Finding religion without looking for God

Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me, by Peter J Conradi (Short Books, £9.99)

Satan seems to have got a pretty good grip on religion lately. In the land of the free, pious priests rack up TV deals and fiddle with their prepubescent congregations.

In the Middle East, fundamentalists blow up Israeli children as other fundamentalists build fortress "settlements" on Muslim land. In Kashmir, Hindus slaughter Muslims who slaughter Hindus in their turn. God knows, religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, it's the cluster bomb.

Of all the world religions, Buddhism alone has kept its hands more or less clean, and perhaps it is this which accounts for its growing popularity here. In Going Buddhist, Peter Conradi has constructed an elegant and gently compelling homage to the attractions of the only major religion without a god.

The book's subtitle, Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me suggests a Californian-style confessional of the "how I triumphed over divorce, obesity and monomania to become Demi Moore's guru" variety, but Going Buddhist is

mercifully spare both of biographic detail and self-congratulation. In so far as Buddhism can ever be simple, it is a simple and affecting account of Conradi's experience of Buddhist practice over the past 20 years, laced with threads of Buddhist philosophy and decorated here and there with tender little episodes drawn from the author's friendship with Iris Murdoch, who was herself a fan of Buddhism.

The real heart of the book, and the reason to read it, is what it has to say about meditation. Going Buddhist is the clearest account of the somewhat mysterious business of "sitting" that I've read, and I've read many.

Meditating, says Conradi, is partly about "shedding one's biography" and "being invited outside your life to understand the principles that secretly govern it". The practice "proposes a way not of eradicating ego but of ceasing to live exclusively from within the narrow perspective ego offers". And in that way it opens up some "unexpected detail and space" from which the meditator had previously protected himself.

According to Conradi, meditation practice can give you a still and accepting mind which is not above or beyond wanting to change the world for the better, but which cultivates patience and by "revealing what one's busyness concealed", promotes both wellbeing and compassion for others.

Like the ex-smoker who feels compelled to bang on about lung cancer, Conradi overstates the size of the Western spiritual vacuum and the grip of materialism here. We are not all empty-hearted consumers.

That said, this is a serious, subtle and intelligent book and a good and challenging read for anyone whose interest in Buddhism extends beyond Tibetan sky burials and chanting Om in yoga class.