This book examines why Buddhism did not reach the West until the 18th century

Ideas related to the Buddha and his legacy started reaching the West sporadically, in fragments, around the 13th and 14th centuries. Marco Polo, the famous Venetian merchant and traveller who stayed in China between 1275 and 1291, produced a reasonably detailed account of the life of the Buddha. With the greater movement of the merchants and missionaries of the West, ethnographic accounts about Buddhist beliefs and practices in different Asian nations began to be written 16th century onwards. This continued over the next two centuries, but India was still not the focus. This was despite the fact that some European travellers had visited sites like the rock-cut caves of Kanheri. These travellers were unable to discern the nature of the monuments, not to mention their Buddhist connections.

Most stupas and monasteries were dilapidated, abandoned, buried under subsequent habitations or appropriated by other religions and local faiths. Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, for instance, had been a flourishing Buddhist centre (as attested by the records of Xuanzang), but the presence of the Buddha’s statues inside later Hindu temples suggests that the Buddha was assimilated into Hinduism. Similarly, parts of rock-cut Buddhist monasteries in the western Deccan, such as those at Junnar and Nashik,...

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