Lege. Meditāre. — Read. Contemplate.
Careful, beautiful editions of the world's contemplative classics — the Gospels in the Latin of Saint Jerome, Pāli taught the way a child learns a language, the lost meditation manuals of early Buddhism, and the great story-books of the island, now in English for the first time. Sacred language, ancient practice, quiet craft.
READ THE NEW TESTAMENT IN LATIN
Illustrated, step-by-step graded readers of the Latin Vulgate. No prior Latin required: every sentence is built from simple words explained in Latin beside the text — and whenever Jerome's real words come within reach, they stand apart in gilded panels marked hoc ipsum legis: "this, you are truly reading." Language help only, never doctrinal commentary — at home in Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and classical-education settings alike.
The Gospel of Matthew in Easy Latin
The Pater Noster, the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount — words Latin Christendom carried for fifteen centuries, arriving in your own reading. 304 full-color pages, 25 photorealistic plates, and the whole Gospel in the unaltered Vulgate in the back.
The Gospel of Mark in Easy Latin
The swiftest Gospel, complete — every verse of Mark in twenty-two graded chapters with twenty-two plates, from the Jordan to the empty tomb. Finish it, and you have read an entire book of the Bible in Latin.
The series continues — the whole New Testament, one book at a time.
READ THE FATHERS IN LATIN
After the Gospels, the Fathers — beginning with the most personal book antiquity ever produced. The same method as the Gospel readers: clear graded Latin, every hard word explained in Latin in the margin, and the author's real sentences framed in every chapter, verified word for word against the source.
The Confessions of Saint Augustine in Easy Latin
The stolen pears. The voice over the garden wall singing tolle, lege. The window at Ostia. The book that invented the inner life, in 24 graded chapters with 24 plates, a journey map, cast of characters, and a full Latin index — with Augustine's own words, letter-for-letter, in every chapter.
Next among the Fathers — more of the inner library of the Latin West.
READ THE BUDDHA’S LANGUAGE
The Ørberg method, built for Pāli for the first time. No English in the lessons: pictures, patterned repetition, and a village on the Rājagaha–Nāḷandā road teach the language of the suttas the way a child learns — until the reader is no longer studying Pāli, but reading it.
A Natural Method Course in Pali · The Village
Gāmo hoti. Gāme rukkho hoti. Rukkhe ambāni honti. There is a village. In the village is a tree. On the tree are mangoes. Twenty-eight graded chapters, 345 pages, and not one word of English in the lessons.
Volume II, Bhagavā — the Buddha’s life in his own voice — is in production. The same staircase as our Latin Gospels: begin where you stand, end inside the source.
THE MEDITATION MANUALS
First English editions of the manuals China, Kashmir, and the Theravāda actually used — and a book that restores the quotation marks the translations erased, so the suttas become a practice library again.
NEW · AUGUST 2026
A Himalayan Meditation Manual — and the Roots of Zen
Buddhasena and Dharmatrāta’s Kashmiri course, carried over the mountains by Buddhabhadra around 411 CE. The first edition made for a reader who means to sit.
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NEW · AUGUST 2026
The Buddha’s Meditation Instructions, Lost in Translation
Restore the quotation marks English translations dissolve, and the Pāli canon becomes what its first hearers heard: a practice library.
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SAṄGHARAKṢA · T606
Foundations of Meditation Practice
The meditation manual of China’s first meditators — composed in Gandhāra, complete in English for the first time.
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UPATISSA · RECONSTRUCTED PĀLI
The Path of Freedom
Before the Visuddhimagga there was this book. The Pāli vanished; the Chinese survived. This edition brings the Pāli back.
Read more →Also in this shelf — guides to reading, and the oldest recoverable layer of the teaching.
THE ISLAND’S LIBRARY
First complete English translations of the books Buddhist Asia actually read aloud — the elders in the margins of the commentaries, the hundred-and-three stories of the Rasavāhinī, and the great Sinhala Garland of Offerings.
NEW · FIRST COMPLETE ENGLISH
The Rasavāhinī — 103 stories from ancient India and Sri Lanka
The book the temple schools grew up on. All one hundred and three stories, never before entire in any Western language.
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NEW · FIRST COMPLETE ENGLISH
The Garland of Offerings
Mayūrapāda’s thirteenth-century Sinhala masterpiece: thirty-four chapters on the Nine Virtues of the Buddha. Only one chapter had ever been in English.
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LOST STORIES OF ENLIGHTENMENT
If you love Zen stories, meet their ancestors
Forty-eight lives from the margins of the Pali commentaries — hunters, wrestlers, librarians, dying men, quiet nuns.
Read more →Small presses live on honest words from real readers. If a book of ours has been part of your practice or your study, an honest review on Amazon — whatever you truly think — helps the next reader find it.
ABOUT THE PRESS
Contemplative Sciences Press publishes the texts people have actually used, for centuries, to order their inner lives — and gives them the editions they deserve. Our books are typeset by hand in the classical tradition, illustrated with care, and printed to be kept.
We work across traditions without collapsing them. Our Latin Gospels add language help, never doctrine; our Buddhist editions present the sources plainly and let them speak — including first English translations of manuals and story-books that had waited centuries. What the books share is a conviction: that contemplative texts reward slow, close, first-hand reading — in the original language where possible, in honest editions always.
We are the sister imprint of Imperial Restitution Press, publisher of the Lingua Latina series of graded classical readers — Caesar, Pliny, Ovid, Vergil, Seneca — with which our Latin Gospels share their method and their care.
Teaching Latin through the Gospels, sitting with one of the meditation manuals, or reading the island’s stories with a group? We provide desk copies and are glad to help you evaluate a text for your setting.