In volume I of his monumental 'The Story of Civilization' the eminent historian Will Durant has written thus about India's spiritual impact on Asia : "Whereas Buddhism disappeared from India, it won over nearly all the remainder of the Asiatic world. The cultural zenith of most of these nations came from the stimulus of Buddhism.…. As Christianity transformed Mediterranean culture in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, so Buddhism in the same centuries effected a theological and aesthetic revolution in the life of China. In the seventh century AD, the enlightened warrior Srong-tsan Gampo, established an able government in Tibet, annexed Nepal, built Lhasa as his capital and made it rich as a halfway house in China-India trade. He invited Buddhist monks to come from India to spread Buddhism and inaugurated the Golden Age of Tibet….. In Cambodia and Indo China, Buddhism conspired with Hinduism to provide the religious framework of one of the richest ages in the history of oriental art. Buddhism, like Christianity, won its greatest triumphs outside the land of its birth - and won them without shedding a drop of blood"

In the 19th century Buddhism began to impact in Europe and the USA. Thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated British civil servants in India, particularly William Jones and Charles Wilkins who were encouraged by Governor General Warren Hastings and supported by the Asiatic Society founded in 1784, a number of ancient Sanskrit works were translated into English and gave the world for the first time an idea of the spiritual treasures and great literary beauty of these works. Among those deeply impressed by them were Goethe, Hegel and Schopenhauer. But it was Max Muller who made the greatest contribution in interpreting ancient Indian spirituality to Europe. In his book 'India : What can it teach us ?' he wrote: " If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of the choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant - I should point to India." 

In 1879, Sir Edwin Arnold, using a prose translation of 'Lalitavistara', an account of Buddha's youth and enlightenment, wrote a long verse narrative under the title 'Light of Asia'. This created a wide interest in Buddhism in Victorian England.

The first American intellectuals to read and be inspired by India's ancient wisdom, were Emerson, Thoreau and Walt Whitman. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson's first contact with India's spiritual literature came in 1818 when as a student at Harvard, he read some writings of Raja Ram Mohan Roy. By 1836 he read William Jones 'Code of Manu' and Wilkin's 'Bhagavat Gita'. and subsequently the Vishnu Purana and the Kathopanishad. The impact of all this was first seen in his poem 'Hamatreya'. His renowned poem (1856) however is 'Brahma', the first stanza of which reads as under: 

" If the red slayer thinks he slays or if the slain think he is slain
they know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Henry David Thoreau, read a great deal more of India's sacred literature than Emerson. His book 'Walden Pond' emphasizes the need to live in harmony with nature. His book on 'Civil Disobedience', justifying non payment of taxes and undergoing imprisonment to oppose slavery, impressed Gandhi deeply. 

Walt Whitman, led to Indian Philosophy by Thoreau, got deeply interested in Advaita. He often referred to the "real me" in his writings. The opening and closing lines of his best known work, 'Passage to India", read as under:
"Passage O soul to India!
Eclairicise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.
Passage to India, cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man…… 
On one side China and on the other side Persia and Arabia
To the south the great seas and the Bay of Bengal,
The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions castes,
Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender and junior Buddha…

Passage to more than India!
Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where no mariner has yet dared to go
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all."

Col. Henry S. Olcott, reared in a puritan Christian family, late in life became a Buddhist. In 1875, in collaboration with Madame H. P. Blavatsky, a Russian emigre, he set up the Theosophical society in New York. This society brought together many strands of religious and spiritual wisdom as also nationalities. Its hallmark was tolerance. non violence and spiritual growth. It was Mrs. Annie Besant, Col. Olcott's successor as the Society's President, who moved its headquarters to Madras.

Mohandas K Gandhi, with his innovative Truth and non violence 'satyagraha' strategy, first against racial injustice in South Africa and then against British Colonialism and social injustices in India, gave non violence a new potency and status. The eminent psychologist Eric Ericson has aptly described it as "militant non violence". Its successes came to world attention mainly through news reports in the New York Times, which after the 1930 Salt March editorialized that "Whereas Britain lost America on Tea, it was losing India on Salt." Time Magazine put Gandhi on the front cover of its January 5th 1931 issue as its 'Man of the Year'. The historian Will Durant wrote "China followed Sun Yat Sen, took up the sword and fell into the arms of Japan. India, weaponless, accepted as her leader one of the strangest figures in history, and gave to the world the unprecedented phenomenon of a revolution led by a saint, and waged without a gun". 

In Russia the famed novelist Count Leo Tolstoy, who had started life as a soldier and fought first in the Crimean War and then in Chechenya, later turned to the gospel of Love and Non Violence, which he affirmed the Russian Church had abandoned. He wrote much about this and was excommunicated for it. He followed Gandhi's non-violent struggle in South Africa with great interest, and a few days before his death in 1909 wrote to him "I have received your letter and your book 'Indian Home Rule'. I read your book with great interest because I think that the question you treat in it - passive resistance - is a question of the greatest importance not only for India but for whole humanity." 

Martin Luther King was won over to Gandhi's satyagraha strategy in 1956 after hearing a speech by Dr Mordecai Johnson, President of Howard University. He came to India in 1959 to learn first hand from Gandhi's disciples how non- violent resistance was planned and implemented. On his return to the US he wrote "I left India more convinced than ever before that non - violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom." 

It was in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1961 that King first tried out 'satyagraha' in his struggle for racial equality. Using it consistently thereafter he brought about more beneficial change for American blacks in eight years of non-violent struggle, than had taken place in the hundred years after the Civil