The ‘Priming’ of the West for ‘Engaged Buddhism’ – Indian Beginnings

Having now examined the history of Indian Buddhism (especially in its first millenium - c. 400 BCE to c. 600 CE) over the last thirty odd posts, the next several posts including this one will outline how the West came to know Buddhist history and philosophy and what Western thinkers (influenced by a Western history of thought as they have been and are) have made and continue to make of them.

The interest in Buddhism in the West begins with the economic, military, social and political invasion of India by the British in the 17^th Century but the route was somewhat circuitous. As so often, the ideas of the invader are often as influenced by the very indigenous ideas the invaders imagine themselves to be influencing. It’s about what ideas work and information is somewhat inevitably a two-way process. Let’s take a tour of that route.

The English had no knowledge at all of Buddhism at first. They formally wrested power from the Mughal Empire in 1765 and initially roughly the area of Bengal was the main area of British control and interest. This area extended from the Mughal capital Delhi to the east coast at Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was essentially the lower Ganges Valley and surrounds. As they sought to rule this area, they sought to understand its laws and customs and for this purpose in part they employed translators of Sanskrit. Indians generally had up until this time considered the language too sacred to translate for European interlopers so naturally British and other European linguists were employed for the purpose, principally the brilliant linguist, and competent lawyer, William Jones.

Jones had become a lawyer for the sole purpose of seeing service in India and learning its languages. He appears to have had a good knowledge of virtually all European languages and some Classical and ancient languages as well as at least Arabic and Persian and to have also started to learn the Chinese writing system at an early age.

Jones was the first European to learn Sanskrit (at first officially, so that he could read the Hindu law books). As a pioneer linguist, an expert in comparative linguistics and (by virtue of his work in India) the father of philology, he was quick to form a view of Sanskrit as related to many European languages and as belonging to a family of ‘Indo-European’ languages all with a common antecedent language relatively close to Sanskrit. He is also regarded today as a pioneer in the study of religion and comparative religion and culture. He set up the Asiatic Society of Bengal for the study of more Indian texts and is thereby also known today as the father of Indology. The Victorian German Indologist (and Oxford don of Sanskrit) Max Müller may arguable share some of these distinctions (especially with regard to paternity of the academic disciplines of comparative religion and Indology).

Jones famously regarded Sanskrit as a superior language in various ways to both of the then-revered languages of Classical Greek and Latin (“more perfect than Greek” and “more copious than Latin”, he said) and this idea proved quite revolutionary for many. The usual awe felt concerning the idealised Classical underpinnings of Western culture and even concerning ideas of European ‘exceptionalism’ and superiority were significantly diminished by Jones's work.

Schopenhauer, for one, certainly thought the discovery of Indian texts would be as influential in the West as the rediscovery of Classical texts there had been. He predicted a new Renaissance would be provoked (the old one had been essentially provoked firstly in Florence in the 14^th and 15^th Centuries by the rediscovery by Europeans of the works of Plato and Aristotle, of Classical literature more generally and of hermetic Egyptian works that themselves drew on Classical learning (partly due to the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans and partly due to Moorish sharing in (and their progressive withdrawal from) what is now Spain and Portugal)). It may be yet still to get underway even today.

Jones’s revelations, in particular, did spark serious European intellectual interest in Asia beyond mere interest in language but only later in Buddhism. His 18^th Century work revealing the religious thought of India, which in fact paid scant regard to Buddhism, is regarded in part as having inspired the 19^th Century Romantic movements that would be re-inspired by later interest in Buddhism. Romanticism as a fully formed viewpoint based on Indian ideas can be seen as derived from the philosophy of the brothers Schlegel from Germany, both earnest students of Sanskrit (the word for the movement was actually also coined by one of the brothers). They saw India as a great originator and a more spiritual and less empirical civilisation than the West’s. Despite their great interest in and idealisation of India, neither of the Schlegels ever visited it, however. Had they done so, they may have developed a perhaps more realistic view of it.

The Romantics loved India and held it up to Europe as a paragon. Their problems with the European way included its scientific method, its materialist philosophy and its Industrial Revolution (recall the “dark satanic mills” of Blake, an English Romantic poet) and they saw India as a nation living closer to their ideal. Other notable Romantics include Beethoven, Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth. They saw progress as a more complex animal that the mere utilitarian advancement of science, technology and material prosperity and their opponents as the Liberal and Enlightenment thinking that had recently come into fashion.

Romantics questioned both European empiricism and rationality (read Greek logic) as reliable bedrock and unalienable principles of any truly sane civilisation. Expressions like “the white man’s burden” and “mission civilisatrice” and colonialism generally are imbued with their urgency from those ‘progressive’ ideals that Romantics sought to question. In today's post-colonial, 'post modern' and warming world these ideas are beginning to gather more converts than they may have even among the formerly ‘enlightened’ thinkers of the 19th Century. One can certainly see Romantic ideas in the roots of later non-violence and environmental movements.

What remained after the removal of empiricism and logic (and which they valued more) was imagination, ‘intuition’ and the ‘divine’ within as also expressed in nature in its ‘wild’ state. These ideas inspired Freud’s idea of accessing the sub-conscious via psychoanalysis. The US ‘wilderness appreciation’ and ‘national parks’ movements of the late 19^th Century were early expressions of Romantic ideas that have ongoing effects today as the seeds of modern environmentalism.

Religion (and the psyche for Freudians) was to be experienced in the here-and-now rather than studied to within an inch of its life (albeit that Jones, while inspiring Romantics, had also instigated this study). 'Nature' became an idol of a sort. This ideal of inner searching corresponded almost exactly with the Indian way that I’ve been exploring throughout these posts including the earliest Buddhist way.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a noted 18^th Century and early 19^th Century Protestant thinker (considered the father of holistic hermeneutics) wrote the engaging On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers in an attempt to explain the meaning of this Romantic idea of the eternal moment derived partly, as I’ve said, from Jones’s 18^th Century work. Schleiermacher wrote: “it is to have a sense and taste for the infinite, to lie in the bosom of the universe and feel its boundless life and creative power within your own.” And Blake wrote, in Auguries of Innocence, “To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour” and, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the door of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” And how about this from William Wordsworth: “... a sense sublime, Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man” from Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye (published in 1798).

Imagination and internal searching were required both for the creation of and apprehension of this infinity. Less condescension to other ‘races’ than the other main strand of European thought, that of the Enlightenment, was inherent in this way of thinking concerning the paramountcy of thought itself over revealed doctrine (whether religious or scientific).

Truth was now an infinite subjectivity and not about control, for Romantics (as for Buddhists, I might argue, though Romantics did not yet know it). Mother Nature was thus not like a woman who, in the patriarchal and sexist way of Enlightenment thought, was seen as slowly yielding her secrets under the pressure of men of science (pressing in order that they might control her - Edward Said suggested that the Orient and ‘Orientals’ were viewed in the same way).

Only science and logic were limited and finite and therefore unable to comprehend, much less control, this infinity. Romanticism thus prefigures the ideas of Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh and others that control cannot be hoped to be achieved if it is even possible at all without first giving up control (in the limited rational and logical sense).