When a dozen years ago I began to study oriental influences on Richard Wagner’s operas in the mid-nineteenth century, I had no idea where my investigations would lead. Having done some research on the Western discovery of Japanese religions in the sixteenth century, it did not take me long to find traces of this discovery in the nineteenth century. But Raymond Schwab’s La renaissance orientale and studies on the history of the Western encounter with Asian religions such as Henri de Lubac’s La rencontre du bouddhisme et de l’Occident presented an utterly confusing mass of data arranged according to modern notions such as “Buddhism” or “Hinduism” and to modern geographical units such as “India” or “China.”
A major reason for this confusion was the fact that the primary sources seem to come from a different world where such neat delimitations do not exist. They tend, for example, to distinguish between esoteric and exoteric “branches” of a pan-Asian religion or to connect the creeds of various countries of “the Indies” to some descendant of Noah. Another factor that complicated matters was the sheer mass of data in many European languages that used different local pronunciations and transcriptions for the same person or thing. Thus, the Portuguese missionaries in Japan often called the Buddha “Xaca,” the French missionaries in China “Xekia” or “Foe,” the Italians in Vietnam “Thicca,” and so on. Some were aware of their identity, others not; and again, others claimed that the Indian god Vishnu, the Persian prophet Zoroaster, or the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistos were alternative names of Buddha. An additional complicating factor was the maze of authors and texts. Trying to distinguish the trailblazers from imitators, embellishers, copyists, and plagiarists turned into a laborious enterprise that involved burrowing through heaps of multilingual literature in libraries on several continents in order to find out where specific items of information came from. This often was difficult. However, patient investigative work over a decade clarified matters to a certain extent and allowed me to isolate a number of ideas, figures, and texts that played key roles in the drawn-out and complex process of the premodern European discovery of Asian religions. These I will present in this introduction.
One of the ideas repeated in countless European sources about Asian religions is the distinction between “outer” or “exoteric” and “inner” or “esoteric” forms. It was already used in early Christian literature, for example, by Eusebius of Caesarea and Lactantius, to characterize heathen creeds around the Mediterranean. But its roots lie in ancient Greek views of Egyptian religion where Egyptian priests are said to have encoded secret esoteric teachings in hieroglyphs while feeding the outer, exoteric bark of religion to the people. This idea gained renewed popularity in the Renaissance when texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistos (“hermetic texts”) were translated into Latin and portrayed as vestiges of ancient Egyptian “esoteric” monotheism. In Europe, this inspired proponents of ancient theology (prisca theologia) like the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher as well as many missionaries.
Several case studies in this book will show how this notion of esoteric and exoteric teachings allied itself with sixteenth-century reports about Japanese Buddhism and became one of the dominant ideas about Asian religions. The Japanese views, in turn, have roots in Chinese and Indian Buddhism and are thus about as old as their European counterparts. Having heard of this Buddhist distinction in the second half of the sixteenth century, the missionaries to Japan used it to classify the Buddhist sects of that country. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a long-time resident of Japan, João Rodrigues, first applied it to all three major religions of China (which today are called Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism). In the 1620s, the Italian Jesuit Cristoforo Borri in Vietnam used the esoteric/exoteric distinction to characterize two phases of the Buddha’s life and to classify religious movements in India, Vietnam, China, and Japan. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this distinction became not only the most conspicuous feature of the Buddha’s biography (the story of his deathbed confession) but also the dominant way of explaining the connection between various religions of Asia in terms of esoteric and exoteric branches of a huge pan-Asian religion. The importance of this distinction (as well as of other key ideas mentioned below) for the European discovery of Asian religions cannot be overestimated. It had a far deeper influence than the politico-economic motives that tend to stand in the limelight of current “Orientalism” literature.
A fundamental factor in the premodern European discovery of Asian religions is easily overlooked just because it is so pervasive and determines the outlook of most discoverers: the biblical frame of reference. All religions of the world had to originate with a survivor of the great deluge (usually set circa 2500 B.C.E.) because nobody outside Noah’s ark survived. In Roman times, young Christianity was portrayed as the successor of Adam’s original pure monotheism, thus stretching its roots into antediluvian times. In the Renaissance and its aftermath, Egyptian religion, hermetic texts, and other “ancient” writings such as the Chaldaic oracles were seen as a confirmation of, or a threat to, such claims.
