13 Facts About Richard Gombrich

Richard Francis Gombrich is a British Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit, Pali, and Buddhist studies.

Richard Gombrich was the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1976 to 2004.

Richard Gombrich is currently Founder-President of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies.

Richard Gombrich is a past president of the Pali Text Society and general editor emeritus of the Clay Sanskrit Library.

Richard Gombrich studied at St Paul's School in London from 1950 to 1955 before attending Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1957.

Richard Gombrich's first major contribution in the field of Buddhist studies was an anthropological study of contemporary Sinhalese Buddhism entitled Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon.

Richard Gombrich argues in Precept and Practice that, rather than being the mark of later corruptions of Theravada Buddhism, these practices can be traced to early periods in Buddhist history.

Furthermore, since the worship of Hindu deities and rituals involving sorcery are never explicitly forbidden to lay people in the Pali Canon, Richard Gombrich argues against viewing such practices as contradictory to orthodox Buddhism.

Richard Gombrich stresses the importance of relating Buddhist texts and practices to the rest of Indian religions.

Richard Gombrich has been an active contributor to an ongoing discussion concerning the date of the Buddha's death, and has argued that data supplied in Pali texts composed in Sri Lanka enable us to date that event to about 404 BCE.

Whilst an undergraduate, Richard Gombrich helped to edit the volume of papers by Karl Popper entitled "Conjectures and Refutations".

Richard Gombrich was general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library from its founding until February 2008.

Richard Gombrich was instrumental in Numata Foundation's endowing a chair in Buddhist Studies at Oxford.