The Dating of the Historical Buddha (Die Datierung des historischen Buddha)

The Dating of the Historical Buddha, Die Datierung des historischen Buddha, edited by Heinz Bechert and published in several volumes by Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, collects the papers of an international symposium that brought together specialists in Buddhist chronology, epigraphy and textual history to reassess when the Buddha actually died. The symposium's collective work moved the scholarly center of gravity away from the traditional long chronology toward a date of death placed roughly between 410 and 370 BCE. Its strength is that it represents a genuine convergence of specialists working independently from different kinds of evidence, epigraphic, textual and archaeological, rather than one scholar's argument. Its limit is that a symposium volume presents multiple contributors' distinct calculations and reasoning rather than one settled figure, so a specific date drawn from it should be attributed to the individual paper making that argument.