A Portrait of the Buddha Drawn from his Discourses by Harold Beaver
Looks very interesting, because it started life as a portrait of the Buddha as a master of literature and poetry, and was written by an ‘academic rebel who challenged conventional thinking with unorthodox theories’ whose ‘breadth of intellectual interests made him appear to many a charismatic figure’, while to others, this ‘chameleon quality suggested a lack concentration’. So he had out-sized curiosity, and was erudite, and understood that ‘literature contained truths and models that we would do well to understand - not just in the halls of universities, but in the reality of human life’.
He also recognises/reckons that ‘Buddhism has always been hospitable to the fine arts’ because ‘the Buddha himself had a marked poetic talent’, and goes on to appreciate the Socratic method the Buddha used, describing it in a chapter title as “A Dialectical Free-for-All”, and translates the Picnic-Party Sutta thus:
But one chap being unmarried, a prostitute was brought along; and she’s run off with all our stuff while we were having a game.