This room opens with Paul Ambroise Bigandet's The Life or Legend of Gaudama, the Buddha of the Burmese, in its fourth edition of 1911–1912. The two volumes give a Burmese life of the Buddha, from the previous existences and birth of Phralaong through the enlightenment, the preaching and the death, to the councils that followed. Bigandet sets beside it his own annotations, an abstract of birth stories, a treatise on the Ways to Neibban (nirvāṇa), and a notice on the phongyies, the monks of Burma.

Bigandet was a French Catholic missionary bishop, and his notes often measure Buddhism against Christian doctrine. Read the Burmese narrative for itself and the notes as nineteenth-century missionary scholarship. The book's names are Burmese forms, so look for Gaudama for Gotama, Neibban for Nibbāna, and Nats for the devas.