Introduction: Buddhism and its Religious Others

In the introduction to the volume, the editor justifies the need to address Buddhism’s varied attitudes to rival religious traditions by attending to concrete literary examples of how Buddhist authors wrote about religious interlocutors and themselves in relation to them. With reference to relevant existing scholarship on Buddhism and its frontiers with other religions, the editor provides an overview of Buddhist religious history in especially India and East Asia, focusing on some particular contexts of inter-religious encounter with which contributions to the present volume are concerned. The introduction concludes with reflections on recurring mechanisms and strategies for making sense of the religious other that are in evidence in South and East Asian Buddhist writing and art.