About the Book
"The Gospel of Buddha" by Paul Carus presents a comprehensive overview of the Buddha's life and teachings, drawing from various ancient texts and traditions. Carus synthesizes these accounts to provide a coherent narrative, highlighting key themes such as compassion, the nature of suffering, and the path to enlightenment. The book emphasizes the universality of Buddha's teachings, appealing to readers from diverse backgrounds. Carus aims to make Buddhist philosophy accessible, promoting moral and ethical living as essential to spiritual growth. His work serves as an important resource for understanding Buddhism's foundational concepts and their relevance to contemporary life.
Preface
This booklet needs no preface for him who is familiar with the THIS sacred books of Buddhism, which have been made accessible to the Western world by the indefatigable zeal and industry of scholars like Burnouf, Hodgson, Bigandet, Bühler, Foucaux, Senart, Weber, Fausböll, Alexander Csoma, Wassiljew, Rhys Davids, F. Max Müller, Childers, Oldenberg, Schiefner, Eitel, Beal, and Spence Hardy. To those not familiar with the subject it may be stated that the bulk of its contents is derived from the old Buddhist canon. Many passages, and indeed the most important ones, are literally copied from the translations of the original texts. Some are rendered rather freely in order to make them intelligible to the present generation. Others have been rearranged; still others are abbreviated. Besides the three introductory and the three concluding chapters there are only a few purely original additions, which, how-ever, are neither mere literary embellishments nor deviations from Buddhist doctrines. They contain nothing but ideas for which prototypes can be found somewhere among the traditions of Buddhism, and have been added as elucidations of its main principles. For those who want to trace the Buddhism of this book to its fountain-head a table of reference has been added, which indicates as briefly as possible the main sources of the various chapters and points out the parallelisms with Western thought, especially in the Chris-tian Gospels.
