First Sentence

"Anyone who writes nowadays about the history of Buddhism takes for granted its promulgation by Sakyamuni Buddha in the central Ganges Valley as the starting point of this religion, and it is all too easily forgotten that this great event which probably occurred about 500 B.C. was scarcely known of in the western scholarly world until the early nineteenth century and that it was only since then that several decades of laborious research, mainly in Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan Buddhist literature supported by extraordinary archeological discoveries all over the Indian subcontinent, have given substance to the belated discovery."