What was the original message of the Buddha? What if the teaching that has come down to us has become distorted by centuries of accretions? A learned and impassioned discourse, What Was The Original Gospel of 'Buddhism'? is the result of four decades of study, by the President of the Pali Text Society. A hundred years ago, Mrs. Rhys Davids already saw the tendency towards nihilism that would come to infect Western Buddhism, and she sought to correct it with a careful reading of the earliest Buddhist texts. "I am mainly ...
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What was the original message of the Buddha? What if the teaching that has come down to us has become distorted by centuries of accretions? A learned and impassioned discourse, What Was The Original Gospel of 'Buddhism'? is the result of four decades of study, by the President of the Pali Text Society. A hundred years ago, Mrs. Rhys Davids already saw the tendency towards nihilism that would come to infect Western Buddhism, and she sought to correct it with a careful reading of the earliest Buddhist texts. "I am mainly concerned with the historical importance of reconstructing original Buddhism - that is, Sakya, or the gospel of Shakyamuni - as a mission with a New Word to the Many, to the Man, and not to the monk as such ..."
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