CHAPTER 5
In 1844, the Lotus Sūtra arrived in Boston, by a rather circuitous route.
The East India Company was established by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600. During the last half of the eighteenth century, troops of the company defeated armies of many of the Indian princely states, so that by 1800, the East India Company ruled most of the subcontinent. This huge trading company also required an army of administrators, so a college in Hertfordshire, called Haileybury, was established in 1806. Young men destined for the India service would be educated there before being sent to the company's headquarters in Calcutta, where they would continue their training at the College of Fort William. One such student was Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800–1894).
In 1818, Brian Hodgson arrived at the College of Fort William. He soon suffered health problems and was told by a doctor that he had three options: “six feet under, resign the service or get a hill appointment.” He opted for the third, that is, a posting to the north at a higher altitude, away from the heat and humidity of Calcutta, serving for a year as Assistant Commissioner in Kumaon, a mountainous region that the East India Company had annexed in 1816 after defeating the previous rulers, the Gurkhas of Nepal. As part of the treaty, the East India Company demanded the right to have a representative, called a resident, at the Nepalese court. In 1820, Hodgson was appointed Assistant Resident (and would later become Resident) at the court of Nepal. The Nepalese court had accepted the presence of the British in Kathmandu under duress and strictly limited their activities (what Hodgson refers to below as “Chinese notions of policy”). In a letter of August 11, 1827, Hodgson looked back on his first years in Nepal:
Soon after my arrival in Nipál (now six years ago), I began to devise means of procuring some accurate information relative to Buddhism: for, though the regular investigation of such a subject was foreign to my pursuits, my respect for science in general led me cheerfully to avail myself of the opportunity afforded, by my residence in a Bauddha [Buddhist] country, for collecting and transmitting to Calcutta the materials for such investigation. There were, however, serious obstacles in my way, arising out of the jealousy of the people in regard to any profanation of their sacred things by an European, and yet more, resulting from Chinese notions of policy adopted by this government. I nevertheless persevered; and time, patience, and dexterous applications to the superior intelligence of the chief minister, at length rewarded my toils.1
Thus, Hodgson, only twenty-one years old and with time on his hands, began collecting copies of the books of local Newars, a Buddhist community in largely Hindu Nepal and the only surviving Buddhist community on the Indian subcontinent (apart from some tribal groups in Chittagong near the Burmese border). Hodgson had studied enough Hindustani to recognize that they were in Sanskrit and that they were Buddhist texts, although it appears that he could not read them with any real fluency; most of what he learned about Buddhism (which he would publish in a number of influential articles in journals such as Asiatick Researches) was gleaned from conversations with a Newari pundit named Amṛtānanda.2 However, Hodgson thought that the texts would be of interest to the scholars of Europe. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, there was something of a Sanskrit craze in the wake of Sir William Jones's discovery, announced in a lecture in Calcutta in 1786, that Sanskrit was directly related to Greek and Latin; by 1814, a chair of Sanskrit, the first in Europe, was established at the Collège de France in Paris.
At the time of Jones's famous lecture, the study and translation of a number of important Hindu works had already been undertaken by officers of the East India Company. Charles Wilkins published his translation of the Bhagavad Gītā in 1785; Jones's translation of the famous drama Śakuntalā appeared in 1789. However, although the existence of Buddhism had been known in Europe for centuries, no Sanskrit Buddhist texts had been known prior to Hodgson's “discovery.” With the aid of Amṛtānanda, in 1824 Hodgson began gathering Sanskrit texts (he acquired some existing manuscripts and had scribes make copies of others) and sent them to a number of universities and learned societies in Europe, beginning with the gift of sixty-six manuscripts to the library of the College of Fort William in 1827 and continuing until 1845. These would include ninety-four to the Library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, seventy-nine to the Royal Asiatic Society, thirty-six to the India Office Library, seven to the Bodleian in Oxford, and eighty-eight to the Société Asiatique in Paris. Eventually, a total of 423 works were provided. However, despite the importance of these works, which included many of the most influential texts in the history of Buddhism (both in India and in translations into Chinese and Tibetan), the scholarly response was rather muted, except in Paris. Among the Sanskrit manuscripts dispatched there was the Lotus Sūtra.
Brian Hodgson was not the first European to encounter the Lotus Sūtra. The Portuguese Jesuit missionary to Japan Luís Fróis reports that in 1574 he and the Italian Jesuit Organtino Gnecchi-Soldo spent two hours each day over the course of a year studying the Lotus Sūtra (in its Chinese translation) with a former Buddhist abbot.3 Meanwhile, in China, Matteo Ricci had learned enough about Buddhism to denounce it, in Chinese, drawing on the work done by priests of the Japan mission, especially his fellow Italian Alessandro Valignano. Ricci arrived in Macao in 1582. Twenty years later, he completed his exposition of Christianity in Chinese, entitled The True Doctrine of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shiyi), published in 1603. Here, he mentions the Lotus Sūtra by name: “Then, there is a scripture called the Mahayana Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Law which informs men of later times that if they can recite this scripture they will go to Heaven and there enjoy a life of blessedness. We may now say, then, that should a great criminal and evil-doer be able to make preparations to chant this scripture he will rightfully ascend to Heaven and enjoy its blessings. However, if a person cultivates his virtue and practices the Way, but cannot conveniently purchase this scripture, he will descend to Hell.”4
At the end of the seventeenth century, Engelbert Kaempfer, a physician in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, spent two years in Japan (1690–1692). His account of his time there was widely read in Europe. In his description of the Buddha, we find:
The most eminent of those who listened to him are believed to have been Anan [Ānanda] and Kashō [Mahākāśyapa], or, as they are called with their title placed after their name, Anan Sonja and Kashō Sonja. They collected into a book what they had heard from his mouth, as well as what they found among his manuscripts on tree leaves. Comparing the teaching's purity with the sacred tarate flower, they called it Hokke kyō [Lotus Sūtra], which means “Book of Beautiful Flowers.” On account of its perfection, it is also referred to simply by the general name of kyō [sūtra] or book, and it serves all pagan teachers east of the river Ganges as a general bible.5
Nor was the copy of the Lotus Sūtra that Hodgson sent to Paris the first copy to arrive in Europe. In the fourteenth century, a beautifully printed 1346 copy of the Lotus Sūtra in Chinese, with illustrations of the life of the Buddha, arrived in Rome, sent by a Franciscan missionary to China.6
Indeed, before the arrival of Hodgson's gift to the Société Asiatique, the Lotus Sūtra had been known in Paris. Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832) was one of the founding figures of Chinese studies in Europe. In 1814, he had been appointed to hold the newly established chair in Chinese at the Collège de France. A French cleric had shown him a Chinese text on the medicinal qualities of various plants; Abel-Rémusat, trained as a physician, taught himself Chinese in order to read the text. His most important contribution to the study of Buddhism was the Foe koue ki, whose full title is Foĕ Kouĕ Ki ou Relation des royaumes bouddhiques: Voyage dans la Tartarie, dans l'Afghanistan et dans l'Inde, exécuté à la fin du IVe siècle, par Chў Fă Hian. This was Abel-Rémusat's translation of the Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Fo guo ji), the travel journals of the Chinese monk Faxian (ca. 337–ca. 422), who set out for India in 399, returning to China in 412. The Chinese text is relatively short, only about fifty pages in translation, but Abel-Rémusat provided detailed notes, in which he sought to identify and explain the many Buddhist persons, places, and doctrines that occur in Faxian's work, making use of other Chinese sources as well as the available scholarship of the day. Abel-Rémusat died in the cholera epidemic of 1832, when the book was only half finished. Two of his students took over the project; it was published in 1836.
