The ‘Discovery’ of Buddhism

When Buddhism was first ‘discovered’ in China (by Europeans), it was thought to possibly be indigenous. Works of Indian Buddhism weren’t discovered by Europeans until around the 1820s. When Europeans finally discovered Buddhism, it also took some time to dawn on them that Siddhartha was an actual historical figure. It was discovered soon after the great predictions of Schopenhauer that I mentioned in the last post and almost immediately had a significant impact in the US.

When, in the 19^th Century, the wealthy Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend and protégé, the creative Henry David Thoreau, led a Romantic movement in the US called the New England Transcendentalists they could by then draw on Buddhism as one of the Indian viewpoints that were then so in vogue among Romantic movements. They firstly rejected in a rather Sramana and Buddhist style the American idea that it was somehow virtuous to be wealthy. Their main direct influence, though, was a translation by Jones from the Sanskrit of The Laws of Manu (not a Buddhist work).

Thoreau in particular enjoyed the wilderness and is also linked to the so-called 'National Parks movement' that led (as a first major success) to the establishment of Yellowstone National Park as the first National Park. He is possibly the most cited writer of all time due to his many talents and has inspired many a scholar to study Sanskrit (because it interested him). The Transcendentalists produced the first translation of the Lotus Sutra into English, which was, of course, a famous Buddhist work (along with being the first to translate various Hindu texts).

While it was not seen by Romantics as proper to control the East (as the Eastern ideas themselves revealed), the East certainly was still considered ‘the Other’ and examined especially with a view to what Eastern ideas could do for the West (perhaps not surprisingly still the most important thing from the point of view of the Westerners). It was a potential source for Western spiritual re-birth. The idea of what came to be called the Perennial Philosophy school was that perhaps India still possessed a key to universal truths possibly once also held in the West.

In a time of French interest in the Indian subcontinent inspired by the work of Baron Admiral Guy-Victor Duperré, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron searched for the ancient works of Zoroastrianism in this connection (and found the ancient Hindu Upanishad scriptures translated from the Sanskrit into Persian instead, which he, in turn, translated into Latin). His work was the origin of the theosophy movement begun by Perennial Philosophers, Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, who later professed to be Buddhists. I will discuss their link to Gandhi and thus to “Engaged Buddhism” in the next post.

So the West has been primed by the important Romantic movements of the last two centuries to have a special interest in Sanskrit writings and Buddhism (“Engaged Buddhism” at that). The activist movements of the 1960s (including the “Engaged Buddhists” and others that I consider in the next posts) that continue to have influence today were clearly sympathetic to these earlier movements. Thus, a long history of cultural ‘priming’ is potentially ready to yet bear more fruit.