Ideas related to the Buddha and his legacy started reaching the West sporadically, in fragments, around the 13th and 14th centuries. Marco Polo, the famous Venetian merchant and traveller who stayed in China between 1275 and 1291, produced a reasonably detailed account of the life of the Buddha. With the greater movement of the merchants and missionaries of the West, ethnographic accounts about Buddhist beliefs and practices in different Asian nations began to be written 16th century onwards. This continued over the next two centuries, but India was still not the focus. This was despite the fact that some European travellers had visited sites like the rock-cut caves of Kanheri. These travellers were unable to discern the nature of the monuments, not to mention their Buddhist connections.
Most stupas and monasteries were dilapidated, abandoned, buried under subsequent habitations or appropriated by other religions and local faiths. Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, for instance, had been a flourishing Buddhist centre (as attested by the records of Xuanzang), but the presence of the Buddha’s statues inside later Hindu temples suggests that the Buddha was assimilated into Hinduism. Similarly, parts of rock-cut Buddhist monasteries in the western Deccan, such as those at Junnar and Nashik, had begun to be used as shrines for local deities. In addition, Brahmans and pandits, the main informants of Indian culture for the early Europeans, were either antagonistic to the Buddha or understood religious practices associated with him as a part of Hindu worship, or the Vaishnavite tradition, where he was seen as an avatar of Lord Vishnu. However, Brahman intellectuals and other champions or practitioners of the Vedic and Puranic religions had continued to redefine and imagine themselves in relation to the Buddhist past.
The early Europeans were unable to make the connection between the divergent forms of Buddhist practices and the dilapidated ruins in a largely “Hindu” India. The documents, reports and ethnographic accounts prepared by missionaries, travellers, merchants and diplomats did not have any substantive impact on the understanding of Buddhism in the West. A systematic engagement with Buddhism developed in the West only around the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which manifested in an obsessive engagement with the core Buddhist texts. This period also witnessed the emergence of greater European and colonial interest in India’s ancient past. There was an added reason, too.
Post the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, there was a progressive demand in the United Kingdom and Europe for sources of raw material and a market for manufactured goods, since their own markets were saturating. Gradually, this resulted in a scramble for colonies. European trading companies, which made colonial forays into India, soon began to make political inroads. As India became more integrated with Europe, there was a growing curiosity about India’s past. Initially, this interest was fuelled through the growing academic fascination for India’s religions and classical texts, and the romantic charm of the ruins. Later, India became the focus of strategic colonial interests, which drew support from emerging ideas and disciplines like social Darwinism, archaeology and anthropology.
It was not as if there was an instant fascination for Buddhism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In fact, in the early encounters, there were more questions than answers. Was the Buddha a mythical figure like the gods of Greece, Egypt or India? Or was he a human being? Were there two Buddhas – one, the founder of Buddhism (as referred to by the Hindus), the second, a later reformer? Was the Buddha born in Africa, Persia, Mongolia or India? Was Buddhism older than Brahmanism? It was also around this time that the word “Buddhism” first began to be used in journals and publications in England.
Europe’s engagement with the figure of the Buddha evolved over time. In the first phase, Buddhism came to be seen more as a phenomenon geographically and culturally experienced in the East, or the “Orient” – it was seen as the “other”. Gradually, such curiosities and questions began to settle down. Around the mid-19th century, the idea of a historical Buddha began to gain ground. He began to be seen as a human being. He was as human as Jesus, Mohammad or Luther. Further, the Buddha’s teachings or philosophy, it was held, could only be understood through the texts. Here, the Europeans deployed their traditional knowledge framework – classical texts were the only objects for studying ancient histories, religions and philosophies.
In the initial phase, there was an overt focus on Sanskrit texts as opposed to Pali, in which the bulk of the early Buddhist tradition was recorded. Sanskrit, as discussed earlier, became popular with the ascendancy of the Mahayana tradition. When such ancient texts were read together with the diverse ethnographic accounts of the beliefs of Futo, Hotoke (Japan), Sangay, Bodo, Booddhu, or Bauddha – as Buddhist practices were known in different parts of Asia – the seemingly divergent styles of worship started appearing as those belonging to the same religious tradition that had its origins in ancient India.8 The dust that had gathered over the Buddha’s legacy and diverse Buddhist traditions was beginning to clear. The dots began to show a connection. It was in this context that Eugène Burnouf (1801–52) wrote the first comprehensive study of ancient Indian Buddhism in 1844, using the Sanskrit manuscripts procured from Nepal. The study was able to underscore that Buddhist texts from Tibet and China were translations of Sanskrit texts from India.
By the middle of the 19th century, large collections of Buddhist texts and manuscripts had become available in libraries and institutions of the West. Buddhism, as PC Almond says, had become “a textual object defined, classified and interpreted through its own textuality.” This process of textualisation was also controlled and regulated by the West. Towards the end of the century, such collections grew bigger, especially with the addition of Pali texts. The study of Buddhist manuscripts in Pali began more systematically after the establishment of the Pali Text Society by TW Rhys Davids in 1881.
More textual studies meant more constructions of the Buddha and Buddhism. Gradually, the Buddha came to seen as a social reformer who challenged the authority of the Brahman priests and Vedic Hinduism based on rituals and sacrifices. The Christian missionaries started becoming more sympathetic to what came across as a humane and compassionate Buddha, whose teachings placed greater emphasis on the equality of human beings. Brahmanical Hinduism, on the other hand, came to be depicted as discriminatory and based on privileges and inequalities. A distinction began to be drawn between pure or authentic Buddhism, as taught by the Buddha and his close disciples, and the corrupt later Buddhist traditions and forms of worship.
Excerpted with permission from Casting the Buddha, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Pan Macmillan India.
