First Commentary on the Digha Nikaya Since the Fifth Century

August 26, 2015 (Toronto). Chroniker Press has published the first comprehensive commentary on the Digha Nikaya since Buddhaghosa’s Sumangala-vilasini, entitled Conversations with the Buddha: A Reader’s Guide to the Digha Nikaya, by Tseten Thokmey, the Buddhist name of Alexander Duncan. Conversations is written from a modern, non-sectarian, universalist point of view. Unlike many sectarian exegetes, Conversations does not try to “second guess” the Pali Canon, but takes the Pali Canon itself “at its word,” disregarding nothing, to establish a basis for the Dharma Transmission to the West. The hermeneutic is non-historicist and phenomenological. This is Duncan’s seventh book.