INTRODUCTION

Buddhism was ‘discovered’ in the West during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was at this time that the term ‘Buddha’ (‘Buddoo’, ‘Bouddha’, ‘Boudhou’, etc.) began to gain currency in the English- and French-speaking worlds, and that the term ‘Buddhism’ first made its appearance in English in the scholarly journals which appeared, in part at least, as a consequence of the developing imperial interests of both England and France in the Orient.

This is not, of course, to deny that, as is now well known, there had been periodic encounters between the West and what we now understand as Buddhism. Pieces of information had filtered through to the early Christian world. From A.D. 1000, a version of the life of the Buddha in the form of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat influenced the Western Christian ascetic ideal. And from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries there had been a succession of contacts: William van Ruysbroeck, Marco Polo, John of Monte Corvino, Dominican, Jesuit, Capuchin, and Franciscan missionaries to Japan, China, and Tibet, had all encountered Buddhism and reported their findings to a curious West.

But for the greater part of the nineteenth century, these early encounters made little impact on the understanding of Buddhism in the West. The various reports of travellers, missionaries, diplomats, and so on, with a few notable exceptions, did not form a significant part of, or play an important role in, the network of texts about Buddhism that began to develop at the end of the eighteenth century. Certainly, they are seldom cited.