Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline

Jan Nattier's Once Upon a Future Time, Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, published by Asian Humanities Press in 1991, is a scholarly study of the Buddhist doctrine of the decline of the dharma across Indian, Chinese and other Asian textual traditions, examining how a prophecy of the teaching's eventual disappearance took different forms in different Buddhist cultures and periods. Nattier is a recognised specialist in early and East Asian Buddhist textual history. Its strength is the comparative range across traditions usually studied separately, and its standing as a frequently cited reference on the decline-of-the-dharma theme specifically. Its limit is that the study is more than three decades old and newer manuscript discoveries have refined some of the textual chronology it relies on, so a claim resting on a precise dating within the book should be checked against more recent philological work on the specific texts involved.