After the discovery of America and the opening of the sea route to India at the end of the fifteenth century, new challenges to biblical authority arose. It was difficult to establish a connection between hitherto unknown people and animals and Noah’s ark. But an equally tough nut to crack were the Chinese annals which in the seventeenth century caused much consternation as claims were published that they might be as old as, or even older than, Noah’s flood. Our case studies show different ways in which Europeans tried to rise to such challenges: missionaries who attempted to incorporate ancient Asian cultures and religions into Bible-based scenarios; others who tried to move the starting shot of biblical history backward to beat the Chinese annals; people like Isaac La Peyrère and Baruch de Spinoza who concentrated on cracks in the biblical edifice; deists and reformers like Voltaire and John Zephaniah Holwell who attempted to use Asian texts as older and better Old Testaments; and skeptics like Constantin-François Volney who came to see the Old Testament as just another outgrowth of the Oriental imagination.
Asian phenomena and texts, invented or not, were operative not only in the European discovery of Asian religions but also in that of Europe’s own religions, languages, and cultures. Just as a people on an isolated island tends to question its own origin and customs only after contact with aliens, Europe’s changing worldview and obsession with origins were intimately linked to its confrontation with other cultures and religions—particularly with nonAbrahamic religions far older than Islam and possibly even than the religion of Abraham. In the course of this confrontation and the crumbling of previous certainties (for example, that Hebrew is the mother of all languages and the Bible the world’s most ancient book), even the traditional sequence from initial paradisiacal perfection to the Fall and eventual regeneration came increasingly under attack. The traditional European worldview and even Christianity itself were in danger of being relativized, destabilized, and marginalized.
Of course, the discovery of Asian religions was far from the only factor in this process of erosion. But the influence of this discovery on the view of eighteenth-century opinion leaders and innovators such as Pierre Bayle, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder is well documented. Nevertheless, it remains little studied. The same can be said of the role of the discovery of Asian religions in the birth of Europe’s modern Orientalism. This discovery may appear to be an exotic topic, but in its time it broadened perspectives far more than the Hubble space telescope is expanding ours. It contributed to a change in the very lens apparatus through which the Orient, Europe, the origin of peoples and their cultures, and the world as a whole were seen. Not just traditional religious convictions and ideas about other religions were at stake but the very identity of the Europeans.
Boosted by seventeenth-century Jesuits like Rodrigues, Kircher, and Charles Le Gobien, the notion of a pan-Asian “oriental system” or doctrina orientalis with possible Mesopotamian or Egyptian roots became a major factor in eighteenth-century views of Asian religions. Facets of this complex of ideas include theories of an Egyptian origin of Buddhism (Kircher, Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze, Engelbert Kaempfer, Johann Jacob Brucker, Diderot), the view that Brahmanism is a form of exoteric Buddhism (Diderot, Herder, etc.), the notion that some Buddhist texts of China are translations from the Veda (Joseph de Guignes), and the suspicion that Greek philosophy and particularly Plato were inspired by oriental ideas (A. M. Ramsay) or even by Buddhism (la Créquinière). The “inner” teachings of this doctrina orientalis were first modeled on the purported monism, emanatism, and “quietism” of Japanese Zen Buddhism and later also of Vedanta and Sufism. In 1688 François Bernier linked such oriental quietism to the teachings of Miguel de Molinos, François Fénelon, and Madame Guyon as well as the philosophy of Spinoza.
