ABSTRACT
The engagement with the past is always a project in which present concerns and future aspirations loom large; history is constructed through the interpre tive lens of the historian, Buddhist or non-Buddhist. The historian’s own theo retical and definitional understandings of history, the sources she privileges, and the values she ascribes to historical narratives for shaping the present and future all significantly determine the construction of historical narra tives. Contemporary historians either reject or nuance positivist approaches to history, which proceed from the notion that a historical account can accu rately define what “actually” happened in the past; instead, historians now generally acknowledge that histories, even of a “single” context or event, are always multiple and often contradictory and contested. Indeed, as some of the essays in this section suggest, different Buddhist conceptions of the past and its relationship to the present and future have the potential to alter and enrich scholarly notions of history significantly.
