Here is a new Clay Sanskrit Library translation of Ashva-ghosha's Handsome Nanda.<BR>Nanda has it all - youth, money, good looks and a kittenish wife who fulfills his sexual and emotional needs. He also has the Buddha, a dispassionate man of immense insight and self-containment, for an older brother. When Nanda is made a reluctant recruit to the Buddha's order of monks, he is forced to confront his all-too-human enslavement to his erotic and romantic desires.<BR>Dating from the second century CE, Handsome Nanda portrays its hero's spiritual makeover with compassion, psychological profundity and great poetic skill. The Buddhist monk Ashva-ghosha's ancient composition succeeds both as a work of poetry and as a Buddhist spiritual biography. Native of Saket, perhaps Ashva-ghosha too had been torn between his celibacy-demanding faith and a beloved woman.<BR>Nanda is not alone in being cured by the Buddha's sugar-coated bitter pills; the famous penultimate verse identifies all who hear or read Handsome Nanda as patients on the path to liberation, because we have savored the medicine that is bottled in this honeyed poem.