How about an Early Buddhism timeline?

[Thanuttamo]

@Gabriel

Can anyone please name the sources for dating the Buddha’s birth and death dates? The asian historiographies are just so shaky…

I created an preliminary bibliography here: Bibliographies for Buddhist Studies. I think a good starting point.

@Brahmali

It is probably true that there is no consensus on the exact dates of the Buddha, but I believe there is a consensus that the traditional accepted (at least among scholars) date of 480 BCE for the parinibbāna is too early, at least by several decades. If you read “The Dating of the Historical Buddha”, it is clear that 400 BCE is closer to the current ideas of most scholars than the traditional 480 BCE.

I read a good part into that topic and the most influential paper in support of the 400 B.C. date seems to be the paper by Haertel on the archaeology of the ancient Buddhist sites, in Bechert (ed.) 1988: Symposien zur Buddhismusforschung IV/1 – The Dating of the Historical Buddha. Most scholars who believed beforehand that the 480 B.C. date is the more likely alternative adapted their appraisal accordingly.

A paper of a lesser known symposium held after Bechert’s was supporting the 480 B.C. date. The paper of Krishna Deva The Antiquity of Sites Related to the Buddha in Narain (ed.) 2003: The Date of the Historical Sakyamuni Buddha, which contains the contributions to the symposium, fundamentally and heavily questions the results of Haertel, for me convincingly showing that almost all the key sites mentioned in the EBTs existed around 480 B.C. and far earlier, this being in contradistinction to Haetels presentation. Krishna Deva was closely involved in excavations himself. To me that moves the barrier quite strongly down to 480 B.C.

Metta