In a footnote, the twelve traditional divisions of the Buddhist scriptures are enumerated, with examples given of each. Under the ninth division, “instruction” or “teaching” (upadeśa in Sanskrit), we find (presented in French here to show how Chinese was phoneticized at that time), “Comme dans le Fă hoa king, le chapitre Ti pho thă to, où le Bodhisattva Tchi tsў discourt avec Wen chu ssu li sur la loi excellente”—“As in the Lotus Sūtra, in the Devadatta chapter, where the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī speaks with Prajñākūṭa about the excellent law.”7
But Hodgson's copy was the first version of the Lotus Sūtra in Sanskrit, the language of its composition, to reach Europe. On or around April 20, 1837, twenty-four of Hodgson's Sanskrit manuscripts arrived in Paris, sent from Kathmandu seven months before.8 They would be read by a young French scholar named Eugène Burnouf.
He was born in Paris on April 8, 1801, the son of the distinguished classicist Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775–1844). Eugène Burnouf entered the École des Chartes in 1822, receiving degrees both in letters and in law in 1824. With a strong background in Greek and Latin from his father, Burnouf turned to the study of Sanskrit under Antoine Léonard de Chézy (1773–1832), first occupant of the Sanskrit chair at the Collège de France. Burnouf published his first translation from Sanskrit in the Journal Asiatique in 1823, when he was twenty-two years old. It was a translation of the story about the snake and the frogs from the Hitopadeśa, a famous anthology of animal tales. In the story, a wily snake agrees to serve as the mount of the king of the frogs in exchange for being given one frog a day as his meal. Soon, there is only one frog left, the king himself, who meets his fate.
Burnouf's interest in Sanskrit grammar and philology was evident from his first publications. In 1824, a year after his translation of the story, he published an article entitled “Sur un usage remarquable de l'infinitif sanscrit.” Two years later, he published his first book, coauthored with the young Norwegian German scholar Christian Lassen (1800–1876). Entitled Essai sur le pâli,9 it dealt with Pāli, the canonical language of the Buddhist traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia (called “Southern Buddhism” by European scholars of the period). The book dealt primarily with grammar and orthography, as well as the origins and extent of Pāli. Pāli is one of the vernaculars of ancient India, called Prakrits, and Burnouf and Lassen were interested in how these languages developed from classical Sanskrit. In addition to his work in Sanskrit and Pāli, Burnouf was an accomplished scholar of Avestan, the sacred language of Zoroastrianism, publishing translations of its scriptures as well as lithographs printed with fonts of Burnouf's own design.
The cholera epidemic that struck Paris in 1832 also claimed the life of Burnouf's Sanskrit teacher Chézy. Burnouf was appointed to succeed him in the chair of Sanskrit at the Collège de France.
His first major project was an edition and translation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the famous Hindu compendium of the legends of Krishna. He published three large volumes between 1840 and 1847 but did not live to complete the project.
Burnouf soon became a highly respected and much sought teacher of Sanskrit, with many of those who would become nineteenth-century Europe's most important philologists studying with him over the next two decades. In his diary entry of March 20, 1845, Friedrich Max Müller describes his first meeting with his future teacher: “Went to see Burnouf. Spiritual, amiable, thoroughly French. He received me in the most friendly way, talked a great deal, and all he said was valuable, not on ordinary topics but on special. I managed better in French than I expected. ‘I am a Brahman, a Buddhist, a Zoroastrian. I hate the Jesuits’—that is the sort of man. I am looking forward to his lectures.”10
Even by the high standards of Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century, both the breadth and the depth of Burnouf's learning are impressive. The 358-page catalog of his library, prepared for an auction in 1854, lists 2,730 books and 218 manuscripts divided into the following subjects: theology; jurisprudence; philosophy; natural sciences; fine arts; linguistics, languages, and literatures; geography and voyages; history of religions; history; archaeology; biography; bibliography; texts printed in India; and manuscripts (in the following categories: Zend, Sanskrit, Nepal, Buddhist, Pāli, vernacular Indic, Burman, Siamese, Sinhalese, Tibetan, French).11
In 1834, the Société Asiatique, of which Burnouf was now secretary, received a letter from Hodgson offering to send Sanskrit manuscripts of Buddhist texts to Paris. On June 5, 1837, Burnouf wrote to Hodgson to report that twenty-four volumes (“vingt-quatre curieux manuscrits buddhiques en sanscrit”) had arrived in Paris in April. He explained that the Société Asiatique had instructed him and Eugène Jacquet (1811–1838) to examine the texts. They determined which ones were most important, divided them between themselves, and began reading. Burnouf was initially put off by the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas (Aṣṭasahāsrikāprajñāpāramitā), “because I saw only perpetual repetitions of the advantages and merits promised to those who obtain prajñapāramitā. But what is this prajñā itself? This is what I did not see anywhere, and what I wished to learn.”12 He next considered the Lalitavistara, an important biography of the Buddha, but knew that “a Russian friend” (presumably Robert Lenz, 1808–1836) was working on a translation. He continued reading:
I turned to a new book, one of the nine dharmas [the sacred texts of the Newars], the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, and I can promise you that I have not repented my choice. Since about April 25, I have without reserve devoted every moment that I could steal from my occupations as professor of Sanskrit and academician to this work, of which I have already read rather considerable portions. You will not be astonished that I did not understand everything; the material is very new for me, the style as well as the content. But I intend to reread, with pen in hand, your excellent memoirs of the Asiatic Researches of London and Calcutta, as well as the Journal [of the Asiatic Society of Bengal] of [James] Prinsep. Though many things are still obscure to my eyes, I nevertheless comprehend the progression of the book, the mode of exposition of the author, and I have even already translated two chapters in their entirety, omitting nothing. These are two parables, not lacking in interest, but which are especially curious specimens of the manner in which the teaching of the Buddhists is imparted and of the discursive and very Socratic method of exposition. Without being impious (but you are not a clergyman), I know of nothing so Christian in all of Asia. Brahmanism now seems to me a rigid and merciless Judaism; you have found moral Christianity, full of compassion for all creatures. Do not believe that everything in this book is diverting; on the contrary, the repetitions and the tautology are completely tedious. But even this tautology is of a quite remarkable character, most appropriate to the people whom the Buddha addressed. What especially interested me is the dialect in which several parts of these books are written (for the Samādhirāja is of the same genre); the metrical pieces, the gathā, are in a Sanskrit that is already turning into Pāli, which, giving a high degree of authenticity to this latter language and the books it has preserved, also fixes the date, in an approximate way, when these books could have been written at one or two hundred years after Śākyamuni. Finally, I confess to you that I am passionate about this reading, and that I would like to have more time and health to attend to it day and night. I will not, however, set aside the Saddharma without extracting and translating substantial fragments, convinced that there is nothing I could better do to recognize your generosity than to communicate to the scholars of Europe part of the riches that you have so generously placed at our disposal. I will exert myself in that until this winter, and I will try to dig up some printer in Germany to bring out an Analysis or Observations on the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka.13
There is much to say about this passage from Burnouf's letter. After his disappointment at the tedium of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas, there was clearly something about the Lotus Sūtra that captivated him. Burnouf was always extremely polite and deferential in his correspondence with Hodgson, and he begins by admitting that there are many things that he did not understand, promising to go back and reread Hodgson's own essays on Buddhism (which would be of little value to him since Hodgson proved to be wrong about Buddhism on many points). The first element that attracted Burnouf to the Lotus Sūtra seems to be the fact that it has a plot, something that so many Buddhist sūtras lack. But the literary element that most captivated him, and seems to have led to his decision to translate the entire sūtra, no small undertaking in any historical age, was the presence of the parables.
