any other students. Six years later Bergaigne was dead and Lévi, aged 25, became the new professor of Sanskrit at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes. He set himself a daunting, lifelong task, to trace how India had shaped the cultures of Asia through the spread of Buddhism, which first flourished in India but had long since disappeared from there. He mastered Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese and various other languages he would need.
