Items

• Fleeting Images from India
  This is a Slovene diplomat-researcher’s account of the first impressions of India upon landing in Bombay in the 1930s. These chapters form part of the first secular, book-length, personal account of the subcontinent to be published by a Slovenian. Teeming with ‘facts’ and impressions related in rich, poetic language, the following excerpts reveal a mind at work that strives to make sense of things against all odds. The voice tends towards all-knowingness and the tone is a mixture of surprise, indignation, derision and, occasionally, admiration and joy.
• Jest buddhismus náboženství vhodné pro Evropana? (Is Buddhism a religion convenient for Europeans?)
  Translation of an article that provides the Czech scholar of religion Otakar Pertold’s response to the increasing popularity of Buddhism in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. This popularity led many Europeans to leave their countries and take refuge in the Three Gems in Buddhist monasteries across Asia, most commonly in contemporary Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Pertold bases his radical “no” to the question in the title on two grounds explained in the translated text.