A Stream of Delights

The book you are holding has been read aloud for seven hundred years. In the villages of Sri Lanka its stories were the evening lessons of the temple school; in the monasteries of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma it was copied onto palm leaf under the name Madhurarasavāhinī, the Stream of Sweet Delight, well into the nineteenth century.

Whole peoples grew up inside these stories. Yet the book has never been translated into English in its entirety — not into any Western language.from the introduction

Composed in the thirteenth century by the forest-monk Vedeha Thera from a much older island story-book, the Rasavāhinī gathers one hundred and three stories of karma and consequence: the deer who died listening to a sermon, the crow who paid his debts, the girl who crossed the sea on faith alone, the old woman whose ladleful of gruel outlasted a kingdom. Kings who feed their enemies. Paupers whose last handful of rice feeds five hundred monks. Nāga-kings converted by a single verse. Every tale is a seed and its fruit — cause and effect made luminous, never argued.

Partial translations have existed: forty stories here, twenty there, a German Duṭṭhagāmaṇī cycle. This is the first complete English translation ever published — all 103 stories, with Vedeha’s prologue and his own epilogue, translated sentence by sentence from the best surviving Pali witnesses, including a Mekong palm-leaf copy written in 1806.

A full introduction tells the detective story of the lost Sinhala original, the manuscripts, and the editions. Two hundred and sixty-eight endnotes carry canonical cross-references verified against the Pali canon itself. A table of parallels sits behind every story. There is a glossary, and a hand-drawn map of the island of the stories.

For readers of the Jātaka, the Dhammapada, and Buddhist Heroes of the Ancient World — and for anyone who loves a story that carries its moral like a lamp into the dark.