Such was, indeed, the purpose of British missionaries in Sri Lanka a little more
than a century later. Men like Benjamin Clough studied Pāli and wrote grammars,
together with lengthy word lists based upon indigenous dictionaries.5 If the original
intention was to learn the language so that the religion it supported might be demolished,
we may suspect that familiarity begat not contempt but affection, and translations of the
Pāli texts, e.g. the Dhammapada, which those missionaries produced did more to make
English readers want to learn more about Buddhism than to convert the followers of
Buddhism to Christianity. In fact the impact of Buddhism upon nineteenth-century
Britain reveals a very varied response, well depicted recently by Philip Almond.6