ABSTRACT
For a community of scholars this is disastrous. Our research presentations end up bearing witness to our lives in an academic Tower of Babel.
It is easy to see how this occurred. As students of Buddhism, we may welcome new approaches to the rich resources of the Buddhist traditions.3 There is more than enough work to do, and labourers are still few. Perhaps the chronological and spatial extent of the Buddhist traditions made the introduction of some new approaches relatively unproblematic at first. For example, anthropologists and sociologists, seeking to understand the workings of culture and society, were naturally drawn to the study of contemporary Buddhist communities, fields of research which textualists and historians generally preferred to ignore.
