The way in which the history of Indian Buddhism has been studied by modern scholars is decidedly peculiar. What is perhaps even more peculiar, though, is that it has rarely been seen to be so. This peculiarity is most readily apparent in what appears at first sight to be a curious and unargued preference for a certain kind of source material. This curious preference, although it may not be by any means uniquely characteristic of the study of Indian Buddhism, is particularly evident there; so too is the fact that it has no obvious scholarly justification. We might first look at a small sample of statements expressing this preference and at its consequences. Then we must at least ask what can possibly lie behind it.

When Europeans first began to study Indian Buddhism systematically there were already two bodies of data available to them, and the same is true today. There was, and is, a large body of archaeological and epigraphical material, material which can be reasonably well located in time and space,1 material that is largely "unedited" and much of which was never intended to be "read."2 This material records or reflects at least a part of what Buddhists-both laypeople and monks actually practiced and believed.3 There was, and is, an equally large body of literary material, material that in most cases cannot actually be dated4 and that survives only in very recent manuscript traditions,5 material that has been heavily edited,6 is "canonical" or "sacred," and was intended-at the very least-to inculcate an ideal.7 This material records what a small atypical part of the Buddhist community wanted that community to believe or practice. Both bodies of material, it is important to note, became available to Western scholars more or less simultaneously.8 The choice of sources for the scholar interested in knowing what Indian Buddhism had been would seem obvious. But the choice made was, apparently, not based on an assessment of the two kinds of sources as historical witnesses, but on some other kind of an assumption. This assumption, it appears, more than anything else, has determined the status and use of archaeological and epigraphical sources in the study of Indian Buddhism, and this assumption, apparently, accounts for the fact that an overriding textual orientation was very early in place in Buddhist studies.

  • 1. There is, of course, no single, systematic survey of Buddhist archaeological remains in India. The best attempt so far is D. Mitra, Buddhist Monuments (Calcutta, 1971). It, however, was not only not intended to be exhaustive but is now also almost twenty years out of date. For inscriptional remains we have, for the period up to 1910, H. Liiders, A List of Brahmi Inscriptionsfrom the Earliest Times to about A.D. 400 with the Exception of Those of Asoka, Appendix to Epigraphia Indica, 10 (Calcutta, 1912). It is, though, by now badly outdated and, as its title indicates, does not list material beyond "about A.D. 400." Both more comprehensive and much more recent is Shizutani Masao, Indo bukkyo himei mokuroku (Catalog of Indian Buddhist inscriptions) (Kyoto, 1979), but it too is already dated and contains serious omissions-cf. Shizutani's listings of the Kharosthi inscriptions, e.g., with that in G. Fussman, "Gandhari ecrite, gandhari parlee," in Dialectes dans les litteratures indo-aryennes, ed. C. Caillat (Paris, 1989), pp. 444-51. Shizutani is especially unreliable now for important sites like Amaravati (none of the early inscriptions brought to light in the "clearance-operation" in 1958-59, e.g., are included; see A. Ghosh, "The Early Phase of the Stupa at Amaravati, South-east India," Ancient Ceylon 3 [1979]: 97-103; etc.) and like Mathura (only one of the finds from Govindnagar is included).
  • 2. On the curious fact, e.g., that a considerable number of Buddhist inscriptions were never intended to be seen, let alone read, see H. Liiders, "The Manikiala Inscription," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1909), p. 660; S. Konow, Kharoshthi Inscriptions with the Exception of Those of Asoka, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. 2, pt. I (Calcutta, 1929), p. 31; A. V. Naik, "Inscriptions of the Deccan: An Epigraphical Survey (circa 300 B.c.-1300 A.D.)," Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute 11 (1948): 3-4, etc.
