Nanda has it all: youth, money, good looks and a kittenish wife who fulfills his sexual and emotional needs. He also has the Buddha, a dispassionate man of immense insight and self-containment, for an older brother. When Nanda is made a reluctant recruit to the Buddha's order of monks, he is forced to confront his all-too-human enslavement to his erotic and romantic desires. Dating from the second century CE, Ashva·ghosha’ ...
Plato's best-known work, The Republic was written around 380 BC. Largely a Socratic dialogue concerning justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man, it serves as the forerunner for such other classics of political thought as Cicero's De Republica, St. Augustine's City of God, and Thomas More's Utopia. Among the ideas put forth are the eternal conflict between the world of the senses (the cave) and ...
Four thousand years ago, Egyptian society struggled with the downfall of the Old Kingdom, which brought an end to material success and introduced anarchy and chaos. Out of this period of crisis came such literature as A Dialogue between a Man and His Ba, Instructions to Meri-ka-Re, as well as the story recounted in this volume, The Eloquent Peasant. In this story, Khun-Anup, a poor peasant, was robbed, beaten, and scorned by Nemtinakht, ...
Имя древнекитайского мыслителя Лао-цзы, жившего в Китае в VI–V вв. до н. э., можно перевести как «Старый ребенок». (Хотя этот иероглиф можно перевести и как «Старый мудрец».) Лао-цзы является основоположником древнекитайского учения, суть которого изложена в трактате «Дао дэ цзин». В книге представлен первый перевод трактата Лао-цзы, сделанный в 1894 г. японским ученым, толстовцем, выпускником семинарии при Российской духовной академии в Токио К ...
Volume 1 of this new grammatical reader on the first 12 chapters of Book 1 of Plato’s Republic is the most thorough of available resources, designed for students who have only basic skills as well as those at a more advanced level. The text is complete and not adapted; no difficult passages are excised. The running vocabularies are complete, providing the reader context specific meanings. The text is broken down into sentences, providing a manag ...
Theocritus of Syracuse (born c. 300 BCE,—died after 260 BCE) is remembered as the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, though little is known of his life outside of his writings. He was probably born in Syracuse, in Italy, and lived for a time in Alexandria when he gained the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus. This lyric and pastoral poet wrote what was termed eidyllia («idylls»), which means «little poems,» that reflected the love he felt f ...
Greek poet Hesiod, who lived sometime during the 8th and 7th century B.C., is regarded as one the most important poets of classical antiquity. What little is known of him largely comes from his own epic poetry, in which he unconventionally inserted details of his life. Only three of his works, the “Theogony,” “Works and Days,” and the “Shield of Heracles” survive to this day in their entirety. The “Theogony” is a foundational work of Greek mytho ...
