The original text of the law is inscribed in “letters as big as a cow” on the boundary-wall of the universe, from which it is transcribed and transmitted to the human realm by [Manu], who magically retrieved the alien text during the reign of the first king Mahāsammata. In addition to its origins in outer space, accessible only to superhuman cosmonauts, dhamma-sattha texts are engaged in a complex relationship with Buddhist vinaya and sutra texts, which are frequently deployed, although sometimes with substantial changes…

A brief look at the actual legal history of Burma shows that the supposed constitutionality of dhammasattha treatises was always in negotiation with the proclamations of kings, showing how power and rhetorical authority were actually constituted in premodern, mainland Southeast Asia.

One could, of course, dismiss this as a misunderstanding of what real Buddhism is, but then one would probably have to jettison most of the history of Buddhism in Japan as wrongheaded delusion as well. The cost is considerable.

The piece is organized into three sections, in which I comment on misrepresentations of what I have tried to do; on “silences” in the history of morality, or, alternately, on what constitutes evidence in studies of that history; and on gender-specificity as it relates to these questions.

In 1775, during the process of collecting books for the Sìkù qúanshū (四庫全書) project, an empire-wide literary inquisition was imposed on the deceased monk Jīnshì Dánguī (今釋澹歸) (1614–80).

The Qianlong Emperor and his officials went to extraordinary lengths to posthumously prosecute a Ming-official-turned-monk for his unflattering writings about the early Qing, showing the limits of monastic withdrawal and the importance of historical memory.

The Konjaku monogatari shu (今昔物語集) is a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan.

Orientations of temples at Ayutthaya seem to have been determined by magnetic compass

By correlating the exact orientations of different historical temples in Thailand and their construction dates to the known drift of the magnetic north pole, scientists have been able to confirm that Thais had the compass centuries earlier than previously thought.

deathbed practices in nineteenth-century Siam were structured to flow seamlessly from chanting for the dying to chanting for the dead, a sequence reflected in the physical layout of the manuscripts themselves.

This surprising fact shows that the abbot was likely more interested in courtly trends than in Buddhist piety and was perhaps appointed for political reasons: a trend all too common in places where the state is entangled with the monastic Saṅgha. These panels also demonstrate how trends in non-Buddhist art and fashion can come to influence Buddhist temple art proper.

Dorogawa became the place where male travelers made last-minute preparations for the climb and afterwards availed themselves of worldly pleasures at the many inns and teahouses

How Japan’s sacred mountains are selectively remembered.

We can put an Egyptian mummy in a museum and it’s nice and exotic, but we’re not gonna learn anything from it. That’s how we tend to think of tradition. We don’t literally destroy the past, but we render it something that we can learn nothing from.

people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC.

A religion’s power lies in its symbols, and those symbols are by their very nature not reducible to a set of propositions, or a body of doctrines

Despite their seeming reluctance to engage in the politics of the now, historians have a crucial role to play as witnesses to climate change and its attendant social injustices.

In spite of these negative descriptions of the behaviour of single Buddhist monks, the impression is certainly not correct that all monks followed all sorts of occupations to assure their good life and to increase their riches. There is no reason to doubt that the vast majority of monks seriously pursued their spiritual goals, particularly those who criticised their fellow monks for such lax behaviour.

How do we understand the evolution of a prominent figure or any kind of deity like this over long stretches of time, especially when they have many, many iterations?

The first part, as is usual in votive texts, opens up a wide perspective on the Buddhist teaching and the value of sutras. It evokes the ephemeral nature of the world, including our fragile human existence. Rescue can only come through the knowledge of the correct texts that save and protect.

This book chapter details the archeological history of Stone Hymn, engraved Buddhist scriptures on Mount Tie (鐵山).

Not just a catalog of sculptures, the included essays by leading scholars explain much of what is known about the early history of Southeast Asian polities and their Indic religions.

Among the Dunhuang documents, when examining some of the monk signature lists, name list of monks copying scriptures and name list of monks chanting scriptures in monasteries, we can estimate a relatively accurate literacy rate of the Buddhist sangha. Generally speaking, the literacy rate of the sangha during the Guiyi Army 歸義軍 period (851–1036) was lower than that during the Tibetan occupation period (786–851). The reason for this change is closely related to each regime’s Buddhist policy, the size and living situation of the sangha, and the Buddhist atmosphere.

The same Indo-European metaphor for abusing paternal property is traceable in the Middle Iranian and Indic tradition, ranging from Vedic to (Buddhist) Sanskrit dāyāda-.

This article focuses on the philology of the Sanskrit term dāyāda and its relation to the Buddhist story of Ajātaśatru. Dāyāda is a Sanskrit and Pāli term usually translated as ‘heir’. For example, “kamma-dāyādo” is to be the heir of one’s actions.

