The very impulses and notions that make us read biographies -- curiosity about the individuals who shape historical events and a belief in the significance of their personal dreams, loves, flaws, disappointments, passions and intimate relationships -- all of this the Buddha considered not just irrelevant to human happiness but inimical to it. As some observers pointed out when the Taliban destroyed two monumental statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan last month, the spiritual leader would have considered both the effort to erect the sculptures and the fight to save them (as well as, mostly likely, the crusade to annihilate them) sadly misguided; he himself was not the point. A faithful biography of the Buddha would have to be a kind of anti-biography in which everything that we in the West consider "interesting" about the man eventually falls away like, to use his own metaphor, the discarded skin of a snake or the scabbard of a sword, leaving behind a being who is serenely "impersonal."

Nevertheless, Armstrong ("A History of God," "Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths"), a former Roman Catholic nun and arguably the most lucid, wide-ranging and consistently interesting religion writer today, manages to pull it off. And she does it so successfully that "Buddha" is the first book in the Penguin Lives series to make the New York Times bestseller list. Buddhists will probably find this book sketchy and overly detached (Armstrong clearly isn't a believer), but they aren't its intended audience. Instead, Armstrong has set herself the task of explaining one of the East's most enigmatic spiritual figures to a Western audience accustomed to encountering the divine with an entirely different set of cognitive tools. She places Gautama in his historical context (the most exciting, earthshaking few hundred years in religious history) and deftly compares his teachings with those of more familiar Western sages: Jesus and the authors of the Gospels, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates and Mohammed. She unpacks some of the more baffling Buddhist concepts, elucidates aspects of the religion that Westerners often find off-putting and, where earthbound reason can't take us, attempts to suggest an outline of the ineffable.

It can't have been easy. Unlike, say, the New Testament, in which the story of Christ's life is the heart and soul of the scripture, Buddhist holy texts don't focus much on Gautama's life or offer a continuous narrative of it. Scattered fragments of his biography appear in various texts whose status is often disputed. And, among these, there are "almost no details about the forty-five years of the Buddha's teaching mission, after his enlightenment." What does matter about his life, the Buddha insisted, is that it was entirely human. The gods who populate some Buddhist tales -- holdovers from the Vedic cult that would evolve into Hinduism -- were fallible and mortal despite their powers. The Buddha himself did not believe in a Supreme Being. "He confined his researches to his own human nature and always insisted that his experiences -- even the supreme truth of Nibbana [or nirvana; Armstrong uses the Pali spellings of Buddhist terms] -- were entirely natural to humanity."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"