Ambedkar was not, of course, the first person to be impressed by the vast extent of Buddhist literature, nor even the first to compile a volume of selections for the benefit of the common reader. As early as the ninth century CE the poet-sage Shantideva had compiled – mainly from earlier Mahayana sutras – his Siksa-samuccaya or ‘Compendium of Instruction’, and in modern times American and British scholars, in particular, have produced a number of such works. By far the most popular of these was Paul Carus’s The Gospel of Buddha, published in 1894, which apart from Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879) did more to promote the wider dissemination of Buddhism than any other book. Two years after Carus’s best-seller came Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations, a scholarly work which had a much more limited circulation. After an interval of several decades these pioneering efforts were followed by such well-known anthologies as F.L. Woodward’s Some Sayings of the Buddha (1925), Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932), E.J. Thomas’s Early Buddhist Scriptures (1935), J.G. Jennings’ The Vedantic Buddhism.