Part 2 of 2
Buddhism: Philosophical HumanismThe close association of Hardy's interpretation of Buddhism with his professional and political objectives was paralleled by Sir James Emerson Tennent, whose book Christianity in Ceylon also appeared in 1850. Tennent arrived in Ceylon in 1847 as colonial secretary to Governor Torrington. As an administrator, Tennent believed that the British government should honor its treaty obligation, but this did not imply his support for Buddhism, which he was as keen as Hardy to see supplanted. Not only was the government legally bound to honor the treaty, but doing so was a means of avoiding measures that would increase the power of Buddhist groups. If the treaty were severed, he argued, the administration of sangha affairs would most likely pass to a council of Kandyan officials, an unattractive idea for the government as it would create an organized center of power among the Sinhalese. Under the existing arrangement, as Tennent pointed out, the duty of ratifying sangha appointments gave the government some control over the choice of Buddhist leaders. In general, Tennent's views seem consistent with those of Governor Torrington, who advised the Colonial Office in 1849 that the treaty should be upheld if only as a means of avoiding having to legislate on the relationship between Buddhism and the state, which could only serve to strengthen Buddhism. Torrington believed that by returning to the loose obligations of the original treaty, Buddhism would "sink of itself whereas legislation would only perpetuate it."49 Tennent's interpretation of Buddhism consequently offered a response to the missionary agitation for disestablishment, justifying the continuation of government participation in Buddhist affairs and the political expediency of fulfilling the terms of the treaty.
Tennent shared Hardy's assumption of the historical reality of the mortal Gautama, and his opinion that the modern practice was a degeneration from the Founder's original teaching. Tennent's Buddhism was not, however, an idolatrous religion but a system of rational philosophic morality. For Tennent, the idolatry and excesses of Ceylonese practice had less to do with the failings of the teaching or the absence of divine wrath than with the racial inadequacies of the Sinhalese people. "The self reliance which Buddhism inculcates, the exaltation it proclaims, and the perfection of wisdom and virtue which it points to as in the reach of every created being" failed to overcome the "torpid and inanimate genius of the Sinhalese."50 "The Sinhalese are lethargic and slothful to an excess beyond even the extreme of most Southern Asiatics."51 Buddhism itself is a force for good, a rational philosophy: it was "less a form of religion than a school of philosophy," and its worship is "an appeal to reason" rather than a matter of "rites and parade."52 Tennent did not attempt to deny the existence of ritual and image worship in Ceylon but simply to distance them from what he presented Buddhism to be. They were non-Buddhist accretions, the result of the weakness of mind of the people; a perpetuation of Hindu practice introduced by the conquering Hindu kings; features not intrinsic to Buddhism but "associated" with it over time.53
Tennent's association of the corruption of Buddhism with Hinduism, his frequent favorable comparisons of Buddhism against Hinduism, removed the Ceylonese situation from the legal precedent established in India. Tennent began his discussion of Buddhism with the proposition that assumed Buddhist superiority. Buddhism was either the "original doctrine of which Brahmanism became a corruption, or Brahmanism the original and Buddhism an effort to restore it to its pristine purity."54 Buddhism denied the efficacy of ritual, and "salvation is made dependent upon moral qualifications, not upon the practice of ceremonies." Buddhism "utterly disclaimed" the "supremacy of 'caste'"55 and "exhult[s] in the idea of the infinite perfectibility of man, and the achievement of the highest attainable happiness by the practice of every conceivable virtue."56 Buddhism was far from being idolatrous. The Buddha was "in fact a deification of the human intellect."57
The essential features of Tennent's interpretation of Buddhism were that it is a system of ethics consistent with Christianity, that it does not share Hinduism's preoccupation with ritual, that the Buddha is not worshiped as a deity but merely revered as a teacher and guide. For Tennent Buddhism was not an idolatrous system. Consequently Tennent points out that Buddhist ceremonies are "less religious than secular, and that the Perahera in particular, the chief of their annual festivals was introduced not in honour of Buddhu [sic], but as a tribute to the Kandyan kings as patrons and defenders of the faith."58 This is a crucial passage in understanding Tennent's position. The Perahera is the ritual procession of the Tooth Relic, palladium of the state and symbol of the mutually dependent relationship between the ruler and the sangha in Buddhist polity. Participation in the Perahera was the British government's principal and most visible connection with Buddhism and therefore at the center of the intense debate over this relationship. If, as Tennent claimed, the Perahera was a secular ceremony, and one honoring the ruler, there would be no objection to the government's participation. If Buddhism was really a philosophical system rather than a religion, Hardy's argument of the impropriety of a Christian government's connection with a heathen religion was undermined. The state's obligation to verify sangha appointments was not a religious question but an "indisputable civil right" because, Tennent explained, the sangha was "a clergy of reason" and the bhikkhus not priests but "teachers of ethics."59 In 1852 Tennent was instrumental in framing the Colonial Office legislation that was to form the basis of settlement of the treaty problem, because it managed to reassure the Buddhist sangha and at the same time appease the missionaries.
