Richard G. Salomon (professor of Asian studies)

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard G. Salomon carries an unusual academic title at the University of Washington. He is the William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. A named professorship like that usually marks decades of focused, specialized scholarship. In Salomon's case, that focus spans three ancient languages: Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit.

  Behind that title sits a scholar known specifically for his work on Indian epigraphy, the study of inscriptions cut or written onto lasting material. He also built a reputation as a specialist in early Indian Buddhism. What convinced a university to name a professorship in his honor? And what exactly did decades of reading ancient inscriptions reveal about a religion's earliest written traces?

• 2. Academic Formation

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  In 1970, Salomon completed a Bachelor of Arts in Oriental Studies, with a minor in Religion, at Columbia University. Five years later, in 1975, he earned a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania, completing it with Distinction. That academic foundation, built across two universities in five years, pointed his research toward a single region: Gandhāra.

• 3. Gandharan Manuscripts

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  In 2003, Salomon published "The Senior Manuscripts: Another Collection of Gandhāran Buddhist Scrolls" in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. The scrolls in that collection added to a small, fragile body of surviving Gandhāran Buddhist writing. Working with Mark Allon, he also examined Kharoṣṭhī-script fragments of a Gāndhārī version of the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra.

  Salomon and Allon later joined other researchers to radiocarbon-date Kharoṣṭhī fragments from the Schoyen and Senior manuscript collections. In 2010, the same two scholars published new evidence for Mahayana Buddhism's presence in early Gandhāra. Separately, working with Gregory Schopen, Salomon examined a Kharoṣṭhī inscription on a Gandhārian relief, questioning an alleged reference to the Buddha Amitābha.

  That body of work drew formal recognition in 2016, when the Puget Sound Association of Phi Beta Kappa gave Salomon its Humanities Achievement Award. The association praised "the Gandharan manuscripts, which illuminate the oldest period of Buddhist culture for which documents exist, and the dissemination of its results." One of his later essays asked a question that still shadows the field: why did the Gandhāran Buddhists bury their manuscripts at all?