  • 3. This point in regard to archaeological evidence in general has been made a number of times. See, e.g., R. Grenet, Les pratiquesfuneraires dans l'asie centrale sedentaire de la conquete grecque a l'islamisation (Paris, 1984), p. 7, who, in referring to Zoroastrianism, contrasts "canonical or clerical texts-always untiringly scrutinized although the narrowness of the milieux which produced them is ever more clearly evident," with archaeological materials "which allow us the most direct access to the religion as it was lived and practised by all social classes." Much the same has also been said of epigraphical sources. L. H. Kant, in speaking of Jewish inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world, e.g., says "inscriptions, in contrast to most other written records, reflect a broad spectrum of society-from nearly illiterate poor, who wrote many of the Roman catacomb inscriptions, to the apparently wealthy patrons of funerary poetry and from tradesmen such as shoemakers and perfume sellers to educated persons such as rabbis and disciples of sages. It is also striking that, unlike many written texts, the inscriptions express for us religious views that have not been filtered by a subsequent normative literary tradition" ("Jewish Inscriptions in Greek and Latin," in Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms in Spiegel der Neueren Forschung, Teil 2, Principat, Band 20, Halbband 2, ed. W. Haase [Berlin, 1987], p. 674). Likewise, in regard to "les inscriptions latines chretiennes," Sanders has said: "De la sorte, les inscriptions nous renseignent aussi de maniere privilegiee sur la masse, sur la majorit6 oubliee par la litterature a hauts talons, le majorit6 silencieuse, l'homme de la rue, sa vie priv6e, son imbrication dans son monde a lui, telle qu'elle fut d6finie par les coordonnees du temps, de l'espace, des conditions sociales, du climat religieux et 6motionnel" (G. Sanders, "Les chr6tiens face a l'6pigraphie funeraire latine," in Assimilation et resistance a la culture greco-romaine dans le monde ancien: Travaux du VIe congres international d'tudes classiques, ed. D. M. Pippidi [Paris, 1976], p. 285). For the points of view represented in Indian Buddhist inscriptions and the role of the "lettre," whether "moine ou sculpteur," see the important remarks in G. Fussman's review of Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit, by Th. Damsteegt, Journal asiatique (1980), pp. 423-24. It should be noted, finally, that inscriptions are, of course, written sources, but they are most easily and clearly distinguishable from literary sources by the simple fact that they were not meant to be circulated.
  • 4. For some representative recent views, see K. R. Norman, "The Value of the Pali Tradition," Jagajjyoti Buddha Jayanti Annual (Calcutta, 1984), pp. 1-9 (who points out that it is now known that "the Pali canon is a translation from some earlier tradition" [p. 4], that, in fact, "all traditions which we possess have been translated at least once" [p. 5]); L. O. G6mez, "Buddhism in India," in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade (London, 1987), pp. 352 ff. ("Textual sources are late, dating at the very least five hundred years after the death of the Buddha"); G. Schopen, "Two Problems in the History of Indian Buddhism: The Layman/ Monk Distinction and the Doctrines of the Transference of Merit," Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 10 (1985): 9 ff.
  • 5. This, ironically, is especially true for the so-called early literature. For Pali, see 0. von Hiniiber, "Pali Manuscripts of Canonical Texts from North Thailand-a Preliminary Report," Journal of the Siam Society 71 (1983): 75-88 ("most of the surviving [Pali] manuscript material is hardly older then the late 18th century" [p. 78]); and the material cited in G. Schopen, "The Stfpa Cult and the Extant Pali Vinaya," Journal of the Pali Text Society 13 (1989): 94, n. 23. For central Asian Sanskrit material, see L. Sander, Palaographisches zu den Sanskrithandschriften der Berliner Turfansammlung, Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Supplementband 8 (Wiesbaden, 1968), p. 51 ("Unter den in die Tausende gehenden, von den vier preussischen Expeditionen [1902-1914] im Norden Ostturkistans gefundenen fragmentarischen Sanskrithandschriften gibt es, soweit mir bekannt ist, nur sieben mit den charakteristischen Merkmalen der Kusana-Brahmi," and so on).
  • 6. I.. B. Horner, Women under Primitive Buddhism (London, 1930), p. xx: "Still another inherent difficulty in dealing with the Pali texts arises from the various editions, glosses, and revisions which they have undergone at the hands of the monks"; etc.
  • 7. A. K. Warder, e.g., starts his discussion of the Pali Canon as a "historical record" by saying "the Buddhists .. . were ready to turn everything to account in developing and popularizing their ideas and in presenting a comprehensive 'world view,"' and ends it by saying: "The bias of the repeaters [of the canon] sometimes intrudes itself, often very clumsily" ("The Pali Canon and Its Commentaries as an Historical Record," in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, ed. C. H. Philips [London, 1961], pp. 46-47).
  • 8. For the history of the study of the archaeological and epigraphical material, see now D. K. Chakrabarti, A History of Indian Archeology: From the Beginning to 1947 (New Delhi, 1988); there is also some interesting material for the earliest period in P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977); and some useful data in A. Imam, Sir Alexander Cunningham and the Beginnings of Indian Archaeology (Dacca, 1966). For the study of literary sources the most recent and reliable work is J. W. de Jong, A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America, 2d rev. ed. (Delhi, 1987); see also H. de Lubac, La recontre du bouddhisme et de l'occident (Paris, 1952); R. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. G. Patterson-Black and V. Reinking (New York, 1984); W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, N.Y., 1988).