Norton Anthology of World Religions

This magisterial Norton Anthology, edited by world-renowned scholars, offers a portable library of more than 1,000 primary texts from the world’s major religions. To help readers encounter strikingly unfamiliar texts with pleasure; accessible introductions, headnotes, annotations, pronouncing glossaries, maps, illustrations and chronologies are provided. For readers of any religion or none, The Norton Anthology of World Religions opens new worlds that, as Miles writes, invite us "to see others with a measure of openness, empathy, and good will..."

Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Buddhism brings together over 100 substantial selections from the fifth century B.C.E. to the present day, organised by country to mirror the spread of Buddhism from India to China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and the United States. The volume features Jack Miles’s illuminating General Introduction—“How the West Learned to Compare Religions”—as well as Donald S. Lopez, Jr.’s “In the World of the Buddha,” a lively primer on the history and core tenets of Buddhism.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Ph.D. University of Virginia) is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. His works include Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra, Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, The Story of Buddhism, The Madman’s Middle Way, The Scientific Buddha, From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (with Robert Buswell), and In Search of the Christian Buddha (with Peggy McCracken, published by Norton). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jack Miles is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies with the University of California at Irvine and Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy. He spent 1960-1970 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. Its sequel Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God led to his being named a MacArthur Fellow for 2003-2007. The third in this trilogy, God in the Qur'an, was published in 2018. Miles is general editor of The Norton Anthology of World Religions and, most recently, the author of Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story.