ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1993 I attended a conference in America on the State of the Art in Buddhist Studies.1 At that conference speaker after speaker said that they felt marginalised, in effect left out on the edges of their subject. In some cases this meant that their interest in Buddhism was what might be called “on the fringe”, often combined with another discipline, e.g. social anthropology; in other cases it meant that in the departments of humanities in the various universities to which they belonged they were regarded with some sort of suspicion as being teachers of subjects which were not as important as other subjects, so that when money was allocated for teaching or library purposes they got the smaller share, or when posts were sacrificed in the interests of economy it was posts in their subjects which went.
