Burnouf Opens the Sanskrit Manuscripts Hodgson Sent Home

Buddhist studies is the academic discipline that reads Buddhist canonical and commentarial texts across their Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese transmissions, alongside the archaeology and art history of the monastic institutions that preserved them, to reconstruct the doctrinal and historical development of Buddhist traditions. Its founding work is generally taken to be Eugène Burnouf's Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien, published in 1844, which drew on Sanskrit manuscripts the British resident in Nepal, Brian Houghton Hodgson, had sent to Paris, and gave European scholarship its first text critical account of Indian Buddhism grounded in primary sources rather than travelers' reports.

The discipline is central to the atlas wherever a Buddhist tradition's own account of a teaching's origin or transmission is compared against the textual record. Buddhist studies has repeatedly shown that texts attributed to the historical Buddha were composed and layered over centuries by different communities, and that doctrines presented within a tradition as a single unbroken transmission often carry a documented history of revision and regional divergence. The atlas relies on that philological record rather than on any single tradition's internal account when the two disagree.