Ocean State Libraries

The author of the popular new English version of "Tao te Ching" brings his gift for bringing new life into ancient sacred texts to one of the world's greatest and most widely read scriptures. This gift edition includes two-color interior, colored endpapers, rough-cut pages, and a ribbon marker.

Selected poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha.

"David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New Testament etsi doctrina non daretur, "as if doctrine is not given." Reproducing the texts' often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced an often pitilessly literal translation of the early Christians' sometimes raw, astonished, and halting prose, one that captures the texts' frequent impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to...

"The First Nations Version (FNV) is a retelling of the Creator's Story-the Scriptures-following the tradition of the storytellers of these oral cultures. While remaining faithful to the original language of the New Testament, the FNV is a dynamic equivalence translation that captures the simplicity, clarity, and beauty of Native storytellers in English." --

"Written by an anonymous author or authors during India's antiquity, the Rig Veda (sometimes referred to simply as 'Rigveda') literally translates to 'shrine knowledge' in ancient Sanskrit. An enormous collection of hymns, prayers and poems written in Vedic Sanskrit script, the book has astonished and impressed scholars of religion, language and India itself for centuries. It also holds a strong measure of historical importance, in that it alludes...

"When all the ties that bind the heart are unloosened, then a mortal becomes immortal." The Upanishads, the earliest of which were composed in Sanskrit between 800 and 400 BCE by sages and poets, form part of the Vedas -- the sacred and ancient scriptures that are the basis of the Hindu religion. Each Upanishad, or lesson, takes up a theme ranging from the attainment of spiritual bliss to karma and rebirth, and collectively they are meditations on...

"This is the essence of India's Vedic Wisdom and one of the great spiritual and philosophical classics of the world." --

In 1973, the unsealing of the Mawangdui tombs in China's Hunan province yielded up a treasure trove of texts that have profoundly altered our understanding of Chinese intellectual history. Among the documents discovered in the richly furnished tomb of a second-century B.C.E. aristocrat were five texts written on silk that contained primary works on Huang-Lao Taoism and Yin-yang philosophy that had been lost to mankind for more than two thousand years--a...