KIRKUS REVIEW
A spiritual guidebook based on the principles of the mystic trinity.
In his inspirational debut work, Pi reminds his readers at the outset that mankind has been inventing ideologies of the trinity for thousands of years. “It is called Middle Path in Confucian culture, the Kybalion in ancient Egyptian myth, and the Middle View in traditional Buddhism,” he writes. “In Tibetan Buddhism, it is called the Great Zeal as well as the Great Enlightenment under different traditional lineages.” Of course, in addition to these, there is the trinity with which most of Pi’s readers will be familiar: the Christian concept of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Pi maintains that “[t]o know God is to know life,” and he explores in his book’s opening sections the ways in which a tripartite philosophical outlook facilitates what he views as the ultimate goal of any spiritual system: the closer interrelation of “the absolute and the relative.” In prose that manages to explain a great many complex philosophical concepts without oversimplifying, Pi pieces together a fusion of Eastern and Western religious traditions in an extremely well-designed argument. Concepts of karma and meditation appear side by side with frequent, apposite quotations from the Old Testament and New Testament, all of it designed to convey a unified framework that answers what Pi considers to be the basic question of human life: “[I]s there really any purpose behind all forms of manifestation and existence?” In Pi’s view, the closer humans can come to achieving “absolute perspective,” the closer they come to glimpsing “ultimate truth”—though the tripartite view of existence is the only way to that perspective, “the only means to unfold the overall and ultimate reality of God.” The book’s assured, readable combination of Zen mysticism, ancient Chinese philosophy, traditional Christian teachings and the author’s own observations on the nature of life make the book pleasingly unpredictable and ultimately quite thought-provoking. The end goals of all this theorizing are refreshingly practical: Pi is offering a kind of blueprint for re-engineering an individual’s life. “We transform all negative conscious energies into positive and productive ones,” he insists.
An elaborate spiritual handbook that intriguingly builds upon multiple traditions.