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Buddhist Literature & Sacred Texts, Buddhist & Zen Poetry
Handsome Nanda by Ashvaghosa Ashvaghosa — book cover

Handsome Nanda

by Ashvaghosa Ashvaghosa, Linda Covill
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Overview

Nanda has it all&8212;youth, money, good looks and a kittenish wife who fulfills his sexual and emotional needs. He also has the Buddha, a dispassionate man of immense insight and self-containment, for an older brother. When Nanda is made a reluctant recruit to the Buddha&##8217;s order of monks, he is forced to confront his all-too-human enslavement to his erotic and romantic desires. Dating from the second century CE, Ashva·ghosha’s Handsome Nanda portrays its hero’s spiritual makeover with compassion, psychological profundity, and great poetic skill.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Synopsis

Nanda has it all — youth, money, good looks and a kittenish wife who fulfills his sexual and emotional needs. He also has the Buddha, a dispassionate man of immense insight and self-containment, for an older brother. When Nanda is made a reluctant recruit to the Buddha's order of monks, he is forced to confront his all-too-human enslavement to his erotic and romantic desires. Dating from the second century CE, Ashva·ghosha's Handsome Nanda portrays its hero's spiritual makeover with compassion, psychological profundity, and great poetic skill.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

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Editorials

From the Publisher

“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

“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

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“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

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“Published in the geek-chic format.”
-BookForum

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“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

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Book Details

Published
November 1, 2007
Publisher
New York University Press
Pages
448
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780814716830

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