About

Stefan Baums teaches Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali at the Institute for Indian and Tibetan Studies of the University of Munich and serves as lead researcher of the project Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Before joining the University of Munich, he held research and teaching posts at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, and Leiden University. His research interests include Buddhist philology and epigraphy, the beginnings of written Buddhist literature, the interaction of written and oral modes of text transmission, the development of Buddhist hermeneutics, and the description of Gāndhārī language and literature. His current work focuses on the decipherment and edition of three Gāndhārī birch‐bark manuscripts containing commentaries on early Buddhist verses, and on a comprehensive study of the historical connections and exegetical principles of this group of verse commentaries and the related Gāndhārī Saṃgītisūtra commentary. He is the editor (with Andrew Glass) of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī.