I really enjoyed Paul Williams' book on Mahayana. Today I was quite disappointed to read that he had converted to Catholicism!
He wrote a book on it, 'The Unexpected Way: On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism'
He also wrote this article: http://whyimcatholic.com/index.php/conversion-stories/buddhist-converts/...
His reasoning is very disappointing - very poor. Ajahn Sujato has written a response to the article:
https://sujato.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/contentment-and-hope-or-why-paul...
It makes me wonder how reliable his scholarship was on Buddhism, if he can produce such weak arguments as these. However, I did learn a lot from his book on Mahayana and I remain very grateful to him for that. I am also left wondering if this had anything to do with his affiliation to the Gelugpa school. While it is a wonderful school, they do tend to focus very much on study rather than practice, and also tend (the ones I have met, including in the Gelugpa monasteries I have stayed in in India) to view enlightenment as something so distant and taking so long that it is effectively impossible. Indeed he expressed this view himself in the above article.
So, I thought this might be interesting for some of you.
