There are many different textual sources for the study of Indian Buddhism. These include Buddhist texts themselves, but also non-Buddhist texts from rival religious orders in India, secular texts from India, and accounts by Greeks, Persians, Central Asians, Chinese, and, later, Europeans who visited India. In terms of creating a history of Indian Buddhism, each of these sources has different strengths and weaknesses. Indian texts, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, have the benefit of being written by Indians themselves, but it is often difficult to date their composition. The composition of foreign sources are usually more firmly dated, but the authors of these sources often seem confused—projecting their own biases on what they observed in India. A final source for textual histories is inscriptions. Throughout India, both kings and commoners carved inscriptions in temples, columns, and rock faces. Among the main benefits of inscriptions is that they are often easily dated and, in many cases, the dates precede the composition of the earliest textual sources. On the downside, most inscriptions are very short—providing only limited insight into the lives of the people who had them carved. All of these sources are critical for constructing an archaeological history of Buddhism, but they must be incorporated carefully, accommodating the different problems and potentialities of each source.
It should be noted at the outset that, other than inscriptions, most of the literary sources are written versions of what were oral and written histories that preceded them. For this reason, texts have two important dates. The first is the date that scholars believe the existing texts were written. The second is the period these texts refer to and from which they are presumed to have originated as oral histories. For example, many scholars argue that the Rig Veda, the earliest readable text in India, records oral histories referring to the mid-second millennium bce. However, the Rig Veda was not written down until sometime in the early to mid-first millennium bce, at the earliest (Basham 1967; Thapar 2002). It can be expected that, just as modern texts are constructed within a particular social context, the versions of the primary texts available today were also written in specific social contexts. The result is a mediation between what was written and the source material they were based upon, either written or oral (see Thapar 2000 for an excellent discussion of this point). These texts can be used for investigating periods to which they refer, but not uncritically.
World History
