After Buddhism, the culmination of four decades of study and practice in the Tibetan, Zen and Theravada traditions, is Stephen Batchelor's attempt to set the record straight about who the Buddha was and what he was trying to teach. Combining critical readings of the earliest canonical texts with narrative accounts of five members of the Buddha's inner circle, Batchelor depicts the Buddha as a pragmatic ethicist rather than a dogmatic metaphysician. He envisions Buddhism as a constantly evolving culture of awakening, whose long survival is due to its capacity to reinvent itself and interact creatively with each society it encounters.