Richard Francis Gombrich (; born 17 July 1937) is a British Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli, and Buddhist studies. He was the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1976 to 2004. He is currently Founder-President of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. He is a past president of the Pali Text Society (1994–2002) and general editor emeritus of the Clay Sanskrit Library. Early life and education Gombrich is the only child of classical pianist Ilse Gombrich ( Heller; 1910–2006), and Austrian-British art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich. He studied at St. Paul's School in London from 1950 to 1955 before attending Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1957. He received his B.A. from Oxford in 1961 and his DPhil from the same university in 1970. His doctoral thesis was entitled Contemporary Sinhalese Buddhism in its relation to the Pali canon. He received his M.A. from Harvard University in 1963. Early work Gombrich's first major contribution in the field of Buddhist studies was an anthropological study of contemporary Sinhalese Buddhism entitled Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon (1971). This study emphasised the compatibility between the normative Theravada Buddhism advocated in canonical Theravadin texts and the contemporary religious practices of Sinhalese Buddhists. Contemporary Sinhalese religious practices often include such elements as sorcery and the worship of yakshas and Hindu deities; previous scholars of Buddhist studies had interpreted these practices as contradictory to or corruptions of the orthodox Buddhism of the Pāli Canon. Gombrich argues in Precept and Practice that, rather than being the mark of later corruptions of Theravada Buddhism, these practices can be traced to early periods in Buddhist history. Furthermore, since the worship of Hindu deities and rituals involving sorcery are never explicitly forbidden to lay people in the Pāli Canon, Gombrich argues against viewing such practices as contradictory to orthodox Buddhism. It is also in Precept and Practice that Gombrich lays out his distinction between Buddhism at the cognitive level and Buddhism at the affective level. At the cognitive level, Sinhalese Buddhists will attest to believing in such normative Buddhist doctrines as anatta, while, at the same time, their actions indicate a supposed affective acceptance of, for example, an individual, transmigrating soul. Gombrich's notion of a cognitive/affective divide in Sinhalese Buddhism has since come under criticism; Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah considered it simplistic and insupportable. Major contributions and concepts Gombrich's recent research has