From the author’s introduction:
The Burmese life of the Buddha which follows is taken from a translation made in the mid-nineteenth century by an American Baptist missionary, the Reverend Chester Bennett, and published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1851. Before coming across Bennett’s version, I and a Burmese friend had begun a translation of a life of the Buddha from an early nineteenth-century manuscript acquired by me in Tharrawaddy, a town in Lower Burma, in 1946. This was abandoned for various reasons, and on reading the Bennett version and comparing it with our own it seemed obvious that we must have been working from a similar manuscript to that translated by the American missionary. The present version has been edited and corrupt passages replaced and in certain cases re-translated. The Burmese names for places and people have been changed to the more easily pronounced and better known Pali ones. The narrative has also been broken up into chapters and re-paragraphed for easier reading.
