Historicity of First Buddhist Council

[sujato]

I’m talking about the Universities. In the US, with a few noble exceptions, the doctrines of extreme skeptics in the mold of Gregory Schopen, which aim to undermine any possible knowledge of anything in the first 500 years of Buddhism, dominate.

I have commented on this many times before. For example, in the American Academy of Religions (AAR) annual conference, which is the largest religious studies conference in the US, there are normally about 50 papers on Buddhism. Checking the papers year by year, it is invariably the case that there are no or very few papers on anything that happened in the first 500 years of Buddhism.

Can you imagine an academic conference on Christianity that ignored the Bible, Jesus, and the early Christian community?

It’s a shocking state of affairs, and a disgrace to the very idea of scholarship.

Previous posts:

Buddhist contributions to the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Boston, 2017

For the past few years, I’ve posted a summary of the contents of the AAR annual conference as it pertains to early Buddhist studies. Each year, the conference features dozens of papers, while managing to almost completely avoid saying anything about the Buddha or his teachings. I just received the panels for this year, so I will continue my grand tradition, and we can see if anything has changed. The AAR conference is a large, perhaps the largest, annual conference for discussion of religion in…

Early Buddhism still doesn't exist in American Buddhist academia

I just got the latest list of Buddhist topics for this year’s American Academy of Religions conference. This is the largest religious conference in the US, and each year most of the prominent figures in Buddhist studies there attend and give papers. And, as usual, there is not a single topic that deals with anything that happened in the first 500 years of Buddhism. Nothing on the suttas, on the Vinaya, on Ashoka, on the emergence of the schools, or on anything else that might actually have anyt…