The following tribute was written by Martin Stuart-Fox Professor Emeritus

Reconstructing Early Buddhism, Rod Bucknell’s ground-breaking analysis of the teachings of early Buddhism, was published in January this year by Cambridge University Press in their prestigious Studies in Religion series.

The book is the fruit of years of study and meditation from when Rod Bucknell was a monk in Thailand to after he retired from teaching written Chinese and the varieties of Indian meditation at UQ.

Rod Bucknell, for those who never knew him, is known as a gifted linguist who worked in a dozen languages. In addition to writing A Sanskrit Manual, he compiled and published A Dictionary of Polyphonic Chinese Characters and at various times taught Pali, Sanskrit, Thai, and German. It was his command of Chinese that led him to compare the earliest-known Buddhist texts in Pali, Sanskrit and Chinese, identify key differences between them, and show how these could have derived from a single earlier account.

The book began to take shape after Rod retired from active teaching, with new chapters produced one by one between continuing translation projects and presentations to international conferences. As draft chapters were completed, he sent them to me to read, criticise, and discuss at length on his back verandah.

Rod and I first met as undergraduates studying evolutionary biology at UQ. Thereafter we pursued oddly parallel paths. We both worked in Papua-New Guinea, Rod on freshwater fisheries in the Highlands, I on coastal fisheries. We both found our way, separately, to Asia, where we were both drawn to Theravāda Buddhism. An additional common interest was in altered states of consciousness, how they could be produced, and how they have been accounted for in different religious traditions.

We kept in contact, and years later caught up in Chiang Mai, where Rod had become a monk. A common interest in Buddhist symbolism led us later to collaborate on the research project that culminated in our joint publication entitled The Twilight Language after we both ended up teaching at UQ.

Reconstructing Early Buddhism aimed to establish a stronger textual basis for some of the rather speculative conclusions offered in The Twilight Language.  As the number of chapters increased, I urged Rod to begin thinking about publication. But there was always another set of lists to compare, or another paper to be written for another conference.

When, towards the end of 2018, Rod was diagnosed with a health condition, completion of the manuscript became a matter of urgency. The original study comprised fourteen chapters, four of which do not appear in the published book. Two of these Rod deleted on the grounds that, though the arguments and comparisons would be of interest to scholars of Buddhism, they were too abstruse for the wider readership Rod hoped the book would also attract.

The manuscript eventually submitted to Cambridge in 2020 therefore comprised twelve chapters. Unfortunately this was in the middle of Covid, and a six-month delay occurred before it was sent to readers. When eventually reports were received, Rod felt he was not up to making the required revisions and asked me to respond.

This placed me in a difficult position, for though I accepted Rod’s radical reconstruction of the path of meditative practice that the Buddha had originally taught, I had none of his linguistic skills. I was therefore not in a position to respond to criticism of two chapters in particular, neither of which related directly to the path, but rather made symbolic reference to its final three stages, the ‘three knowledges’ by means of which the Buddha claimed to have finally attained enlightenment. As both chapters were thus tangential to the main focus of the book – reconstruction of the 'Stepwise Training' that the Buddha encouraged all monks to embark upon to attain nirvana – I reluctantly decided to omit them too.

Omission of these four chapters had the advantage of focusing attention squarely on the sequence of stages of moral and mental training, known as the ‘Noble Eightfold Path’, which constitutes the core of Buddhist doctrine. Rod Bucknell’s reconstruction of the historical development of this path of practice – from an earlier sequence of eight stages to a tenfold path that was later reduced to a different eight stages – is a measure of how radical his interpretation is, and how likely it is to stir controversy among practising Buddhists and Buddhist scholars alike.

One thing is certain, however: no matter how Reconstructing Early Buddhism is received, the methodology of critical textual comparison that Rod Bucknell developed and used is here to stay. No longer can scholars attempting to understand how Buddhism evolved during its period of oral transmission rely just on the Pali canon. Chinese and Sanskrit texts (and others coming to light in Central Asian languages like Sogdian) recording teachings of schools other than Theravada must also be taken into consideration.

Martin Stuart-Fox

Professor Emeritus