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In 1837, couriers delivered a large bundle of fifty-nine Buddhist texts to the Paris office of the scholar Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852). Upon opening the packages, Burnouf quickly realized that they contained rare Sanskrit manuscripts, written on sturdy handmade paper and bound between hand-painted and carved wooden covers. Later that same year, an additional eighty-eight Buddhist manuscripts arrived at the Société Asiatique, a group of French scholars dedicated to the study of Asia. Until then, European scholarship on Buddhism had relied primarily on Chinese and Tibetan translations. This collection offered a more direct window into South Asian Buddhism.
Together, these manuscripts informed the first major European-language study of Indian Buddhism based on Sanskrit sources: Burnouf’s magisterial Introduction to Indian Buddhism (1844). This book provided a...
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