A Review of Scholarship on the Buddhist Councils

Charles S. Prebish is a scholar of Buddhist studies, and this is his peer reviewed article in The Journal of Asian Studies, a review surveying and critically assessing the prior body of academic scholarship on the traditional Buddhist councils, the assemblies said to have convened after the Buddha's death to settle the content of the canon. Its strength is exactly its reflexive method, it is a scholarly survey of the historiography and the scholarly debate over the councils' historicity and content, not itself a primary account of the councils, making it the correct source for understanding where and why scholars have disagreed about them rather than for the councils' own traditional narrative. Its limit is that, as a review article, it summarizes and assesses others' arguments rather than presenting original archival or textual research of its own on the councils.