Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas

The present work raises many challenging questions in regard to the nature and functional role of Buddhism in the history of Indian ideas. Beginning with a general survey of the history of researches on Buddhism, it makes a reassessment of the views on the origins of Buddhism put forward by eminent scholars and deals with the ideological background of Buddhism in which its key-concepts as found in other sources have been traced, identified and documented. The traditional substrata of the Buddhist mythology have also been explored from the pre-vedic, vedic, puranic, regional and tribal sources. It has been argued that the doctrinal, epistemological and ontological critique of Buddhism vis-a-vis the standpoints of the Jains, Vedantists, Mima{msakas and Nyaya-Vaise]sikas clearly suggest that Buddhism was viewed by its opponents as a thought-complex and not as a distinct religious system. It has also been pointed out how factionalism arising out of personality clashes eventually led to doctrinal centrifugality.