On the Buddha’s Trail in Bangladesh

Beginning at Kushinagar on Asia’s Buddhist circuit, the author’s long, looping trail through Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Tarim Basin, China and Tibet ultimately turns back towards Bengal and its overlooked eastern corridors. This book grows out of that return. It follows the old routes that once linked West Bengal and Bangladesh with Tibet and the southern provinces of China, where trade in horses, silk, aromatics and medicinal herbs moved alongside a steady traffic of monks, scholars and translators. These were not merely commercial roads but intellectual ones, feeding the mahaviharas of Bengal and carrying Buddhist texts, teachers and ideas into Tibet and China. Set in Bangladesh, the narrative explores the country through what remains of that older Buddhist landscape. Along highways and riverbanks, ruined monasteries and unexcavated mounds appear with striking regularity: some formally identified, others half-obliterated into high earthen rises, and many built over by later structures. Drawing on archaeology, travel and close observation, the book connects celebrated sites such as Somapura at Paharpur and the Mainamati–Lalmai range with lesser known settlements across Bogra, Dinajpur, Bikrampur and the deltaic south. More than a catalogue of ruins, it is a route-led portrait of Buddhist Bangladesh, tracing how sacred ground survives through fragments, museums, reused stone and memory, even when the monuments themselves have fallen.