From my undergraduate coursework:

Sidebar: controversies about the Buddha

Reframing the date of the Buddha; Heinz Bechert "The Date of the Buddha Reconsidered."

Lance Cousins, "The Dating of the Historical Buddha: A Review"

The Canonical evidence (Buddha born in Lumbinī)
The Divyāvadāna evidence (Aśoka visited birthplace of the Buddha in Lumbinī)
(Re)discovery of Lumbini: Hultszch pp. xxii and 164.
Lumbini at Google maps.
Coningham 2013, "The earliest Buddhist shrine".

After studying Coningham 2013 carefully and the responses from Shaw and Gombrich (which are informal but clear and damning), I no longer attend to Coningham's publications.

Best,

Dominik

Professor Dominik Wujastyk

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity

Department of History and Classics

University of Alberta, Canada

South Asia at the U of A:

sas.ualberta.ca

On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 at 03:23, Harry Falk via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

I quote:
- given half the chance, modern historians of ancient India will not stop
at anything!
- writing was known in historic India around 500 BC.
- orthodox ‘comparative philologists’ of the nineteenth century.
- strong smell of racism
- Birch leaf fragments have been identified in its Black-and-Red Ware
level dated around 800 BC [for nothing but writing]
- direct hard evidence
sancta simplitas!
The lamented and truly knowledgable dear friend Iravathan Mahadevan had
sent the book to me as well. We were fully d'accord regarding its nature.
Was he a racist?
Harry Falk

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