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Andre Bareau (1921 1993) was one of the foremost scholars of Buddhism of his generation. Dissatisfied with piecemeal and contradictory information on early Buddhist schools, he set out to construct a coherent and authoritative overview, which has remained the standard treatment in the field since its appearance in 1955. This book offers a close description and analysis of Bareau s findings on the history, geographical whereabouts, and doctrinal positions of early schools of Buddhism. He systematically presents data from a diverse array of sources: texts in canonical Buddhist languages (P li, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese), inscriptions, and accounts of Chinese pilgrims to India. The result is an encyclopedic resource on thirty-four schools of Indian Buddhism and the approximately five hundred doctrinal theses by which they are differentiated. Bareau s genius was to conceive a plan to draw on an exhaustive range of primary sources preserved in all the major Buddhist languages and to conduct a comprehensive synthetic analysis, thus creating an authoritative picture. He provides several appendices, including summary tables of all doctrinal points discussed.
Several additions have been made to this, the first English-language edition of the work to increase the effectiveness of the original volume: an index of names and places, a supplementary bibliography, and a short essay on Bareau s career and work. Complex diagrams have been redrawn, and the lengthy subject index table in Appendix 1 has been separated into separate tables to make the material more useable.
The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle will be used by students and scholars as a primary resource and starting point for any discussion on the history and doctrines of early Buddhism and Buddhist schools. This seminal work is translated by Sara Boin-Webb, who across a career of four decades translated into English some of the most important French-language works of Buddhist scholarship.
Translated from the French by Sara Boin-Webb
Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle, Andre Bareau, Dev Publishers. Hardcover, 2015, 463 pages, $40.00
Born in Paris, Andr� Bareau forged a career in the interpretation of Buddhist doctrine from textual sources that led him to become a professor at the Coll�ge de France and a world authority on early Buddhism. He published several books, including several definitive volumes on the biography of the Buddha taken from the S tra and Vinaya collections of the Buddhist canon, and more than one hundred scholarly articles.
Andrew Skilton (Editor) is a scholar of the Buddhist history and literature of South, Southeast Asia. He studied Buddhism and Buddhist languages at the universities of Bristol and Oxford, where he did his Ph.D. on the Sam dhir jas tra, a major Mah y na scripture, examining its Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit recensions. He was senior lecturer in Buddhist studies at Cardiff University and associate lecturer and research fellow at SOAS, London. He is now senior research fellow in Buddhist studies in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at King s College, London, and also manages the Revealing Hidden Collections Project at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. His publications include A Concise History of Buddhism, The Bodhicaryavatara (with Kate Crosby), and How the Nagas Were Pleased.
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