The Search for the Buddha

I’ve just finished reading The Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion, by Charles Allen and published by Carroll & Graff in 2002. While there are moments of rough slogging, I very much recommend it.

In addition to it being a straight forward exploration of the eighteenth and nineteenth century British officers who pretty much in their spare time first caught on to the fact that Buddhism’s origins were in fact in India, gradually understood what Buddhism was, and then systematically found the various hows, whens and wheres, Allen defends these explorers of Eastern religion against the charges of “orientalism” leveled first by Edward Said and since him a veritable host of critics. There is much to criticise, of course, and Allen tends to acknowledge that. But he also points out it is these men he investigates and records in this book who with all their limitations actually found all the major sites of the Buddha’s life and teaching.

I admit in addition to a prose style that never rises to great literature, when he got around to describing the people I know a fair amount about such as Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott I felt he didn’t really capture who they were in all their complexity. This gave me some pause about his other treatments. That said I freely acknowledge Allen’s comprehensive overview must of necessity be sketchy here and there.

If you have any interest in the actual sites of the Buddha’s life and how we moderns, Eastern and Western came to know of them, this is the book for you.