Late one night, as he seeks shelter in a potter’s entrance hall, Kamanita meets an old ascetic. Encouraged by the monk, he relates the story of his life so far: how, born the son of an Indian merchant, he follows in his father’s footsteps; how, on his first trading trip, he meets and loses his great love Vasitthi; how he builds up a fortune and raises a family; and how one day he leaves everything behind to set on a pilgrimage. But the old monk is not who he seems, and when Kamanita refuses to accept his teachings, the consequences are startling and irreversible. What follows is a colorful, bewildering, revelation-filled journey through the past, present, and the Paradise of the West. Sixteen years before Hermann Hesse published Siddharta, there was another European writer who used Buddhism as a source of inspiration for a novel. After earlier naturalistic works such as Minna and Germanernes Lærling (The German Apprentice), The Pilgrim Kamanita was a stylistic turning point for the Dane Karl Gjellerup. It became a worldwide success, and his subsequent novels would touch on Buddhism as well. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

What do people think of translation in the different historical, cultural and linguistic traditions of the world? How many uses has translation been put to? How distant from one another are the concepts of translation found in the different traditions? These are some of the questions A World Atlas of Translation addresses. Its twenty-one reports give us pictures taken from the inside, both from traditions that are well represented in the literature and from the many that (for now) are not. But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact, the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports, the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously, the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect, the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.