Nancy Gettelman made her first trip to India, Nepal and Sikkim during the time she was the Foreign Student Counselor at Marquette University at Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Many of the foreign students, hearing of her travel plans, invited her to visit families, which afforded her first-hand experience with their familial and religious customs.

She was also fortunate to meet at Marquette several visiting Canadian Jesuits who taught in the Himalayan areas of Nepal, Darjeeling and Bhutan. Later, it was they who made it possible for her meet people and visits places in her Asian journeys which otherwise would have been out of reach.

In 1965 she had a private audience with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, and in Sikkim she was a guest of the lake Chogyul and Hope Cooke in the Palace at Gangtok.  In 1969 she and three others in a small group were the first western women ever in Eastern Bhutan.

Intrigued by everything she had seen, Gettelman decided in 1970 to commence the study of Tibetan Buddhism at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  She received an advanced degree in 1973 from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, having studied under the Tibetan Lama, Geshe Lhondrup Sopa.

In 1986 she traveled to Lhasa and back from Kathmandu, after which she felt ready to write this book.  She shares the knowledge she gathered along with many photographs, a number of which are historically significant because of the rapid changes taking place n that formerly little-known part of the world.

This book is intended to be an easily read and understood explanation of the birth of Buddhism in India and how it spread to the Himalayan Kingdoms of Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan.

Gettelman has an active career in writing and has published fiction as well as many scholarly articles in the United States and Nepal.