A Buddhist Bible
Thetford, Vermont · 1932
D
Dwight Goddard
Dwight Goddard
1861 CE–1939 CE · Modern · Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School)
July 5, 1861 – July 5, 1939
Dwight Goddard (1861–1939) was an American engineer and former Christian missionary who became an early Western Buddhist anthologist. After study at a Zen monastery in Japan, he compiled A Buddhist Bible (1932), an influential English-language anthology of Buddhist texts that later helped shape Beat-generation interest in Buddhism. He also attempted, with limited success, to establish an American Buddhist monastic community. He is best understood as an interpreter and anthologist rather than an authorized lineage teacher. He died in 1939.
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Stop 1 of 2Born
Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School)
What they did here
DOCUMENTED: born in 1861; trained as a mechanical engineer and later as a Christian minister, serving as a missionary in China and Japan.
About Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School)
Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, is the home of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979 and developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the programme that adapted Buddhist-derived mindfulness practice into a secular clinical context.
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The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Dwight Goddard’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.