Although Hardy and Tennent differed on points of interpretation vital to the immediate issue of treaty revision, they agreed on the essential features of the construct, the human historical existence of the Buddha, the absence of revelation, the essentially atheistic character of Buddhism, the absence of ritual or worship in "original" Buddhism. The Buddha had been a philosopher who taught an elevated system of ethics and self-reliance. The Buddha's teachings were a reaction against and reform of Brahmanism. Both Hardy and Tennent dismissed as later developments the mythological and soteriological aspects of the Buddhist texts that were the basis of alternative interpretations denying their essential argument of the human historical existence of the Buddha.60
In the four decades from the time of these first publications to the time of the Parliament, a distinctly Western conception of Buddhism was formed and propagated, and because much of the output at this stage depended on existing sources in European languages rather than on new translation, the impact of these early texts was considerable, and supplemented the influence they had through their direct readership. Hardy's Eastern Monachism was an important book for the American Transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott, and therefore in introducing sympathy for Buddhism to America.61 Hardy also made a significant, if less direct contribution to knowledge of Buddhism through Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia (1879), which went through more than thirty official editions in England by 1885. This extended romantic poem, based on the life of the Buddha given in Hardy's Manual of Budhism, did more than any other single book to popularize Buddhism in the West. There were numerous pirated editions in both countries and the book was translated into several other languages. It is estimated to have sold between five hundred thousand and one million copies in the United States alone.62 Many of the other books and articles written on Buddhism between 1850 and 1880, when Rhys Davids's books began to appear, also relied to a considerable extent on Hardy's earlier publications. His interpretation of Buddhism, born of explicit political intent, was basic to the institutionalization of Buddhism, the creation of the construct that constituted the knowledge of Buddhism available to the audience at the World's Parliament of Religions.
Buddhism: Materialist ErrorThe next major work on Buddhism to appear was J. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire's The Buddha and His Religion in 1860, which not only relied on Hardy for its knowledge of Southern Buddhism, but shared his project of using Buddhism to combat the increasing European interest in materialist philosophy.63 For him, as for Hardy, Buddhism demonstrated the inadequacy of materialist philosophy to meet the needs of man.
Interest in materialist philosophy had increased as a consequence of the crisis in religion, the perceived incompatibility between Christianity and the implications of natural science. Christianity in its orthodox form no longer fitted the known facts of the nature of the world and human history. The tensions that had begun to be felt from about 1830 with the publication of works such as Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) and Robert Chambers's Vestiges of Creation (1844) reached a crisis in the third quarter of the century with Comte's Catechism of Popular Religion (1858); Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859); Bishop Colenso's The Pentateuch Examined (1862-63); Ernest Renan's scientific rewriting of the life of Christ, La vie de Jesus (1864); and Darwin's later book, The Descent of Man (1871).
