Richard Francis Gombrich (/ˈɡɒmbrɪtʃ/; born 17 July 1937) is a British Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli, and Buddhist studies.

This study emphasised the compatibility between the normative Theravada Buddhism advocated in canonical Theravadin texts and the contemporary religious practices of Sinhalese Buddhists.

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.

Gombrich's notion of a cognitive/affective divide in Sinhalese Buddhism has since come under criticism; Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah considered it simplistic and insupportable.

Whilst an undergraduate, Gombrich helped to edit the volume of papers by Karl Popper entitled "Conjectures and Refutations".

In a review of 2003, Jon S. Walters defended the "Gombrichian" approach to textual tradition against the view attributed to Anne M. Blackburn that "colonial/Orientialist" scholarship is "epitomized here by Richard Gombrich".

[4] Whereas the earlier usage of "Gombrichian" seems to indicate a theory specifically set out by Ernst Gombrich in Art as Illusion,[5] the usage of Gombrichian in the context of Buddhist Studies refers more vaguely to an emphasis on working with comparative reference to primary-source Pali texts found throughout Richard Gombrich's career.