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This note is about a series of lectures available in audio form; Michael Roach also has a book on the subject, called "The Diamond Cutter". This isn't about that.
This is a collection of thirteen lectures, each about an hour long, recorded live from an actual class; they're available for free on the Web. While nominally about the Diamond Cutter Sutra (aka the Diamond Sutra, the Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion, etc), the lectures are really a basic introduction to the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism, loosely structured around some passages from the Sutra, but branching off in many directions.
Roach is a Geshe (roughly equivalent, apparently, to a Doctor of Divinity), with years of training in the subject, so presumably what he's teaching is a reasonably accurate picture of at least one strand of this sort of Buddhism. I was initially put off when I saw the blurbage for Roach's hardcopy book on the same general subject; all about how to use Buddhism to succeed in business and get rich. But these lectures aren't about that at all; they're about the nature of reality, the meaning of emptiness, the purpose of life, and all that. The closest they get to the business world is when Roach uses (as he often does) a yelling boss as an example of a piece of the world that can be challenging to deal with correctly.
(Roach's references to his own experiences with yelling bosses, to the unpaved road leading to the place where the class is being held, to when the lunch-break will be and whether it's hot in the room, and the (sometimes not quite audible) questions from students, all give the lectures a nice immediacy and intimacy that a hardcopy book would have a hard time duplicating.)
I'm not a Tibetan Buddhist myself, and my reading of the Diamond Sutra is quite different from his. I don't share his belief in a very literal and extremely structured and rule-governed process of rebirth and karma and enlightenment and all, with numbered stages and a single inevitable course; I think that the philosophy that he presents is wrong in significant ways. But as an explanation of an interesting set of views that I don't myself share, I found the lectures very worthwhile. Roach is an engaging speaker, modest, sometimes funny, sometimes unsure of himself, willing to admit that some questions are still open ("there's alot of debate about that in the monasteries"). His laugh takes a little getting used to, but it stopped being irritating after the first couple of hours.
While I didn't come out of these lectures believing the truth of the teaching, I did learn quite a bit about something that lots of other people believe, and that's always good. It also gave me a chance to think more deeply about what I do believe, and about what I think the Diamond Sutra means, and where my understanding resembles, and differs from, Roach's. I definitely consider them to have been a good use of time (many grocery trips and mornings at the Health Club).
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