A Buddhist Bible

Editor: Dwight Goddard | Published: 1932 (revised 1938) Full text: A Buddhist Bible - Goddard

Overview

Dwight Goddard’s “A Buddhist Bible” (1932) is the single most useful one-volume introduction to Mahayana Buddhism ever assembled in English. Goddard, a former Baptist missionary who became a practicing Buddhist after encounters with Zen masters in China and Japan, brought a convert’s passion and an editor’s discipline to the project. The result is an anthology that covers the essential Mahayana texts in a compact, readable form: the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, the Lankavatara Sutra, the Surangama Sutra, the Awakening of Faith attributed to Ashvaghosha, and — most consequentially for Western culture — the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng, the founding document of Chan/Zen Buddhism.

The anthology’s influence on American culture is difficult to overstate. Jack Kerouac carried a copy in his rucksack; Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts all encountered Buddhism through it. The Beat Generation’s engagement with Zen — which would eventually reshape American spirituality, psychology, and literature — traces back in significant part to this book. Goddard made the Mahayana tradition accessible to readers who had no access to Sanskrit, Pali, or Chinese, and no connection to Asian Buddhist communities. Whatever its scholarly limitations, the book opened a door that has never closed.

The individual texts included range across several centuries and philosophical traditions. The Diamond Sutra and Heart Sutra represent the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) tradition with its emphasis on emptiness (shunyata). The Lankavatara Sutra presents the Yogachara or “mind-only” school, teaching that all phenomena are manifestations of mind. The Platform Sutra of Hui-neng introduces the distinctive Chan/Zen emphasis on sudden awakening, direct pointing, and the identity of meditation and wisdom. The Awakening of Faith provides a philosophical synthesis, introducing the concept of tathagatagarbha (Buddha-nature) as the ground of both enlightenment and delusion. Together, these texts map the major currents of Mahayana thought.

Key Themes

• Emptiness (shunyata) — The Diamond and Heart Sutras teach that all phenomena, including the self, are empty of inherent existence. “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
• Mind-only (cittamatra) — The Lankavatara Sutra teaches that what we experience as an external world is a projection of consciousness. This is not solipsism but an insight into the nature of experience itself.
• Sudden awakening — The Platform Sutra of Hui-neng insists that awakening is not gradual but instantaneous — a direct recognition of one’s own nature that cannot be produced by stages of practice. Practice and awakening are not cause and effect but two aspects of the same reality.
• Buddha-nature (tathagatagarbha) — The Awakening of Faith teaches that all beings possess an intrinsic Buddha-nature that is never lost, only obscured. Liberation is not achievement but uncovering.
• Prajna and dhyana as one — Hui-neng’s revolutionary teaching that wisdom (prajna) and meditation (dhyana) are not sequential but simultaneous. You do not meditate in order to become wise; meditation is wisdom.

Historical Context

Goddard compiled the anthology during the early 1930s, a period when virtually no Mahayana Buddhist texts were available in English outside academic libraries. He drew on existing translations (the Diamond Sutra, for example, uses the Samuel Beal version) and commissioned new ones, notably working with D.T. Suzuki on the Lankavatara Sutra. The 1932 first edition was revised and expanded in 1938. Goddard also founded the “Followers of the Buddha,” a short-lived American Buddhist community in Vermont — one of the earliest in the United States. His anthology must be understood as a missionary document in the best sense: the work of someone who had found something transformative and wanted to share it with his culture. Its selections reflect his particular enthusiasms (especially for Zen and the Lankavatara) and should be supplemented with other translations for scholarly purposes.

Who Should Read This

Anyone looking for a single entry point into Mahayana Buddhism. The anthology format allows the reader to encounter multiple traditions and perspectives without committing to the full length of any single text. Start with the Heart Sutra (the shortest and most concentrated), then the Platform Sutra (the most dramatic and accessible), then the Diamond Sutra, then the Lankavatara (the longest and most philosophically demanding). The Awakening of Faith is best read last, as it synthesizes themes from the other texts. Readers already familiar with individual Mahayana texts will still benefit from seeing them collected in a single volume, where their relationships and tensions become visible.

Connections

• non-dual-recognition — The anthology’s central theme, across all its included texts, is the direct recognition of one’s own nature as already awake. This parallels the Upanishadic “Tat tvam asi” and the Hermetic gnosis.
• bodhisattva-ideal — The Mahayana texts in the anthology all share the bodhisattva commitment: awakening not for oneself alone but for the liberation of all beings.

Further Reading

• A Buddhist Bible - Goddard — The full text of the anthology
• diamond-sutra — The Diamond Sutra in its own right, with fuller context
• dhammapada — The Theravada foundation that the Mahayana texts in this anthology build upon and transform
• lotus-sutra — A major Mahayana text not included in Goddard’s anthology, offering the complementary vision of universal Buddha-nature and skillful means