The Date of The Historical Sakyamuni Buddha

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This book The Date of the Historical Šakyamuni Buddha includes fifteen articles on the date of the historical Sakyamuni Buddha, ten of which submitted by Indian scholars to a Workshop on the subject held in 1990, three by scholars from outside and two English translations of old French articles of importance. Many of these contributions take into account the papers submitted to a Conference on the subject held at Gottingen in 1988. The consensus of the articles in this book is in favour of confirming 483 (486) В.С. as the date of the Parinirvana of the historical Buddha as against any later date.

Professor A.K. Narain was Emeritus Professor of History and of Languages and Cultures of Asia: University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA) and Founder-Director of the Bhikkhu Jagdish Kashyap Institute of Buddhist and Asian Studies, Sarnath, Varanasi (India). Formerly he had been Manindra Chandra Nandy Professor of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology. Banaras Hindu University. He was Chairperson of the Buddhist Studies Programme at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was the Founder of the International Association of Buddhist Studies and has been the Editor-in-Chief of its periodical the JIABS. He was the Editor-in-Chief of The Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies (IIJBS).

The date of the historical Siddhartha Gotama, the Śākyamuni Buddha is one of the most important dates of world history and civilization. This is so for not only the history of Buddhism and the Buddhists all over the world but also for its bearing on the dates of monarchs and institutions, ideas and interactions of world significance. This is why, inspite of the fact that most of the Buddhists accepted the traditional date of 543 B.C. to celebrate the Buddha-Jayanti, and that most of the modern scholarship and standard books of reference fix it around 480 B.C., recently a well organized seminar on the subject was held at Göttingen. A set of Pre-prints of many papers presented at the Seminar were made available to us. These papers have now been published. I take this opportunity to thank Professor Bechert for taking me on, and inviting me to contribute a paper on the subject to be included in the 2nd Volume of his Seminar papers. While preparing the paper for him I thought also of having a Workshop on the subject in India in order to provide a forum for interested scholars and an opportunity for some loud thinking and response to the papers presented at the Göttingen Seminar.