Buddhism in Five Minutes - Elizabeth J. Harris
37. How did Buddhism Relate to the Brahmanism of the Buddha’s Day, and Later Hinduism?
Buddhism in Five Minutes - Elizabeth J. Harris
Christopher V. Jones [+]
University of Cambridge
Christopher V. Jones is a Bye-Fellow of Selwyn College, and affiliated lecturer and research associate at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. A primary focus of his research is the history of Mahayana Buddhist thought in the early centuries of the Common Era, preserved in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literature.
Description
The relationship between Buddhism at its origins and Brahmanism is a still much-debated topic. Although nineteenth- and some early-twentieth-century discussions of Buddhism represented the Buddha as something like a reformist who learned from but corrected teachings of his day, most scholarship has now retired the simplistic hypothesis that Buddhism “emerged from Brahmanism,” let alone from something that we can accurately call “Hinduism.”