Richard Francis Gombrich (/ˈɡɒmbrɪtʃ/; 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.

Gombrich is the only child of classical pianist Ilse Gombrich (née 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.

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.

Gombrich's recent research has focused more on the origins of Buddhism. He stresses the importance of relating Buddhist texts and practices to other Indian religions. Rather than studying Buddhism, Jainism, and Vedism in isolation, Gombrich advocates a comparative method that has shed light on both Buddhist thought and the early history of Buddhism. He has been an active contributor to an ongoing discussion concerning the date of the Buddha's death, and has argued that data supplied in Pali texts composed in Sri Lanka enable us to date that event to about 404 BCE.

Whilst an undergraduate, Gombrich helped to edit the volume of papers by Karl Popper entitled "Conjectures and Refutations". Since then, he has followed this method in his research, seeking the best hypothesis available and then trying to test it against the evidence. This makes him oppose both facile scepticism and the quest for a method which can in any way substitute for the simple need for critical thought.