It is important to recall that the word parable, a word that we associate so closely with the Lotus Sūtra, the word that has made the Lotus Sūtra famous, especially in the West, was coined for the first time on June 5, 1837, by Burnouf, in this letter to Hodgson. The Sanskrit term in the sūtra is aupamya, which simply means “comparison,” “resemblance,” “analogy.” Yet Burnouf chose to translate the Sanskrit term as “parable” (parabole in French). As the son of a renowned classicist, Burnouf knew that the French term derived directly from the Greek parabolē, which means a parallel case or a comparison. It is thus a very accurate translation of the Sanskrit term. The Greek term occurs some fifty times in the New Testament, not simply in the sense of an edifying tale, as found especially in the Gospel of Matthew, but also more generally as a comparison, a proverb, an adage, or a maxim.
The stories in the Lotus Sūtra are more accurately allegories rather than parables, first because they tend to be lengthy and often detailed narratives and second because the precise meaning of the narrative and the identity of those symbolized by the fictional characters (the father is the Buddha, for example) is spelled out by the person who relates the parable (the Buddha in all but two cases) after he has told it, as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. There are clear philological reasons why Burnouf translated the Sanskrit aupamya as “parable,” but there is likely another reason.
He writes, “I have even already translated two chapters in their entirety, omitting nothing. These are two parables, not lacking in interest, but which are especially curious specimens of the manner in which the teaching of the Buddhists is imparted and of the discursive and very Socratic method of exposition.” Burnouf does not say which parables he chose, although it is possible to guess. We recall that the first parable of the Lotus Sūtra, the parable of the burning house, does not appear until the third chapter. Thus, Burnouf began reading before he began translating, making his way through the phantasmagorical events of the first chapter before deciding that this was a text worthy of translation. As we shall see below, Burnouf held the supernatural elements in the Mahāyāna sūtras in especial contempt; even here, referring only to the opening chapters, he complains of the tedious repetitions and tautologies. It was only when he reached the third chapter and the first parable, and likely the fourth chapter and the second parable, that he decided to translate the sūtra and that he likely decided to translate aupamya as “parable.” For the parable in the fourth chapter is what we refer to in English as “the parable of the prodigal son,” a name that we owe to Burnouf; he called it la parabole de l'enfant prodigue, as the parable in the Gospel of Luke is known in French. French savants of the early nineteenth century knew their Bible well, even those who hated the Jesuits.
And thus we are led to wonder whether Burnouf decided to translate the Lotus Sūtra because it reminded him of a Christian work: “I know of nothing so Christian in all of Asia.” He then descends into a familiar caricature of Judaism as rigid and merciless, a theme that would be developed by his student Ernst Renan, and congratulates Hodgson for finding a Buddhist text that contains “moral Christianity, full of compassion for all creatures.” More important for the reception of Buddhism in the West, he suggests an analogy: Brahmanism is to Judaism as Buddhism is to early Christianity. Brahmanism was the term used at that time for what we today call Hinduism, while referring especially to the religion of the Brahman priests of ancient India. In the nineteenth century, as Buddhism slowly began to come into fashion among the European intelligentsia, the Brahmans would be represented as greedy clerics, using their claims of sanctity to enforce the rigid caste system that exploited the masses, the Pharisees of ancient India. As Burnouf would later portray him, the Buddha fought against them, offering his teachings to all who approached him, like the Jesus of the Gospels, what Burnouf calls here “moral Christianity,” not the Jesus of the Roman Catholic Church. (Indeed, in an alternative analogy that gained prominence later in the nineteenth century, especially in Germany and Britain, the Brahmans were the Catholics and the Buddhists were the Protestants.)
Moving beyond praise for its Christian elements, Burnouf also praises the Lotus Sūtra for what he calls its “very Socratic method of exposition,” again reflecting the attitude of savants of the French Enlightenment who often valued the classics more highly than the Gospels. Here, however, his referent is more difficult to discern. Nowhere in the sūtra do we find the kinds of philosophical conversations, the questioning and refinement of positions, that we associate with the Socratic dialogues. It is true that in the opening chapters to which Burnouf refers, the Buddha sometimes asks Śāriputra a question, such as whether the father lied about the three carts when he lured his children from the burning house, but the answer is always what one expects, confirming the Buddha's wisdom. These questions, far from being Socratic, appear to be yet another manifestation of the anxiety that courses through the sūtra.
Burnouf was perhaps above all a philologist, but a philologist who believed, as he declared in his inaugural address as holder of the Sanskrit chair at the Collège de France, that “there is no philology without philosophy and history.” Thus, what especially interested him about the Lotus Sūtra was what he called the dialect. He would have noted at the end of the first chapter that the text turns from prose into poetry and that the language changes from a classical Sanskrit to what the American Sanskrit scholar Franklin Edgerton would dub “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit,” a Sanskrit with a heavy admixture of vernacular or Prakrit forms. As noted above, in 1826, Burnouf had coauthored a book in which he analyzed Pāli, the most famous of the Prakrits. Thus, he writes here that in the verse portions of the Lotus Sūtra, one is able to observe the process by which Sanskrit turned into Pāli. Always seeking to set accurate historical dates to Buddhist texts and figures, he states (incorrectly) that the presence of these vernacular forms allows us to date the sūtra as having been composed about two centuries after the Buddha's death (when in fact it is more likely that the earliest portions of the sūtra date from four or five centuries after the Buddha's passing).
At the end of the passage, Burnouf promises that, in an effort to repay Hodgson's gift of the books, he will work hard to translate the Lotus Sūtra, wishing that he had the time and the health to work on it night and day. Burnouf did work night and day; he was at his desk by 3 AM each morning. And his health was poor throughout much of his adult life; he seems to have suffered from chronic kidney problems. He does not say that he will translate the entire sūtra but, rather, only substantial fragments. His plan, instead, is to write a book called Observations on the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka. As we shall see, however, he did translate the entire sūtra, and he did not write a book about the Lotus Sūtra. He wrote another book instead.
