There are not many people who can be said to have done something first. To Xanthus of Lydia belongs the distinction of being the first person on record to write in Greek about Zoroaster and aspects of Iranian religion. Not a Greek but writing in Greek, and living in the country that still joins Asia and Europe, he was to play an exemplary role in presenting details of an eastern religion directly to a western audience.

Any researcher into the pre-modern history of India inevitably faces the problem of source material, and the creative genius of medieval Indians furnishes us with a wide range of sources; innumerable files of original documents, multi-volumed chronicles, bulky treatises, etc. A great number of travelogues enables us to view medieval India through the eyes of visitors from all parts of the globe. The source to be analysed in this article will hardly stand comparison with the above-mentioned materials. It is a biography of an insignificant man, a family history of modest middle-class people unconnected with court intrigues and political battles. And the title of the book is anything but serious. Ardhakathanaka means “Half a Tale”. The author, a Jain merchant named Banarasi Das, completed it in 1641, being fifty-five at that time; the ideal life span of the great Jain sages was believed to be one hundred and ten years. Thus Banarasi, who harboured no ambitions to equal the great sages, titled his autobiography “Haifa Tale”, displaying a somewhat bitter humour (he died shortly after completing the book).

Anyone familiar with classical Japanese literature cannot but be struck by the rich array of terms such as mono no aware, yugen, wabi and sabi, to mention just a few, which are regarded as being central to the understanding of Japanese artistic theory and practice. These categories were not, of course, essentialist and unchanging. They were dynamic concepts which were subject to major transformations. These transformations illuminate important aspects of Japan's cultural history.