Preamble 10: “Every Secret Loses its Force”

—From the “Translators’ Introduction” to Ornament of the Great Vehicle Sutras: Maitreya’s Mahayanasutralamakara. (Doctor, 2014, p. vii)

As an undergraduate (in a dual degree of philosophy and religious studies, class of ‘72) and then as an MA student (in philosophy, class of ‘75; see Jardine 2016), I recall clear as day that the Mill’s Library at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, had a collection of editor Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East. This 50-volume behemoth was a set of English translations produced between 1879 and 1910 and published by Oxford University Press over that time period. It took up several shelves, and the books themselves, especially the earlier volumes, were slick and shiny leather-bound, a sort of dark brownish dried blood color that made the collection look like the hide of some great and exotic beast, slivers of which you could slide out and open.