My contribution to the conference was a paper on “Pāli studies in the West:
Present state and future tasks”,2 delivered in a session on Textual and Philological
Studies. It was greeted with no great enthusiasm. People I met at various social functions
thereafter during the course of the conference said “Ah, you are Mr Norman, aren’t you?
Your paper was about texts, wasn’t it?” and hurriedly changed the subject, although one
or two people did express interest, in a way which showed that they had never thought
seriously about textual and philological studies before. Despite this reception, I felt in no way marginalised, as did the many participants who spoke about what I might describe as
the “trendier aspects of Buddhism”. This was strange because there were very few people
at that conference who would claim to be philologists first and foremost, and to the best
of my knowledge I was the only philologist there who disclaimed