Gregory R. Schopen

Influential scholar in the field of Buddhist Studies. In a groundbreaking corpus, he not only transformed the view of Buddhist lay and monastic practice, but significantly altered the ways in which Asian religions are studied. He focuses on Indian Buddhism, especially on monasticism and on the early Mahayana movements. By looking beyond the Pali canon in favor of less commonly used sources such as the Mulasarvastidvada-vinaya and Indian Buddhist stone inscriptions, his scholarly work shifted the field away from Buddhism as understood through its doctrine and philosophy and toward Buddhism as understood through its social history. He made particular use of the large and long overlooked monastic literature of the Sanskrit traditions of Indian Buddhism (preserved largely in Tibetan), from which he was able to discern social and economic structures in the Buddhist monastery that were previously unknown. MacArthur Fellow (1985).