The Intellectual Traveler’s Guide

Where Ideas
Begin

A scholar’s private briefing on Eastern India — the place where a 2,500-year-old argument about suffering, meaning, and freedom first took shape.

  • Scholar-Led Walk each site with the scholar who has spent a career studying it.
  • Since 1983 Four decades of serious, scholar-led cultural travel.
  • Small Groups An unhurried pace, room for real questions.

Field Guide — Eastern India

Where Ideas Begin: An Insider's Guide to Eastern India — Far Horizons field guide cover
A field briefing on Eastern India, written around the scholarship that leads the journey.

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The Field Briefing

What's Inside

  • Why the tree at Bodh Gaya is an argument, not a shrine — and what it argues.
  • The 6th-century-BCE counterculture that made Buddhism inevitable.
  • Nalanda: 10,000 students, 2,000 teachers, and ideas that outlived the burning.
  • The Diamond Triangle — lost for a thousand years, dug back into daylight in 1958.
  • How Buddhism vanished from the land that made it — and why 1956 brought it back as protest.
  • A site-by-site orientation to Dr. Eckel’s January 2027 route.

Why Choose Far Horizons?

Your scholar: Dr. Malcolm David Eckel

Dr. Malcolm David Eckel is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Boston University, where he taught Buddhist studies, comparative religion, and the religions of Asia for decades. He holds a BA from Harvard, studied Religion and Sanskrit at Oxford, and completed his PhD in comparative religion at Harvard with a focus on the Buddhist traditions of South Asia. His lectures on Buddhism for The Great Courses have introduced hundreds of thousands of listeners to this tradition, and his three books range from the accessible to the deeply technical — evidence of a scholar equally at home in a seminar and in conversation.

Far Horizons, since 1983

Every Far Horizons journey is built around a single idea: a place opens up differently when the person beside you has spent a career studying it. Our groups stay small — never a raised umbrella through a crowd — so the pace stays unhurried and there's room for the questions that only occur to you once you're standing there. This is what four decades of scholar-led travel looks like in practice.

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