Half a millennium before Jesus, more than a millennium before Mohammed, the Buddha found Enlightenment. Today the number of his followers far exceeds the number of Christians and Muslims added together.

Here, the fortunes of Buddhism are traced through time and space, from the founding of the world's largest monastic Order in north-eastern India 2,500 years ago to contemporary Europe and America. This volume, the result of years of painstaking and imaginative research and preparation, presents the whole of that contribution to Asiatic civilization in a vivid and authoritative manner. World-renowned scholars provide the eleven chapters, accompanied by illustrations drawn from the astonishing wealth of Buddhist art.