Brill's Encyclopedia of Buddhism
Rome [ENA] On 20 June 2019 Volume Two of Brill's Encyclopedia of Buddhism Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 2 South Asia, has been published. Brill is the international scholarly publisher and this volume is particularly interesting for all those concerned with religions in South Asia, the history of Buddhism, as well as Indologists and historians of religions. Volume One edited by Jonathan A. Silk, Leiden University as
Editor-in-Chief examined Buddhist literatures, scriptural and nonscriptural, and offered discussions of the languages of Buddhist traditions and the physical bases (manuscripts, epigraphy, etc.) available for the study of Buddhist literatures. Also Volume Two, has been edited by Jonathan A. Silk . Editors of Volume Two are: Richard Bowring, University of Cambridge , Vincent Eltschinger, EPHE, Paris, and Michael Radich, Heidelberg University . It is impossible to imagine Buddhism without Buddhists, without the monks, poets and philosophers who set up Buddhist communities of every time and place. Furthermore, there is no Buddhism without the Buddha and the hosts of figures who populate the Buddhist Universe, bodhisattvas, gods, deities
and so on. This second volume of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, devoted to Lives, presents an impressive display of entries dedicated both to the Buddhist pantheon and to historical Buddhists from throughout Asia in the pre-modern period. Folllowing on the 2015 publication of Volume One, dedicated chiefly to Buddhist literature, this volume offers in its first section entries on transhistorical and translocal figures, while the second section presents descriptions of historical or semi-historical individuals, organized by geographic region, from India through Central, Southeast, and East Asia, in almost 200 separate entries of considerable importance.