A Stream of Delights

For seven hundred years, this was the book Buddhist Asia grew up on. It had never been in English — until now.

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, the king who fed his enemies before himself. Copied onto palm leaf from Anurādhapura to the Mekong, the Rasavāhinī is medieval Buddhism's most beloved storybook: one hundred and three tales of karma, gratitude, and grace arriving through the smallest door — a last measure of rice, a worn-out cloth, a word of refuge.

Composed in the thirteenth century by the forest-monk Vedeha Thera from a much older island story-book, every tale is a seed and its fruit — cause and effect made luminous, never argued.

Vedeha Thera's collection has never before been translated in full. This first complete English edition, made from the best surviving Pali witnesses, carries all one hundred and three stories with an introduction, notes, and glossary.

A book that raised nations — in English for the first time.

Inside this edition

• All 103 stories in vivid, faithful English — prose and verse alike
• A full introduction: the author, the lost Sinhala original, the manuscripts, the editions, the detective work of reconstruction
• 268 endnotes with canonical cross-references verified against the Pali canon itself
• A Table of Parallels for every story
• Glossary, and a hand-drawn map of the island of the stories