This article argues there is a second interpretation of the term as eating (√ad) what is given (dāya), i.e., one eats the fruits of one’s karma. The study here focuses on how Indo-European metaphors inform this translation and understanding of the term, using various related languages, especially West Tocharian. 

We follow archaeological research and employ skeletal records of women’s and men’s health from 139 archaeological sites in Europe dating back, on average, to about 1200 AD to construct a site-level indicator of historical bias in favor of one gender over the other using dental linear enamel hypoplasias. This historical measure of gender bias significantly predicts contemporary gender attitudes, despite the monumental socioeconomic and political changes that have taken place since.

We also show that this persistence is most likely due to the intergenerational transmission of gender norms, which can be disrupted by significant population replacement. Our results demonstrate the resilience of gender norms and highlight the importance of cultural legacies in sustaining and perpetuating gender (in)equality today.

Has humanity ever really learned from the past and been able to apply the lessons?

A short defense of studying history, despite its difficulties.

The Indian culture is an amalgam of various cultures from an early age. It is essentially syncretistic in nature.

On the origins of the politics of the origins of Indian civilization.

We may quibble over whether the Latin ‘indices’ or the Anglicized ‘indexes’ is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: ‘sillyboi’.

…how the index responded to shifts in the reading ecosystem – the rise of the novel, of the coffee-house periodical, of the scientific journal – and how readers, and reading, changed at these points.

… the controversial basis for such identification, the tomb’s now-vanished inscription of “shēlì 猞猁,” resulted from an unverifiable reading by a local archaeologist working under adverse conditions and an unqualified confirmation … distorting the picture of early Buddhism and its material culture in China.

While there is a growing recognition of the importance of asceticism in Buddhism among scholars, the view that Indian Buddhist monastic communities, on the whole, should be considered non-ascetic remains largely intact. It is the goal of this chapter to challenge this heavily ingrained attitude toward asceticism in the Indian Buddhist context.

… excavations revealed a sequence of early structures preceding the major rebuilding by Asoka

See this post by Bhante Sujato explaining that it’s quite expected that Maya would haven given birth at a pre-existing shrine. And see this response by Richard Gombrich further refuting the paper’s proposed chronology.

Still, the paper does inform us a bit about the site as Maya must have found it: a ~200-year-old outdoor shrine with thick wooden fencing around a central tree.

Centuries, minutes later, one might ask
How the hilt of a sword wandered so far from the smithy.

Targeted groups came to be attributed a biological or timeless essence, not because this was inevitable, we argue, but because of these failures to historicize inequality.

… in sketching out what the councils were, I hope to indicate how they might be fruitfully studied

The Slave’s role is no less brief upon his second appearance than it was in his first. But he has grown in stature now: he has earned himself a footnote.

… soon enough, events began to unfold around [the Geniza] in a sly allegory on the intercourse between power and the writing of history.

After the Buddha’s awakening he spent seven weeks at Uruvelā, the modern Bodh Gaya, and during the second week he sat gazing at the Bodhi Tree without blinking. In time, a shrine called the Animisa Cetiya, in English the Shrine of Steadfast Gaze or sometimes the Unblinking Shrine, came to be built on this site and became one of the seven sacred locations at Bodh Gaya.

The whole idea that all of this can be locked up in a little box and say ‘Oh, nothing much happened before the invention of farming,’ is just beginning to look kind of silly.

An archeologist responds to Sapiens and points out that history is always more variegated and contingent than our neat stories let us believe.

Back in the 1930s, Alan Lomax traveled the country recording obscure musicians of all stripes for the Library of Congress. Lomax believed that the culture of poor Americans was important, and worthy of saving. And it was these same beliefs that led to an investigation by the FBI.

Information about Buddhism was scarce and vague at best in the West until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first Orientalists studying Indian sources had to rely on Hindu texts written in Sanskrit which portrayed the Buddha as an avatra of the Hindu god Viṣṇu. The situation changed with the discovery of the Pāli texts from Sri Lanka through scholars like George Turnour and the decipherment of the Aśokan inscriptions through James Prinsep by which the historical dimension of the religion became evident. The final confirmation of the historicity of the Buddha and the religion founded by him was taken, however, from the records of Chinese Buddhist travellers (Faxian, Xuanzang, Yijing) who had visited the major sacred places of Buddhism in India and collected other information about the history of the religion. This paper will discuss the first Western translations of these travelogues and their reception in the scholarly discourse of the period and will suggest that the historical turn to which it led had a strong impact on the study and reception of Buddhism-in a way the start of Buddhist Studies as a discipline.

…as soon as they could demonstrate that a text had been composed and translated from an Indian language, they refused to question it.

John Kieschnick explains how Chinese Buddhists thought and wrote about their own history from antiquity to the modern day.

