Primary sources, newly translated
An independent press publishing first English translations of the oldest Buddhist texts — the meditation manuals that carried the breath from India into China, the story books that raised Buddhist Asia, and a natural-method course in Pāli itself. Every volume is made from the primary sources, with the scholarship shown rather than asserted.
Fifteen volumes·Seven first English translations·5,273 pages in print
Established 2024 · Osprey, Florida
How the world learned to sit. Four editions recovering the oldest practical instructions in Buddhism — from An Shigao's breath scripture in second-century Luoyang, through the Gandhāran and Kaśmīri courses that reached China, to the lost Theravāda manual that Buddhaghosa rewrote.
The Mindfulness of Breathing Sutra of An Shigao — China's First Meditation Book
In the year 148 a Parthian prince who had renounced his throne reached the Chinese capital and began teaching people to watch their breath. The book of that teaching is the oldest meditation manual in the Chinese language — here translated whole for the first time.
Saṅgharakṣa's Yogācārabhūmi — the meditation manual of China's first meditators
Around the turn of the first century, in Gandhāra — where Greek art met Indian thought — the elder Saṅgharakṣa set down a complete course in how to meditate. In 284 CE it entered Chinese and became one of the first real answers China ever received to a simple question: how, exactly, is this done?
A Himalayan meditation manual — and the roots of Zen
Around the year 411 the Indian monk Buddhabhadra brought a living tradition of meditation from the mountain country of Kaśmīr and Gandhāra. The book he carried and translated into Chinese is this one — a complete and practical course, among the very first ever to reach China.
The Path of Freedom — a reconstructed Pāli edition
Before Buddhaghosa wrote the Visuddhimagga, there was another book — and its Pāli original vanished. This edition reconstructs all twelve chapters from the sole Chinese witness, in a four-tier typography that keeps the work honest on every line.
The books Buddhist Asia actually grew up on — story collections, lives of the elders, and island chronicles, copied onto palm leaf for seven hundred years and never before put into English.
The Rasavāhinī — Buddhist stories from ancient India and Sri Lanka
For seven hundred years these were the stories Sri Lanka grew up on — the deer who died listening to a sermon, the crow who paid his debts, the girl who crossed the sea on faith alone. All one hundred and three, in English for the first time.
Lost stories of enlightenment from the Pali commentaries
If you love Zen stories, meet their ancestors. Centuries before Zen was born, monks in the meditation caves of an ancient island told stories just like these — short, startling, and true.
The Garland of Offerings — a masterwork of classical Sinhala literature
Composed around 1270 at the court of Dambadeṇiya, the Pūjāvaliya presents a complete life of the Buddha and ends with the arrival of his relics on the island — a closing chapter that stands among the earliest written histories of Sri Lanka.
The Chronicle of the Hatthavanagalla Monastery
A new translation of the Hatthavanagallavihāravaṃso, the thirteenth-century Pali chronicle of King Sirisaṅghabodhi — the king who gave his own head rather than let a war be fought for him.
A natural-method course in the Buddha's own language, taught the way Lingua Latina teaches Latin: entirely in Pāli, with no translation anywhere, until you find yourself reading the canon in the words it was recited in.
Volume I: The Village — a natural-method course in Pāli
Learn Pāli, the Buddha's own language, by living in it. A world of farmers and potters, of festivals and monsoon rains, told entirely in simple Pāli that grows with you, page by page.
Volume II: The Blessed One — the Buddha's last years
Volume II follows the young monk Nando across northern India in the Buddha's last years — climbing from simple narrative to the suttas themselves, read in the exact words of the canon.
Volume III: The Message — keeping the Buddha's words alive through the age of empires
The Buddha's message crosses the sea. Six generations of reciters carry the words through councils and schisms, past Alexander's armies and under Ashoka's edicts — until a monk steps onto the sands of Egypt with a memorized sutta.
A picture dictionary of the Buddha's world — the first thousand words of Pāli, explained in Pāli
The world the Buddha walked through — drawn, and named. Twenty-nine full-page engravings, everything in them numbered, and every number named and explained in Pāli.
Books about how the canon works and how to read it — the ancient interpretive manual, a computational search for the Buddha's oldest words, and the meditation instructions hiding in plain sight.
How to Read What the Buddha Taught
The canon's own manual of interpretation: how the Buddha's teachings are to be analysed, related, and applied. A modern translation of the Nettippakaraṇa, with commentary.
A computational search for the Buddha's oldest words
What if the oldest layer of the Pali Canon could be found by measurement rather than by intuition? Semantic similarity, formulaic density, metre, morphology and Bayesian phylogenetics, turned on the canon itself.
The Buddha's meditation instructions, lost in translation
The texts describe meditators constantly and seem to instruct them never. The claim of this book: the answer was on the page all along — in the quotation marks that English translations wiped away.
“Count the breaths, one to ten, and begin again.”The Scripture on Ānāpāna · Luoyang, second century