By October 27, 1837, Burnouf had finished all but the final fifteen folios of his translation of the Lotus Sūtra. He was translating many other sūtras at this time and seems to have set aside the Lotus Sūtra for two years. He completed the translation of the sūtra in November 1839. He decided to have it printed but not published; in a letter of October 28, 1841, he writes to Hodgson that he has finished printing his translation of the Lotus Sūtra, “but I would like to give an introduction to this bizarre work.”14 Three years later, he would publish Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien, a book that was many things; it was not observations on the Lotus Sūtra.
Burnouf delayed the publication of his translation of the Lotus Sūtra because he felt that it would not be comprehensible to European readers without an introduction. That introduction grew to 647 pages. Burnouf intended at least one, and perhaps as many as three, more volumes. The published volume, which has “Tome Premier” on the title page, is devoted to the Sanskrit works received from Hodgson, what Burnouf calls the Buddhist literature of Nepal. The second volume would be devoted to the Buddhist literature of Sri Lanka, preserved in Pāli. This study would be followed by another that compared the Sanskrit collection of Nepal with the Pāli collection of Sri Lanka. Burnouf intended to conclude the series with what he calls the Esquisse historique (Historical Sketch), which would analyze various traditions on the date of the Buddha's death and then go on to examine the fate of Buddhism in India after his death as well as the various periods of the emigration of Buddhism from India to other regions of Asia. Burnouf alludes repeatedly to these various subsequent memoranda in the present volume, suggesting that he fully intended to complete and publish them before he published the translation of the Lotus Sūtra.
The contents of his massive Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien are not easily summarized. However, one of Burnouf's major aims is to demonstrate that Buddhism is first and foremost an Indian religion. On the first page of the foreword, Burnouf declares that the belief called Buddhism is completely Indian, literally “a completely Indian fact” (un fait complètement indien). After several centuries of confusion, with speculation that Buddhism originated in such diverse locales as Egypt and Scandinavia, by Burnouf's time most scholars understood that Buddhism had originated in India. However, prior to Hodgson's dispatch, no original Indian texts (that is, Sanskrit texts) had been discovered. For Burnouf, Hodgson's discovery restored “to India and to its language the study of a religion and a philosophy whose cradle was India.”15
Burnouf believed that the life of the Buddha and the tradition that he founded could only be fully understood as a product of Indian culture and expressed in an Indian language. He endeavors to understand the origins of Buddhism and the life of the Buddha in historical rather than mythological terms, arguing that original Buddhism, that is, the Buddhism of the Buddha himself, is a human Buddhism that arose not in heaven but on the contested soil of ancient India, where the Buddha challenged the authority of the Brahman priests. It was Burnouf's conviction that the historical circumstances and social milieu of the origins of Buddhism, as well as the chronology of its subsequent development, can be gleaned from reading its scriptures. He saw in Buddhist texts, in their original language—not in translations into Chinese, Tibetan, or Mongolian—the key to determining the original teachings of the Buddha and their historical milieu.
Interestingly, despite the fact that Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien seems to have been originally intended to aid readers in understanding the Lotus Sūtra, the Lotus Sūtra figures only tangentially in Burnouf's long book. Indeed, he alludes to its most famous message but twice and only briefly. For example, near the end of the book he writes that the “dogmatic part” of “the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka or the Lotus of the Good Law … has the object of establishing that there are not three distinct paths of salvation for the three classes of beings, named śrāvakas or listeners, pratyekabuddhas or individual buddhas, and bodhisattvas or future buddhas, but that there is but one vehicle, and that if Śākya speaks of three vehicles, it is solely to adjust his teaching to the more or less powerful faculties of those who listen to him.”16
Another of Burnouf's allusions to the Lotus is linguistic. In the first chapter, he establishes what was only suspected by a few European scholars at that time, that the most important Buddhist texts preserved in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese are in fact translations of works originally composed in Sanskrit. He goes on to argue for the importance of reading Buddhist texts in the language in which they were originally composed; crucial elements that are evident in the original disappear in translation. As he writes, “These translations are materially exact imitations of the original but, while retracing the outward features, they express no more of the soul than a tracing of a painting that would stop at the outline of the figures without reproducing the colored and living part would represent this painting. In this respect, the original texts have an incontestable advantage over the translations that repeat them.”17 As an example of what is lost in translation, he mentions the Lotus Sūtra:
By putting a uniform color on a work whose several parts carry the trace of diverse origins, the translation causes the sole index with which the critic can recognize the authenticity or even the age and the homeland of the work to disappear. … There is, nevertheless, at least one book in the Nepalese collection that justifies these remarks and allows one to conjecture that the Tibetan translators did not always accurately render certain features of the original that constitute one of the most interesting and the most innovative characteristics of the primitive text.
This work is entitled Saddharmapuṇḍarīka or the “White Lotus of the Good Law”; it forms part of the nine dharmas or books regarded as canonical by the Buddhists of Nepal. It is composed of two distinct parts or, in fact, two redactions, one in prose and the other in verse. The second does nothing in general but reproduce the content of the first, with the difference that poetic exposition necessarily entails. These two redactions are interspersed with one another in such a way that when a story or a discourse has been set forth in prose, it is reprised anew in verse, sometimes in an abridged manner, sometimes with developments that add a few things to the first redaction.18
Here, what Burnouf noticed in his initial reading of the Lotus Sūtra—that the chapters contain prose and poetry, one in Sanskrit, one in Prakrit—becomes central to his argument for the importance of reading Buddhist texts in the original; the shift in language becomes invisible in Tibetan and Chinese translations of the sūtra. Beyond this, in Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien the Lotus Sūtra functions above all as an example of a type, a type of which Burnouf does not entirely approve.
Burnouf seems to have read, or at least read through, all of the sūtras that Hodgson had sent. Having done so, he divided them into two categories, based on both their content and their style. It was not the familiar Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna but categories of Burnouf's own coinage, what he called the simple sūtras and the developed sūtras. The French term simple in this case does not connote something obvious and easy but, rather, something that is straightforward, unadorned, and unpretentious. Burnouf speculated that the simple sūtras were those that best represented the teachings of the historical Buddha, teachings that had been composed shortly after his death. These texts best reveal the social milieu, the real world of ancient India, where the human Buddha preached his message of humanity to ordinary people, many of them living under the repression of Brahman priests.
Simple was Burnouf's own term; it has no analogue in Buddhist literature. The term developed (développé), however, was a translation of the Sanskrit term vaipulya, meaning “vast,” “broad,” or “extended.” It appears in the extended titles of many Mahāyāna sūtras, especially those that are particularly lengthy, including the Lotus; indeed, in the Sanskrit manuscript that Burnouf read, the Lotus is called the “king of vaipulya sūtras.” For Burnouf, these were clearly later works, composed in cloisters in a baroque literary style, the products of a tradition that had grown complacent, sheltered from the concerns of the real world. One of the stylistic elements absent in a simple sūtra but present in a developed sūtra for Burnouf is something that he noticed in his first reading of the Lotus Sūtra: a passage in prose followed by a passage in poetry that says essentially the same thing.
