"Colonial Counterflow: Romanticism Encounters Buddhism"
“Buddhism is the only really positivistic religion history has to show us . . . it no longer
speaks of the ‘struggle against sin,’ but, quite in accordance with actuality, ‘the struggle
against suffering.’ It already has . . . the self-deception of moral concepts behind it—it
stands, in my language, beyond good and evil.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ)
Nietzsche makes this pronouncement on Buddhism (in the latter half of 1888)
approximately 500 years after the first recorded European encounter with Buddhist
cultures and texts. Yet the critical discernment of a fully differentiated category termed
“Buddhism”—a difference emerging from the translation of tantra and sutra texts into
German, English French and other European languages—was a relatively recent
development for Nietzsche. Of course, Nietzsche followed his mentor Arthur
Schopenhauer in this recognition that with Buddhism “Never has myth come closer to the
truth, nor will it,”1 and both philosophers followed Friedrich Schlegel’s clarion call for a
reorientation of the critical gaze, since “In the Orient we must seek the highest
Romanticism” (Batchelor 252). Strangely, during 500 years of encounter, as the
geopolitical machinery of colonialism moved East, a counter-colonial flow of
philosophical texts was established, particularly during the 18th Century, yet the laudatory
comments offered Buddhism at the end of the 19th Century would have horrified those
Europeans at the vanguard of encounter, who saw Buddhism as “vulgar idolatry”
(Batchelor 171).
Initially (and not unexpectedly), religious intrigue brought the first report of
Buddhism to the European geopolitical gaze, when the Franciscan friar William of
Rubruck traveled to the Mongolian capital of Katakoram in 1254. Friar William hoped to
persuade Möngke Khan (at the time, one of the world’s most powerful leaders) to convert
1
The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2.
to Christianity. Upon his arrival, Friar William learned that other religions had sent
emissaries for similar reasons, including representatives of the future “buddhocratic state
of Tibet” (as proclaimed by Kublai Khan in 1260 [Batchelor 83]).2 After only eight
months, Friar William was expelled from the capital and offered, upon his return, the first
eyewitness report on Buddhism to reach Europe. Secondary encounters, like the arrival of
Francis Xavier in Japan at mid-16th Century, aligned political and religious forces, yet
sufficient links could be found for Xavier to mistake “Buddhism [for] a modified form of
Christianity” (Batchelor 167). However, in Stephen Batchelor’s insightful words, “the
task of confronting the idolators of Asia inevitably fell to the Jesuits” (164), whose
linguistic talents positioned them at the nexus of literal and symbolic concerns. As a
result, most reports before the 18th Century remain sequestered in, among other places,
the Vatican Library. When Xavier died awaiting entry to China in 1552, the linguistically
talented Matteo Ricci inherited the Jesuit mission in the East, and it is through his
analyses of Buddhist texts that the European view of Buddhism settled into hostility.
After all, from the Church’s point of view, “there could be no question of any dialogue
with Buddhists as equals for the simple reason that truth could never be balanced against
error” (Batchelor 175).
The hostile phase of encounter ebbed during the 18th Century, when “three
interconnected factors” fully differentiated various Eastern religions and gave rise to the
concept we term “Buddhism” (Batchelor 231): 1) the emergence of enlightenment
epistemology; 2) the decline in religious authority, and 3) the consolidation of colonial
endeavors in the East. As well, the close of the century brought into translation through
“In 1253 Sakya Pandita’s nephew Pakpa . . . became the religious preceptor of Qubilai Khan,” resulting in
the establishment of Buddocratic state in Tibet. John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (New
2
the burgeoning “Orientalist” movement, an impressive range of Buddhist texts, including
the Diamond Sutra. Three figures played a crucial role in the European reception of a
multi-vectored Buddhism at the beginning of the 19th Century. The Hungarian Csoma de
Körös traveled extensively in northern India under the auspices of the British government
and created a Tibetan grammar and a Tibetan-English Dictionary in 1828. However,
when he sought to cap twenty years of study by traveling to Lhasa, he died in the
Himalayan foothills in April 1842. The second crucial figure in the construction of
European Buddhism during the Romantic period was the British administrator Brian
Houghton Hodgson, who arrived in India in 1818 and settled in Kathmandu in 1824.
Although Hodgson’s primary aim was to impose colonial order on the cultural wilderness
of the Himalayan region, he inadvertently provided Europe with a steady flow of
Buddhist texts. When 88 volumes and manuscripts of Sanskrit texts arrived in Paris in
1837, they entered the hands of the third major figure in the European construction of
Buddhism, the brilliant French philologist Eugène Burnouf. Burnouf’s first translation
efforts were the Lotus Sutra, and by 1844 he had written a history of Buddhism in India.3
With Burnouf’s history, which relied almost entirely on unknown Sanskrit, Pali, and
Tibetan writings, a thoroughly rational view of Buddhism was achieved within Europe
for the first time.
Upon this newly established textual basis, by mid-century, the French journal Le
Correspondant could “admire with what speed” that knowledge of “Buddhism has
emerged from its profound obscurity and long silence” (Batchelor 242). Once French and
English translations of Buddhist texts were widely disseminated, the philosophical
York: Snow Lion, 1995), p. 140.
3
L’Introduction à l’historie du buddhisme indien (Paris 1844).
contemplation of it relative to European epistemologies was ignited, leading to the
pronouncements of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche with which this discussion began. Of
course, as today’s papers suggest, this brief mapping of the trajectory of Europe’s
encounter with Buddhism has only brought our discussion into the 19th Century, and the
threads of this counter-colonial flow of translated texts only provides partial elaboration
of a complex process.
Although Buddhism currently enjoys wide success in the west—undergoing a
typical, even inevitable process of commodification as it adapts to (and is adopted by)
late capital postmodern culture—the critical examination of Buddhism within Romantic
thought and writing has been only intermittently pursued by scholars. While considerable
critical attention has been paid to “Orientalist” projects and processes during the 1990s,4
most discussions of Orientalism have tended to focus on other aspects, even other
regions, of encounter, although this has not been the case for the American
Transcendentalist movement generally and Emerson and Thoreau in particular. To this
end, today’s panel is designed to re-focus attention on the impact that the colonial
counter-flow of Buddhist texts exerted on the governing epistemologies of Europe and
America.
Consider, for example, Nigel Leask’s British Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge 1992) or the
essay collection Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East (1998).
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