Bog Buddhas and Travellers’ Tales: How Knowledge Crossed Eurasia

Abstract

This chapter presents a reception history of Buddhism, not simply for Ireland, but for Europe in this period. By treating books as material facts and translation, rewriting, compiling, plagiarising, printing, distributing and so on, as material processes rather than as disembodied words, it shows, first, that a series of different knowledges about Buddhism circulated continuously in Ireland and the broader Irish world. Secondly, these processes, and the situation of different kinds of Irish people within these, were shaped by the changing world-system relations within which knowledge and people were both embedded. Thus Ireland becomes not an isolated case apart but a vantage point from which to explore broader European processes.