Journey to India and Ceylon

Ivan Pavlovich Minaev’s contribution to science is so significant that simply listing his highest merits would take more than a page. Minaev is rightfully considered the founder of Russian indology; he became the first Russian scholar to visit Burma; he conducted one of the first ethnographic studies of the indigenous population of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). His study of Buddhism made Ivan Pavlovich famous in high scholarly circles—before him, at least in Russia, no one had approached research of this world religion with such care. The scientist also showed himself as a philologist: he developed his own original variant of a language classification system, created one of the first phonetics and morphology studies of the Pali language in Europe.

In this book—published for the first time, almost 140 years after it was written—it becomes accessible to the native reader. I. P. Minaev describes faraway exotic countries—India and Ceylon—in detail and with love. The Russian traveler understood India much better than the Englishmen who colonized it, and knew its history deeper than most of the most enlightened local residents. No wonder L. N. Tolstoy studied Minaev’s work with special interest; this book, filled with numerous notes, occupied an honored place in the writer’s personal library. Such deep penetration into the very core of Indian culture is the main, enduring value of I. P. Minaev’s work published here—and for the modern reader as well.