The writer begins introducing himself as an elderly Buddhist monk who joined the monastic order in 1990 at the age of sixty-nine years. Until then, he was a Professor of Buddhist Studies at different universities both in Sri Lanka and abroad, having started his academic career as a young lecturer in Pali and Buddhism at the age of twenty-five.

The subject of Buddhist Studies about which a few observations are made at this stage spreads over a very extensive period of more than twenty-five centuries. Buddhism as a religious system had its genesis in a specific cultural milieu in the Gangetic valley of India in Asia. It was a young Sakyan prince named Siddhartha, born into an agricultural family of royal lineage, who initiated this new protestant movement within a Brahmin dominated Indian society which until then upheld the creationist theory that Brahma created the world and the people within it. The socially obnoxious divisive caste theories of India which criminally fragmented the human community came in its wake. The respect, even for human life, came to be graded in terms of the social elitism of the divine origin of man out of the primeval being in the Purusa Sukta.

Discovering the way of salvation out of the sufferings of human life, propounded by him latterly as dukkha and nirodha, Siddhartha came to be called the Enlightened One or Buddha. It was a personal triumph called Nirvana in the termination of the painful process of Samsaric continuance which Siddhartha achieved as a human in this very life. It was well and truly a liberation, a release in this very existence, a jivan mukti, a Nirvana here and now, whether one calls it Nirvana or Parinirvana. It is not one beyond death or videha mukti as unmistakably declared to be in all forms of theo-centric salvation systems.

The Buddha categorically declared that every human had to obtain this goal of Nirvana the same way, each one by him-self. For salvation in Nirvana, there was no external refuge which one seeks or goes to [attano loko anabhissaro]. This position dominated Buddhism during its early history, for nearly three to four hundred years. However, towards the beginning of the Christian era, there began to appear the idea that humans could seek the assistance of a hierarchy of divine spiritual supporters or heavenly guardians under the name of bodhisattvas. They are presented as providing security to humans during worldly calamities like fires, burglaries and other threats to life. Their emergence is clearly seen in works like the Saddharmapundarika Sutra.

These bodhisattvas work as divine emissaries for and on behalf of the Buddha who by this time had also been elevated to the position of a divine source of power, stretching through time and space, for the sheer benefit of mankind. This is the Buddha who now is omnipresent, the Buddha endlessly stretching through time and space. This limitlessness of the Buddha is the key note of the word AMIDA. He is limitless in space because he is, as AMITA + ABHAH, i.e. limitless radiance. He is equally limitless in time because he is, as AMITA + AYUH, i.e. limitless life span. It seems, as it were, unimaginable to accept that Shakyamuni or Buddha Gotama, at the end of 80 years, had left the world for ever. He had to continue to be in the world.

These trends, in handling material connected with religion, we would look upon as deflections and deviations from the original corpus of Buddhist thinking and teachings. They freely elaborate and expand as imagination would allow. Here we would not grudge the need for this. But we would firmly resist the use of the term development for this trend. Or more specifically, the development of Buddhism in any form.

In the context of academic studies in the world today, of what to teach and how to teach, any serious undertaking of Buddhist studies, whether at undergraduate or at postgraduate levels, must in its totality not only scrutinize subtleties of diverse areas of Buddhist thinking, but also include studies on the cultural impact of Buddhism on the lives of people who adopt it. These would include art and architecture, social institutions, family growth, statecraft, agricultural and industrial development, trade and etc. etc.

Yet another vital area has to be the comparative study of the extant literature preserved in different languages like those of Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka on the one hand and those of China, Japan and Korea on the other.