Thomas Cleary

Thomas Cleary (1949-2021 CE) was an American translator and scholar, widely regarded as one of the most prolific translators of Asian and Islamic spiritual classics into English. He was born on April 24, 1949, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and began translating Buddhist scriptures in his late teens. He went on to earn a doctorate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Over a long career Cleary produced more than eighty volumes spanning four traditions, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and, from the 1990s onward, Islamic. He translated from Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Pali, and Arabic, and his Islamic translations reflect the same attention to spiritual depth that marked his earlier work. Among Muslim readers he is best known for The Essential Koran, published in 1994, and a complete rendering titled The Qur'an, A New Translation, along with The Wisdom of the Prophet, a collection of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. His other widely read works include translations of the Taoist Secret of the Golden Flower and Japanese classics on strategy and discipline. His translations sold millions of copies and were rendered into more than twenty languages. He died on June 20, 2021, in Oakland, California, leaving a body of work that opened the spiritual literature of several civilizations to English-speaking readers.