Sacred Books of the East, Including Selections from Vedic Hymns, the Zend Avesta, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, the Koran and the Life of Budha

by Anonymous, Epiphanius Wilson

Collected in 1899 by Epiphanius Wilson, the works in this text are words of praise to the one unknown God, illustrating the spiritual connection between peoples spanning across continents and centuries. This volume includes hymns from the Hindu Vedas, thought to be the oldest sacred texts in the world; the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, from pre-Christian Middle East; the Dhammapada, transcribed words of the Buddha given to provide guidance to men; excerpts from the Upanishads, Indian scriptures meditating on the philosophy and nature of God; selections from the Koran, the words God spoke to the prophet Mohammed that formed the foundation of Islamic faith; and the poetic story of the life of Buddha. Seen together in one place, these holy writing beautifully illustrate the passion of the rich, worshipful tradition of the lands of the East.

Genres: Religion, Philosophy, Spirituality, Buddhism, Theology, Nonfiction, Amazon

457 pages, Hardcover

Published May 6, 1999

About the author

Books can be attributed to "Anonymous" for several reasons:

* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author

Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.

See also: Anonymous

Reviews

[Darius]

This book presents selections from: Vedic Hymns, Zend Avesta, Dhammapada, Upanishads, Koran, and Life of Buddha. Each is prefaced by an introductory note.

I thought the selections were fine, but a bit repetitive for a modern reader. The prefaces were informative. I ended up reading all the prefaces, and only sampling from the samples of the original texts.

The best preface was the one on the Koran. It deserves to be pulled out as a stand-alone essay. Written by George Sale, it comes from a Christian perspective, and is extremely sympathetic to the Koran and to Islam: making a strong case that -- theologically - Christianity and Islam (as expressed in the Koran) are not that different at their root.

[Holybooks.com]

The Sacred Books of the East is an enormous project undertaken by Max Müller and various authors from 1879 and 1910. The group’s work was published by Oxford University Press and to this day many of the translations are the only ones existing or the most precise. These translations might be some of the most important pieces of religious literature in one collection the world has ever seen. It is not possible to buy the complete set of these works, but Google Books and Microsoft has done an effort to scan them all from library sources since they are now in the Public Domain. You can download the complete 50 volumes here: https://www.holybooks.com/the-sacred-...

[Neela]

includes: Vedic Hymns, Zend-Avesta, Dhamapada, Upanishads, the Koran, and the Life of Buddha

[Yusak Lie]

I read this book in the library of PCU, and it was a very old book but had been sold out in a book fair held by the university. This book discovered and compared many things about religion from the East, including the history both told and untold by common people. Therefore, this book was amazing in the sense that it revealed the most controversial history of each religion that the followers of the each might keep silent of. This book might be the most transparant in revealing the history of each religion.

[Bilal Tahir]

I feel that either there is some error in the description of this book or this is another book with the same name. The book, rather set of 50 books that I read in this name were compiled by different translators and the project was supervised by the great linguistic Max Muller. And that one is a great book no doubt and I have given 5 stars for that book.