“What Makes You Not a Buddhist.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 253, no. 38, 25 Sept. 2006, p. 63+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A152253193/AONE?u=cuny_nytc&sid=AONE&xid=bcd93a04. Accessed 19 Oct. 2020.

This book was written by one of the most influential buddhist teachers of our time, Dzongsar Jamyang Khynetse, and he addresses many social and political problems and unlike other research papers, he presents an answer to all the problems he addresses. These methods that he presents are a hundred percent valid as they have been tested by various people across various countries and during various time periods. His methods were taught by the buddha over two thousand five hundred years ago and since then all his methods were renowned for making people reach a state of mind where they neither felt hope for positive circumstances nor the fear of bad ones. They would reach a state of complete sanity and this is what is presented in this book, a method to reach that resultant state of complete sanity. The methods are presented by the author quite simply and in a straight forward manner which is easy to comprehend and to integrate in our daily lives. The author quotes the words of the buddha and explains them in a very modern and implicative way which seems to be his style.

“we do not acknowledge that our bodies and environment are made up of unstable elements that can fall apart with even the slightest provocation” Statements such as these are made by the author to emphasize on the area that we seem to skip in our lives. We know that we are going to die someday but we are sure that it is not tomorrow or a week away. We think we will die with grandchildren around us or at-least in an adult care facility. The author states the importance of knowing that we are impermanent and everything around us is impermanent which is why we have no time to be sad or depressed. If we acknowledge the fact that everything is temporary, we can embrace both good and bad situations because we know, in the back of our minds, that nothing is going to last, not the good experience, not the bad experience, not even the person who is experiencing it. This is an essential and a very crucial point that I feel will re-direct the mental illness to a deep sense of appreciation and will lead to everyone appreciating each moment of their life completely and fully without having to be depressed or mentally ill.