Indian and Buddhist Studies

Indian and Buddhist Studies examines the histories, texts, practices, and philosophical traditions that emerged from South Asia and spread across East Asia over roughly two and a half millennia, drawing on languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese to trace how ideas about mind, ethics, and liberation traveled and transformed across cultures. Scholars in this area work at the intersection of philology, history, philosophy, and religious studies, asking not only what canonical Buddhist texts say but how communities actually lived, debated, and adapted those teachings under shifting political and social conditions. Central open questions include how Buddhist ethical frameworks translate into contemporary contexts such as global economics and bioethics, and how modernization movements across Asia have selectively reinterpreted classical doctrine in response to colonialism, nationalism, and secularization. The field also continues to investigate Buddhism's long entanglement with Hinduism, Jainism, and other South Asian traditions, where boundaries between systems were historically far more porous than later institutional accounts suggest.

Works

221,692

Total citations

191,935

Keywords

BuddhismSouth AsiaEast AsiaHistoryCulturePhilosophy