Hinduism and Buddhism, an Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 of 3

Book is the expansion of Indian influence throughout Eastern Asia and the neighbouring islands. That influence is clear and wide-spread, nay almost universal, and it is with justice that we speak ofF urther India and theD utch call their colonies Neerlands I ndie. For some early chapters in the story of this expansion the dates and details are meagre, but on the whole the investigators chief difficulty is to grasp and marshal the mass of facts relating to the development of religion and civilization in this great region. The spread of Hindu thought was an intellectual conquest, not an exchange of ideas. On the north-western frontier there was some reciprocity, but otherwise the part played by India was consistently active and not receptive. The Far East counted for nothing in her internal history, doubtless because China was too distant and the other countries had no special culture of their own. Still it is remarkable that whereas many Hindu missionaries preached Buddhism inC hina, the idea of making Confucianism known in India seems never to have entered the head of any Chinese. It is correct to say that the sphere of India sintellectual conquests was theE ast and North, not theW est, but still Buddhism spread considerably to the west of its original home and entered Persia. Stein discovered aB uddhist monastery in the terminal marshes of the Helmund inS eistan1 and Bamian is a good distance from our frontier. But in Persia and its border lands there were powerful state religions, first Zoroastrianism and then I slam, which disliked and hindered the importation of foreign creeds and though we may see some resemblance betweenS ufis and Vedantists, it does not appear that theM oslim civilization of I ran owed much to Hinduism. 1O eog. Jour. A ug., 1916, p. 362.(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of histo