Pūjāvaliya

The first complete English translation of a 750-year-old masterpiece - never before rendered whole into any Western language.

In the golden age of the Sinhalese court at Dambadeniya, around 1270 CE, the scholar-monk Mayūrapāda Buddhaputta set himself a task of staggering devotion: to expound a single one of the Nine Virtues of the Buddha - that he is arahaṃ, the Worthy One - and to do it he composed four-and-thirty chapters drawing on the whole vast reach of the Pāli canon from memory, without a search tool in the world but his own trained mind.

The result, the Pūjāvaliya - the "Garland of Offerings" - is at once a life of the Buddha, an anthology of his former births, a meditation on the meaning of offering, and, in its famous final chapter, a chronicle of the island of Sri Lanka down to the author's own day. For seven centuries it has been read aloud, learned by heart, and loved. Yet only its historical thirty-fourth chapter was ever translated - by B. Gunasekara, in 1895. The one-and-thirty chapters between have waited a hundred and thirty years. Until today.

This edition is conceived as a fine-press art book:

• A faithful, unabridged translation - every catalogue, every birth-tale, every litany preserved in full, in an elevated and cadenced English worthy of the original.
• Verse rendered as verse - the Pāli and Sinhala stanzas recast as rhymed English quatrains in the manner of the older devotional poets, with a plain literal construe of each given in the notes.
• Thirty-four full-colour plates in the Kandyan temple-mural tradition - gold-leaf and lapis, one for every chapter.
• Full scholarly apparatus gathered discreetly into endnotes, so the page itself stays clear.