Clear but dry overview of Buddhist thinking. ( )

As another reviewer says, this might better be called "The Analytic Philosophy of Buddhism." This is very much a text about philosophy, not a text about Buddhism in any sense; to read it as a book about Buddhism would be like reading texts of medieval European logic as books about Christianity. This is frustrating at times; Siderits goes out of his way to ignore the more colorful aspects of the texts he describes, including some extraordinary attempts to suggest that they can be read without committing them to the doctrine of reincarnation (compare: "this text of Einstein's is really interesting, but I think it's best read as really being about something I find more congenial than physics, like, say, spaghetti").

Once I got over that, I enjoyed the book. It clarified a lot of things left murky by 'Introduction to Buddhism' books (which do, on the other hand, go into the colorful bits about the multiple hells and Gautama's encounters with divinities and so on), and also brought out very important background assumptions for classical Indian philosophy as a whole (to my shame, I had no idea, for instance, that non-reflexivity--the knife cannot cut itself; the eye cannot see itself; the mind cannot think itself--was just a shared assumption that wasn't thought to require argument.

It would be pretty turgid if you don't care about history of philosophy, though. Fair warning. ( )