Introduction

This modest selection of excerpts from the Pali Canon provides a rough sketch of the life of the Buddha. I hope you will find enough in this rather sparse selection to gain at least an inkling both of the range of the Buddhas teachings and of the sweeping trajectory of his extraordinary life.

For more thorough accounts of the Buddhas life, please see these two superb anthologies: The Splendor of Enlightenment: A Life of the Buddha (two volumes), compiled by Phra Khantipalo (Bangkok: Mahamakut Rajavidyalaya Press, 1976), and The Life of the Buddha by Bhikkhu Nanamoli (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1992).

"Indeed, the Blessed One is worthy and rightly self awakened, consummate in knowledge and conduct, well gone, an expert with regard to the world, unexcelled as a trainer for those people fit to be tamed, the Teacher of divine and human beings, awakened, blessed."