The finale of the book is a play set in India. A French intellectual, an anthropologist, uses the relics he sees in museums and archeological sites to explain the state of Western Europe. Everywhere he looks, he sees the lost union of West and East, the ancient Graeco-Buddhist world that could have been.

At Taxila he begins a meditation on the layers of history beneath his feet. Like Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, this is a site where the relics an ancient cultural plurality contrasts harshly with what was, in 1950, the emerging reality of the post-colonial Hindu and Moslem states. He uses the occasion to question whether Christianity, which absorbed the Graeco-Roman world, and Islam, which displaced Buddhism, should ever have come into existence.

If this heresy had been written fifty years later, it might have generated death threats for the author. But as completely as he eviscerates the value of Islamic civilization, he quickly confesses that he is not really talking about Islam. He is talking about the West. “I rediscovered in Islam the world I myself had come from; Islam is the West of the East. Or, to be more precise, I had to have experience of Islam in order to appreciate the danger which today threatens French thought.”^[26] This is the danger of a world that believes only in its own formal logic without recognizing that “the universe is no longer made up of the entities about which we are talking.”^[26] He is condemning the tendency towards intolerance present in Islam. He could be condemning Christian fundamentalism and we can remember the sympathy he expressed for the Brazilian Indians who murdered their intolerant Protestant missionaries in the second act. His meditation on the cultures of the Old World never mentions Judaism and does not explore the varieties of Christian or Islamic thought. He speaks of Christian, Moslem and Buddhist civilizations as if they were a set of structural relationships.

He is writing about India, but he is talking about the failure of the West. His arguments are both historical and ahistorical. If Islamism had not come into being, if the Spanish had not expelled it and then destroyed the Aztec and Inca states, if the Portuguese had not decimated the native of Brazil, the world would be a different place.

In much the same way he found the easy social balance of the Bororo men’s house to be an antidote for his uninspiring spiritual past in act two, in the conclusion of act three Levi-Strauss finds a profound solace in the Buddhism that observes in a Mogh village in what is today the Bangladesh-Burmese border. As the book ends, he is scrambling up a muddy hill to enter a modest community monastery. In sharp contrast to his description of other forms of contemporary religion, Lévi-Strauss finds beauty, humanity and profound logic in the village temple he has been invited to enter.