Discovering and Appropriating the Buddha: Scholarly Studies of the so-Called Southern Buddhism in Nineteenth Century Europe
In: Learning from the West, Learning from the East: The Emergence of the Study of Buddhism in Japan and Europe before 1900Search for other papers by Martin Baumann in
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Abstract
The chapter points at main developments in the increase of knowledge about Buddhism in Europe during the nineteenth century. It reconstructs the encounters with Buddhism which led to detailed presentations of the Buddha and his teachings between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. While these studies relied on Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Sanskrit texts and did not pay much attention to the Buddhist traditions in South Asia, a shift of attention towards the texts of the Pāli canon was observable from the 1880s onwards. Key figures responsible for this shift were Robert Spence Hardy, Thomas Rhys Davids, and Hermann Oldenberg. Buddhist monks in South Asia, however, did not only play a passive role, but followed their own interests and agenda. While the interests of European civil servants, missionaries, and scholars of the Buddhist religion ranged from facilitating British colonial administration to uncovering the true and inspiring biography of Gotama, Asian Buddhists strove to acquire a voice in nineteenth century global discourse and to reassert their authority on Buddhism. The contribution emphasises that European scholars made Buddhism an object of academic pursuit with biased interpretations while Buddhists in South Asia appropriated, reinterpreted, and used some of these interpretations to advance their own interests and agendas.