The Sacred Books of the East (SBE) series, comprising fifty volumes, was issued by the Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910. It has translations of key sacred texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Islam. The series was edited by the famous linguist and scholar of comparative religion, Max M�ller. He wrote three of the volumes, and collaborated on three others. The SBE has been designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.
Friedrich Max Müller, K.M. (Ph.D., Philology, Leipzig University, 1843)—generally known as Max Müller or F. Max Müller—was the first Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University, and an Orientalist who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology and the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations, was prepared under his direction.
Müller became a naturalized British citizen in 1855. In 1869, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres as a foreign correspondent. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite (civil class) in 1874, and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art the following year. In 1888, he was appointed Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, delivering the first in what has proved to be an ongoing, annual series of lectures at several Scottish universities to the present day. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 1896.
His wife, Georgina Adelaide Müller was also an author. After Max's death, she deposited his papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.