A few years ago, some of my friends were raving about a new book they had been passing around. Most of them were not avid readers, so I knew it had to be good. Turns out it was called Buddha and the Sahibs: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion by Charles Allen. (a.k.a, Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion)
Finding a copy proved a problem until I visited Neville, a friend in Mississauga, Ontario. He had a copy he acquired at the ROM in Toronto. I borrowed it, of course, and read it as quickly as possible. It certainly was the book worth waiting for.
I wish to pay homage to Mr. Allen as the inspiration for this website. Soon after reading the book, my wife suggested a trip to the UK to see if we could locate the same source material used by Allen. We spent a week in London, mostly learning that the British Library is not the best source for someone in a hurry, especially if you don’t know what you are looking for. We also hit all the used book dealers in Bloomsbury with little to show. There were two places, however, that proved to be rich resources for us: The library at SOAS (School for Oriental and African Studies) and the Arthur Probsthain Bookstore on Great Russell St.
Anyway, back to Allen—His book leads you through the discovery of Buddha by the western world. At the beginning of the 19th Century, although knowledge of the Buddha and His Teaching had survived in many Asian countries, it had been, for all practical purposes, completely lost in its country of origin, India. The arrival of the European powers to India brought not only the commercial presence of traders and the political ambitions of the rulers-to-be; but in the East India Company it brought a small thoughtful and erudite group of scholars who would study anything that crossed their paths.
Of course, the field of scholars was not entirely British, but they seemed to be in all the right places to make the Buddha puzzle emerge. Allen takes you into the lives of such luminaries as Oriental Jones, James Princep, Francis Buchanan, Alexander Cunningham, George Tourner and other early British explorers, soldiers and civil servants—not only in India, but also in China, Burma and Ceylon.
It is to these people that we owe our present knowledge of the Buddha. They translated the travel diaries of the Chinese monks who occasionally visited the holy sites of the Buddha, found and dug up the lost monuments, cracked the code on the lost Brahmi script, unravelled the life of Emperor Asoka, and pestered the Sangha of Burma and Ceylon for the most important puzzle pieces to be found—the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka stored in the form of palm leaf manuscripts. They laid the groundwork for the surge of research that followed on many fronts in the 20th Century.
These people organized their learning in scholarly societies such as the Royal Asiatic Society in its many chapters, the Pali Text Society and several others. These societies have maintained the tradition of learning and publication up the present and all the old journals by all the old scholars are still to be had for those that take the time to look them up.
With thanks to Mr. Allen for the inspiration, we now present many of these 18th and 19th Century articles and much more—Please enjoy. [—the editor]