The fundamental issues were, first, the incompatibility of concepts of revelation, divine intervention, and the miracles of Christ with the scientific world view that denied recourse to the supernatural. As Renan observed, "[T]he miracles and messianic prophecies which were formerly the basis of Christian apologetic were now an embarrassment to it."64 Second, theories of evolution and human origin challenged the idea that humans were of a different order of being from the animal world, distinguished from the rest of creation by God's gift of an immortal soul. The denial of the existence of the soul undermined orthodox ethics. Darwin suggested that the social behavior observed among animals might be interpreted as an earlier stage of the social and moral capabilities of man, that morality was also subject to evolutionary development,65 but Christians such as Hardy and Saint-Hilaire were outraged. Without the aid of divine wrath and the threat of eternal suffering to deter him from evil, the comfort of salvation and the inducements of rewards in heaven to encourage virtue, man is "thrown upon his own resources" and the moral code becomes "powerless for good."66
Saint-Hilaire is representative of those concerned about the threat to orthodox belief posed by growing interest in materialist philosophy among his contemporaries. For him, as for Hardy, Buddhism exemplified "the fate of man when he relies on himself alone." He states in the introduction that the sole purpose of the work is to bring out "in striking contrast the beneficial truths and the greatness of our spiritualistic beliefs" against "the strange and deplorable doctrines which it professes, the explanation for its powerlessness for good."6? Buddhism, as he projected it, was a demonstration of the indispensable necessity of divine interference. Its value to him was the crucial difference of Buddhism from Christianity on the question of God and the immortality of the soul in an otherwise comparable system of values. He spoke of the Buddha and his teaching with the highest praise-the Buddha was second only to Christ in his perfections, "irreproachable" in the personal example of his life68 -- but only to stress that no matter how perfect a moral code, it is inadequate without divine interference. The principal fault he found in the religion was that "in the whole of Buddhism there is not a trace of the idea of God. Man, completely isolated, is thrown upon his own resources."69 Saint-Hilaire echoed Hardy's position but extended the authority of his argument with reference to Sanskrit sources. In his defense of Christian orthodoxy against its European opponents, Saint-Hilaire reinforced the image of the Buddha as a human teacher, teaching an atheistic, pessimistic, nihilistic philosophy. Mahayana Buddhism was a falling away from the teachings of the Founder; the idolatry and ritual that it had developed, proof of man's need for religion.
Saint-Hilaire's message was endorsed by Bishop Bigandet's Life and Legend of Gaudama (1860) and by Samuel Beal's works from Chinese sources (1871, 1875), but the number of books available on Buddhism before 1880 was not large.70 Nevertheless, articles discussing Buddhism appeared increasingly frequently in journals, both specifically Christian journals such as the Christian Remembrancer and the Church Quarterly Review, and in more general intellectual journals such as London Quarterly Review, Intellectual Observer, Atlantic Monthly, Westminster Review, Saturday Review, Dublin University Magazine, and even the Times. The number increased dramatically after 1880. Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer wrote on Buddhism. Hardy, Tennent, and Saint-Hilaire were frequently cited. But before attempting to summarize the image of Buddhism created in the public domain, it would be useful to look at the Buddhism of T. W. Rhys Davids which articulated the other side of the positivist debate. The message Rhys Davids wished to convey was that an effective moral system-a liberal humanist religion-was possible without the orthodox Christian belief in an interventionist God and immortal soul. Rhys Davids used Buddhism to argue that the latest developments in European philosophy, far from being in conflict with Christianity, were the culmination of its evolution.
Buddhism: The Religion of Self-RelianceBy the time of the World's Parliament of Religions, the unassailable authority on Buddhism was T. W. Rhys Davids, Pali scholar and founder of the Pali Text Society (1881). Rhys Davids, like so many before him, first became interested in Pali while serving in the Ceylon Civil Service (1864-72). His interest in Buddhism at that time was incidental. To learn Pali he had to study with a bhikkhu. His first translation, typical of the historical bias of the time, was in numismatics and epigraphy, and led to his Ancient Coins and Measures of Ceylon (1877), which contained an attempt to date the death of the Buddha.7! Moreover, the book that established his reputation as a Buddhist scholar, Buddhism (1878), was not the result of his own translation but was compiled from "materials then available," including the work of Hardy.72 During the influential Hibbert Lectures in which he elaborated the results of this study, Rhys Davids announced the founding of the Pali Text Society, which was to become the vehicle for propagating his interpretation with the full apparatus of academic scholarship. Rhys Davids and his society colleagues dominated Buddhist scholarship until the early twentieth century.73 Their pioneering work in collating, editing, and translating almost the whole of the Pali canon and in producing a dictionary, as well as their scrupulous adherence to the principles of "the science of religions" gave their interpretation indisputable authority within the academic parameters of the time.
