‘Visions of the Buddha’: A Critical Reply

The oral nature of the early discourses is a topic that requires more attention than it has received so far. For this reason, it is highly appreciated that recent monograph publications, like Levman (2020), Allon (2021), Shaw (2021), and Shulman (2021b), are dedicated to exploring various dimensions of this topic. Of these four, the last presents an approach to understanding the basic dynamics of early Buddhist orality that substantially departs from scholarly consensus thus far and therefore calls for a detailed evaluation.1