And there were other differences between the simple sūtras and the developed sūtras. Burnouf describes the two categories clearly in the following extended quotation from his Introduction, where his own preferences are not difficult to discern. He begins by asking a reader who knows Sanskrit to begin reading one of the developed sūtras:
I propose to a reader versed in the knowledge of Sanskrit and endowed moreover with a robust patience to read the first fifty leaves of this treatise, and then to say whether it seems to him that such a work is a primitive book, an ancient book, one of these books upon which religions are founded, a sacred code, in a word, if he recognizes in it the character of a doctrine still in its first beginnings; if he apprehends the trace of the efforts of proselytism; if he encounters the struggles of a new belief against an order of previous ideas; if he discovers in it the society in whose milieu the preaching is tested. Either I am gravely mistaken or, after such a reading, the one whose testimony I invoke will find in this book nothing other than the developments of a complete doctrine, triumphant, which believes itself to be without rival; nothing other than the peaceful and monotonous conceptions of the life of the cloisters; nothing other than vague images of an ideal existence that calmly slips away into regions of absolute perfection, far from the noisy and passionate agitation of the world. Thus, what I say about the Gaṇḍavyūha applies almost rigorously to the other great sūtras, to the Samādhirāja, the Daśabhūmīśvara, for example. And in the other developed sūtras, such as the Lalitavistara and The Lotus of the Good Law where something more distinguishable and more real than the ideal virtues of bodhisattvas appears, where the life of Śākyamuni is related and where beautiful parables are recounted that give such a high idea of the preaching of the last buddha, in these sūtras, I say, the traces of development let themselves be so often recognized that we are constantly led to suppose that these books are but working at their leisure on an already existent theme.
Well, it is here that the difference and the anteriority of the simple sūtras relative to the vaipulya sūtras appears clearly; everything lacking in the second is found in the first. The ordinary sūtras show us Śākyamuni Buddha preaching his doctrine in the midst of a society that, judging from the legends in which he plays a role, was profoundly corrupt. His teaching is above all moral; and although metaphysics are not forgotten, it certainly occupies a less grand position than the theory of virtues imposed by the law of the Buddha, virtues among which charity, patience, and chastity are without objection at the first rank. The law, as Śākya calls it, is not set forth dogmatically in these books; it is only mentioned there, most often in a vague manner, and presented in its applications rather than in its principles. In order to deduce from such works a systematic exposition of the belief of the Buddhists, it would be necessary to have a very great number of them; still, it is not certain that one would be able to succeed in drawing a complete picture of Buddhist morality and philosophy by this means; for the beliefs appear there, so to speak, in action, and certain points of doctrine recur there on each page, while others are hardly mentioned, or not at all. But this circumstance, which for us is a true imperfection, also has its advantages from the historical perspective. It is a certain index of the authenticity of these books, and it proves that no systematic effort attempted to complete them afterwards, nor to place them, through later additions, at the level of progress that Buddhism certainly reached in the course of time. The developed sūtras have, as far as doctrine is concerned, a marked advantage over the simple sūtras, for the theory there proves to be more advanced from the dual perspective of dogma and metaphysics; but it is precisely this particularity which makes me believe that the vaipulya sūtras are later than the simple sūtras. These latter make us witness to the birth and the first developments of Buddhism; and if they are not contemporary with Śākya himself, they at least have preserved for us the tradition of his teaching very faithfully. Treatises of this kind could doubtless have been imitated and composed afterwards in the silence of the monasteries; but even in accepting that we have only imitations of the original books, all readers of good faith who will study them in the Sanskrit manuscripts of Nepal will be forced to agree that they are still closer to the preaching of Śākya than the developed sūtras. This is the very point I desire to establish at present, it is the one that it is important to shield from all contestation; at whatever date subsequent research must one day place the most simple sūtras, whether they go back to the time of the first disciples of Śākya, or they come as far as the epoch of the last council of the North is of little importance; the relation that seems to me to exist between them and the developed sūtras will not change; only the distance that separates one from the other could increase or decrease.
If, as I have every reason to believe, the preceding observations are well founded, I am entitled to say that what there is in common between the developed sūtras and the simple sūtras is the framing, the action, the theory of moral virtues, that of transmigration, of rewards and pains, of causes and effects, subjects that belong equally to all schools; but these various points are treated, in the one and the other, with differences of proportion that are quite characteristic. I have shown how the framing of the developed sūtras was more vast than that of the simple sūtras; that of the first is almost boundless; that of the second is restricted to the limits of plausibility. The action, although the same on both sides, is not performed for the same listeners in the developed sūtras as in the simple sūtras; it is always Śākyamuni who teaches; but instead of these brahmans and merchants whom he converts in the simple sūtras, in the developed sūtras it is bodhisattvas, as fabulous as the worlds from which they depart, who come to attend his teaching. The scene of the first is India, the actors are humans and some inferior divinities; and save for the power to make miracles that Śākya and his premier disciples possess, what occurs there seems natural and plausible. On the contrary, everything that the imagination can conceive as immense in space and time is still too confining for the scene of the developed sūtras. The actors there are these imaginary bodhisattvas, with infinite virtues, with endless names one cannot pronounce, with bizarre and almost ridiculous titles, where the oceans, the rivers, the waves, the rays, the suns are coupled with qualities of unmerited perfection in a manner most puerile and least instructive, because it is without effort there. No one is left to convert; everyone believes, and each is quite sure to become a buddha one day, in a world of diamonds or lapis lazuli. The consequence of all this is that the more developed the sūtras are, the poorer they are in historical details; and the farther they penetrate into metaphysical doctrine, the more they distance themselves from society and become estranged from what occurs there. Is it not enough to make us believe that these books were written in countries and in epochs in which Buddhism had reached its full development, and to assure all desirable likelihood to the opinion I sought to establish, namely the anteriority of the ordinary sūtras, which take us back to times and countries where Buddhism encountered its adversaries at every moment, and was obliged by preaching and by the practice of moral virtues to do battle with them?19
Burnouf thus clearly prefers the simple sūtras, and it is from them that he would make his palette for his portrait of the Buddha. The developed sūtras, in comparison, are effete works of fantasy. Two developed sūtras receive a somewhat reduced sentence in Burnouf's judgment of the vaipulya sūtras: the Lalitavistara, because it relates the life of the Buddha, and the Lotus, because it has parables. But although he does not say so directly, the Lotus Sūtra is guilty of all other charges: the immense distances in space and time, the bodhisattvas arriving from other universes, the lengthy unpronounceable names. When Burnouf writes, “No one is left to convert; everyone believes, and each is quite sure to become a buddha one day, in a world of diamonds or lapis lazuli,” he can only be thinking of the Lotus Sūtra. He may not have recalled that in the thirteenth chapter, the Buddha predicts how its followers will be mocked in the future, albeit in rather cruder terms than Burnouf uses in mocking the developed sūtras.