While in no way detracting from the immense value of this great scholar's work, it is instructive that the inspiration for undertaking the task, Rhys Davis tells us, was his belief that study of the Pali texts could shed light on the evolution of religious thought in general and consequently on the changes that Christianity was undergoing in the nineteenth century. His aim was to establish that contemporary trends in philosophy represented the culmination of Christian evolution.74 Buddhism, Rhys Davids declared, was "a religion whose development runs entirely parallel with that of Christianity, every episode, every line of whose history seems almost as if it might be created for the very purpose of throwing the clearest light on the most difficult and disputed questions of the origin of the European faith."75
A similarity between Buddhism and Christianity was fundamental to Rhys Davids's argument but so was the difference between them. Rhys Davids describes the shared moral doctrines; the shared concern for charity, sincerity, purity, meekness, gentleness, truth, and love-the humanistic aspects of religion so highly valued at the Parliament; and even the similarity in mode of teaching of the two "revered Teachers." The significance of these similarities, however, depended on the crucial difference, the question of God: "[ i]n the midst of all this likeness, there is a difference no less unmistakable arising from the contrast between the Theistic creed which underlies the Christian and the Agnostic creed which underlies the Buddhist doctrines."76
Buddhism's value was its alterity. It was not the radically "not us" of Hinduism, but a religion that was recognizably similar, differing on precisely those points at issue in the current debates: the nature and necessity of God, the existence of the immortal soul, the divinity of Jesus. Rhys Davids underlined the similarities and took care to eliminate any question that either religion might have influenced the other. The resemblances were not due to borrowing in either direction but to "the same laws acting under the same conditions"77 and were therefore evidence of a universally applicable, scientific law. As he saw it, both religions were born out of reaction against formalism and priestcraft, both owed their origin and insight to a "hero of humanity."
He also valued Buddhism because its texts preserved a complete record of the process of the elaboration of Gautama, the revered human teacher, into a divine personage, which provided the scientific evidence for a similar development in Christian orthodoxy. The similarities in the lives of the Buddha and the Christ are explained, he argued, by their shared humanitarian aims. The similarity in the elaboration of the texts-the miraculous birth, wonderful infancy, and supernatural powers-are alike caused by the similar stage of cultural development of their respective followers and their similar desire to give expression to a deeply felt reverence. Gautama was elevated by association with the Brahmanic concept of cakravartin, which conferred upon him all the legendary attributes of the World Ruler, his life embellished with "hallowed sun-stories" of the "half-converted Hindus."78 When we realize this, Rhys Davids argued, we can see how Jesus was similarly associated with the Judaic concept of Messiah and thus became known as the Christ. The example of Buddhism provided an argument by analogy for the fabrication of the divinity of Jesus and, by extension, an argument against the Trinity. Through the study of Buddhist texts, he argued, we can clearly see the process of elaboration that gave rise to "stories miraculous and incredible"; to the development of powerful orthodoxies with new dogma and new deities; and, finally, to "the powerful hierarchies of modern Christianity and Buddhism."79 For Rhys Davids, Christianity, like any other religion, should be able to stand scientific scrutiny.80 Buddhism was the mirror that allowed Christians to see themselves more clearly. The mythological and miraculous that was no longer acceptable to the scientific world view could be disregarded, restoring Christianity to a place of respect in the modern world.
Rhys Davids saw another lesson to be learned from the history of Buddhism and its lack of dependence on the divine: pantheistic or monotheistic unity will always give rise to "a school to whom theological discussions have lost their interest," to thinkers who will seek "a new solution to the questions to which theologies have given inconsistent answers, in a new system in which man was to work out here, on earth, his own salvation."81 His point was once again that Buddhism mapped the universal path of religious evolution that Christianity was to follow, so that the Pali texts help us to understand "how it is that there is so much in common between the Agnostic philosopher of India, the Stoics of Greece and Rome, and some of the newest schools in France, Germany, and among ourselves."82 Here again, Rhys Davids argued, the path of Buddhist development indicated that the new developments in European philosophy represented the highest evolution of Christian thought.
