This article examines how nineteenth‐century scholars reconstructed the geography of early Buddhism through a historically contingent hierarchy of texts that privileged Chinese monastic travelogues over Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles. Focusing on the relationship between the Pāli vaṃsa literature—especially the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa —and Chinese pilgrimage accounts attributed to Faxian and Xuanzang, it argues that European Orientalists, Sinologists and archaeologists assigned distinct epistemic functions to these sources. Chinese travelogues were treated as primary authorities for spatial reconstruction, while Sri Lankan chronicles were confined largely to chronology and historical validation. Through analysis of translators and archaeologists—especially Alexander Cunningham—it shows how chronicles became indispensable for dating Aśoka and the Buddha yet remained marginal in geographical reasoning. The hierarchy operated pragmatically: time belonged to chronicles, space to travellers and archaeology mediated between them. It further traces the afterlives of this structure, showing how European reconstructions reshaped Buddhist historical imagination and pilgrimage across Asia. By foregrounding textual hierarchy, the study argues that Buddhist geography was assembled through selective authority rather than simply discovered.
This article considers what a ‘big picture’ approach to global religious history might look like, and in particular the implications of deploying the comparative method across much larger stretches of time and space than historians normally attend to. It will begin by reflecting on the epistemological moods that have hindered this project to date, the problem of the very question of defining ‘religion’ and the recent development of Globale Religionsgeschichte. A truly longue durée global history of religion will need organising problems, and there are at least two: how were innumerable religious systems eaten up by a handful of world religions? And how might religion ever have ceded the centre‐ground of social and political life? After briefly referring to the way in which the author has sought to answer the first question through the model of immanentism‐transcendentalism, it is suggested that attending to the big picture will necessarily involve genuine dialogue with anthropology, historical sociology and cognitive science. Among the many problems of conceptualisation raised by this perspective is the question of how to understand macro‐cultural regions or ‘civilizations.’ Lastly the question of modernity and secularisation theory is briefly addressed in a final section.
