Review: In Love With the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying

In Love With the World: What a Buddhist Monk Can Teach You About Living from Nearly Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a tricky one to rate.

There's two aspects to it, really: the Monk's journey (or, the beginning of it) and Buddhist teachings on life and death.

I think it was the contrast between the two that made this such a slow read for me, because it's two topics I'm rather fascinated by but it was jarring to switch between the two constantly with this book.

The journey: Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche has lived his life as a Buddhist monk in relative comfort and luxury. He has risen through ranks with dedication to the teachings of Buddhist ways and is highly respected and thus treated with considerable respect. However he's decided it's time to discover how to 'be comfortable being uncomfortable' (my words, not his) so he sneaks out of the monastery compound with little money and possessions and sets out to explore. This book follows the first leg of his journey, where he sleeps at a train station for a few nights then moves on to a Buddhist site (sorry, the names are all a thousand letters long and hard to pronounce, so equally hard to remember and attempt to spell) where he eventually becomes sick.

The plug of the novel is what this book can teach you from his experience of nearly dying, but the near-death occurrence doesn't happen until nearly 200 pages in. So a lot of this book is spent waiting for things to take that dark turn, and when it does it's kind of ... underwhelming. SORRY. This guy actually nearly died and here I am talking about how his relating the experience was underwhelming! SORRY. But he's just so CHILL about it! It was really interesting but also I was just so baffled that he did nothing except meditate on it. I'm not reaching enlightenment any time soon, my sense of self-preservation is way too strong.

To be honest, I would have been really fascinated to read about his entire 'wander', since he apparently wandered for four years, and this only detailed a few weeks or so. It was fascinating to read about how his teachings comforted him (or didn't) when faced with unique experiences.

However, the story itself was constantly interrupted by ...

The teachings: While there were some interesting ideas amongst it all, this is heavy stuff. It is pages and pages of walls of text and it is full of concepts that kind of start by making sense but drift into me wondering where I lost the thread. It is full on. It was kind of like a race-car driver trying to explain to a two-year-old how to drive. With instructions like, 'the accelerator makes you move so you just stick your foot on it and drive' but the kid doesn't even know what any of those words mean.

It's me. I'm the kid.

I tried really hard to follow all the stuff about bardos and in-between and dying every day etc but in the end I honestly had no fkn clue what this dude was talking about. He's just so used to his way of life that it's impossible for him to dumb it down because he already thinks he is.

That was my impression, anyway. Perhaps people smarter than me, or with more experience of Buddhist teachings, will appreciate his message a little more.

So the story itself was a 4-star, but way too bogged down by the teachings. And the ideas in the teachings were about a 3-star, but then they were too dense for my dense mind to understand so the delivery was 2-star.

So overall I guess we have a 3-star novel with an interesting story, interesting ideas, but a slow, tedious, confusing sort of delivery.

Not one to read on a whim, friends, but if you want some deep insight into Buddhist living this account is well worth a read.

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