In this context, Rhys Davids associated the Buddha with such philosophers as Spinoza, Descartes, Berkeley, Hobbes, Locke, Comte, Mill, and Spencer and, consistent with his view that Buddhism is a totally rational religion, spoke of the attainment of Buddhahood as "the crisis under the Bo-tree,"83 interpreting it as a psychological experience rather than a religious one. In his Pali dictionary Rhys Davids wrote that "Nibbana is purely and solely an ethical state to be reached in this birth by ethical practices, contemplation and insight. It is therefore not transcendental."84 To supplement this, Rhys Davids translated bodhi as Enlightenment, now accepted as standard.85 The word comes from the root budh, to be awake, and the Buddhist commentaries explain that it denotes the acquisition of the Four Truths and is identical with the realization of nirvana,86 They distinguish deductive and learned knowledge-the knowledge of the European Enlightenment-with which Rhys Davids wished to associate the Buddha, from this direct knowledge.
The theme of parallel development was propagated in Rhys Davids's extremely influential book Buddhism (1878) and repeated explicitly in the Hibbert Lectures of 1881 (also published) that did so much to introduce academic knowledge of Buddhism to the public. This project did not pass unremarked. To Arthur Lillie, whose book on Buddhism was written to "assail" Rhys Davids's interpretation, "it is very patent from the Hibbert lectures that the perversions of Dr. Rhys Davids are due to his sympathies with Comtism."87 Rhys Davids, like Paul Carus, whose post-Parliament interpretation of Buddhism is the basis of a later chapter, looked to Buddhism for answers to the religious questions of the day in the new study of comparative religion. This, not Buddhism per se, but what Buddhism could contribute to his particular theory of the evolution of religious thought, was Rhys Davids's object. In spite of the vast quantities of meticulous translations of sacred texts, it was part of an academic discourse that had no interest at all in existing Asian practice or belief.88 One of the more perverse assumptions of the "scientific" analysis of the texts was -- as Max Muller, the most eminent of scholars in the field, explained -- that the actual teaching of the Buddha was most likely different from Buddhism as it was practiced. In cases where there is a discrepancy between texts, the text "which least harmonizes with the later system of orthodox thought" was to be taken as the original one, the one peculiar to the Buddha.89
For Rhys Davids, the guiding principle in this process of selection was the assumption of the rational humanist nature of the Buddha's teaching, which could be extracted from the Pali texts. The process of uncovering it was first to establish which of the versions available was the earliest, then to eliminate all that "could be explained by religious hero-worship, mere poetical imagery, misapprehension, the desire to edify, applications to Gautama of previously existing stories, or sun myths and so on."90 It is no surprise, therefore, that the Buddhism revealed by his scholarship contradicts the image of Buddhism derived by missionaries from observation of contemporary belief: "The Buddhism of the Pali Pitakas is not only a quite different thing from Buddhism as hitherto commonly received, but is quite antagonistic to it."91 This was a strong platform from which to contradict the negative missionary interpretations, but it also excluded existing Asian practices just as effectively and with greater authority.
The Defining Debate: Rhys Davids versus Saint-HilaireRhys Davids was of course one voice among the many contributing to the discussion on Buddhism, a voice representing liberal humanism, advocating ration~l, scientific belief. Saint-Hilaire represented the other side of this debate-that concerned about the threat to orthodox belief posed by materialist developments in contemporary Western thought. Though radically opposed, what Rhys Davids and Saint-Hilaire argued was the meaning and significance of a shared perception of the general features of Theravada Buddhism. The features themselves were not disputed, and their repetition in the discussion confirmed them. Buddhism as an object of discourse existed as a core of agreed assumptions within the ongoing debate. Buddhism was atheistic or, at least from the more positive interpretations of Rhys Davids in the 1880s, agnostic. The absence of a concept of Deity was fundamental to Saint-Hilaire's demonstration of the inadequacy of Buddhism, but, on the other hand, it was also an example of the possibility of a religion without an interventionist God. It questioned the orthodox claim, frequently reiterated at the Parliament, that belief in the Creator or higher authority is fundamental to all men. Buddhism appeared to offer examples of many different nations operating on this basis. Accounts of the observed ritual and worship of local deities in Buddhist practice fell into line with either Hardy's view that it was the natural result of man's craving for religion, or Tennent's view that they were merely accretions, evidence of the racial weakness of its followers. Both confirmed the reified textual Buddhism of Western scholarship as "real" Buddhism.
