The Sacred Books of the East (SBE) series, comprising fifty volumes, was issued by the Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910. It has translations of key sacred texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Islam. The series was edited by the famous linguist Max Müller, who also produced many of the translations. The SBE has been designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.

This series was the one of the inspirations for the sacred-texts website. As most of the SBE texts are in the public domain worldwide (and all of them in are public domain in the US), we have a long term project of converting the entire series to etexts. This page is a progress report on this project, and a way of centralizing known bibliographic information on the SBE.

At this time, 44 of these volumes have been converted into electronic versions and are online at this site in some form. All but two of these were scanned and formatted at sacred-texts or by volunteers for the site.

The difficulties of turning these books into etexts are enormous, and requires great care and diligence. The typography is, in a word, substandard; not to diminish the fact that it must have been a substantial accomplishment for its time. The system of transliteration of non-western alphabets uses specialized italics and diacritics. The result is that every one of the SBE volumes gives optical character recognition (OCR) software the fits. It is not unusual to have to spend up to 100 hours proofing each volume. One volume (vol. 5.) took over six months of work, primarily due to the thousands of italicized words and letters.

More recently, improvements in OCR technology and the development of our Sacred Texts markup language (STML) have reduced the amount of time required to prepare an SBE etext to days, rather than months. In particular, OCR programs--with some tweaking--can now recognize circumflex vowels with high accuracy. However these volumes still represent some of the most difficult work in the field of etext preparation, and exacting care is still necessary in the editing phase. Each page requires up to four passes: one to correct gross formatting and spelling errors, one to insert STML markup and mark 'dotted' consonants, a third pass where it is read for comprehension (in parallel with the printed page) to eliminate additional errors such as 'specks' and missing quotes, and a final pass in the case where the text has individual words and phrases italicized, to mark these using macros.

The SBE texts suffer from the usual disease of Victorian scholarly texts; they are replete with extensive (and often superfluous) introductory matter and footnotes. The footnotes in a typical SBE volume can comprise from one-half to two-thirds of the bulk of the text. As the scholarly apparatus is set in a smaller typeface it is very difficult to OCR and proofread. For this reason, only more recent SBE etexts originated at sacred-texts include the footnotes and introductions.

In some cases these are the only available translations of a particular text, or the principal reference version. The source material which was used over a century ago to compile the SBE volumes is for the most part extremely rare and highly inaccessible.

The original Oxford University Press printing was very small, and is today very rare. A very few of the more important volumes have been reproduced by Dover publications. The Dover versions are inexpensive but very high quality trade paperbacks. Unfortunately, some of the SBE reprints in the Dover line are now out of print; they turn up often in used bookstores, though.

The Indian publishing firm of Motilal Banarsidass has reprinted the entire set in hardcover (ISBN 8120801016). This is the version available at most large public and academic libraries. The Banarsidass SBE lists for 9000 Rs or approximately US$ 200, with separate volumes priced at 200 Rs, or about US$ 4.50. These are the prices listed on their website, and presumably reflect the retail price in India.

Be prepared to pay a lot more if you order the Motilal Banarsidass SBE set through a bookstore in the US. The books are not available through normal channels and must be shipped from India; the size of the set (as well as its specialized nature) makes it unreasonable for American or European distributors or bookstores to keep it in stock. For this reason, the US list price of the Banarsidass reprint set is $2,250! Used sets have been listed from $600 to $1,250. Individual used volumes are typically between $20 to $40.

NOTE: I was quoted $495.95 (in February 2003) for the set if you order it direct from Motilal Banarsidass and have it shipped to the US. So that might be your best bet if you want the whole set. No word on how long it might take to get from India to the US, though.

In spite of all these difficulties, the translations are uniformly of high quality and are essential for scholars of religion. For this reason, we feel that it is important that this material be published on the Internet.

The original transliteration used in the Sacred Books of the East can be viewed by clicking on the links below. Each of these files is a large jpg image:

We have evolved the following conventions in our etexts of the SBE series. Many of these conventions have been used for other texts scanned at sacred-texts. Refer to the Sacred-texts transcription standards document. Because these conventions have been developed gradually, not all SBE etexts presented here will adhere to all of these guidelines. We are actively engaged in updating the older texts to more recent standards.