Although Burnouf clearly preferred the simple sūtras over the developed sūtras, he did not dismiss the latter outright. However, another group of texts included in the works provided by Hodgson received his unequivocal condemnation: the Buddhist tantras. Here, the otherwise always decorous Burnouf makes no attempt to conceal his contempt. He writes, “For coarse and ignorant minds, such books certainly have more value than the moral legends of the early days of Buddhism. They promise temporal and immediate advantages; in the end, they satisfy this need for superstitions, this love of pious practices by which the religious sentiment expresses itself in Asia, and to which the simplicity of primitive Buddhism responded but imperfectly.”20 He devotes most of the section on tantra in the Introduction to the summary and analysis of a single text, the famous Golden Light (Suvarṇaprabhāsa), a text that appears in some canons as a sūtra and in others as a tantra. It has many of the characteristics of a “developed sūtra,” including those that appear in the Lotus Sūtra. However, perhaps because it is classed as a tantra, Burnouf reserves particular criticism for it. He writes:
Such is the content of this book, mediocre and indeed vapid, like the things of which it speaks, despite the great esteem it enjoys among the Buddhists of the North. … The cult of Śākya and the observation of moral virtues that his teaching aimed to spread are still recommended; Śākya is the main personage and he is still not replaced, as takes place almost completely in the other books of the same genre, either by imaginary buddhas, or by other personages strange or terrible, of a less peaceful and less pure character. But despite these advantages, how little value this book has for us compared with the legends where the real life of Śākyamuni is recounted, and with the so profound parables of The Lotus of the Good Law! It bears all the characteristics of a treatise that does not belong to the preaching of Śākya, and which must have been composed at leisure in some monastery, at the time when Buddhism was completely developed. It is written in prose and in verse, like all the compositions of the second age of Buddhism, and the poetic parts bear traces of this mixture of Prakrit forms that I have indicated in the developed sūtras.
Then, and this touches on the content itself, this book is so filled with praises of itself made by the Buddha or his listeners, and with the account of the advantages promised to one who studies and reads it, that one searches for it in vain beneath this mass of praise, and one arrives at the last page, almost without knowing what the Suvarṇaprabhāsa is. This feature is, to my mind, quite decisive. Nothing, indeed, better shows to what mediocre proportions Buddhism was reduced by the tantras than this tiresome repetition of the advantages and merits assured to the owner of a book which, in itself and apart from these developments, would be almost reduced to a few pages.21
Everything that Burnouf condemns in the Golden Light is present in the Lotus. What seem to save the Lotus are the precious parables, the elements of the text that likely caused him to translate it in the first place. Indeed, if one deleted the reference to the parables in the passage above, one could substitute Saddharmapuṇḍarīka for Suvarṇaprabhāsa and the description would remain accurate. Still, the Lotus Sūtra seems to hold a special place for Burnouf, perhaps because he had already translated it and had it printed (but not published) at the time the Introduction was published in 1844. It may have held a special place in his heart as the first sūtra that he read, or it may simply have been that he did not want to specifically condemn a work that he was planning to publish. His attitude, whatever its origin, is nowhere more evident than in the second paragraph above, where he complains about the pages of self-praise that fill the Golden Light. He surely knew that “this tiresome repetition of the advantages and merits assured to the owner of a book” also fills the Lotus Sūtra. Yet this did not deter him from working on the Lotus Sūtra, albeit intermittently, for the few years that remained in his life.
Burnouf had had his translation of the sūtra, which required 283 pages, printed, without notes, in 1841.22 After having it printed, he did not have it published. He delayed the publication of the translation for two reasons. The first was that he wanted to provide notes as well as a number of appendices. He seems to have worked on these up to the time of his death, ultimately providing 150 pages of notes. During the years that he worked on the sūtra, Burnouf acquired three more Sanskrit manuscripts; many of the notes discuss variants among the four Sanskrit manuscripts as well as a Tibetan version of the sūtra that he had before him. Other notes discuss various technical terms, lists, and personal names that appear in the text; there is a very long note, for example, on what a kalpa (aeon) is. Burnouf confines himself for the most part to philological and historical matters, rarely editorializing. One exception is his note on the transformation of the nāga princess, where he begins by apologizing for discussing a miracle: “Once this belief is accepted as a religious element, one miracle more or less is not an important point: credulity does not recoil at the number any more than it does at the absurdity of their conception.”23
Because he had had the translation printed years earlier, Burnouf had not been able to insert footnote numbers. He did, however, provide the folio page in the margin of each page of the translation and used these as the reference for the notes, which themselves have footnotes. The notes become fewer and generally shorter as he proceeds through the sūtra; more than a third of the 150 pages of notes is devoted to the first chapter.
To these notes Burnouf added twenty-one appendices, constituting an additional 433 pages. In order to gain a sense of Burnouf's interests in the last years of his life, and to demonstrate how far those interests had ranged from the Lotus Sūtra, it is useful to briefly survey their contents.
The first appendix, nine pages in length, deals with the term bhikṣu saṃgha, or “community of monks,” considering how the term has been rendered by other scholars and what the term encompasses, with a discussion of the term as it appears in the inscriptions of Aśoka. The second, the third longest at fifty-six pages, deals with the key Buddhist term kleśa, often translated as “affliction” or “defilement,” the negative mental states that induce negative deeds. The length of this appendix derives from the inclusion of a translation from the Pāli and discussion of the famous Sāmaññaphala Sutta, the Discourse on the Fruits of Renunciation, in which the Buddha sets forth the path to King Ajātaśatru, who had committed the heinous crime of murdering his father, the Buddha's friend and patron King Bimbisāra, and who was in turn destined to be murdered by his own son. The third appendix, fourteen pages long, deals with the bodhisattva of wisdom, Mañjuśrī, who, as we have seen, is an important figure in the Lotus Sūtra. The fourth appendix, seven pages long, deals with dhātu, a polyvalent term in Buddhism, often translated as “element” or “realm,” with Burnouf providing various occurrences of the term in Sanskrit and Pāli works. The fifth appendix, fourteen pages long, deals with the four noble truths, or as Burnouf refers to them, “les quatre vérités sublimes,” especially as they are implied in various versions of the famous ye dharma formula. When Śāriputra asked the Buddha's disciple Aśvajit to summarize the Buddha's teaching, he replied, “Of those phenomena produced through causes, the Tathāgata has proclaimed their causes and also their cessation. Thus has spoken the great renunciant.” Beginning with the words ye dharma, and hence often referred to by those words, it is perhaps the most famous statement in all of Buddhist literature. The sixth appendix, fifteen pages long, deals with the twelve links of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and includes a translation of the Mahānidāna Sutta, the Great Discourse on Origins. The seventh appendix, ten pages long, discusses the famous six perfections (pāramitā)—giving, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom—which the bodhisattva perfects over the course of the long path to buddhahood.
