LIKE EVERYTHING the British poet Edwin Arnold wrote, The Light of Asia was quickly written: a poem in eight books of about five hundred lines each, mostly in blank verse, composed over a period of several months when Arnold was busy with other concerns. Immediately upon its publication in the summer of 1879, the poem […]

IN THE WINTER 1992 issue of Tricycle, I reaffirmed one of the most cherished claims of American Buddhism. The first known translation from a Buddhist sutra into English, I wrote, was “The Preaching of Buddha,” an excerpt from the Lotus Sutra which appeared in an 1844 edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist quarterly The Dial—translator, […]

Thoreau’s Translation of the Lotus Sutra