In 1958, the great Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan wrote about the strangeness of what is called ‘Buddhism’ – a global religion instituted in the name of a wandering mendicant who in his lifetime had been a formidable foe of institutionalised religion. Siddhartha Gautama had sought to emancipate people from rituals and idolatry; his devotees crafted elaborate rituals and made an idol of him. He preached against transactional worship; they converted him into an object of worship. He disbelieved in gods; they extolled him as God. In life, he was bald and emaciated; they recast him as a voluptuous deity ornamented with luscious curls, carved him out of every imaginable material and commodified him into a bauble to be sold alongside tiger-skin rugs and antelope horns. ‘From Peking to Chicago,’ Bachchan wrote, ‘there isn’t a curio shop that, even if it sells nothing else at all, can’t produce a Buddha on demand.’

Despite these contradictions, what makes Buddhism seem so worthy of respect and reverence to laypersons is its emphasis on ahimsa, non-­harming, the keystone of its body of ethics. Christianity has its crusades, Islam its imperial conquests and Hinduism is stained by the horrors of caste. Buddhism (and Jainism) appear to stand alone in the pantheon of religions as exemplars of peace and non-violence. ‘Hatred is never appeased by hatred,’ the Buddha told his followers. ‘By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.’

The teachings of the Buddha, acquiring a religious form, had a revolutionary effect. The Mauryan emperor Ashoka, appalled by the blood shed by his army in pacifying the east Indian republic of Kalinga around 261 BC, turned to the Buddha and renounced violence. His rule became the model for others