Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

2 Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies
commentaries, but on the continuous living tradition of Tibet,
Mongolia, China and Japan, in the perhaps not entirely unfounded
belief that the mentality of Asiatic Buddhists is
probably nearer to that of the Buddha than that of the Protestant
Christians of a Europe bursting with imperialistic conceit.
Obermiller's translation of Bu-ston's History of Buddhism
(1931) showed us how Buddhists view their own history, and
Bu-ston's masterpiece has been the model for the two general
histories of Buddhism which have recently appeared in English,
i.e. my own Buddhism (1951), and Sangharakshita*s A Survey
of Buddhism (1957). While thus the educated non-specialist
has had some taste of the spirit of the Leningrad school,
Stcherbatsky's elucidation of the word "dhamia f> —in the
singular, and especially in the plural—has still much to teach
him. 1 Far too many people seem still incapable of appreciating
the fundamental difference between *' dharmas' * and * * things **.
So intent had the "Older Anglo-German 11 school been in
making the Buddha appear as a moralist, that the significance
of the philosophical analysis of reality into its factors, or
dharmas, was overlooked. In fact the dharma-theory is the
basis of all forms of Buddhism, and the starting point of all
later developments. I cannot here go into the details and must
refer to the excellent summary of the situation by von Glasenapp
in 1938* 2 With Stcherbatsky's and Obermiller's deaths in
the forties the Leningrad school has unfortunately come to an
untimely end in the Soviet Uniqn, and no traces of it can be
detected at the present time. '
Finally, there was the school which Regamey calls " Franco-
Belgian 11 , because it was decisively shaped by men like de la
ValMe-Poussin, Jean Przyluski, Sylvain Levi, Paul Demieville
and Etienne Lamotte. Regamey (pp. 247-8) describes
their approach as follows: "These scholars continue on the
lines of the Russian school. They do not, however, slavishly
follow Buddhist scholasticism, but use all the sources which are
today available, supplementing their philological and philosophical
analysis with the data of ethnology, sociology, etc.
1 Th. Stcherbatsky, The Central Conception of Buddhism and the
Meaning of the word "Dhanna", 1923. Reprinted in 1956.
2 Zur Geschichte der buddhisiischen Dhartna-Theorie, ZDMG 1938,
PP- 383-420.