The Light of Asia – Edwin Arnold (1906)

S$82.00

The Light of Asia – Edwin Arnold (1906)

S$82.00

Title: The Light of Asia (The Life of Buddha)
Author: Sir Edwin Arnold
Publisher: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1906
Condition: Half leather with cloth, marbled endpapers, gilt to top edge. Very good. Spine and parts of leather severely sunned. Foxing to blanks pages, inscription to ffep. No other defects. Text very clean, binding very tight. A small book. 240pp.

SKU: lightofasia-1902 Categories: , ,

About the book (from Wikipedia):

The Light of Asia, subtitled The Great Renunciation, is a book by Edwin Arnold. The first edition of the book was published in London in July 1879.

In the form of a narrative poem, the book endeavors to describe the life and time of Prince Gautama Siddhartha, who after attaining enlightenment became The Buddha, The Awakened One. The book presents his life, character, and philosophy, in a series of verses. It is a free adaptation of the Lalitavistara.

A few decades before the book’s publication, very little was known outside Asia about the Buddha and Buddhism, the religion which he founded, and which had existed for about twenty-five centuries. Arnold’s book was one of the first successful attempts to popularize Buddhism for a Western readership.

The book has been highly acclaimed from the time it was first published, and has been the subject of several reviews. It has been translated into several languages, including Hindi (by Acharya Ram Chandra Shukla).