Year of parnirvana

[pael]

Why there are this many estimation for Year of parnirvana?
Much:

2420 B.C.E. the Pandita Sureshamati
2150 B.C.E. the rGya-bod-yig-tshang
2146 B.C.E. Üpa Losal
2136 B.C.E. Atisha
...

I thought about 500 B.C.E.
What sources they use?
I'm confused.

[Queequeg]

I've never seen dates that old. I've seen about 1000 bce in East Asia.

I've heard it might have had something to do with the Chinese counting biannual retreats as happening once a year thus roughly doubling the time. I can't imagine how those Tibetan dates were calculated.

[Queequeg]

Recent research puts the date back to 10 th c. Bce.
http://www.newsgram.com/blend-of-belief ... hought-of/

[tingdzin]

The research cited immediately above is not conclusive, and should not be relied on.

[Ekayano]

Gautama Buddha c.563-483 BC.

[Queequeg]

The research cited immediately above is not conclusive, and should not be relied on.

So, is there conclusive evidence that should be relied upon?

[tingdzin]

Not that I know of. Still, some guesses are based on more evidence than others.

[Piet]

Some opinions with sources:

This reform movement is mainly identified with the
teaching of Gautama Buddha who is regarded as the first historic figure
of Indian history. The date of his death (parinirvana) has always been a
controversial issue. Whereas the Buddhist world celebrated in AD 1956 the
2,500th anniversary of his Nirvana (in 544 BC ), modern historians and
Indologists had generally accepted c.483 BC as the date of his death. But
in the early 1980s the German Indologist H. Bechert has convincingly
shown that none of these dates which are based on later Buddhist chroni-
cles and canonical texts can be taken for granted and that the Buddha may
instead have lived and preached about a century later. These findings were
generally approved at an international conference at Göttingen in 1988 even
though they are not unanimously accepted, especially by Indian historians.
As early Buddhist literature, in particular the Jataka stories of the Buddha’s
previous lives, depict an already flourishing urban society in north India,
archaeological evidence also seems to indicate that the Buddha lived in the
fifth rather than in the sixth century when urbanisation in the Ganges valley
was still in its incipient stage.

-A History of India/Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund. – 4th ed. 2004.

The more legendary dates for the Mahāparinibbāna, widely posited at differ-
ent times in the Eastern and Northern Buddhist traditions and ranging from 686
B.C. to the twenty second century B.C., have found little support in European
scholarship in the last two centuries. Even the apparently more reasonable, and
certainly better grounded, date of 543 B.C., universally accepted for considerably
more than a thousand years in the Southern Buddhist literature, has met difficul-
ties when confronted with other historical data.

As early as 1836 Turnour realized that the royal king lists associated with the
Southern Buddhist chronology placed the first three Emperors of the Mauryan
dynasty some sixty years too early. To this day, the consequential problems in
dating the earlier history of Ceylon remain with us. Be that as it may, there are two
reasonably certain facts in the earlier history of Ancient India that stand firmly
in the way of simply accepting the Southern Buddhist chronology. The first of
these is the identification of the founder of the Mauryan dynasty known to us
as Candragupta or Candagutta with the Sandrakottos associated with the period
of Alexander the Great’s foray into the area of modern Pakistan. The other is the
recognition of the author of numerous stone inscriptions of the third century B.C.
as the third ruler of the Mauryan dynasty, remembered in subsequent Buddhist
tradition as Asoka Moriya. In recent years I have come across various attempts to
reject or marginalize one or other of these, but I believe they remain unchallenged
in serious scholarship.

The solution to this problem, first adopted towards the end of the nineteenth
century, was in essence to remove sixty years from the traditional Southern Bud-
dhist date of 543 B.C., usually assuming that the Sinhalese regnal lists may have
included kings reigning simultaneously in different parts of the island of Cey-
lon. This gives a date early in the fifth century B.C. and several dates around that
time have had support, variously adducing evidence from Jain sources, from the
Puranas and from the so-called Cantonese ‘Dotted Record’. For most of the twen-
tieth century the resulting near consensus held sway.

Heinz Bechert, however, initiated a process of questioning in the early 1980s
which led to a major conference on this subject and an important three volume
publication. This resulted in considerable discussion and the widespread adop-
tion of a date around 400 B.C., although Bechert himself inclines towards a some-
what later date. I will not address the arguments for this now, but refer anyone
who is interested to my 1996 review article in JRAS.

For the purposes of this article I shall accept this dating of the Buddha. That
is to say, I shall assume that the main part of his teaching career took place in the
second half of the fifth century B.C. or thereabouts. It should be noted that there
remain a number of supporters of an earlier dating, especially in South Asia, but
I have not so far seen any convincing presentation of a case for that.

-L.S. Cousins, The Early Development of Buddhist Literature and Language in India, JOCBS. 2013: p. 90-92
http://www.jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/57/88

In conclusion

It is clear that if the objective of these volumes was to find absolute proof as to the exact date of the Buddha, then they would have failed. No method or evidence we have at the present is sufficient to establish that to the strictest standards of evidence. What certainly has been done is to firmly dethrone the old consensus - it is not impossible that the long chronology may yet be rehabilitated, but someone will have to undertake the task. From the point of view of reasonable probability the evidence seems to favour some kind of median chronology and we should no doubt speak of a date for the Buddha's Mahaparinibbana of c. 400 B.C. - I choose the round number deliberately to indicate that the margins are rather loose.

-The Dating of the Historical Buddha: A review article, by L.S. Cousins, JRAS 1996.
http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documen ... s_1996.pdf

[Footsteps]

Who cares if the date is off by a couple hundred years? It still has an effect on us.

Then again, if it is off by a few thousand years, it may be of realistic concern...