Hirakawa Akira

Hirakawa Akira (b. 1915), is Professor Emeritus of Indian Philosophy at Tokyo University.  He has also taught at Waseda, Komazawa, and Tohoku universities.  In 1983, he was elected President of the Japanese Association of Indian and Buddhist Studies, the most important academic organization for Buddhist studies in Japan.  Hirakawa is the author or editor of over twenty books on Buddhism and has written more than 240 scholarly articles and reviews on Indian Buddhism. Among his most important books are studies of monastic discipline and the rise of Mahayana Buddhism.  In addition, he has directed several major research projects in Buddhist studies, including a concordance of the Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese versions of the Abhidharmakosa, and is currently in charge of the compilation of a Chinese-Sanskrit dictionary of Buddhist terms.  He is widely recognized as one of the most eminent scholars of Indian Buddhism in Japan today.  Paul Groner received his Ph. D. from Yale University and is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia.  He is the author of Saicho:  The Establishment of the Japanese Tendai School and a number of articles on early Japanese Buddhism.