From another review of the new book, "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World," by Pankaj Mishra (appearing in the latest New York Review):

"Perhaps the central figure among such thinkers is Nietzsche, who saw early on that the fading of the Christian god might propel people toward a rational philosopher from the East who proposed a struggle against suffering rather than a struggle against sin. Buddhism, for Nietzsche, 'is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity - it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems of its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept 'God' is already abolished by the time it arrives."

Methinks Nietzsche was a little too optimistic about the West rejecting superstition and embracing rational thought as the basis of their spiritual seeking.

More interesting stuff from the same review:

"The Buddha, though entirely Eastern by origin, provides an example, in fact, of the very qualities that Mishra has long admired in the West: reason, rigor and the power of the mind (Buddhism can more easily be called a highly empirical 'science of mind" than a religion)."

...

"It is central to Mishra's story that we owe the rescue of the Buddha from complete obscurity to Europeans: it was Europeans, he tells us, who invented the very word 'Buddhism' around 1820 ... and it was European amateurs who worked hard to recover texts that had been lost ..."

It is fascinating to contemplate how Western admirers unearthed and promoted the Buddhism that many of us now find so attractive in the West.