Archaeological Reflections and the Study of South Asian Buddhism

Dr. Sumudu Dharmarathna
Additional contact information
Dr. Sumudu Dharmarathna: Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Peradenita

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, 2022, vol. 6, issue 6, 605-609

Abstract: As we are aware, there are two bodies of data available to study the history of Buddhism – literary material and archaeological and epigraphic material. Traditionally it is accepted that the large body of literary material is the most suitable for the studies of religious. From the mid-nineteenth century there has been a significant shift in the direction of Buddhist studies, because, on the one hand, literary works of Buddhist traditions came to be discovered one after another. On the other hand, archaeological and epigraphical sources were considered a powerful historical witness of Buddhist cultural history. Thus, while considering the significance of archaeological sources than the textual material for religious studies, most of them were attempted to make various arguments on the texts-bound studies of Buddhism. In this article, attention has been paid to this debatable issue regarding much more accurate sources material for the study of the nature of Buddhist religious culture. Here my attempt is made to explore new interpretations of the history of Buddhism readdressing some of early implications while reevaluating previous researches on the subject, dealing with architectural and inscriptional materials of the region.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rsisinternational.org/journals/ijriss/ ... -issue-6/605-609.pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.rsisinternational.org/virtual-library/ ... outh-asian-buddhism/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bcp:journl:v:6:y:2022:i:6:p:605-609

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science is currently edited by Dr. Nidhi Malhan

More articles in International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science from International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr. Pawan Verma ().