SHORTER NOTICE
The Road to Nirvana ; a Selection of the Buddhist Scriptures Translated, -from the Pali. The Quest of Enlightenment : a Selection of the Buddhist Scriptures Translated from the Sanskrit. Both- by E. J. Thomas. " Wisdom of the East " series. (John Murray. 45. each.).
THE first of these books contains familiar extracts from the Pali scriptures with an excellent, short introduction covering the main points of the Buddhist belief. It is more methodical than the World's Classics selection, IAA lacks such parables as " The Blind Men and the Elephant," which are so much more compelling than the Miracle stories of the birth and childhood of Gautama—the counterparts of our own Apocryphal Gospels. It is, of course, impossible to extract a consecutive story of the Buddha's life ; none of the scriptures are in any sense biographical. It is however easy, if we set aside the poetic elaboration, to grasp, even in so small a compass, a teaching which applied, on different levels, to monk and laymen, and to understand something of the Buddha's statement regarding the nature of man. The second book contains some recently discovered Sanskrit versions which circulated in India during its Buddhist -epoch. Here already the accent is upon the Boddhisatva theory, that every man in the course of lives can attain to Buddhahood. For it-is from the Sanskrit and not the Pali tradi- tion that the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet and China—to which this doctrine is central—evolved. The Quest of Enlightenment is an interesting curiosity, its stories differing only in their accent from the better-known scriptures of Ceylon. The " Wisdom of the East " series must be half a century old, and it is pleasant to remember how much it has done to familiarise us with Eastern writings. In wishing, it at least another half century of activity,, however, would it be ungracious to ask that in future volumes verse' quotations be translated into prose ? True, Mr. Thomas does not attempt rhyme, but the padding and inversion needed even to observe a metrical pattern are fatal to the dignity and conciseness of the original.
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