Buddhist Hymns

Buddhist Hymns is one of Paul Carus’s many short works on Asian religion published through the Open Court Publishing Company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carus was a German born American philosopher, theologian, and prolific author best remembered as the long time editor of Open Court and of the journals The Open Court and The Monist. He was one of the most important early American interpreters of Asian religion and philosophy for Western readers, and his many books on Buddhism, Taoism, and comparative religion played a significant role in shaping how educated Americans first encountered these traditions.

The Buddhist Hymns volume collects translations and adaptations of devotional and meditative texts from various Buddhist traditions, presented in English versification for Western readers who had little prior knowledge of the underlying texts. Carus was not a Buddhist himself but he had a serious philosophical engagement with the religion and corresponded with leading Buddhist figures of his era, including Soyen Shaku and D.T. Suzuki. The hymns and verses he selected and translated were chosen to give Western readers access to the devotional and contemplative dimensions of Buddhism that his more philosophical books on karma and other doctrinal subjects could not directly convey.

The translations are now historical artifacts more than authoritative contemporary versions. Modern Buddhist studies has produced much more accurate translations of the original texts, and many of Carus’s interpretations have been substantially revised by later scholars. But for readers interested in the history of how Western Buddhism developed, in the prehistory of the modern engagement with Asian thought, or in the wider intellectual culture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, Carus’s work remains worth knowing.

The hymns themselves, even in their dated late Victorian English versification, retain a certain dignity and were widely used in early Western Buddhist meetings and gatherings. For students of comparative religion, of the Theosophical and Open Court intellectual cultures of the period, or of the long history of Asian religious texts in Western circulation, Buddhist Hymns is a useful primary source from the era when the Western engagement with Buddhism was just beginning to take shape.