‘It was by no means certain,’ says King, ‘that the Tibetans, Sinhalese and the Chinese conceived of themselves as Buddhists before they were so labelled by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’82 In this case, the crucial figure was Eugène Burnouf, whose Introduction à l’histoire de Bouddhisme indien effectively created the religion as we recognise it today. Published in 1844, Burnouf’s book was based on 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal in 1824 by Brian Hodgson
