Asao Iwamatsu

Asao Iwamatsu (岩松浅夫) is a Japanese scholar of Indian Buddhism and Buddhist studies, holding a master's degree in literature. He is a professor in the Department of Human Sciences, Faculty of Letters, at Soka University. His research centers on the philology of Sanskrit and Gāndhārī Buddhist manuscripts, including work on Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions, sūtra transmission history, and the metrical and textual analysis of fragmentary Buddhist verse texts—notably the Sarvadharmāpravṛttinirdeśasūtra. His scholarship has also touched on questions of Chinese Buddhist canonical attribution, including arguments concerning the authorship of translations traditionally credited to Faxian, and has been cited and engaged with by other specialists in the field.