“Good book for children telling a Buddhist story. I’m American and I’ve learned a bit about western-flavored Buddhism but this story about the bodhisattva that eventually became the Buddha is new to me. The story is simply told and gorgeously illustrated with author-disclosed AI pictures. The pictures do have obvious AI “tells” but since the author didn’t lie about it, I won’t take off a star in my review. This is a very good entry point to learning more about the Theravada Buddhist canon. Now that I’ve read the simplified version of the story, I can search for an English translation of the real thing. Children would also enjoy this as it engaging pictures, easy to understand language, and a lesson. I recommend this book to parents who want to expose their kids to Buddhism.” – Amazon Review
The Silent Prince: Ten Lives of the Buddha
Prince Temiya was a fortunate, bright, and beautiful child. But he was also a Bodhisattva, an incarnation of the one who one day would be born as the Buddha, the Enlightened One. One day, the King, his father, offered him a taste of kingship — to sit in judgment on an evil criminal, and to condemn him to death. Unable to disobey his father, and unable to kill, the Bodhisattva responded by deciding never to speak again.
First in a series of ten retellings of the classic DasJati which are iconic texts of Buddhism, The Silent Prince and its sequels shed light on stories that are a vital part of Asian culture but relatively unknown in the west.
About the Author
S.P. Somtow
Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as ‘the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,’ Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.
Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.
His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, ‘skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.’ Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers’ Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children’s books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.
In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon’s Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok’s first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
According to London’s Opera magazine, ‘in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.’ His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.
Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with “Homeworld of the Heart”, a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.
To support S.P. Somtow’s work, visit his patreon account at patreon.com/spsomtow.
His website is at somtow.com
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