Abbe Grossier wrote of Buddhism in 1795 that "the whole of holiness consists in ceasing to exist, in being confounded with nothing, the nearer man approaches to the nature of a stone or log, the nearer he is to perfection."92 Since that time, absence of a concept of God had been interpreted to mean that Buddhism was pessimistic, nihilistic, and world-denying. As we have seen, this image was propagated by German philosophers working from travelers' records such as Grossier's, and was repeated by the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1810.93 The interpretation depended on translating nirvana, the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice, as annihilation, or utter extinction. The Triple Refuge of Buddhism then became, as Hardy put it, trust in a being annihilated (the Buddha), in a law without sanction or revelation (the dharma), and in the "partakers of sin and sorrow" (the sangha), a bleak outlook confirmed by a simplistic reading of the Four Noble Truths.94 From this position, the pessimism of Buddhism was contrasted with the optimism of Christianity, which offered salvation through Jesus and eternal life in heaven. In opposition to this, Rhys Davids argued that Buddhism was more optimistic than Christianity because it offered salvation here in this world in the self-reliant pursuit of Enlightenment (his translation of the word bodhi, the prerequisite to attaining nirvana), whereas for Christians, this world was a place of probation. Rhys Davids explained that nirvana was not annihilation but the cessation of craving, lust, and desire, which hindered the pursuit of Enlightenment,95 and that nirvana was "purely and solely an ethical state to be realized in this birth by ethical practices, contemplation and insight."96 Edwin Arnold projected a similar view in his Light of Asia. Both presented the Buddha Sakyamuni as a prototypical humanist.
Karma and RebirthThe other great issue of the period, the discussion of the nature of man, focused on the doctrine of karma and the related concept of rebirth. Karma was repugnant to many because, like Darwinism, it destroyed the theological uniqueness of the human species. All life belonged to the same interdependent continuum within samsara. Not only was there no immortal soul, but a human might be reborn as a beast. For others, however, it offered a view of the human position in the world that was compatible with evolutionary theory, "an anticipatory Asiatic Darwinism."97 The doctrine of codependent origination (paticcasamuppada), which explained the basis for moral action, also offered an explanation of the human condition that did not rely on an interventionist deity. This was the subject of Shaku Soen's paper at Chicago. While argument continued over the implications of the Buddhist notion of the nature of man, reflecting the community's ambiguous feelings about nineteenth-century developments, the debate confirmed the premise that Buddhism had a great deal in common with "the latest speculations among ourselves."
