European scholars did not at first realise that the many religious sects of East and Southeast Asia were closely related. So different were the extant forms of Buddhism from each other that they seemed like totally different religions. However, it soon became apparent that they all claimed to have been founded by a figure called "Buddha" (A story now told several times: Almond 1988, Bluck 2006, Franklin 2008). It was apparent that all the different forms of Buddhism must have some common history. In the early decades of the 1800s, scholars assumed that the history of Buddhism would follow the ..read more

Jonathan Walters was kind enough to correspond with me and send me a pdf copy of his extended essay in book form: Finding Buddhists in Global History (1998). The book has three chapters Problematizing the Buddhological Construct Historicizing the Buddhological Construct Beyond the Buddhological Construct Walters is a historian, and thus his work can be bracketed with other historians of Buddhism such as David Drewes, Bernard Faure, Charles Hallisey, Frank Reynolds, Gregory Schopen, and Joseph Walser. All of these historians have been critical of how the history of Buddhism has been ha ..read more

In 2017, David Drewes published an article that is now famous or infamous, depending on your viewpoint. Drewes argued for the thesis that we cannot connect the Buddha to any historical facts and concludes that historians should stop referring to "the historical Buddha". His article has no abstract, so let me cite a passage from his introduction that seems to sum up his argument: On one hand, the Buddha is universally agreed to have lived; but, on the other, more than two centuries of scholarship have failed to establish anything about him. We are thus left with the rather strange proposition ..read more

In this short essay, I will challenge a universal presupposition about the Heart Sutra, i.e. that the lines that appear to be spoken to Śāriputra in the core section are spoken by Guanyin. I will show that, by all the conventions of Buddhist literature, this is not true. Guanyin does not speak. This observation further undermines the already weakened historically dominant narrative about the Heart Sutra. For some years, I have made a practice of reading every scholarly publication on this text (in English), as well as selected popular works. To the best of my knowledge, no modern scholars ha ..read more

In the process of revising the history of the Heart Sutra, it has become clear that Conze's Prajñāpāramitā chronology is faulty in many respects. In this essay, I will discuss some of the main faults with the existing chronology and then propose a substantial revision, notably deprecating his use of the term "abbreviation".  In "The Development of Prajñāpāramitā Thought" (1967) Conze outlined nine stages of development: The initial formulation represented by the first two chapters of Ratnaguṇasamcayagāthā (Rgs). Chapters 3-28 of Rgs. Incorporation of matter from the Abhidharma. Concessi ..read more

The evolution of the Heart Sutra has been largely obscured by the historically dominant narratives and by the reluctance of Buddhist Studies to go beyond description and seek explanations. Watanabe Shōgo (1990) and Jan Nattier (1992) showed that the historical narratives about the Heart Sutra are pious fictions and pointed to another, rather unexpected history: the Heart Sutra was composed in China in the mid-seventh century. Their insights were subsequently confirmed by Huifeng (2014), and then I started publishing on this topic in 2015, both confirming the existing observations and adding a ..read more

“What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Stefan Karpik (2023) has proposed that “serious attention be given to the Theravada tradition that the Buddha spoke Pali” (2023: 41). Both this and an earlier paper (Karpik 2019) make linguistic arguments about the Pāli language, arriving at conclusions that question the existing paradigm on the history of Pāli and it relation to other Prakrits. Karpik then argues that these new conclusions tell that the Buddha spoke Pāli. In this essay ..read more

For the last decade or so, my exploration of Buddhist ideas generally has been overtaken by intensive study of the Heart Sutra. My focus has move from blogging to publishing articles in academic journals. My project has looked at aspects of the history, philology, and philosophy of the Heart Sutra and Prajñāpāramitā generally. Getting to the point of being able to regularly publish articles has involved more than one steep learning curve. I have no training in history, philology, or philosophy. I learned by reading everything I could get my hands on. An ongoing frustration that I have is that ..read more

I doubt there is a Buddhist alive today who does not revere the words of the Buddha (buddhavācana), at least in some form. The extent to which Buddhist doctrines are considered authentic, is the extent to which they are considered to have been enunciated by the Buddha, whether we think this means an historical person or some form of deity. While academic historians argue against the historicity the Buddha (e.g. Drewes 2017), Buddhist theologians produce apologetics for the authenticity of the Pali suttas as buddhavācana (e.g. Sujato and Bramali 2014). Indeed, the idea that the Pāli suttas are ..read more

I recently came across the text of talk by Elizabeth Wilson, an academic historian. Her academic website says: "I work on the religions of South Asia; my main specialization is in Buddhist Gupta-era narrative literatures". So we might expect Wilson to have a fairly sophisticated approach to narratives and the historicity of religious narratives. And yet, I find her saying: The historical Buddha lost his mother when he was just a baby. Legends describe the awakened Buddha ascending to the heaven where his mother had taken birth as a goddess due to her good karma. He gave her the greatest gift ..read more