Buddhism: A Journey Through History

Over the course of twenty-five centuries, Buddhism spread from its place of origin in northern India to become a global tradition of remarkable breadth, depth, and richness. In this ambitious book, Donald S. Lopez Jr. draws on the latest scholarship to construct a detailed and innovative history of Buddhism—not just as a chronology through the centuries or as geographic movement across a map, but as a dense matrix of interconnections.

Beginning with the life and teachings of the Buddha, Lopez shows how a set of evolving ideas and practices traveled north and east to China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet, south and southeast to Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and finally westward to Europe and the Americas. He provides insights on questions that Buddhism has asked and answered in different times and different places—about apocalypse, art, identity, immortality, law, nation, persecution, philosophy, science, sex, war, and writing.

Vast in its erudition and expansive in its vision, this is the most complete single‑volume history of Buddhism in its full historical and geographical range.

Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author, translator, or editor of more than twenty books, including The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life, The Story of Buddhism, and the award-winning Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism.