The present work of Professor S.R. Goyal is a study of the Buddhist Triratnas, the Three Jewels of Buddhim-the Buddha, Dharmma and Sangha. But here the author has not confined himself to a life-history of the Buddha, or a description of what are usually accepted as the basic tenets of his Dharmma and an outline of the monastic Order. He has tried to go deeper into the antecedents, forces and circumstances which produced the Buddha and reconstruct an authentic history of his life. He has also tried to find out the original nature of his Gospel and the origin and early development of his Order. An interesting feature of this work is that Professor Goyal has thrown valuable light on the image of the Buddhist Sramanas as they were seen by the Greeks in the fourth century B.C., the earliest foreigners who have left a description of the Buddhist monks as they found them only about a hundred and fifty years after the Nirvana. Probably in no other work on Buddhism the Greek testimony has been so utilized. This work, therefore, is a complete and critical through succinct study of all the aspects of the earliest phase of Indian Buddhism. We, therefore, feel confident that it will be welcomed by scholars of Buddhism the world over.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR S R Goyal
Professor S.R. Goyal is the retired Professor and Head, Department of History, J.N.V. University, Jodhpur. Described as ‘one of the five best recent historians of ancient India’ by Professor David N. Lorenzen, the great Mexican Orientalist, Professor Goyal combines all the qualities associated with scientific scholarship. He has authored more than thirty voluminous works and over 150 research papers which cover so diverse fields as political history, religious history, literature, biographies, numismatics and epigraphy. He was honoured with the General Presidentship of the Silver Jubilee Congress of the Epigraphical Society of India held at Udupi in 1999 and was elected the Honorary fellow of the Society. His doctoral thesis, A History of the Imperial Guptas (1967), was acclaimed as ‘the best analysis of the Gupta Period which I have ever read†by Professor A.L. Basham (National Professor of Australia) and as ‘imaginative’, ‘well-written’ and ‘a model of historiography’ by Professor Eleanor Zelliot (Minnesota, U.S.A.). The varaious theories propounded in it are described by Professor R.C. Majumdar as ‘deserving very careful consideration’. Among his other major works are included three corpus-like volumes on ancient Indian inscriptions, two volumes respectively on Kautilya and Megasthenes, a three volume authoritative study of ancient Indian history in about two thousand pages, a three volume study of ancient Indian numismatics, and four volumes on great rulers of ancient India. Professor Goyal is deeply involved with the study of the history of Indian religions. Apart from the present monograph he has published two volumes entitled A Religious History of Ancient India (Vol. I, 1984; Vol. II, 1986), and Harsha and Buddhism (1986). All these works of his have been highly acclaimed and admired both in India and abroad. Professor Goyal has been honoured with several Festschrifts, including Reappraising Gupta History for S.R. Goyal (ed. By Professor B.Ch. Chhabra et al) for S.R. Goyal : His Multidimensional Historiography (ed. By Professor Jagannath Agarwal and Dr. Shankar Goyal). A four volume Festschrift in his honour entitled Sriramabhinandam (Reconstructing Indian History for S.R. Goyal) has recently been published.
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