Search for ‘Eliot Weinberger’ (1 article found)

In Kathmandu, Brian Houghton Hodgson was stranded for years with little to do for his employer, the East India Company, and passed the time collecting ornithological specimens for the British Museum and Buddhist scriptures. The original, Sanskrit versions of Buddhist texts had been lost in India, and were only known to exist in translations into Chinese, Tibetan, Pāli, Mongolian and other languages. Hodgson had found them among the Newars, a Buddhist community in otherwise Hindu Nepal. Many of the books he sent to Eugène Burnouf in Paris. Burnouf, a professor who never visited Asia and never met a Buddhist, had moved from his studies of Avestan, the sacred language of the Zoroastrians, to Sanskrit, having caught from German Romanticism the fever of the time: a passionate belief that, as the study of Greek and Roman antiquity had brought on the Renaissance, so the knowledge of India would transform modern times.

Burnouf was the greatest Sanskrit scholar of the period, and his translations of the texts Hodgson sent – including the most influential of Buddhist texts, the Lotus Sutra – and his vast Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism were read by Thoreau, Emerson, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner (who left an unfinished ‘Buddhist’ opera at his death), among many others. Burnouf’s Buddha was neither idol nor god, but the teacher of a humanist philosophy which, unlike the Hindu caste system, offered a liberation that was available to all. The original Sanskrit texts offered the clearest views of the Buddha’s own philosophy – in Burnouf’s words, the ‘most ancient, the human Buddhism’. They were, he wrote, ‘of incontestable value for the history of the human spirit’.

It was remarkable how quickly the image of the Buddha had changed. In 1796, Father Paulinus, a Carmelite missionary on the Malabar coast and author of the first European grammar of Sanskrit, had proved that the Buddha was not a man, but the planet Mercury. By the 1840s, the West had more or less the image of the Buddha that we still have today. It was not, however, a complete triumph. Two years after Burnouf’s early death in 1852, H.H. Wilson, the leading scholar of Sanskrit in Britain (director of the Royal Asiatic Society, appointed to the country’s first chair of Sanskrit at Oxford), lectured that the Buddha was a fraud who had never existed, that ‘ignorance and superstition’ are the ‘main props of Buddhism’, but that fortunately it will be ‘overturned’ by the Christian missionaries ‘before whose salutary influence civilisation is extending’. Wilson, almost needless to say, found the admiration of the Buddha typically French.