I am writing to you
from deep in the bad days,
hoping you will hear me
wherever you are

… they voted unanimously, every person there, that they would not provide labor to allow any drilling or mining to go ahead. These were men who would’ve made money, it might have been years of work for them if oil drilling and mining had gone ahead, but they didn’t want to spoil what many of them—having been to The Great Barrier Reef—knew was at risk

A brief history of the United Nations’ efforts to promote cultural tolerance in the aftermath of World War II.

… when the Japanese kept insisting that Buddhism was a specific religion that originated in north India, westerners were puzzled. There was no cult of Buddha in India, and northern India in particular was largely Muslim.

On the early modern encounters between Europeans and Japanese Buddhists and how they shaped each other’s understanding of Asia.

General Gutiérrez Mellado pulls his arm violently out of the Prime Minister’s grip; then the burst of gunfire erupts.

The history of the 1981 failed Spanish coup and of the gestures that saved democracy.

I find it reasonable that a period that was characterized by both a low standard in Pāli and indeed Buddhist learning, and a desire to effect a revival of Buddhist thought and practice could provide a fertile context for the acceptance of a work like the Tuṇḍilovāda Sutta. As happened with “apocryphal” Buddhist literature in other contexts, “suspicions concerning the authenticity of a text (may have) paled as its value in explicating Buddhist doctrine and practice became recognized.”

A thought-provoking example of a sutta composed in medieval Sri Lanka and a demonstration of the painstaking work going into the study of old manuscripts.

… what was the religious environment that encouraged the spread of the new technology of printing in late seventh century China?

The captivating story of how Empress Wu’s struggle for legitimacy led to the printing of the first mass-produced Buddhist text.

… does the garuda alight from the sky on the treetop with his wings grown instantaneously to maturity, or once he has been born in a crag or elsewhere, must his wings mature gradually?

An early account of the legendary debate that forever oriented Tibetan Buddhism South towards India—and away from China.

Important Note! Please also read pages 17–22 of David Jackson’s summary of the controversy this article stirred up, published eight years later in the same journal. Did you notice the original paper’s key methodological flaw?

Since July 20, 1985, a new higher ordination (upasampadā) movement has emerged at the Dambulla Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka. The architect of this movement, a Sinhala Buddhist monk named Inamaluwe Sumangala, challenges the contemporary Buddhist monastic practice of ordaining monks on the basis of their castes

On the face of it, the movement seems to involve a debate about the irrelevance of caste to higher ordination between Sumangala and the monks of the Asgiriya temple, one of several chapters of the Siyam Nikāya that ordains only high-caste Buddhist males. However, the challenge constituted by the new ordination can be seen as part of a broader attempt on Sumangala’s part to redefine monastic identity

For a critical response to some of Collins’ assertions, see this essay by Bhante Sujato.

The argument that a nun called Sthūlanandā really did have pendulous breasts and large buttocks is, pardon the pun, a thin one. As stock images of uncouth femininity, these outsized and ungainly physical features serve the representational project of this passage

A survey of post-modern hermeneutical strategies for critical and historical readings of Canonical Vinaya literature.

… wealth and power did not seem to ease disruptive conflict

The fascinating details of monastic life in medieval Dunhuang as told by their cave-preserved legal documents.

That Buddhism became so ritualistic, excessive, and subservient to the state even along the Silk Road demonstrates how common and impactful state intervention has been to the history of Buddhism.

Every other rights struggle that we have seen—disability rights, gay rights, women’s rights—all come from the efforts of the black civil rights struggles. […] It is black people who have been the perfectors of democracy.

The history of The United States, retold beautifully and powerfully in three emotional hours.

… in many cases, I did not know how the inscriptions could possibly mean what I had said they meant, and as a result of not knowing how they could mean what I had said, I had great doubts about what they did actually mean. And so my study of the Aśokan inscriptions led to a situation where every year I understood less and less.

A classic series of ten lectures exploring the languages of ancient India and how they help us unravel the mysteries of early Buddhist history.

This is striking proof of the general reliability with which Buddhist monks transmitted their texts

The amazing story of ancient Pāli texts in Burma, discovered to contain only minor differences from the contemporary canon.

… the particular wording introducing these place names can tell us much about the development of the literary form of early Buddhist texts and about the historical memory of the early authors

Despite an extremely unfortunate (and, tellingly, uncited) dig at the very end against the Lord Buddha’s final words, this (otherwise) well researched and moderate take on mining the EBTs for historical fact gives us a good idea of how the texts were composed and when.

In 94 B.C., the Chinese historian Sima Qian wrote, “In the area south of the Yangtze the land is low and the climate humid; adult males die young.”

The text jumps inside me to help me out.
…
So, when you’re studying Buddhism, what are you studying?
I know the answer. I’m studying me.
I’m studying me.