Wisdom Highlighted on Beliefnet.com

From the One City blog.

An Amazing Decade for Dharma

Over the past ten years we Buddhists have been the beneficiaries of a staggering wealth of new resources. We’ve been incredibly fortunate in the number of new translations of sutras, commentaries, and new studies that have emerged over the last ten years. Whatever your particular area of interest, there is without question exponentially more to work with than there was even ten years ago.

Last year I singled out Snow Lion Publications for praise, so I won’t repeat that at length here. But I would like to extent the appreciation and thanks to Wisdom Publications (a nonprofit organization), which has also been doing great work. In particular, I’m excited about four of their fantastic series:

Teachings of the Buddha Series – Excellent new translations of the Nikayas and other material from the Pāli canon, with exhaustive footnotes and explanations from leading experts like Bhikkhu Bodhi. Never has it been easier to explore for oneself directly what the Buddha taught.

Classics of Indian Buddhism –  The counterpart to the above series, it features translations of Mahāyāna  texts from Sanskrit. It’s just getting underway with an avadāna collection published last year, but hopefully many more titles are to come.

The Library of Tibetan Classics – As His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote, ”When completed, the Library of Tibetan Classics will represent a comprehensive reference library of the most important Tibetan classics embracing the entire spectrum of Tibetan thought and artistic traditions. Such a series will make Tibet’s classical thought truly a world heritage, an intellectual and spiritual resource open to all.”

Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism – “Conceived to provide a forum for publishing outstanding new contributions to scholarship on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and also to make accessible seminal research not widely known outside a narrow specialist audience;” this series has produced a number of amazing titles already, many of which elucidate the particular views of the smaller “Red Hat” traditions of Tibetan Buddhism which had previously been sorely underrepresented in print. Every one I’ve read has been illuminating.

To all of the authors and employees at Wisdom, Snow Lion, and other Buddhist publishers, thank you ever so much for the work you’ve done over the last decade. I know I am not alone in having benefited greatly from it, and that my sentiments are shared by practitioners around the world. May the decade to come be even more fruitful for all of us.