Robert Aitken

The Christian-Buddhist Life and Works of Dwight Goddard

In 1932, Dwight Goddard introduced a collection of Mahayana Buddhist texts translated from the Chinese. This collection, entitled A Buddhist Bible, has helped introduce many Americans to Mahayana. The publication of the texts marked the end of a fascinat- ing journey on the part of Goddard from engineer, to Christian mis- sionary and minister, to student, to practitioner of Zen Buddhism. The best record of this journey is Goddards own writings. A serious obstacle to gaining familiarity with Mahayana Buddhism in the West has been the complexity and quantity of Buddhist Scriptures. As a consequence, Westerners are much more familiar with the Pali texts of the Theravada tradition since they are fewer, are better ordered, and have been systematically translated by the Pali Text Society in London. Nevertheless, in 1932, Dwight Goddard introduced a seminal collection of Mahayana texts translated from the Chinese entitled A Buddhist Bible that has helped introduce many Americans-including the Beat Generation through writer Jack Kerouac-to Mahayana. Now, sixty-three years later, Beacon Press has reissued the book with a foreword and a bibliography, both of which I put together after researching Dwight Goddards life. Goddard was an engineer but, after the death of his wife, entered Hart- ford Theological Seminary in 1891 at the age of twenty-nine. He was or- dained in 1894 and was sent to China as a Congregational missionary. There