The Great Sutta on Good Fortune describes a thirty-eight step practice we can take to better our lives. Two and a half millennia ago the Buddha outlined a path of practice leading to freedom and happiness. While he mostly taught monastics, the lessons of this Sutta are aimed at the rest of us: describing steps each of us can take that lead towards wisdom. The poem is one of the first learned and memorized by school children in South Asia, but it is little known in the West. This book guides you through all thirty-eight steps with an eye to how to bring them into your life, while providing historical context. The book includes a foreword by eminent translator and scholar Bhikkhu Bodhi.

A Handbook of Early Buddhist Wisdom: The Path of the Mahamangala Sutta, Doug Smith, Akalika Press, 140 pages, $19.99

Doug Smith has a PhD in Philosophy and several scholarly publications in Buddhist Studies. He began Doug's Dharma on YouTube in 2017 to disseminate the dharma of early Buddhism from a contemporary, secular perspective. He also founded the Online Dharma Institute to create a home for longer-form course material on the early dharma.