Richard Gombrich

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Gombrich, a British Indologist born on the 17th of July 1937, did something unusual as a student for a future scholar of ancient India. While still an undergraduate, he helped edit a volume of papers by the philosopher Karl Popper, published as Conjectures and Refutations. That experience left a lasting mark on how he works. Gombrich went on to master Sanskrit and Pāli, the languages of India's oldest religious texts. He studied Buddhism both in those texts and in the lives of ordinary believers. Three questions run through his career. Do villagers who call themselves Buddhists believe what their scriptures teach? Can anyone say when the Buddha died? And what does it mean when a scholar's surname becomes an adjective that his colleagues argue over?

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• 2. A Scholarly Household

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  Gombrich was the only child of two gifted parents. His mother, Ilse Gombrich, born Heller, was a classical pianist who lived from 1910 to 2006. His father was Sir Ernst Gombrich, an Austrian-British art historian.

  From 1950 to 1955 the boy attended St. Paul's School in London. In 1957 he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, and he took his B.A. there in 1961. He then held a Harkness Fellowship of the Commonwealth Fund from 1961 to 1963. Harvard University awarded him an M.A. in 1963.

  His doctorate came later, from Oxford in 1970. The thesis was called Contemporary Sinhalese Buddhism in its relation to the Pali canon. Even the title shows his instinct to set living practice beside ancient text. A year after the doctorate, a book on much the same territory made his name.

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• 3. Village Buddhism

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  Precept and Practice reached readers in 1971 and was Gombrich's first major contribution to Buddhist studies. Its full title is Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon. It is an anthropological study of Buddhism as Sinhalese villagers lived it.

  Many of those villagers practised sorcery and worshipped yakshas and Hindu deities. Earlier scholars had judged such habits to contradict the orthodox Buddhism of the Pāli Canon. Some called them corruptions that crept in later.

  Gombrich disagreed. He argued that these practices can be traced back to early periods of Buddhist history, so they were not late decay. He also noted that the Pāli Canon never explicitly forbids lay people to worship Hindu deities or take part in sorcery rituals. In his reading, village religion and canonical Theravada Buddhism were compatible.

  The same book draws a line between two levels of belief. At the cognitive level, Sinhalese Buddhists affirm doctrines such as anatta, the teaching of no permanent self. At the affective level, their actions seem to accept an individual soul that passes from life to life.

  Not everyone accepted this divide. Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah judged it simplistic and insupportable. Gombrich's book nonetheless stayed in print in revised form, and in 1991 a Delhi publisher issued it as Buddhist Precept and Practice.

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• 4. Testing The Evidence

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  Gombrich's later research moved toward the origins of Buddhism. His working rule is to find the best hypothesis available and then test it against the evidence. That rule makes him impatient with two opposite habits. One is facile scepticism. The other is the hunt for a method that could stand in for the plain need to think critically.

  He also insists that Buddhism cannot be understood alone. Scholars who study Buddhism, Jainism and Vedism in isolation, he argues, miss what connects them. His comparative approach has shed light on both Buddhist thought and the earliest history of the religion.

  The sharpest test case is the date of the Buddha's death. Gombrich has joined the long-running debate with a specific answer. He argues that data in Pāli texts composed in Sri Lanka allow the event to be placed at about 404 BCE. He pressed the case in print, including a 1992 essay titled Dating the Buddha: a red herring revealed, and again in 2000 under the title Discovering the Buddha's date.

  The Popperian habit even reached his paper titles. In 2007 he published a study of the Vinaya called Popperian Vinaya: conjecture and refutation in practice.

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• 5. Chairs And Honours

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  Gombrich taught at Oxford for more than forty years. He began as a lecturer there in 1965. In 1976 he became Boden Professor of Sanskrit and a fellow of Balliol College, and he held the chair until 2004. He was instrumental in persuading the Numata Foundation to endow a chair in Buddhist studies at the university.

