A Buddhist Bible
Thetford, Vermont · 1932
D
Dwight Goddard
Dwight Goddard
1861 CE–1939 CE · Modern · Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School)
July 5, 1861 – July 5, 1939
Dwight Goddard (1861–1939) was an American engineer and former Christian missionary who became an early Western Buddhist anthologist. After study at a Zen monastery in Japan, he compiled A Buddhist Bible (1932), an influential English-language anthology of Buddhist texts that later helped shape Beat-generation interest in Buddhism. He also attempted, with limited success, to establish an American Buddhist monastic community. He is best understood as an interpreter and anthologist rather than an authorized lineage teacher. He died in 1939.
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Stop 1 of 2Born
Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School)
What they did here
Born in 1861; trained as a mechanical engineer and later as a Christian minister, serving as a missionary in China and Japan.
About Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School)
Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, is the second most populous city in New England after Boston and by the mid-nineteenth century was one of the region's largest manufacturing centres. It was the birthplace of the rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard, who taught physics at its Clark University, and of Dwight Goddard, a former Christian missionary in China who compiled the influential anthology A Buddhist Bible (1932). It is home to the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979 and developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), adapting Buddhist-derived mindfulness practice for a secular clinical setting.
Across the traditions, in Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School) at the same time
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The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Dwight Goddard’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.