Buddhism: Northern DecadenceAn agreed feature of Buddhism-one most significant for the Japanese delegation- was that Mahayana or Northern Buddhism was a decadent development of real Buddhism. For Rhys Davids the Buddhism of "Nepal, Tibet, China, Japan and Mongolia" is "exceedingly interesting, and very valuable from the similarity it bears to the development that has taken place in Christianity in Roman Catholic countries."98 That is, it confirmed his thesis of religious evolution. It was the result of "the overpowering influence of sickly imaginations." As theories grew and flourished, filling the sky with "forgeries of the brain ... the nobler lessons of the founder of the religion were smothered beneath the glittering mass of metaphysical subtleties," It was not just a falling away, but a fetid growth, the negation of the real teaching: "As the stronger side of Gautama's teachings were neglected, the debasing belief in rites and ceremonies, and charms and incantations, which had been the special object of his scorn, began to live again, and to grow vigorously, and spread like the Birana weed warmed by the tropical sun in marsh and muddy soil."99
Max Muller's apologetic introduction to the first Mahayana texts published in his Sacred Books of the East series, Takakusu Junjiro's translation of the Amitayur-Dhyana-Sutra,100 testifies to the strength and persistence of these attitudes at the time of the World's Parliament of Religions. Muller was "so much disappointed with the contents of the Sutra, that [he] hesitated for some time whether [he] ought to publish it," and only decided to do so at the persuasion of his "friends in Japan" and his own respect for the truth "that nothing should be suppressed that might lead us to form a judgement of Buddhism in its Mahayana dress, as professed by millions in China and Japan." The main value of the work in his view was not the teaching itself but that the Chinese translations could be dated "with considerable accuracy" and therefore act as "a new sheet-anchor in the chronology of Sanskrit literature."101
Muller's denigration of the Mahayana only confirms what one could deduce from his attitude to the highly trained and specially selected Japanese priests sent to study with him. Instead of seeing their presence at Oxford as a unique opportunity to expand the scope of his study of religion into a new area, he wanted only their skill in reading Chinese. Nanjo Bun'yu, the first Japanese priest sent by the Nishi Honganji to study Sanskrit with Muller in 1876, was put to work cataloging the Chinese Tripitaka in the India Office library, again principally for its value in dating Sanskrit literature.102 For Muller, Mahayana Buddhism was simply beyond the pale. Japanese Buddhism was "a corruption of the pure doctrine of the Royal Prince" depending on the "degraded and degrading Mahayana tracts ... the silly and mischievous stories of Amitabha and his Paradise."103 In his opinion, "[1]f the Japanese really mean to be Buddhists, they should return to the words of the Buddha as they are preserved to us in the old sutras." He saw himself helping them along this path.104
Figure 9. A Buddhist temple (MacFarlane, Japan, 203)Max Muller was not alone in his disdain. Western publications on Japan which included descriptions of the religion of the country appeared from mid-nineteenth century, but all reproduced the assumptions of existing Western scholarship, relying most particularly on the early seventeenth-century observations of Kaempfer. Charles MacFarlane's Japan: An Account, Geographical and Historical, published in 1852, was typical, compiled, the author tells us, from "a critical assessment" of existing European-language sources.105 The accompanying illustration (fig. 9) encapsulated expectations of the as yet secluded country. Japan in this vision is composed of elements borrowed from depictions of China. Note, for example, the hairstyle of the native and the roofline of the buildings. The exotic vegetation is more typical of tropical Asia -- stereotypical Asia, the Asia of Rhys Davids's Birana weed -- than of temperate Japan. Japan was a land of heathens prostrated before a multilimbed idol.
What is more remarkable than the image presented by McFarlane prior to the opening of the country to Westerners is the absence of new material on Japanese religion afterward, particularly given the number of missionaries who flocked to Japan.106 Nothing of significance was published until William Elliot Griffis's The Mikado's Empire in 1876, and although it included valuable observations on the social and institutional state of Buddhism at that time, the strength of the temples and their reform activity, it did not add any information on doctrine or teaching, which was still assumed to be essentially "pure" Buddhism smothered under unnecessary elaboration and local custom.107
Griffis's account of Japanese Buddhism is typical. It combined Orientalist scholarship on Pali Buddhism -- its seventeen-page section on the subject began with an unattributed quotation from one of the standard works on the Theravada construct-with his own experience in Japan. On the one hand, he offered that the "three great distinguishing characteristics of Buddhism are atheism, metempsychosis, and absence of caste,"108 a definition that clearly placed Japanese Buddhism back in the Orientalist field of the evolution of Brahmanism, but, he added, with some perspicacity, "the popular Buddhism of Japan, at least is not the bare scheme of philosophy which foreign writers seem to think it is."109 He described two of the Japanese sects, the Nichiren, "the Ranters of Japan," and the Jodoshinshii, using both to demonstrate the futility of the Christian project of conversion in Japan. Followers of the Nichiren sect, "the most vigorous and persistent" opponents to conversion, could not be converted, he predicted, because of the characteristics they shared with Christians, the "intolerance and bigotry" due to "the precision, directness and exclusiveness of the teachings of their master."110 The Jodoshinshu, on the other hand, did not need to be converted. They were "the Protestants of Japanese Buddhism." Their highly educated priests marry and live among the people, teaching in the vernacular. They "tabooed" penance, fasting, amulets, and charms. They taught salvation through faith.111 Jodoshinshu was already, "in a word, Protestantism in its pure sense."112
