Eastern Wisdom

This shelf gathers the great contemplative texts of Asia in the translations that first carried them to Western readers: the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Buddhist sutras, and the Tibetan texts edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz.

Many of these editions belong to the nineteenth-century project of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East. They are indispensable and also of their time, so read the translators’ introductions with the same attention you give the texts.

Many of the English translations here date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Western readers first met these scriptures through scholars, missionaries and Theosophists. They are often beautiful and sometimes misleading. Where the archive holds more than one version of a text, such as the Tao Te Ching or the Bhagavad Gita, reading two side by side is the simplest way to see where interpretation begins. Treat each tradition on its own terms, Hindu, Buddhist or Daoist, before comparing them, and let the commentaries guide you through unfamiliar concepts.