[Buddha-l] Re: Chronology of Pali texts

[Andrew Skilton]

On Fri, 3 Feb 2006 Stefan Detrez enquired:

>Does anyone know of (recent) works attempting to establish a chronology of
the suttas based on paleography/dialectology? The only works I'm familiar
with dealing with this issue is Vishvanath Prasad Varma's 'Early Buddhism
and its Origins', MLBD, 1973 and, in an implicit way, Oskar Von Hinüber's
'Handbook of Pali Literature'. There is also some discussion of Pali
dialectology in 'Middle Indo-Aryan and Jaina Studies / Sanskrit Outside
India' in the 'Panels of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference-series', Brill,
1991. But's that all.
Any works I'm not yet familiar with?

Stefan, This does not address your question from the angle you ask, but I was interested to find on the web recently: Paul Kingsbury,  'Inducing a Chronology of the Pali Canon'. You'll find it at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kingsbur/inducing.pdf. It employs stats, computers, big Pali corpus and development of Pali grammar to build a chronology. I think it is the result of fairly recent PhD work in the US.  You probably know it anyway.

Andrew Skilton




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Andrew Skilton 

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