Buddhist Parables

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About the Book:

Buddhist Parables contains more than two hundred similes, allegories, parables, fables and other illustrative stories and anecdotes found in the Pali Buddhist texts and said to have been employed, either by the Buddha himself or by his followers, to convey religious and ethical lessons and the lessons of common sense. Much of the material has been translated into English for the first time.

The book is a collection of specimens of an unusually interesting type of literary composition, a text-book of the teachings of the Buddha, presented just as the Buddha and his followers presented them, by discourse and example; and a collection of good stories - all in one. It contains much that will interest children; it also contains much that will puzzle the profoundest philosopher.

About the Author:

The eminent American philologist Eugene Watson Burlingame was born August 5, 1876 at Albany, New York. He earned his B.A and M.A at Yale in 1898 and 1902. He studied at Harvard University from 1900 to 1910, but gained his Ph. D in 1910 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Harrison Fellow for research in Sanskrit, 1908 - 11. Then he studied at Johns Hopkins, 1914-16, where he was a Johnson Scholar in Sanskrit and comparative philology. Then based at Yale from 1917 he engaged in original investigations and publications in Indian philology and Hindu fiction. He was elected a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Besides his Buddhist Parables (1922), he published his doctoral dissertation on Buddhaghosa's Dhammapada Commentary (1910); The Act of Truth (1917); Buddhist Legends, 3 vols. (Harvard Oriental Series, 1928-30); The Grateful Elephant and Other Stories (1923); Parabole Buddhists (1926).

Burlingame never married.