Synopsis Eighteen years after Spence Hardy had published his Manual of Buddhism [sic], mainly a translation from late Sinhalese sources, the society for promoting Christian knowledge published, as the first of their non-Christian religious systems, a Manual of Buddhism by Rhys Davids. This was fifty-four years ago, and the book has been reprinted twenty-three times and yet lives. It has wrought a most useful work, first, by diffusing knowledge about the history of a great and long-lived institution; secondly, by at least checking, in its historical sobriety, the growth of erratic impulses, arising out of a very little learning about that institution and materializing in much well-meant but misleading assertion.