The second longest of the appendices, ninety-six pages long, deals with the strange and fascinating topic of the marks of the “superman” (mahāpuruṣa), the physical qualities of the Buddha's body. Here, Burnouf deals individually with not only the thirty-two “major marks” but also the eighty “ancillary” marks, as well as the various auspicious signs (variously enumerated) on the soles of the Buddha's feet, often depicted in stone “footprints” of the Buddha in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. A short appendix (five pages) on the term āveṇika (unique) is used to describe various qualities of the Buddha; here, as he does so often in the appendices, Burnouf cites Pāli sources.
The tenth appendix, at 130 pages, is by far the longest. It deals with a number of questions—largely lexical and orthographic—connected to the edicts of Aśoka (whom Burnouf refers to as Piyadasi); he reproduces a number of pages in the Brāhmī script of the inscriptions. In a series of articles published in 1837, James Prinsep (1799–1840) of the East India Company had deciphered the Brāhmī script of the edicts of the Indian emperor Aśoka (r. 269–232 B.C.E.). Although legends of the pious Buddhist king appeared in both Sanskrit and Pāli sources (with the Pāli being read by George Turnour and the Sanskrit being read by Burnouf), the inscriptions themselves had been forgotten in the Buddhist world. Burnouf, who devotes a lengthy section of the Introduction to the legends of Aśoka, understood the importance of the inscriptions as the earliest references to the teachings of the Buddha in ancient India, earlier perhaps than the simple sūtras.
The remaining eleven appendices are all relatively brief, first dealing in the eleventh appendix with the ten powers of a buddha (sixteen pages), again making use of Pāli sources; in the twelfth appendix with the meaning of the term bodhyaṅga (limbs of enlightenment) (five pages); in the thirteenth appendix with the four levels of dhyāna or “concentration,” which refers both to meditative states and to places of rebirth in the Realm of Form (rūpadhātu) that result from achieving those meditative states (twenty pages); in the fourteenth appendix with the five “superknowledges” (abhijñā) of a buddha (five pages); and in the fifteenth appendix with the eight emancipations or vimokṣa (nine pages). All of these are important terms in the standard Buddhist lexicon. However, in the sixteenth appendix (seven pages), Burnouf turns to a more obscure term, lokāntarika, literally “between worlds,” strange areas of darkness that separate one world from another. These worlds are inhabited by beings who, because of the utter darkness, are unaware of the presence of each other. The seventeenth appendix (five pages) deals with the term pratisaṃvid, sometimes translated as “specific knowledge.” The eighteenth deals with “fabulous mountains of the earth” (seven pages), and the nineteenth (five pages), with the meaning of the word pṛthagjana, literally “separate being” but often translated as “common being,” a technical term used to refer to those who have not attained one of the four levels of enlightenment. In the twentieth appendix (eight pages), Burnouf provides a great service to all readers of Mahāyāna sūtras by laboriously calculating all of the astronomical numbers with which those sūtras are replete; he calls the appendix “on the name called asaṃkhyeya,” which means “innumerable.” Here, he tells us, for example, that the number nāgabala is one hundred bahulas, that is, “1” followed by twenty-seven zeroes. He does this for almost one hundred different numbers. The final appendix (nine pages) compares some passages in Sanskrit and Pāli texts.
All but the last of the appendices are keyed to a folio in the Sanskrit manuscript of the Lotus Sūtra as well as to a page of the preceding text of the translation. However, it is noteworthy that with the exception of the second appendix, all of the page references are not to the translation of the Lotus Sūtra itself but to the notes. The extensive appendices are thus in a sense twice removed from the Lotus Sūtra, something that is confirmed by the contents of the appendices themselves, where Burnouf rarely makes mention of the Lotus Sūtra or even another Mahāyāna sūtra; his main sources in the appendices are “simple sūtras” or Pāli texts. One may note, indeed, that among the twenty-one appendices, only two deal with specifically Mahāyāna topics: the appendix on the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī and the appendix on the six perfections, accounting for only twenty-four pages, or 5 percent of the more than four hundred pages of appendices.
Indeed, the appendices demonstrate how far Burnouf had strayed from the Lotus. When we consider Burnouf's contributions to the study of Buddhism, we might think of two books, we might think of three books, or we might think of one book. The two books are the Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien and the Lotus Sūtra, the first published in 1844 when Burnouf was alive, the second published in 1852, after his death. As described above, he had planned to publish as many as three other books in between. After he had read at least some of the Lotus, Burnouf had begun to read other books sent by Hodgson, and it was from this reading that he developed his rubric of the simple sūtras and the developed sūtras, a rubric in which the Lotus fared badly. One is left to wonder whether, if he had lived a longer life, Burnouf would have written the other intervening books. One is left to wonder how many more appendices he would have added to the Lotus. One is left to wonder, even had he lived a full life, whether Burnouf would have published the Lotus translation before his death.
And thus it is perhaps useful to imagine that Burnouf published three books rather than two, dated not by the time of their publication but by the time of their composition. The first would be the Lotus Sūtra translation, without notes or appendices, most of which was translated in 1837, the year that the manuscript arrived in Paris. After having it printed, Burnouf set it aside, his interests attracted more strongly now by what he called the simple sūtras. Finding these in the Avadānaśataka and the Divyāvadāna, Burnouf translated hundreds of pages of these texts. These would form the textual foundation for Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien, which he would publish in 1844. This was the second book. Over the remaining years of his life, Burnouf would write the third book: the notes and appendices to the Lotus Sūtra translation. This represented his most mature view of Buddhism, its doctrine, and its history. And, as we have seen, the appendices were so many self-contained essays, most of which had little or nothing to do with the Lotus.
In East Asian Buddhism, we find what is called the “threefold Lotus Sūtra” (Fahua sanbu jing in Chinese). Here, the Lotus is preceded by the Sūtra of Immeasurable Meanings (Wuliang yi jing)—which purports to be the sūtra that the Buddha delivered in the first chapter of the Lotus—and followed by Sūtra on the Method for Visualizing Samantabhadra (Guan puxian pusa xingfa jing); both works are likely of Chinese origin.24 Here, we might consider whether Burnouf wrote one book, his own threefold Lotus Sūtra. The first part was the translation of the Lotus Sūtra; the second part is Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien; the third part is the notes and the appendices, both of which refer repeatedly to the already published Introduction. That these three parts form, in a sense, a single book is supported by the fact that they have a single index, at the end of the Lotus Sūtra volume published after Burnouf's death. As in the threefold Lotus Sūtra, each of the three parts is different from the others. The first part—in the case of the sūtra, the Sūtra of Immeasurable Meanings, and in the case of Burnouf, the Lotus translation—is quite different from the latter two parts. And the latter two parts are related to each other: the Sūtra on the Method for Visualizing Samantabhadra is a kind of appendix to the last chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, and the notes and appendices repeatedly mention the Introduction. Like the more famous threefold Lotus Sūtra, Burnouf's single book, so conceived, is in many cases at odds with itself.