The “Spinoza” article in Bayle’s dictionary of 1702—one of the most famous and controversial articles in one of the most noted works of eighteenth-century Europe—is a good example for both the broad use of missionary and secular sources about Asia and the deep influence of the linkage between features of Asian religions and raging theologico-philosophical controversies of Christian Europe. Bayle’s influence is palpable not only in Brucker’s influential histories of philosophy of the 1730s and 1740s and in Diderot’s articles for the Encyclopédie of the 1750s, but also in Johann Lorenz Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History of 1755, François Pluquet’s Examen du fatalisme of 1757, and many later European works including Herder’s philosophy of history (1784–91) and Friedrich Schlegel’s pioneering work on the language and wisdom of the Indians (1808). Schlegel, with Volney one of continental Europe’s first students of Sanskrit, saw this doctrina orientalis as the ultimate source not only of Oriental philosophy and religion but also of their ancient Greek counterparts (Schlegel 1808:114–23).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, India had thus for some become not only the cradle of human civilization, as Voltaire had so insistently argued, but of all ancient religion and philosophy—a notion that inspired Europe’s romantic indomania. The birth of modern Orientalism is intimately linked to this idea of Indian origins as an alternative to the biblical narrative. It is not by chance that one of the most ardent propagators after Voltaire of Indian origins was Louis Langlès, director of Bible-independent Orientalism’s first institution on European soil, the École Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, founded in 1795.
Bayle (1702), Brucker (1744), Pluquet (1757), F. Schlegel (1808), and many others identified two of the core features of the “oriental doctrine” as emanation and metempsychosis or transmigration of souls. Both were linked to Platonism, pantheism, and Spinozism; thus, they aroused much discussion when all these came under increasing attack. Bayle’s 1702 article on Spinoza explicitly established this link in combining information about Greek philosophers and Christian heretics with extensive data from the Orient (François Bernier, Philippe Couplet, Simon de La Loubère, Louis Daniel Le Comte, Le Gobien, Antonio Possevino, Guy Tachard) and became a central source not only for Brucker’s and Mosheim’s discussion of “oriental doctrine” but also for Diderot’s article on “philosophie asiatique” (1751) that is discussed in Chapter 3.
In the course of the eighteenth century, the old idea that emanation and transmigration had been brought by Pythagoras via Egypt to India got reversed, and India became the ultimate point of origin. Emanation and the thought of a first principle adopting myriad forms had long been linked to the teaching of Buddha, as was the doctrine of transmigration. The idea of the Egyptian origin of such teachings (and by consequence also of Buddhism)—which had prominent supporters like Kircher (1667), La Croze (1724), Kaempfer (1729), and Brucker (1744)—lingered on, but in the second half of the eighteenth century, the notion of an Indian cradle carried the day.
Regardless of such controversies about origins, it can be said that, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the doctrines of emanation and transmigration constituted a crucial link between East and West extending from Japan in the Far East (where these two ideas had since the sixteenth century been associated by missionaries with the esoteric and exoteric teachings of Xaca or Buddha) via China, Vietnam, Siam, India, and Persia to Egypt and Greece. In the thought of Ramsay (Chapter 5) and Holwell (Chapter 6), this link took on a particularly poignant form since these authors identified transmigration as a most ancient and universal pre-Mosaic teaching concerning the fall of angels before the creation of the earth—a teaching that in their view forms the initial part of the biblical creation story that Moses omitted. They regarded human souls as the souls of fallen angels imprisoned in human bodies who have to migrate from one body to the next until they achieve redemption and can return to their heavenly home.
Almost all European writers about Asian religions addressed questions of origin and transmission. They were concerned, among other things, with the connection between secular and sacred history and the problem of national and religious identity. In 1498, just after the discovery of America, Annius of Viterbo produced a number of forged texts that linked the national histories of Spain, Italy, France, and Germany to Noah. While European kings and nations were beneficiaries of the “good” transmission line originating with Adam, his good son Seth, and Noah (who according to Annius had traveled to blessed Italy to transmit antediluvian wisdom), other nations were not so lucky since they received their religion from Noah’s son Ham, the pivotal member of the “evil” transmission line originating with Cain. Though Annius did not invent the idea that Noah’s son Ham is identical with Zoroaster, as Schmidt-Biggemann claims (2006:93), he certainly gave new life to an idea already popular with Clement of Alexandria and other early Christian writers (Rodrigues 2001:356).
