Lives of Great Monks and Nuns is a collection of five translated texts on the lives of prominent monks and nuns. A brief description of each text follows.

The Life of Asvaghosa Bodhisattva gives a brief account of how Asvaghosa was converted from Brahmanism to Buddhism by Parsva. In the history of the development of Buddhism, Asvaghosa is considered one of the founders of Mahayana Buddhism. Besides being a Buddhist theorist with significant influence on the development of Mahayana Buddhism, he was also the initiator of Buddhist chanting and hymn singing.

The Life of Nagarjuna...

This volume contains The Adamantine Pinnacle Sutra and The Susiddhikara Sutra, two important texts in the corpus of Buddhist Tantric literature. These texts include a general introduction in the conventional format of Buddhist scriptures and a supplementary introduction that describes the nature of Mahavairocana, equatable with the Dharma-body, first primarily from the perspective of his aspect as the essence of the Sixteen Bodhisattvas in the Dharma, Great, and Samaya Mandalas, and then in his capacity as the essence of the Dharma-realm.

The body describes the samadhis...

This volume contains two works by the founder of the Nichiren Shu school.

The Risshoankokuron takes the form of a dialogue betweeen a traveler and a master about the troubled state of affairs in the country. It prophesies an invasion from the sea and is sharply critical of the regent at the time.

Kanjinhonzonsho was written to reveal the Most Venerable One as Nichiren conceived it.

This volume includes three texts.

The Larger Sutra on Amitayus relates how a certain mendicant monk by the name of Dharmakara, when practicing under the tutelage of the Tathagata Lokesvararaja, made 48 vows to save all suffering people; to fulfill these vows he created a paradise in the west called Sukhavati, and he himself thus became the Buddha Amitayus. The sutra states, furthermore, that if anyone believing in these 48 vows should chant the name of Amitayus, he will be born in the paradise of Sukhavati and there become a buddha. This sutra being the longest of the three basic...

This volume includes five texts by Kukai (On the Differences between the Exoteric and Esoteric Teachings; The Meaning of Becoming a Buddha in This Very Body; The Meanings of Sound, Sign, and Reality; The Meanings of the Word Hum; The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury), and two by Kakuban (The Illuminating Secret Commentary on the Five Cakras and the Nine Syllables; The Mitsugonin Confession).

On the Differences between the Exoteric and Esoteric Teachings aims to highlight the differences between Exoteric and Esoteric Buddhism and explain why the latter is superior to the former....

This volume includes four separate texts from the Ch'an/Zen tradition.

Essentials of the Transmission of Mind repeatedly espouses a single vision of religious training: one's own mind, just as it is and without any qualification whatsoever, is the Buddha. And to be a Buddha is to act in constant recognition of that fact, without ever generating any thoughts, intentions, or inclinations based on selfish dualistic conceptualization. It insists that the only task of true religious practice is to simply cease discriminating between ordinary person and sage, between sentient being and...

There are two titles in this volume.

The Sutra of Queen Srimala is an important early Mahayana text. It is a unique development within the Buddhist tradition because of its egalitarian and generous view concerning women, portraying, on the one hand, the dignity and wisdom of a laywoman and her concern for all beings, and, on the other, the role of woman as philosopher and teacher. The major philosophical emphases of the text are the theories of the womb of the Buddha and the One Vehicle.

The Vimalakirti Sutra is a well-known sutra that deals extensively with the doctrines of...