Voice of the Buddha

Maria Heim is Professor of Religion and Elizabeth W. Bruss Reader at Amherst College. She is the author of The Forerunner of All Things and Theories of the Gift in South Asia.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction Part One: Building Blocks for an Interpretative ProgramChapter One: The Buddha's Omniscience and the Immeasurability of Scripture Chapter Two: Scripture, Commentary, and Exegetical Distinctions Part Two: Interpreting the Three PitakasChapter Three: Interpreting the Contexts and Conditions of Buddhavacana in the Suttanta Chapter Four: Disentangling the Tangle: Abhidhamma as Phenomenological Analysis Chapter Five: The 'Completely Pleasing' Exegesis on the Vinaya Conclusion Appendix A: The Recollection of the DhammaAppendix B: Commentary on the Section on Verañja Starting the Vinaya Appendix C: Four Oceans and Three Pitakas Bibliography

Heim's study demonstrates what scholars of Buddhism stand to gain by cultivating a (self-)critical and rigorously comparative philological method. Perhaps most strikingly, we gain access to a Pali Canon that most of us, reading through the peculiar lens of modern western epistemologies, have never encountered before.