The fate of Indian Buddhism was not totally dependent on royal patronage. Buddhism had to devise ways to attract patronage from many segments of society, which forced it to enter into complex interactions with social institutions and processes. In that sense, it was never asocial. It had a complex social history. Papers in the present book hope to explore some aspects of the social history of Buddhism in some parts of early historic and early medieval India: western Deccan, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar, Bengal and Odisha.