This book The Date of the Historical Sakyamuni Buddha includes fifteen articles on the date of the historical Sakyamuni Buddha, ten of which submitted by Indian scholars to a workshop on the subject held in 1990, three by scholars from outside and two English translations of old French articles of importance. Many of these contributions take into account the papers submitted to a conference held on the subject aat Gottingen in 1988. The consensus of the articles in this book is in favour of confirming 483 (486) B.C. as the date of the Parinirvana of the historical Buddha as against any later date.

Date of the Historical Sakyamuni Buddha, A.K. Nairan, Editor, B.R.Publishing Company, Hardcover, 223 pp., $24.95

Professor A.K. Narain, a renowned historian of India and founder of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, passed away in Varanasi on July 10, 2013 after a brief illness, at the age of 90.

As a scholar, Prof. Narain was best known for his work on the interchange between Indic and central Asian cultures in general and on the Indo-Greeks in particular. A native of Gaya and a graduate of Benares Hindu University, he received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1954, and went on to teach at BHU in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by nearly two decades in the Department of History and the South Asian Studies and Buddhist Studies programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After his retirement from Wisconsin, he returned to Varanasi, where he founded the Bhikkhu J. Kashyap Institute of Buddhist and Asian Studies, and pursued a multitude of scholarly projects, several of which were ongoing at the time of his death.