After finishing his MA, Kashyap, desiring to doctoral work in Buddhist philosophy, was advised to study Pāli, and so resolved to go to Sri Lanka, to his parents' dismay.
In 1936 he returned to Sri Lanka to spend time in a forest hermitage to practice meditation, which was quite unusual for a bhikkhu in his day, so much so that his teachers tried to dissuade him.
Towards the end of 1936 he returned to India and in 1937 settled at Sarnath where he was involved in scholarly and translating work, principally of the Pāli Canon into Hindi.
While in Sarnath he also worked for Benares Hindu University to offer courses in Pāli - even occasionally walking the 22-mile journey into Varanasi.
Sangharakshita went on to found the Western Buddhist Order in 1968, and considers Kashyap to have been an important teacher in both the spiritual and secular senses.
For the first time in many centuries the villages in Magadha saw a yellow robed bhikkhu, and were pleasantly surprised to find that he spoke their local dialect Magadhi.
Later, when the Bihar state government decided to start an institute for Pāli studies at Nalanda, he was the obvious choice to head the project.
As part of the celebrations, Kashyap's work of bringing out a Devanagari edition of the Pāli Canon was accepted as an official project, and was jointly sponsored by the governments of Bihar and India.
The first volume appeared in 1956 on the occasion of the Buddha Jayanti, and the rest followed over five years - guided to completion with enormous effort and marathon labour by Kashyap.
Having earlier developed diabetes, he became seriously ill in 1974 and spent his last two years bedridden in the Japanese temple in Rajgir, from where he could see the Vulture Peak and the newly constructed Peace Pagoda.