A new Buddhist dictionary has been released, which is being hailed as the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of Buddhism ever produced in English. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, compiled by Robert E. Buswell and Donald S. Lopez Jr., contains over 1 million words and more than 5,000 entries relating to Buddhism, and covers terms from all the canonical languages including Pali, Sanskrit, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan. The American Library Association (ALA) has awarded the dictionary the prestigious Dartmouth Medal, which goes to the most outstanding reference work of the past year. It was also named one of the Top 25 Academic Books of 2014 by Choice.
Robert E. Buswell and Donald S. Lopez Jr. From lionsroar.com
The Dartmouth Medal was established in 1974 to honor a reference work that is considered superlative in both significance and quality. The award itself is of bronze and features the head of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, on one side. It is granted to just one work a year.
“Robert Buswell and I are deeply honored to have our twelve years of labor on the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism recognized by the prestigious Dartmouth Medal,” said Donald Lopez, who is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures (International Institute, University of Michigan). Co-compiler Robert E. Buswell is Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and founding director of the Center for Buddhist Studies and Center for Korean Studies at UCLA.
The Dartmouth medal. From ala.org.
The ALA commended the authors especially for their success in producing a work that can address the needs of an audience requiring different levels of explanation and research on the same topic. One of the compilers’ aims was to give a sense of all the nuances of any common Buddhist term, explaining it according to its meaning and context across the various traditions and languages—the word “Dharma,” for instance, has a 1,000-word entry. “We wanted to give readers a full sense of the depth, breadth, and richness of the Buddhist traditions over its entire history and its geographical expanse,” commented Lopez. (International Institute, University of Michigan)
According to the authors, Buddhism is not always well understood in the West, and many misconceptions still exist. Some of these are the ideas that Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy, or that Buddhists are necessarily vegetarian. By using this dictionary, it is possible to understand both the deep variety and unifying principles of the different Buddhist traditions. Having them compiled together in this way allows one to see that Buddhism is too complex and too rich to fit into some of the narrow tropes that accompany pop culture’s casual take on what it is, or is not.
The presentation of the Dartmouth Medal will take place at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco in June. The dictionary is available in hard or soft copy, or on Kindle.