Annius published his concoctions just when Vasco da Gama was sailing around Africa to India. Though he knew little about Oriental religion, Annius must have sensed its subversive potential and cleared a path to its understanding that was adopted by many. Among them was João Rodrigues, who in the early seventeenth century also identified Zoroaster with Ham and regarded the Chinese as his descendants (p. 356). This meant that the religions of India, China, and Japan were seen as part of a kind of “axis of evil.” In this respect, Rodrigues was opposed to Matteo Ricci and the “accommodationist” Jesuit missionaries who, like their extremist figurist successors, put China in the “good” transmission line of original monotheism and Adamic wisdom. These two opposing views form the heart not only of the famous Chinese Rites controversy around the beginning of the eighteenth century but also of the black-and-white pattern underlying the vast majority of European views of Asian religions.
The question of transmission was often linked to ancient texts. The oldest ones were said to have been carved on two pillars even before the deluge, and Rodrigues was not the only European to think that the ancient Chinese had inherited their mysterious writing system and astronomical knowledge from antediluvian times. As the age of Moses and the Old Testament dwindled in the face of Asian claims of antiquity, the search for older texts and records of divine revelation became ever more urgent. The focus of this search moved from Egyptian hermetic texts, Chaldaic oracles, and so on toward the Chinese Yijing and eventually to the Indian Vedas.
This overall movement reflects major stages in the evolution of European interest in Asian religions and its oldest texts, and I argue in this book that this interest formed a decisive factor in the genesis of modern Orientalism. One of its many effects was that it furnished the motivation for Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s 1754 trip to India, the first journey of a European beyond the Middle East with the sole objective of finding and translating ancient sacred texts. But even European opinion leaders like Bayle and Voltaire, who only traveled within Europe, tended to be profoundly affected by the discovery of Asian religions and ancient sacred texts. The impact of this discovery in such domains as the genesis of European atheism, the formation of the modern conception of religion, and the quest for a modern, less Bible-dependent European identity cannot be grasped on the basis of a few case studies. However, my studies indicate that this hitherto neglected perspective has a considerable potential to enhance our understanding of such developments.
An increasing number of studies focus on the role of “ancient theology” (often called prisca theologia or prisca sapientia and linked to the philosophia perennis) in Europe’s history of ideas. Since D. P. Walker’s The Ancient Theology, which focused on Christian Platonism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and devoted a chapter each to the Jesuit figurists and to Chevalier Ramsay, this movement was usually associated with “a certain tradition of Christian apologetic theology that rests on misdated texts” (Walker 1972:1) and that flourished from the early Church fathers to the early eighteenth century. This grounding in Christian theology and Neoplatonism is also apparent in the case studies ranging from Proklos in the fourth century to Friedrich Schelling in the nineteenth featured in Schmidt-Biggemann’s Philosophia perennis (1998). Though Schmidt-Biggemann draws the circle somewhat wider and also mentions Judaism and Islam, the overall scope remains thoroughly theological and Christian.
In the course of my studies on this subject, I noticed that Church fathers like Eusebius and Lactantius, Renaissance admirers of hermetic literature like Marsilio Ficino, Jesuits like Athanasius Kircher and the figurist Joachim Bouvet, and numerous other “ancient theologians” including Chevalier Ramsay (Chapter 5) were all confronting other religions and tried to link their own religion to an “ancient” (priscus), “original,” and “pure” teaching of divine origin. Reputedly extremely ancient texts such as hermetic literature, Chaldaic oracles, and the Chinese Yijing (Book of Changes) played a crucial role in establishing this link to primordial wisdom. However, I found the same endeavor also in non-Abrahamic religions such as Buddhism where neither the creator God nor Adam, Noah, or the Bible plays a role.
A good example is the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, one of the most important texts in East Asian Buddhism, which also happens to be the first Buddhist sutra translated into a European language. Though the text originated roughly 1,000 years after the birth of Buddhism and in China, it came to be presented as the original teaching of the Buddha (his first sermon after enlightenment) and thus also formed a link to an “original teaching.” The case studies of this book show that such misdated texts—and the urge to establish a link between one’s own creed and a most ancient teaching—played an extraordinary role in the Western discovery of Asian religions.
