The process of encounter between Buddhism and the West was a slow one, perhaps extending back to Alexander the Great and certainly made more complex by Buddhism’s virtual eradication in its native home (northern India and Nepal) during several phases of Islamic conquest.
Buddhist doctrine and texts, originally recorded in Pali and Sanskrit, were subsequently disseminated via large translation projects throughout Central Asia: northward into Tibet, Nepal, China, Japan, and Mongolia, and eastward into Bhutan, Cambodia, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. The first recorded contact between a European and “the Buddhocratic government of Tibet” occurred in a remarkable interfaith gathering at the Karakorum court of the Khans in May 1254 (Batchelor, 93).
The occasion was somewhat straightforward; the Khans sought presentations from all the world’s religions to assess which one they would endorse in support of their empire, and as Stephen Batchelor indicates, “Both Christians and Buddhists had similar motives for being there: to persuade Mönge Khan—at the time the world’s most powerful man—to convert to their religion” (Batchelor, 82).
The Franciscan friar William of Rubruck represented the Western view in this dialogue, but after only eight months, he was quite likely expelled from the city, having only gathered a few converts to Christianity, when knowledge of his report to Louis IX— where he “preach[ed] war against them” (Batchelor, 91)—became known to his host.
Mönge Khan ultimately converted to Mahayana Buddhism in its Tibetan form, giving rise to the authority of Tantric Buddhism across the high Himalayas as discussed by John Drew.1
This brief contact between Christianity and Buddhism was followed by the encounters recorded by Marco Polo near the end of the century, yet both Friar William and Marco Polo provided rather poor analyses of the thrust of Buddhist doctrines and their importance throughout the Central Asian region.