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The Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered India's Lost Religion

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Ancient India was virtually unknown before the 18th Century. Even the Indians had no idea of their own history. The British Orientalists started the unravelling of a complex puzzle that revealed the buried secrets of ancient India, emperor Asoka and Buddhism. Allen's book reveals this stunning tale.

This is very much an unfinished story with more leads than Allen explores but he has related how the keys to the history of India were discovered via Burma and Sri Lanka in deciphering the Brahmi script and making sense of mysterious pillars that dotted the Indian landscape.

This book is also of great interest from the archaelogical angle. Far more has been found in terms of buildings, ruins and places actually frequented by the Buddha than of Jesus though many scholars still ignore the physical evidence about the Buddha and pretend we only know him from oral traditions. In fact, undoubted relics of the Buddha after his cremation have also been found as detailed in this book. Allen indicates how recorded pilgrimages by Chinese monks lead to the rediscovery of lost monasteries, caves and the ancient city of Pataliputra.

Allen also details the history of Buddhist scholarship in the 19th century and how missionaries and their influences both dogged and abetted researches and a revival in Buddhism.

Allen's work will interest historians, archaeologists, linguists and those interested in Buddhism. There is a great deal more to be done in terms of archaeology, translation and reconstructing Indian history from the fifth century BCE and this book is an ideal launching pad. Not since Rhys David's Buddhist India has a similar tale seen the light. A major publication.

I bought this book in preparation for a trip to India, in which I will visit many of the sites that are discussed in this book. This book turned out to be a treasure, and I could hardly put it down. Starting in the 18th century, Allen takes you through the rediscovery of lost, ancient Buddhist sites, the way in which the early Indian portion of Buddhist history was reconstructed, and - perhaps most importantly - the heroic efforts of the remarkable people who accomplished all of this. Weaving the story together is Allen's prose, which is written like a detective story. He takes you through the process of the discoveries in a way that is captivating and engaging. This book is a real page-turner, which is saying something about a book that is ostensibly about archeology!

If you're one of those people who finds stumbling onto an ancient treasure exciting, then this modern treasure by Charles Allen is a book that won't disappoint. It's a phenomenal book for people who are serious about learning something. A rarity among writer's today, Allen packs the book with facts not only words and in doing so creates a wealth of knowledge for the student of things ancient. The book does get a bit crusty at points and dry to read, much like an ancient archaeological dig itself, but the dust makes the finds that much more captivating. If you thought you knew something about Buddhism, Britain and/or India this book will humbly remind you that knowledge has her vast stretches of uncharted territory. Of the books that have been written on Buddhism, this is one that will last, and outlast most. Happy hunting. -JL

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.

As a modern Theravadin Buddhist, I pride myself on adhering to the Buddha's "original teachings," or at least as close as one can come to them. Thanks to this masterful book by Charles Allen, I know now the circuitous (and fortuitous) path the Dhamma took to reach a contemporary American's experience. The story is amazing, and actually reads like an adventure novel -- one that pleasingly replaces violent derring-do with intellectual cliffhangers and edge-of-your-seat escapes. This may sound like a strange way to describe a book about philology, archaeology, and academic squabbles, but read the book and I think you'll agree it is highly appropriate. We in the West who are blessed enough to have been exposed to the Buddha's teaching owe a huge debt of thanks to these intrepid adventurers, and any reader of The Search for the Buddha will be glad to give thanks to Charles Allen and his publisher as well. HIGHLY recommended for all Buddhists, as well as for people interested in Indian history and comparative religion.

This book was a pleasant surprise. I have read a few intro-type books to Buddhism prior to stumbling upon this book by accident. So, I knew about the origins of Buddhism but was not aware that the modern history of buddhism (i.e. the West's re-discovery) - particularly the identification of the various important historical sites - was the outcome of efforts from a few dedicated (often part-time & self-taught) British archeologists. I also found the book to be well illustrated with portraits of the main protagonists and their drawings and paintings of the artifacts and sites. The style of writing is very British (for lack of a better expression) - meaning it can be a bit dry at time but this will not put you off if you are fascinated by the archeology of buddhism. Highly recommended.

Orientalism's derided in academia, but without scholars in British India, Buddha's teachings might still be regarded as but a Brahmin heresy. Allen sums up in two pages the historical names and places linked to the historical Buddha, but the impact of such discoveries which led to the verification of what were little-known Burmese legends through Sanskrit carvings and archeological excavations proved far-reaching. Recovery of an historic foundation for India's Buddhist past, long hidden by Hindu jealousy and then Muslim destruction, led Asians in Sri Lanka to assert their inheritance of a more rational, less ritual practice that in turn inspired Westerners to take up the cause of spreading the dharma in later Victorian times. Out of this dissemination, the present resurgence of Buddhism can trace its energy to the efforts of bureaucrats, adventurers, and officials employed in British India starting over two hundred years ago.

Allen presents this story straightforwardly. His brisk narrative often gets, perhaps unavoidably, mired in minutiae as he must explain a great deal of rather esoteric lore as background and context and detail. Yet, when he shows how lovely rock paintings inside long-neglected caves were discovered, or how James Princep decoded the "Delhi No. 1" script that proved the empirical link between King Ashoka and the contacts with Hellenistic Greece, the excitement of arcane finds infuses the page.

In 1953, the place of the Buddha's great enlightenment at Bodh-Gaya had been regained by the Buddhists. Trails that Fa Hian and Huan Tsang, early medieval Chinese travellers, followed across Asia as they went on pilgrimage to Buddhist sites, are now retraced by tourists and new Buddhists from all over the world. Allen tells how the immense statue of "Maitreya, the Buddha to come," will rise at Bodh-Gaya, 45 stories and 500 feet high. The last chapter ends: "The Maitreya will face north, towards the Land of Snows, as if to signal to Tibet's present occupiers that his time will come." (293)

Allen, with many books on British India to his credit, also offers in this concluding chapter a cogent, if very attenuated, account of the subsequent spread of Buddhist learning as East and West cooperated to advance the knowledge that the Indians themselves had long relegated as an withered offshoot of Hinduism. It seems the chance inquiries of emissaries in the Burmese kingdom of Ava, seeking the holy sites of Buddhism that were recorded, preserved the kernel of the facts that began, after decades of patient study by British and European scholars in cooperation with native priests, to ripen into the solid evidence that concrete proof, long abandoned in jungles and caves or under ground or in a language nobody knew, had preserved for over two thousand years.

One wonders, reading Allen, how much has been lost about this once-dominant faith over much of ancient India. The fragility of what we have been lucky enough to snatch from obliteration humbles, and haunts, for what more has been burned, pulverized, or plundered irrevocably? Allen begins his history noting how the Taliban's dynamiting of the twin colossi, the Bamian Buddhas, in March 2001 echoes. For, "many of the rock-caves in which Osama Bin Ladin and his fellow bigots have sought refuge during the recent war against terrorism were originally excavated by Buddhism for their 'viharas' or monastic retreats." (2)

At least the colonizing British ended, Allen notes, the equivalent Hindu elimination of the subcontinent's Buddhist heritage. The imperialists did not build churches on temple sites, nor did they convert Buddhist images into Christian shrines. The past, which fascinated a few amateur and often self-funded, self-taught scholars, teased a few "griffins" who arrived in India to re-create out of a few surviving hints so much of what we now know about Buddhism's first flourishing there, centuries before Christ.

Certainly, as Stephen Batchelor's complimentary study "The Awakening of the West" attests (also reviewed by me), the scraps and shards left reveal but a fraction of what once documented the rise of the dharma. Closing this study, as Allen remarks in conclusion, the reader may compare the fate of the Indian ruins and runes with the equivalent storehouse of Tibetan wisdom, so much of which has been destroyed by the Chinese today.

I guess my favorite character in this immensely entertaining and instructive book would have to be Alexander Csoma de Koros a "Hungarian vagabond" (as Charles Allen characterizes him), born in Transylvania in 1784, who "had been obsessed from an early age with the idea of discovering the origins of the Hungarian people." As Allen explains "of the various theories about their origins, the one he favoured was that they were descendants of the tribe of Attila the Hun whose original homeland lay somewhere to the east of the high Pamirs." His quest led him, almost by accident, to the culture and (more important) to the language of Tibet. He compiled a Tibetan-English dictionary, making himself virtually the first Western master of this vast and complicated civilization.