Many texts mentioned in our pages are concerned with some “Ur-tradition”—God’s instructions to Adam, Buddha’s instructions to his closest disciples, the “original” doctrine of the Vedas revealed by Brahma, and so on. These texts are covered with the fingerprints of various reformers and missionaries. On the Forty-Two Sections Sutra I found fingerprints of an eighth-century reformist Zen master; on the Yijing those of Jesuit figurists; on the Upanishads those of Shankara and the Sufi Prince Dārā; on the Ezour-vedam those of Jean Calmette and Voltaire; and on the Shastah of Bramah those of Holwell. As much as their respective agendas differ, they possess a common denominator in the obsession with vestiges of an ancient true religion that happens to support their mission. As discussed in Chapter 5, “ancient theology” thus reveals itself not as a unique European phenomenon but rather as a local form of a universal mechanism operative in the birth of religious or quasi-religious movements. This mechanism is characterized by the use of supposedly very ancient texts and unique transmission lines designed to legitimize new or reformist views by linking such views to a founder figure’s old, “original” teaching.
Numerous recent publications stress the role of the nineteenth century when religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism became known under their modern names to a broader public. But the case studies of this book show that such identities were not suddenly discovered (or even “invented”) by Europeans in the first decades of the nineteenth century. They developed over centuries, and even searching for roots as far back as the thirteenth century and the writings of people like William Rubruck and Marco Polo would be appropriate. This book argues that the systematic study of non-Abrahamic oriental religions and languages by Europeans began in sixteenth-century Japan, and that several key ideas shaping the European discovery of Asian religions in the subsequent centuries have their roots there. Helped by learned native informers familiar with Buddhist literature, the Jesuits wrote reports and letters about Japanese sects that were published in various languages and compendia across Europe. Unlike sixteenth-century reports from Africa, India, and America, they described a religious culture that was surprisingly similar to Europe’s. It featured monks and nuns, monasteries and bells, rosaries and sermons, sects and sacred texts, baptisms and funerals, processions and temple services, and even heaven and hell. The dominant Buddhist denomination among Japan’s ruling class was Zen. Its cartooned teachings became Europe’s model for the “esoteric” doctrine of the Orient: quiet meditation, passivity, nothingness, all-oneness, no meritorious acts, no yonder. Such were, according to mid-sixteenth-century reports, the “real” teachings of Buddhism’s founder Xaca, whose creed had come from India via China to Japan. But other sects of the same religion stressed worship, merit, retribution in a future state, and transmigration, and they even mentioned heaven and hell. These were said to be “outer” or “provisional” teachings of the founder. In Alessandro Valignano’s catechism of 1586, this distinction between real/esoteric and provisional/exoteric teachings was touted as the master key to understanding Japanese religions. This catechism was reprinted in Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta of 1593, a textbook used by every aspiring Asia missionary and every student in Jesuit schools. It is one of the hitherto overlooked key texts of the European discovery of Asian religions. Early European perceptions of Japanese religion were extremely influential and also shaped the perception of Chinese religions (from the 1590s) and Indian religions (particularly by Roberto de Nobili in the first decades of the seventeenth century). They created patterns of understanding whose effects are shown to be pervasive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and did not abate in the nineteenth century.
The man who most systematically applied Japanese insights to Chinese religions, João Rodrigues, did extensive research on Japanese and Chinese religions and was an exceptional linguist capable of handling primary sources in both languages. He is a hitherto mostly ignored key figure whose views exerted a profound and lasting influence on European perceptions of Asian religions. Unlike Matteo Ricci, whose 1615 report about China and its religions had gained a broad readership in Europe and opened many a European’s eye, Rodrigues remained in the background. His groundbreaking research on the history of Chinese religions, chronology, and geography was used by others but rarely credited to him. However, in the form of Martino Martini’s publications and of documents that proved decisive in the Chinese Rites controversy, Rodrigues’s ideas reached a relatively broad readership. His reports were intensively studied in missionary circles, and his distinction between esoteric and exoteric forms of Chinese and Japanese religions became widely adopted.
