Basic Teachings of the Buddha : : a new Translation and Compilation, With a Guide to Reading the Texts

AADL has no copies of this item

Includes translated selections from the Tipitạka.
Includes index.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Not a very accurate book. Misleading. submitted by rjstone on June 4, 2008, 1:20pm I've studied Buddhism and the Pali Canon (Tipitaka) for about six years now, so I'm pretty familiar with Buddhist doctrine, in great detail, and many of the Pali suttas. This book contains significantly distorted translations of the suttas. For example, the Buddha does not teach a path of "union with God" because there is no God in the Christian sense, and he doesn't teach a path of union with or worship of any god. However one sutta describes him as teaching exactly that!

The translator is trying way too hard to translate the suttas into western terms and he is distorting them in too extreme of a manner. The pali term dukkha is translated by him as "unease" which is way too trivial of a term. Dukkha means everything from unease, to stress, to massive suffering. "Stress" is a much better translation. He also translates references to "Enlightenment" as "knowing reality," but this is misleading because many people think they "know reality." This references that involve "one who knows reality" may lead readers to think that they are included in this grouping, which they are not.

This book is not all bad, but if you read it you are very likely to come away with some significantly distorted ideas about Buddhist doctrine. Some of these things are clarified in his endnotes and "guide to reading the suttas" but not all of them are, and people who don't read the notes will come away with distorted notions.

It's really very sad that an author with these sorts of credentials would be creating such massive distortions in his translations. I would skip this book and read Thanissaro Bhikkhu's sutta translations at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/. Ven. Thanissaro, also known by his birth name Geoffrey DeGraff, has been a Buddhist monk for over 30 years and has a degree in European Intellectual History. In my opinion he does the best job of translating the Pali suttas into English.