Once published, Griffis's work quickly became the standard and was quoted by later writers such as Reed (1880).113 Reed also began with an introduction to Buddhism from Western Orientalists, equating Japanese Buddhism with the Buddhism of Western scholarship, but his book was distinguished by its inclusion of the first attempts by a Japanese Buddhist to intervene in the Western discourse: a history of Buddhism in Japan composed from Japanese texts, and a summary of the principles of the Jodoshinshu faith. These were both translated by the Nishi Honganji priest, Akamatsu Renjo, who had traveled to England in 1873, "preparing the way," Reed commented provocatively, "for the conversion of Europe to the Shinshu faith." The Japanese vision of Buddhist universality and of Buddhist fulfillment of Christianity predated the World's Parliament of Religions by at least two decades.114 There were Western scholars who studied Japanese Buddhism for personal interest, but who did not publish until much later. Most important among these are the Americans Ernest Fenollosa and William Sturgis Bigelow, who studied Tendai together under Abbot Sakurai Keitoku of Miidera. The work of Griffis, Reed, and Akamatsu did not impinge on academic knowledge. Although Reed and Griffis added local color and observed detail to images of Japanese Buddhism, they perpetuated the assumption that Buddhism in Japan, as elsewhere, was essentially that of the Western construct, which was by this time well established. They confirmed its alterity with Christianity.
ConclusionOnce introduced to the domain of public interest, Buddhism was defined through its participation in discursive contests of essentially Western concern. For all the positivist emphasis on the authority of original texts, what was widely accepted as Buddhism depended less on the results of the labors of translation than on a more general discussion. This is apparent in the persistence of images from travelers' tales "confirmed" by the selective use of sources in the face of equally plausible possibilities. It was most significant in the period leading up to the formation of the Pali Text Society when Buddhism was discussed in writings from Sherlock Holmes to Spencer. The role it played here persisted in the prefaces, introductory essays, and footnotes to the classical works of translation, Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East series and the volumes of the Pali Text Society, and helped determine which texts would be translated and given prominence. How many people read Buddhist texts in translation? How many more were content to read only the interpretations that accompanied them, or the more popular articles of scholars such as Max Muller and Rhys Davids, where they, too, related Buddhism to the concerns of the times? It was these interpretations that were further disseminated through repetition in the popular travel books of the late nineteenth century.
Buddhism, as it was known in the West, was thoroughly imbued with Western preoccupations and presuppositions. The term "Buddhism," following the analogy of Christianity's relation to Christ, implied an essential interdependence between the validity of the religion and the historical existence of its founder, a stress at odds with the Asian focus on the arya dharma, the teaching, rather than the teacher. From the earliest known records, the Buddha in India was not considered to be a Founder but one of a series of Buddhas who appear in the world to revive the dharma. This fundamental fact of Buddhism was recorded by Hardy in his translation of Sinhalese sources and by Rhys Davids's translations of Pali sutras and is evident in the stone sculptures of Sanchi (first century B.C.). The association of the Buddha and the Christ is nevertheless indicative of the role Buddhism played in late nineteenth-century Western thought. More than any other non-Christian religion, Buddhism was the "other" of Christianity. A crucial factor in this was, paradoxically, a perceived similarity with Christianity: even the most dedicated Christian missionaries found it difficult to criticize on moral grounds. Buddhism had an effective ethical system that, they admitted, compared well with their own, a shared sense of humanitarian ethics. The significant "other," the external against which one defines oneself, is not simply radically different but also similar enough to make effective comparison. Within a general frame of similarity, the self and other differ on the essential points of definition. Buddhism was discussed, and thereby defined, in terms of absence of soul, absence of a creator God, absence of divine wrath, absence of a Savior. Buddhism as the "other" of Christianity reflected the "diseased," discarded, disowned, or disputed parts of the nineteenth-century Christian self. It therefore occupied a unique place in the Christian exhibition, the World's Parliament of Religions.