Buddhist Studies have been prosecuted in the West for the last one hundred and eighty years, if not longer. During that time the basic sources, at least in Indic languages, have begun to be excavated, some extensively. The contours of the teachings of the various schools have been outlined and their overlaps recognized. Increasingly the full context of the emergence of Buddhism on Indian soil has been clarified and its complexity determined. In turn this has allowed scholars to work in the understanding that the Buddhist evidence is just one component of the complete body of primary sources defining the total environment of North Indian history in the last five centuries of the first millennium bce. An important implication of this is that the development of Buddhism can be ascertained in a more comprehensive way on the basis of evidence coming from other than Buddhist sources, such that we will not have to rely simply on inference from literary texts not necessarily designed to mirror the day-to-day realities of the empirical world. Thus the emergence and growth of Buddhism can now be understood as just one of several developments in ancient North Indian culture registering on the historical record from the sixth to the second centuries bce. Its use as a governing interpretative tool for this history will be correspondingly modified so that it will no longer be allowed to assume the broad hermeneutical priority it has had even for areas far beyond itself.