In the Buddha's WordsAn Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon
Edited and introduced by
Bhikkhu Bodhi
WISDOM PUBLICATIONS • BOSTON
Wisdom Publications, Inc. 199 Elm Street Somerville MA 02144 USA www.wisdompubs .org© 2005 Bhikkhu Bodhi All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. FOREWORDMore than two thousand five hundred years have kind teacher, Buddha Sakyamuni, taught in India. Hi all who wished to heed it, inviting them to listen, ref examine what he had to say. He addressed differen groups of people over a period of more than forty y After the Buddha's passing, a record of what he sai as an oral tradition. Those who heard the teachings v\ meet with others for communal recitations of what tr memorized. In due course, these recitations from m ten down, laying the basis for all subsequent Buddl Pali Canon is one of the earliest of these written rec complete early version that has survived intact. With the texts known as the Nikayas have the special val gle cohesive collection of the Buddha's teachings i: These teachings cover a wide range of topics; they c renunciation and liberation, but also with the orooer transport and communication that I most appreciate is the vastly expanded opportunities those interested in Buddhism now have to acquaint themselves with the full range of Buddhist teaching and practice. What I find especially encouraging about this book is that it shows so clearly how much fundamentally all schools of Buddhism have in common. I congratulate Bhikkhu Bodhi for this careful work of compilation and translation. I offer my prayers that readers may find advice here—and the inspiration to put it into practice—that will enable them to develop inner peace, which I believe is essential for the creation of a happier and more peaceful world.
Venerable Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama May 10,2005PREFACEThe Buddha's discourses preserved in the Pali Canon are called suttas, the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit word sutras. Although the Pali Canon belongs to a particular Buddhist school—the Theravada, or School of the Elders—the suttas are by no means exclusively Theravada Buddhist texts. They stem from the earliest period of Buddhist literary history, a period lasting roughly a hundred years after the Buddha's death, before the original Buddhist community divided into different schools. The Pali suttas have counterparts from other early Buddhist schools now extinct, texts sometimes strikingly similar to the Pali version, differing mainly in settings and arrangements but not in points of doctrine. The suttas, along with their counterparts, thus constitute the most ancient records of the Buddha's teachings available to us; they are the closest we can come to what the historical Buddha Gotama himself actually taught. The teachings found in them have served as the fountainhead, the primal source, for all the evolving streams of Buddhist doctrine and practice through the centuries. For this reason, they constitute the common heritage of the entire Buddhist tradition, and Buddhists of all schools who wish to understand the taproot of Buddhism should make a close and careful study of them a priority.
In the Pali Canon the Buddha's discourses are preserved in collections called Nikayas. Over the past twenty years, fresh translations of the four major Nikayas have appeared in print, issued in attractive and affordable editions. Wisdom Publications pioneered this development in 1987 when it published Maurice Walshe's translation of the Digha Nikaya, The Long Discourses of the Buddha. .....
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