Introduction to Buddhism?

Here you go:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/buddhism/

The BBC site is wrong on some stuff. Loads of Buddhists worship Gods and deities, especially in Tibet and China. There's no direction to worship in the early Pali scripture but deity worship and instruction to worship permeates parts of the Sanskrit Mahayana. The big thing is there's usually no conception of a creator God.

The Oxford Handbooks are pretty good, and you can read a lot of the Pali Canon in translation online if that is what you're interested in (it can be a slog and is very repetitive). The Mahayana stuff is a bit more difficult to access because so much is untranslated.

Stuff on Lions Roar is good for contemporary practice, I know the editors and they do a great job.

Buddhanet is a fantastic resource and it is cross-tradition.

Don’t understand why they’d even put misleading information then I do apologise for putting that as that was the only thing I can think of mate

It's a misconception that is everywhere, even in the academic material. The oldest Theravada bunch don't 'do' gods, but the Mahayana, which is over half of all Buddhists in the world, do like their deities. Not your fault and to be fair to the Beeb it's probably just a nuance that they couldn't be bothered dealing with at an introductory level.

Don’t understand why they’d even put misleading information then I do apologise for putting that as that was the only thing I can think of mate

The BBC site is wrong on some stuff. Loads of Buddhists worship Gods and deities, especially in Tibet and China. There's no direction to worship in the early Pali scripture but deity worship and instruction to worship permeates parts of the Sanskrit Mahayana. The big thing is there's usually no conception of a creator God.

The Oxford Handbooks are pretty good, and you can read a lot of the Pali Canon in translation online if that is what you're interested in (it can be a slog and is very repetitive). The Mahayana stuff is a bit more difficult to access because so much is untranslated.

Stuff on Lions Roar is good for contemporary practice, I know the editors and they do a great job.

Buddhanet is a fantastic resource and it is cross-tradition.

Don’t understand why they’d even put misleading information then I do apologise for putting that as that was the only thing I can think of mate

The Oxford Handbooks are so expensive... hopefully I can find some secondhand copies somewhere

Is Mahayana content all in Sanskrit still? Sanskrit is a very interesting language to me but resources are scarce and it's very hard to learn so I'm hoping that I could still find some translations somewhere.

Lion's Roar looks really interesting - I will definitely check it often

Buddhanet also looks very thorough, if a little outdated in terms of "updates" but I'm sure it will still be very useful to me.

Thank you for these resources - your help is greatly appreciated!

Abebooks sometimes has this stuff on there for buttons. You can get a load of 'Intro to Buddhism' books but most will be on the philosophy and I'm not sure how much that'd satisfy your curiosities. Are you more interested in practice? There are lots of those as well, stuff by Wisdom Publications is usually good and the layperson-targeted books are written by monastics as well as professional researchers.

You can get a lot of translations for sure, but the majority of stuff remains untranslated - it is 2000 years worth of material, so you can imagine how much there is to get done. I learned it as part of a PhD It's hard ish but if you've done Latin you will likely pick it up relatively quickly. I had not so had to start from scratch, but I attained a professional capacity within 2.5 years or so.

I will no doubt think of more stuff so will return with updates. I'm not exactly on form at the moment because I'm snowed under with work