Aside from its intrinsic merit, Csoma de Koros' inquiry into Tibetan culture made him a player in a remarkable historical enterprise: the recovery of Indian Buddhism. Buddhism was born in India (or at any rate, on the India-Nepal border). Yet it virtually vanished from its homeland and by the time the British arrived, its culture languished in obscurity and its monuments stood uncomprehended.

Aside from Csoma de Koros, the recovery of the history of Indian Buddhism can be traced in large measure to the work of a handful of British imperialists, mostly young men somehow connected with the British East India Company, most of them exemplars of the tradition of amateur scholarship. Perhaps the most famous is Sir William ("Oriental") Jones, who mastered Sanskrit and grasped the insight that the language of the Brahmins must somehow be related to Greek and Latin.

Mostly they worked by a kind of triangulation, working from Tibet, Burman and Celyon (where Buddhism did survive) back to India, where it did not. The enterprise crystallized about 1836, when scholars first saw that these diverse traditions derived from a common source.

Allen's story is rich enough in character and incident to prove almost unmanageable at times-I found myself assembling my own character-list on the inside flyleaf. But it is a marvellous yarn, well worth the effort. Csoma de Koros, by the way never did find Atilla (apparently the Hungarians are not descendants of the Huns after all). He died in Darjeeling, trying to reach the "Yoogatrs"-the Uighurs, now identified with Xinjiang province in Western China. He never himself became a Buddhist. Yet in Japan, of all places, in 1933, he was made a bodhisattva, canonised in the grand hall of Tokyo University. As Allen reports, "a bronze statue of [him] meditating in the lotus position can be found in the Japanese Imperial Museum."

If you enjoy reading about Buddhism, archeology, India, the British Empire, and history you may enjoy this book. Charles Allen delivers an erudite overview of the men who unearthed Buddhism's history in India and initiated scholarship of ancient India including: creating a group that grew into what is today The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britian and Ireland, archaeological excavations, translations of ancient texts, etc. The world is richer for their efforts. The book also has a glossary as well as comprehensive bibliography and index.
Some of the people, places, and texts covered in this book are worth deeper investigation; I plan to use it as a resource to point me to further reading. Actually, the scope of the book combined with the density of information is amazing considering this book is only 321 pages long including glossary, bibliography, and index.

If it were not for organizational skills, coordinated effort, tenacity, energy and mental vigor of a set of quite remarkable Europeans, Buddhism would have been lost to the world forever! It was already lost in India, thanks to persecution by brahmanism, and later by islamic invaders. Buddhism was also lost in Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand as well. In these places, the significance of the key solutions achieved by Buddha was lost and Buddhism was reduced to rules of regulations of monkhood and multitude of rituals for the lay people. In India, almost no one knew of the historical Buddha and his teachings. The brahmanical revivalists had reduced Buddha to yet another avatar of Vishnu, whose mission (they said) was to turn the demons away from the Vedas. The reason for this avatar, the brahmanical revivalists explained, was that the demons had discovered the power of Vedic sacrifices and were becoming powerful by performing them and the gods appealed to Vishnu to do something and hence the Buddha avatar to mislead the demons into thinking that Vedic sacrifices are ineffectual. Indians of the brahmanical revival period bought such nonsense and persecuted the Samanas (freethinkers or those do not recognize the Vedas as revealed text nor the supremacy of brahmins). Hence, when the British came into India in the late 18th century, no one India knew about Buddha, his doctrine of no-self (anatta), his doctrine of dependent co-arising (paticca samudpada), his four noble truths of suffering (dukkha) and the noble eight-fold path. They thought Buddha was simply a minor avatar. This book is a real page turner. I could not put it down and read the whole book during a long weekend. It tells the story of the remarkable Europeans who recovered the treasure of what Buddha really taught and gave it to the world. A must read book.