This book presents the first annotated English translation of Judah Bonsenyor’s Book of Words and Proverbs by Sages and Philosophers (ca. 1294), a seminal work within the medieval Catalan sapiential tradition. Compiled at the request of King James II of Aragon, the book gathers proverbs of Arabic, Hebrew, and Eastern traditions which bring together a didactic purpose from wisdom and personal experience that has not lost its value to this day. The text was widely disseminated during the late Middle Ages from the eight Catalan manuscripts that have been preserved as well as from an early fifteenth-century Spanish translation.

This side-by-side annotated medieval Catalan to English translation is an essential resource for anybody interested in the proverbial genre from medieval Catalonia but not fluent in the language or trained in the gnomic literature field.

The “Twenty Verses on Manifestation-Only” of the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (c. 350–430?), his Viṁśíkā, is one of the most important treatises of the Yogācāra school. Accompanied by the author’s own commentary, the text lays out a vision of a “Buddhist Idealism” in which even one’s experience of the sufferings of hell is revealed to be nothing other than the results of working out one’s karma. Later scholars commented on the work a number of times, in its original Sanskrit, in Tibetan translation, and in three Chinese versions.

This book presents an edition and translation of the Sanskrit text of the core verses, alongside the original author’s commentary, based directly on the manuscript evidence. This is accompanied by an edition of the canonical translations of these texts found in the Tibetan Tanjurs, as well as a “draft translation” of the verses in Tibetan, found in a manuscript from Dunhuang. This publication therefore provides the most reliable and comprehensive philological accounting to date for this fundamental work.