Neerlands Indië. For some early chapters in the story of this
expansion the dates and details are meagre, but on the whole the
investigator's chief difficulty is to grasp and marshal the mass of
facts relating to the development of religion and civilization in this
great region.

The spread of Hindu thought was an intellectual conquest, not an
exchange of ideas. On the north-western frontier there was some
reciprocity, but otherwise the part played by India was consistently
active and not receptive. The Far East counted for nothing in her
internal history, doubtless because China was too distant and the
other countries had no special culture of their own. Still it is
remarkable that whereas many Hindu missionaries preached Buddhism in
China, the idea of making Confucianism known in India seems never to
have entered the head of any Chinese.

It is correct to say that the sphere of India's intellectual conquests
was the East and North, not the West, but still Buddhism spread
considerably to the west of its original home and entered Persia.
Stein discovered a Buddhist monastery in "the terminal marshes of the
Helmund" in Seistan[1] and Bamian is a good distance from our
frontier. But in Persia and its border lands there were powerful state
religions, first Zoroastrianism and then Islam, which disliked and
hindered the importation of foreign creeds and though we may see some
resemblance between Sufis and Vedantists, it does not appear that the
Moslim civilization of Iran owed much to Hinduism.

But in all Asia north and east of India, excluding most of Siberia but
including the Malay Archipelago, Indian influence is obvious. Though
primarily connected with religion it includes much more, such as