Template:Short description Template:Infobox academic Christopher I. Beckwith (born October 23, 1945) is an American philologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana.<ref name="indiana1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
He has a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese from Ohio State University (1968), a Master of Arts in Tibetan from Indiana University Bloomington (1974) and a Doctor of Philosophy in Inner Asian Studies from Indiana University (1977).
Beckwith, a MacArthur Fellow,<ref>MacArthur Foundation, "Christopher Beckwith, Philologist", 1986.</ref> is a researcher in the field of Central Eurasian studies. He researches the history and cultures of ancient and medieval Central Asia. Concomitantly he specializes in Asian language studies and linguistics, and in the history of Central Eurasia. He teaches Old Tibetan, Central Eurasian languages, and Central Eurasian history and researches the linguistics of Aramaic, Chinese, Japanese, Koguryo, Old Tibetan, Tokharian, Old Turkic, Uzbek, and other languages.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="indiana1"/>
His best-known works include Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia and Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Greek Buddha examines links between very early Buddhism and the philosophy of Pyrrho, an ancient Greek philosopher who accompanied Alexander the Great on his Indian campaign. The book is noted for its challenging and iconoclastic approach to multiple issues in the development of early Buddhism, Pyrrhonism, Daoism, Jainism and the Śramaṇa movement.<ref>Beckwith, C. I., Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).</ref> Empires of the Silk Road is a rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of Central Eurasia.<ref>Rothstein, E., "Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links", The New York Times, November 12, 2009.</ref> Beckwith's methodologies and interpretations concerning early Buddhism, inscriptions, and archaeological sites have been criticized by other scholars, such as Johannes Bronkhorst,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Osmund Bopearachchi,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Stephen Batchelor<ref>Stephen Batchelor "Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's encounter with early Buddhism in central Asia", Contemporary Buddhism, 2016, pp 195-215</ref> and Charles Goodman.<ref>Charles Goodman, "Neither Scythian nor Greek: A Response to Beckwith's Greek Buddha and Kuzminski's "Early Buddhism Reconsidered"", Philosophy East and West, University of Hawai'i Press Volume 68, Number 3, July 2018 pp. 984-1006</ref> According to Patrick Olivelle, Beckwith's theory about Ashoka is "an outlier and no mainstream Ashokan scholar would subscribe to that view."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
PublicationsEdit
- The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (1987)<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
- Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages Vols I-III, editor (2002, 2006, 2008)<ref>Peycam, P., "Brill's Proceedings of the Ninth Seminar of the IATS: Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages", International Institute for Asian Studies, 2002.</ref>
- Koguryo, the Language of Japan's Continental Relatives (2004)<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
- Phoronyms: Classifiers, Class Nouns, and the Pseudopartitive Construction (2007)
- Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (2012)
- Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (2011)<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> [1]
- Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (2015)
- The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (2023)