The two major divergent views of the China and India missions—Ricci’s and de Nobili’s “good” monotheist transmission model versus Rodrigues’s “evil” idolatry model—spilled over into other realms and also had important repercussions in Rome, where Athanasius Kircher in 1667 published under the title of China Illustrata a synthesis of an enormous amount of data from the Jesuit archives and personal communication with travelers and missionaries. He thought, like Rodrigues, that the Brahmans of India were representatives of Xaca’s religion who had infected the entire East with their creed. A Chinese Buddhist text helped in fostering this mistaken view: the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. Its preface explained that Buddhism was introduced to China from India in the year 65 C.E. This text played an extraordinary role not only in the European discovery of Buddhism but also in that of China, Japan, and even America (see Chapter 4).
Of course, books attributed to Confucius also elicited major interest in Europe when they appeared in Latin translation, but even more influential was the portrait of Chinese religions in the preface to Couplet’s Confucius Sinarum philosophus of 1687 (see Chapters 2 and 3). This book appeared at a time when scholarly journals such as the Acta eruditorum and the Journal des sçavans published extensive reviews of books on Asia and disseminated such information in the pan-European “republic of letters.” The entries on “Spinoza,” “Brachmanes,” and “Japan” in Bayle’s dictionary (1702 edition) quoted such reviews at length and drew a compelling picture of Asian religions while linking them to some of the hottest topics of European philosophical controversy. Bayle used reports from sixteenth-century Japan and seventeenth-century China along with information from Vietnam, Siam, Tibet, and India; among his sources was also Le Gobien’s 1698 report about the religious tolerance edict of the Chinese emperor. Rodrigues had in his Historia da Igreja do Japão of 1620–21 already called the Brahmans “disciples of Shaka’s doctrine” (Rodrigues 2001:360), but it was Le Gobien’s preface to the book on China’s imperial tolerance edict that became the main European conduit for the idea that Brahmans were Buddhist missionaries. This identification became one of the key ideas of the eighteenth-century pan-European reception of Asian religions, and it is a major reason why studies about “British,” “French,” or “German” discoveries of “Hinduism” or “Buddhism” in “India” or “China” are largely modern fictions.
The need to understand Japanese religions in order to criticize them had promoted the study of Japanese and classical Chinese among missionaries to Japan in the sixteenth century and led to the production of grammars and dictionaries. In the seventeenth century, the European spotlight had turned to China. The controversy about ancient Chinese religion had elicited acute interest in Chinese historical annals, in ancient texts such as the Yijing, and in philological methods to deal with such ancient sources. Claude de Visdelou and other talented French Jesuits were obliged to become competent Sinologists in order to translate and analyze such texts in a reliable fashion, and two of them (Jean-François Foucquet and Joseph-Henri Prémare) became informants of Voltaire (Chapter 1) and Ramsay (Chapter 5). But their know-how, books, and manuscripts were also used—though mostly without explicit acknowledgment—by Paris-based Sinologists such as Étienne Four-mont, Joseph de Guignes, and Michel-Ange-André Deshauterayes (see Chapter 4).
In the course of the eighteenth century, the spotlight turned to India. Early in the century, the German Protestant missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg engaged in the study of South Indian religion, and his reports about India’s monotheism caused a sensation. Ziegenbalg was standing on the shoulders of seventeenth-century Catholic as well as Protestant missionaries,1 but he made extensive use of native informers and teachers and became able to study Indian texts independently. Many results of Ziegenbalg’s specialized research were published later; but his manuscripts were made available to the royal librarian of Prussia, the noted linguist Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze, who recognized the novelty and extraordinary value of Ziegenbalg’s work and intensively used his manuscripts for a groundbreaking treatise about Indian religions (La Croze 1724). Ziegenbalg and La Croze played important roles in the delimitation of the traditions that are now called “Hinduism” and “Buddhism” (see Chapter 2).
