Sayings of Buddha, the Iti-Vuttaka: A Pali Work of the Buddhist Canon for the First Time Translated (Classic Reprint)

Since 1841, when Friedrich Spiegel published the first European edition of a Pali text, the interest taken in the life and teachings of Buddha has been keen and marked. Through the labors ofT umour, DA lwis, Childers, Fausboll, Oldenberg, Hardy, Kern, Davids, and others, steady progress has been made, both in our knowledge of the career of this great Eastern teacher, and in the interpretation of the sacred books of his canon. Chief among the agencies for the publication of these texts has been and still is the Pali Text Society of London, under the direction of its scholarly founder and indefatigable worker, T. W. Rhys Davids. Up to its twenty-fifth anniversary in A pril, 1907, the society published, through the collaboration of many scholars, a total of 46 Buddhist texts in 59 volumes, amounting in all to over 17,000 octavo pages. In contrast with this great number of editions of the texts themselves, the work of translating and commenting upon them has not, however, made equal progress. Despite the translations of Rhys Davids, Oldenberg, Weber, Neumann, and others, along with the labors of many enthusiastic interpreters, the gaps to be filled in translating the canon are wide and many. For this reason almost any comment or argument on any Buddhist topic must inevitably be regarded as only provisional, if not in some cases even premature, until all the texts, together with their native commentaries, shall have been sifted, compared, interpreted, and criticized. There is an element of the charm of the unknown in translating a book that has not been previously rendered into a Western tongue. For that reason the work of translating the I tivuttaka has been to me a task of much interest, although the undertaking was somewhat like a dive into unfathomed waters. Before closing these prefatory remarks, I desire to express my thanks for a number of obligations whic
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)