Five Discourses of Worldly Wisdom - (Clay Sanskrit Library) by Patrick Olivelle (Hardcover)

About the Book

The king despairs of his idle sons, so he hires a learned brahmin who promises to make their lessons in statecraft unmissable.

Book Synopsis

The king despairs of his idle sons, so he hires a learned brahmin who promises to make their lessons in statecraft unmissable. The lessons are disguised as short stories, featuring mainly animal protagonists. Many of these narratives have traveled across the world, and are known in the West as Aesop's fables.

Review Quotes

"No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience."-- "The Times Higher Education Supplement"

"Published in the geek-chic format."-- "BookForum"

"The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance."--Willis G. Regier "The Chronicle Review"

"The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes."-- "New Criterion"

"Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs."-- "Tricycle"