The Prologue surveys the theoretical framework of the book and outlines the story of the chapters to follow. It emphasises that Buddhism was only recognised as a religion in the West from the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus, for this reason, until that time, the story of the Buddha moved from East to West as a series of glimpses and hints, errors and confusions, with occasional insights into the Buddhist path, along with many false trails. It has come to us in textual fragments; or, perhaps, like bits and pieces of a jigsaw that don’t necessarily fit together.

Chapter 7 explores the Copernican revolution in the Western study of Buddhism in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. It argues that it occurred in two moments, the first of which was necessary for the second to occur. The first was the creation of the term ‘Buddhism’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over the next fifty years, this term and a variety of linguistic variants in European languages appeared in the West and became the norm. The second and crucial moment was the creation of Buddhism as an object defined predominantly in terms of its own textuality. Thus, from 1820 to 1860, Buddhism came to exist in the ‘Oriental’ libraries, institutes, learned societies, and universities of the West. It was discovered in its texts and manuscripts on the desks of the European scholars who laboriously learned the languages, read the texts, and translated, interpreted, and published them. The chapter shows how, in the early 1820s, the Buddha left the world of myth and began to become a figure in history.