Jeffery Paine - Major Works

Major Works

In Father India (1998) Paine revealed the 20th Century Euro-American encounter with India through a different lens, in a new light. Through a series of dramatic biographies, extending from Lord Curzon and Gandhi through E. M. Forster and V. S. Naipaul, Paine showed that our everyday assumptions, what unquestioningly we take for granted about politics, religion, and psychology, often have entirely unexpected outcomes when they get immersed in a radically different culture. In the San Francisco Chronicle, the novelist Bharatee Mukerjee called the work "groundbreaking" in how it gave a whole new understanding of modern India vis-à-vis the West.

In Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West' (2004) Paine traced the historical story of how a religion, once dismissed as black magic and seemingly doomed after the Chinese conquest of Tibet, against all odds resurrected itself as a world religion and renovated itself along the cutting edge of spirituality. Harvey Cox of Harvard University and author of The Secular City, said, "This is just the book on Buddhism I had hoped someone would write but was afraid they never would." Scholars such as Robert Thurman and Huston Smith appraised it as the best book written on the subject.

Paine followed Re-enchantment with Adventures with the Buddha (2005), which elucidated Buddhism not through teachings or theology but by how it got lived out on a day-to-day basis by Western practitioners from the early Alexandra David-Néel and Lama Govinda to the contemporary Sharon Salzberg and Michael Roach. Publishers’ Weekly called it a work of "genius, one that delights, informs, and fires the imagination."

Paine's other works include the anthology he edited with Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Brodsky, The Poetry of Our World (2000), and in 2009 he was the writer of Huston Smith's memoirs Tales of Wonder.