earth after consuming too much foamy scum. Pure Land sutras promise salvation through rebirth with Buddha Amitabha. In 1873, a Buddhist monk debated a Christian on whether the earth was flat—and won. In the 1930s, a Chinese monk wrote to Hitler, praising Buddhism as the “Aryan” religion and urging him to embrace it.

11. SEX & DIET
Sexual intercourse is a ground for expulsion from the sangha. Rules define sexual misconduct in detail. In the original tradition, people of certain sexual orientation—called “pandaka”—were barred from ordination. Origin myths portray sex as impure, however one story of Buddha at the wedding of Nanda links celibacy in this life to a strange karmic reward: heavenly sex in the next life. More modern cases, like Michael Dillon’s transgender story, show Buddhism’s ongoing engagement with sexuality. The Buddha ate meat and allowed disciples to do the same. Theravada traditions permit monks to eat meat, but Mahayana schools often forbid it. Tibetans, however, eat meat out of necessity.

[Seo-Woo Choi · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a Christian's idea of a good overview of Buddhism. And I mean it in a bad way. I don’t know whether the author himself is a Christian, but that is irrelevant; these are not the topics Buddhists would find central or definitive to their history and heritage.

It is deeply imbued with Christian religious concepts, presuppositions, and preoccupations. While it is not impossible to tell the story of Buddhism in those terms, it is certainly partial and awkward, leaving out many much more central cultural and historical aspects. The author is not telling lies, but he's certainly not telling the whole truth, and not even the most central parts. I am not myself Buddhist, but my family members are, and they would find it confusing to find their religion introduced in this way. And I know that such flaws are avoidable because I have read a much better introduction to Buddhism by Kang-Nam Oh, a scholar of comparative religion who is himself Christian. His 2006 book Buddhism as a Neighboring Religion (the book is in Korean) is sort of a “for dummies” type, a much more elementary, popular exposition of Buddhism specifically written for his fellow Christians, and it avoids the shortcomings that I mentioned above.

Also, despite its lip service to the worldwide and local nature of Buddhist practices, this book is highly Indocentric, presupposing the now-lost Indian version of Buddhism as the true, genuine Buddhism worthy of its name, instead of directing attention to living and flourishing varieties of Buddhism worldwide that can now boast histories as lengthy as the one practiced in continental India. The Christian equivalent would be focusing on the first four centuries of its development unfolding in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and then treating the rest of its history as mere consequences or echoes of that period. I mean, of course all Christians often look back to those times as an important, formative period, but modern Christianity cannot be reduced to what happened in those lands in those times.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I see what they did with that subtitle: this is *not* a history of Buddhism, which is what I had hoped for and expected, but rather a schematic timeline of history to start with, followed by many very good essays on aspects of Buddhism. The benefits to this approach are clear: Lopez covers a lot of ground, in a way that a more traditional narrative (or even thematic) history could not. The downside is that the coverage is often quite shallow, it's often not clear why we're being told something, and there is a *lot* of repetition. The overall point is something like "Buddhism: not what that American on the podcasts says it is." True, and a good project. But there are only so many times you can be told that sometimes Buddhist monks engage in warfare before you want to ask, okay, but can we hear more about the ones that didn't, as well?

There's very little on doctrine here, and any reader will sorely miss some kind of 'Further Reading' section. But! If you're interested in Buddhism, and its history, this is an amazing place to start. It will be particularly helpful for anyone trying to teach this stuff; I wish I'd had it when I was teaching Buddhist texts.

One pet peeve: just way too much "This European/American archaeologist/explorer/whatever did this thing... blah blah okay now we can get to the topic of the chapter." Avalokitesvara, if you are out there, compassionise me: convince historians to stop introducing their chapters with 'gripping' anecdotes of any kind, let alone 'gripping' anecdotes that are only vaguely related to the subject matter, *let alone* 'gripping' anecdotes that make a chapter look like it's going to be about Euro-American people when the chapter is not about them (us).

[Lelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really excelllent buddhist studies book, and (I think) a really excellent book about historiography. Would recommend anyone to read the introduction at least

---

To be able to choose things to believe, we situate ourselves in the history of buddhism as a statist, puritan, conflicting, war-faring, apocalyptic religion.

The ground is still rumbling. What texts are written for political reasons, and what texts were even written by the learned at all? At some point, believing in historical texts describing reality is itself as religious as believing in a deity

But also what would the historian say about the 21st century version of Buddhism as self-help and self-liberation? We'll obviously talk about its Western and capitalist roots, the odd mix of tech wealth and Twitter unemployeds who've constructed the dogma, but also we'd be interested in the return to experience. What then is the point of the old texts? Is any of this new stuff real anyways? How would you know? Or would you believe the new claim - that the modern human (living post-scarcity and where we've excavated a good deal of old texts and also have the debate-like conditions for truth-seeking) is actually better equipped for classical Buddhist enlightenment, after all period of some two and a half millennia of decline. Maitreya was invented! Maitreya is here!

[Luísa Andrade · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Buddhism: A Journey through History” não é um mergulho nas doutrinas de Siddhārtha Gautama, mas um sobrevoo sobre as muitas formas que o budismo assumiu ao longo do tempo. Reúne uma série de estudos sobre 30 temas (i.e. arte, identidade, ortodoxia, etc) que exploram o budismo como tradição em movimento: enraizado em contextos históricos, moldado por encontros culturais, e frequentemente em tensão com a imagem idealizada de "pureza”. Para quem busca compreender o budismo como fenômeno histórico é uma leitura rica e esclarecedora.

[William Stewart · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty dry historical walk through different aspect of Buddhism. Maybe I am just conditioned now to ingest history through The Rest is History style banter, but switching back to this more academic style was difficult.

Of course there is some interesting stuff here - it's always enjoyable to here to more outlandish and lurid aspects of a religion that is so often regarded as austere. But I am not sure Lopez draws any grand conclusions or particularly shocking insights from his deep knowledge.

[Heiki · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid summary of everything about Buddhism. It gives a very solid introduction of the elusive beginnings and focuses strongly how the original version differs a lot from the Western one, which is very meditation orientated. A long, thorough book on how Buddhism has influenced every part of culture. Suggested for anyone interested in history of the religion.

[Vooh Eheve · Rating 5 out of 5]

buddhism demystified, timely sobering medicine for a "new age"

[Børge Holen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a practice book. Great for historical understanding!

[Jayasankar Thayyil · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's quite good but not exactly what I was looking for.