The history of Buddhism in the West has increasingly gained attention among scholars, even though many aspects remain severely under-researched and deserve more scholarly scrutiny. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.’s Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (1999) remains an unsurpassed pillar of such efforts. In the German-language realm, Volker Zotz's Auf den glückseligen Inseln: Buddhismus in der deutschen Kultur (2000) provides a comprehensive, wide-ranging, and at times idiosyncratic overview. In addition, almost a quarter century later, this massive volume under review offers, similar to the two works previously mentioned, a broad overview, this time of the Austrian preoccupation with Buddhism, including journeys to Asia and the subsequent travel accounts, the reception of Buddhist ideas by Austrian thinkers, writers, and all sorts of literati. It provides accounts of diverse groups such as spiritualists and theosophists, as well as the dissemination of knowledge about Buddhism in intellectual and artistic circles, and other contexts.

This book falls—even though Weitensfelder does not explicitly mention this—into a global turn of Buddhist Studies, especially Buddhist history, that focuses on Buddhism and its reception and impact beyond the Buddhist heartlands in South and East Asia. As such, It belongs to the new Global Buddhist histories. And secondly—and more consciously—the book arises from a growing awareness of a pluralistic view of the history of religions in Europe, or Central Europe, that sheds light not only on the entanglements with Islam, but increasingly on Buddhism as well—and, to a lesser extent, Daoism and other religions or faith systems. As Weitensfelder convincingly shows, Buddhism was not unknown, even though up until the twentieth century, many basic facts were either unknown or disputed. Often this was—and still is today—the result of applying categories honed from monotheistic religions to other religions from outside the Abrahamic fold. Yet, the often patchy knowledge about Buddhism did not stop Austrian people from all walks of life from making bold statements about the true nature of Buddhism. Too often, what one saw in Buddhism reflected one's own identity or, rather, one's quest to find a place in the world. Not surprisingly, then—as Weitensfelder describes and others before him have noted and analyzed—the reception of Buddhism in Europe and modernization were not only temporally concomitant but also intrinsically tied to the effect of modernity that had shaken, on the one hand, the foundation of communal markers of identification and, on the other hand, offered broader alternatives, among them Buddhism, to fill the cracks that had occurred under the pressure of urbanization, industrialization, and early effects of globalization.

Thus, Buddhism was often molded according to one's personal needs, as the diverse subjects of Weitensfelder's book again and again confirm. Accordingly, the vast part of the book plays out in the time period most commonly characterized as modern, with only short forays into pre-modern and post-modern travelers to the East. Even though the title extends the scope of the book from the sixteenth century to the 1960s, when counterculture in the West, as well as in Austria adopted Buddhism, the main focus lies on roughly seventy to eighty years from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War, with only short chapters on the periods before and after.

Equally, the book not only focuses on Buddhism. In fact, especially in the first part that concentrates on journeys to China, Mongolia, Tibet, Japan, Korea, Siam, Burma, and Ceylon, Buddhism played little or no role in the travel accounts Weitensfelder discusses here. Weitensfelder's decision to focus heavily on travel accounts—which make up the first 200 pages of the volume—also evokes the comparison with Jürgen Osterhammel's Die Entzauberung Asiens—Europa und die asiatischen Reiche (1998). The broad perspective that Weitensfelder deploys is not to the book's detriment, as this approach sheds light on the fact that Buddhism was often, for those who traveled to South and East Asia during the nineteenth century, of secondary concern or hardly distinguishable when confronted with the myriad forms of religious life and thought that seemed impenetrable and even harder to understand. Weitensfelder estimates in his conclusion that during the years that are the main focus of the book, only forty-five to fifty persons in Austria (without Hungary) can be considered actual Buddhists, in the sense that they tried to adopt a Buddhist lifestyle and saw their Buddhism as equivalent to that of Christianity (mostly Catholicism) or Judaism.

Buddhism's legacy in Austria is, however, much broader. A major story of Weitensfelder's book is therefore the production of knowledge or growing access to Buddhism and Buddhist texts as well as its dissemination and frequently eclectic adoption in Europe and, more specifically, Austria. The adoption (or reception) of Buddhism in Austria, as described in the second part of the book, where many luminaries of the intellectual history of Central Europe are featured, shows that Buddhist ideas were pervasive but mostly used freely and creatively. Again, the author follows tangents to illuminate the ideas about Buddhism held by various actors. Chapters on theosophy, monism, arts and artifacts, and so forth, in which Buddhism often is only marginal, provide an entirely new account of Buddhism's influence. It is exactly here that the volume opens up numerous avenues for more research and where, ultimately, its truly groundbreaking nature emerges. Not only is it massive in pages and almost overwhelming with the sheer number of facts, biographies, and texts described here, but it also includes a wealth of previously unknown contexts and figures that deserve more in-depth analysis by future researchers.