If the seventeenth century had its “good” and “bad” transmission factions, the eighteenth tended to pitch proponents of a single pan-Asian religion with different branches against people who, in the wake of Ziegenbalg and La Croze, distinguished the followers of Buddha in various regions of Asia outside India from the religions of India proper. An influential member of the “pan-Asian” faction was the German medical doctor Engelbert Kaempfer, who saw an “Oriental paganism” extending from Egypt via India and Siam to China and Japan (see Chapter 3). The English translation of Kaempfer’s manuscript was published in 1727. Soon afterward, in the 1730s, the French missionaries and early students of Sanskrit Jean François Pons and Jean Calmette got hold of a copy of the hitherto elusive Vedas and researched India’s oldest religious literature. A testament of their study is catechetic material such as the Ezour-vedam, whose main publicist was Voltaire. Voltaire used this text for his campaign to marginalize Judeo-Christianity by claiming Indian origins (see Chapter 1).
Just around that time, the British exploited the 1756 Black Hole of Calcutta incident as a starting shot for their empire. The writer of that report, John Zephaniah Holwell, also made a name for himself as publisher of a mysterious text: the Shastah of Bramah. The published fragments were introduced by the stunning claim that this text was far older than the Veda. Though the Ezour-vedam (published by Guillaume Sainte-Croix in 1778) and Holwell’s Shastah (published in 1767) are not exactly divine revelations (see Chapters 6 and 7), they played an extraordinary role in focusing attention on India and its ancient religious literature. The study of Sanskrit texts by the English, which began in the 1780s and astonished Europe by such gems as Charles Wilkins’s Bhagavad gita (1785) and William Jones’s Institutes of Hindu Law (1796), opened the era of modern Indology.
Just before the first Europeans began receiving Sanskrit lessons from Alexander Hamilton in Paris, the last major translation of a Persian version of an Indian text was published: Anquetil-Duperron’s pioneering Latin translation of the Upanishads (1801–2; see Chapter 7). It marked the end of an era, not only because ancient India, thanks to the study of Sanskrit, finally began to reveal its secrets but also because Anquetil-Duperron once more sought to prove the existence of an ancient pan-Asian monotheistic religion. By that time, the first secular institutions offering systematic instruction in oriental languages already existed: the Benaras Hindu College (1791; J. Duncan), the École Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris (1795; Louis-Mathieu Langlès), and Fort William College (1800–1801; H. T. Colebrooke). They were soon followed by the East India College of London (1805–6; Hamilton) and, finally, in 1814 by the creation of Europe’s first university chairs in Sanskrit (Antoine Leonard de Chézy) and Chinese (Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat) in Paris.
The first of the included case studies explores Voltaire’s role in the promotion of India as the perceived cradle of human culture. This idea played a major role in the second half of the eighteenth century and in the genesis of modern Orientalism. This chapter introduces some of the key ideas, figures, and texts and points to the importance of the contribution by missionaries. The second chapter focuses on the role of an early Protestant Indologist, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, whose ideas and writings were falsely thought to have had little impact. They were used, partly in manuscript form, by the linguist La Croze. These two men played pioneering roles in the delineation of Hinduism and Buddhism. The third case study presents Denis Diderot’s view of Asian philosophy as presented in the French Encyclopédie. While tracing some of its sources back in time, it shows how the idea of a pan-Asian religion gained traction. The fourth chapter looks at a man who usually goes unmentioned in histories of Orientalism: Chevalier Andrew Ramsay, a pioneering freemason and secretary of two famous “quietists.” It throws light on the European search for humanity’s oldest religion and the role of Chinese and other ancient Asian sources in this quest. Chapter five shows how Joseph de Guignes, a pioneering Paris-based Sinologist, produced the first European translation of a Buddhist sutra (the Forty-Two Sections Sutra) and attempted to elucidate Asia’s ancient religious landscape (and to confirm biblical authority) with the help of Chinese Buddhist sources. The sixth case study focuses on an early member of the British colonial enterprise, John Zephaniah Holwell, and his connection to a text that he hailed as the world’s oldest sacred scripture, the Shastah of Bramah. The seventh case study looks at the motivations and aims of the first European who traveled to India in search of ancient sacred scriptures, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, and discusses what he found (as well as what he thought he found). The eighth and last case study examines the evolution of views about Asian religions in the work of Constantin-François Volney, who was not only a prime mover of the French Revolution, bestselling author, and friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson but also a well-known Orientalist and promoter of the institutionalization of modern, Bible-independent Orientalism.