Buddhism is now 2,500 years old and has about 300 million followers worldwide and almost 3 million adherents in the United States. Yet, until the late eighteenth century when Sir William Oriental Jones broke the Brahmins prohibition on learning the sacred language of Sanskrit, the Buddha s teachings were treasures unappreciated in the West. Uncovering clues about Buddhism s origins from inscriptions on pillars and rocks, Jones pioneered an enthusiastic band whose search for the Indian subcontinent s secret religion is ...
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Buddhism is now 2,500 years old and has about 300 million followers worldwide and almost 3 million adherents in the United States. Yet, until the late eighteenth century when Sir William Oriental Jones broke the Brahmins prohibition on learning the sacred language of Sanskrit, the Buddha s teachings were treasures unappreciated in the West. Uncovering clues about Buddhism s origins from inscriptions on pillars and rocks, Jones pioneered an enthusiastic band whose search for the Indian subcontinent s secret religion is chronicled in this book of high adventure and monumental historical detection. Acclaimed narrative historian Charles Allen brings to life extraordinary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century characters and travels to lost holy places across the Eastern world as he tells the story of how Westerners found the Buddha. Allen has recorded the Western birth of a religion whose influence in America has increased tenfold in the just the past forty years."
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Interest in Buddhism has grown dramatically in the West in recent years. Much of this growth is due to the increased availability of the Buddha's teaching, and to the spread of meditation practice. There is a wealth of books available on Buddhist teachings, including many translations of Buddhist Suttras and on meditation. but too little has been written on how the teachings of Buddhism were recovered so that people in the West (and, in fact, people in Asia as well) could learn from them.
Charles Allen's book, "The Search for the Buddha: The Men who Discovered India's Lost Religion" (2003) helps fill this void. Mr. Allen was born in India to a family with a long record of service to British India and has published several other books dealing with India. His book deals only lightly with Buddhist teachings and doctrines. The book's focus is the activities of a remarkable group of people who, beginning late in the 18th Century, discovered the languages, texts, sacred sites, and teachings of Buddhism and thus prepared the way for their study and recognition. These individuals worked in not only in India, but in Ceylon, Burma, Nepal, and Tibet as well.
The task of discovering Buddhism in India was not as easy as might be supposed since Buddhism had essentially been driven out of India centuries before the British empire. Many of the earliest discoveries of Buddhism were made by employees of the East India Company or the British Government who were amateurs in the study of religion and archaeology and who were sent to England for other reasons. Thus Dr. Francis Buchanan, who wrote early studies of Buddhism in Burma and Nepal was a surgeon with an interest in Botany. Sir William Jones, who established the Asiatic Society and became known as "Oriental" Jones was a Judge. The brilliant James Princep who unraveled a difficult Sanskrit script was trained as a scientist and also was a pioneer in the study of numismatics (coins). Csmoa de Koros was a Hungarian who made the wealth of Tibetan scriptures available to the West as a result of his quixotical notion that Tibetans constituted a sort of lost tribe of Hungarians.
These Orientalists made lasting discoveries about the history of Buddhist India, its languages and sacred sites. Mr. Allen documents their work with a great deal of detail, which I found confusingly organized at times. But there is no doubt of the significance of their endeavors.
The last chapters of the book discuss early students of Buddhism who were more familiar to me. These individuals include the notorious Russian founder of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky and her one-time assistant Colonel Henry Olcott from the United States. Sir Edwin Arnold, a British newspaper editor composed a famous epic poem in 1879 about the Buddha, "The Light of Asia" which brought Buddhism to the attention of many people in Britain and the United States. Rhys Davis founded the Pali Text Society in 1881, and this group played an invaluable and still ongoing role in making early Buddhist texts available in translation. Dr Lawrence Waddell, a physician, wrote in 1897 an early, highly critical, book about Tibetan Buddhism and also made important archaeological discoveries.
I found the discussion of this latter group of pioneers in the study of Buddhism more accessible than the earlier part of the book, probably because I had some background in their work. But the entire book makes a fascinating study of how the basic facts of Buddhism were learned and organized and brought to the West. The book is replete with many photographs and drawings which help explain and give context to the text.
Mr. Allen writes with affection for Buddhism and with a high, if critical and nuanced regard, for the achievement of the British in India. This book will interest readers interested in the development of knowledge about Buddhism and readers interested in the history of the British in India.