  Mandatory retirement in 2004 did not slow him. He founded the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, where he remains Founder-President. With Geoff Bamford he also founded the Society for the Wider Understanding of the Buddhist Tradition.

  Other posts ran alongside. He was president of the Pali Text Society from 1994 to 2002 and co-edited its journal from 1996 to 2002. He served as general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library from its founding until February 2008.

  His visiting appointments span the globe. They include Bristol in 1981-82, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1982, Princeton in 1986-87, and Dongguk University in Seoul and Hong Kong University, both in 2008. Named lectureships came too, among them the Jordan Lecture at SOAS in 1994 and the Gonda Lecture of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.

  Honours followed. In 1993 the Asiatic Society of Calcutta gave him its SC Chakraborty medal. The next year, the President of Sri Lanka presented him with the Sri Lanka Ranajana decoration.

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• 6. On The Shelf

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  Teach Yourself Sanskrit appeared in 1976, with Michael Coulson as editor. In 1977 came The Perfect Generosity of Prince Vessantara, written with Margaret Cone. A year later Gombrich published On Being Sanskritic, whose subtitle pleads for civilized study and the study of civilization.

  Collaboration marks much of his output. The World of Buddhism, edited with Heinz Bechert in 1984, looks at monks and nuns in society and culture. Buddhism Transformed, written with Gananath Obeyesekere in 1988, examines religious change in Sri Lanka. He also helped edit two volumes honouring teachers, one for Walpola Rahula in 1980 and one for Hammalava Saddhatissa in 1984. In 1998 he wrote Rahula's obituary for The Middle Way.

  The survey Theravada Buddhism: a social history from ancient Benares to modern Colombo came out in 1988. How Buddhism Began, subtitled the conditioned genesis of the early teachings, followed in 1996. Both received second editions in 2006. Japanese translations of two of his books appeared in 2002 and 2006.

  His articles have intriguing titles, among them Making mountains without molehills: the case of the missing stupa, from 1990, and A visit to Brahma the heron, from 2001. In 2008 he co-edited, with Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, the Buddhist studies volume from the 12th World Sanskrit Conference.

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• 7. The Word Gombrichian

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  The adjective Gombrichian was in circulation for decades before Richard Gombrich's career made it matter in Buddhist studies. It first referred to his father, Ernst. An art-historical example speaks of a Gombrichian willingness to appeal to experimental evidence. That usage seems to point to a theory set out in Art as Illusion.

  In Buddhist studies the word means something looser. It describes an emphasis on working with comparative reference to primary-source Pāli texts, a thread running through Richard Gombrich's whole career.

  The term surfaced in a dispute in 2003. In a review that year, Jon S. Walters defended the Gombrichian approach to textual tradition. He was answering a view attributed to Anne M. Blackburn, who saw colonial or Orientalist scholarship as epitomized by Richard Gombrich.

  That same year Gombrich contributed an essay, titled Obsession with origins, to a volume of Buddhist texts and practices co-edited by Blackburn and Jeffrey Samuels.

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• 8. Arguments Beyond Indology

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  In 2000 Tokyo University's Graduate Institute for Policy Studies invited Gombrich to lecture. He chose the title British Higher Education Policy in the last Twenty Years: The Murder of a Profession. The title leaves no doubt about how strongly he feels on the subject.

  He took the same concern into unexpected settings. In 2008 he joined the Rally of the Impossible Professions: Beyond the False Promises of Security, hosted by the London Society of the New Lacanian School.

  His public arguments have not been confined to universities. In 2006 he asked in print whether the Sri Lankan war was a Buddhist fundamentalism, in a Routledge volume edited by Mahinda Deegalle on Buddhism, conflict and violence in modern Sri Lanka.

  His next piece on education appeared in 2009 in Hurly-Burly, an international Lacanian journal of psychoanalysis. It asked why British education has gone so wrong and carried a subtitle naming Popper's nightmare.

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