Burnouf died of gravel (kidney disease) on May 28, 1852. He was fifty-one years old. His Lotus Sūtra, a text he had begun to read in 1837, appeared later that same year. The appendices were edited by Burnouf's student Julius von Mohl, and the entire book—translations, notes, and appendices—was finally published as Le Lotus de la bonne loi traduit du Sanscrit accompagné d'un commentaire et de vingt et un mémoires relatifs au Buddhisme. It is a massive work, 897 pages in length. It was dedicated, as Burnouf had instructed, to Brian Houghton Hodgson, fondateur de la véritable étude du Buddhisme par les textes et les monuments, “founder of the true study of Buddhism through texts and monuments.” These were generous words from the ever generous Burnouf. In the years since his death, however, it has become clear that these words more accurately describe Burnouf himself. Indeed, he would play an important role in the transmission of Buddhism to America.
Burnouf's Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien had been published in Paris in 1844. But earlier in that year, Burnouf's Lotus Sūtra came to America, while it remained printed but unpublished in Paris. In 1840, a group of New England intellectuals, known to themselves as Hedge's Club (after member Frederic Henry Hedge), known to history as the Transcendental Club, found the literary journals of the day reluctant to publish their works; its members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Ripley, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), James Freeman Clarke, and the young Henry David Thoreau. They decided therefore to found their own, which they called The Dial: A Magazine of Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. Its editor was Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), the first woman allowed to use the Harvard College library. The business manager was Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894). A pioneer in children's education (and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne), she had established a bookstore in her home that stocked a wide range of titles in English, French, and German. In “The Editors to the Reader” in the inaugural issue, Emerson wrote, “We do not wish to say pretty or curious things, or to reiterate a few propositions in varied forms, but, if we can, to give expression to that spirit which lifts men to a higher platform, restores to them the religious sentiment, brings them worthy aims and pure pleasures, purges the inward eye, makes life less desultory, and, through raising man to the level of nature, takes away its melancholy from the landscape, and reconciles the practical with the speculative powers.”25 Beginning in the July 1842 issue, the editors began to include what they called “Ethnical Scriptures,” translations of ancient works from other cultures, including China, Persia, and India. From China came sayings of Confucius and Mencius; from Persia, the teachings of Zoroaster. Among Indian works were extracts of translations from the Sanskrit by William Jones.
The Dial (named after the sundial) had a short life of only five years, ceasing publication because of lack of funds in April 1844. In the penultimate issue, from January 1844, was a piece called “The Preaching of Buddha.” It consisted of two parts, a description of the Buddha and a translation of Chapter Five (“Herbs”) of the Lotus Sūtra. Here is the introductory paragraph and the description of the Buddha:
THE PREACHING OF BUDDHA
The following fragments are extracts from one of the religious books of the Buddhists of Nepal, entitled the “WHITE LOTUS OF THE GOOD LAW.”
The original work, which is written in Sanskrit, makes part of the numerous collection of Buddhist books, discovered by M. Hodgson, the English resident at the Court of Katmandou, and sent by him to the Asiatic Society of Paris. M. Burnouf examined, some years since, this collection, which includes a great part of the canonical books of the Buddhists, and of which translations are found in all the nations which are Buddhists, (the people of Thibet, China, and the Moguls.) The book, from which the following extracts are taken, is one of the most venerated, by all the nations, which worship Buddha, and shows very clearly the method followed by the Sage who bears this name. The work is in prose and verse. The versified part is only the reproduction in a metrical rather than a poetical form of the part written in prose. We prefix an extract from the article of M. Eugène Burnouf, on the origin of Buddhism.
“The privileged caste of the Brahmins reserved to itself the exclusive monopoly of science and of religion; their morals were relaxed; ignorance, cupidity, and the crimes which it induces, had already deeply changed the ancient society described in the Laws of Menu. In the midst of these disorders, (about six centuries before Christ,) in the north of Bengal, a young Prince born into the military caste, renounced the throne, became a religious, and took the name of Buddha. His doctrine, which was more moral than metaphysical, at least in principle, reposed on an opinion admitted as a fact, and upon a hope presented as a certainty. This opinion is, that the visible world is in a perpetual change; that death proceeds to life, and life to death; that man, like all the living beings who surround him, revolves in the eternally moving circle of transmigration; that he passes successively through all the forms of life, from the most elementary up to the most perfect; that the place, which he occupies in the vast scale of living beings, depends on the merit of the actions which he performs in this world, and that thus the virtuous man ought, after this life, to be born again with a divine body, and the guilty with a body accursed; that the rewards of heaven and the pains of hell, like all which this world contains, have only a limited duration; that time exhausts the merit of virtuous actions, and effaces the evil of bad ones; and that the fatal law of change brings back to the earth both the god and the devil, to put both again on trial, and cause them to run a new course of transmigration. The hope, which the Buddha came to bring to men, was the possibility of escaping from the law of transmigration by entering that which he calls enfranchisement; that is to say, according to one of the oldest schools, the annihilation of the thinking principle as well as of the material principle. That annihilation was not entire until death; but he who was destined to attain to it, possessed during his life an unlimited science, which gave him the pure view of the world as it is; that is, the knowledge of the physical and intellectual laws, and the practice of the six transcendent perfections, of alms, of morality, of science, of energy, of patience, and of charity. The authority, on which the votary rested his teaching, was wholly personal; it was formed of two elements, one real, the other ideal. The one was regularity and sanctity of conduct, of which chastity and patience formed the principal traits. The second was the pretension that he had to be Buddha, that is, illuminated, and as such, to possess a supernatural power and science. With his power he resisted the attacks of vice; with his science he represented to himself, under a clear and complete form, the past and the future. Hence he could recount all which he had done in his former existences, and he affirmed thus, that an incalculable number of beings had already attained, like himself, by the practice of the same virtues, to the dignity of Buddha. He offered himself, in short, to men as their Saviour, and he promised them that his death should not destroy his doctrine, but that this doctrine should endure after him for many ages, and that when its salutary action should have ceased, there would appear to the world a new Buddha, whom he would announce by his own name; and the legends say that before descending on earth, he had been consecrated in Heaven in the quality of the future Buddha.
“The philosophic opinion, by which he justified his mission, was shared by all classes, Brahmins, warriors, farmers, merchants, all believed equally in the fatality of transmigration, in the retribution of rewards and pains, in the necessity of escaping in a decisive manner the perpetually changing condition of a merely relative existence. He believed in the truths admitted by the Brahmins. His disciples lived like them, and like them imposed stern penances, bending under that ancient sentence of reprobation fulminated against the body by oriental asceticism. It does not appear that Buddha laid any claim himself to miraculous power. In fact, in one of his discourses, occur these remarkable words. A king urged him to confound his adversaries by the exhibition of that superhuman force, which is made to reduce incredulity to silence: ‘O king!’ replied the Buddha, ‘I do not teach the law to my disciples by saying to them, Go work miracles before the Brahmins and the masters of houses whom you meet, but I teach them in this wise, Live, O holy one, by concealing your good works, and by exposing your sins.’ This profound humility, this entire renunciation is the characteristic trait of primitive Buddhism, and was one of the most powerful instruments of its success with the people.”26
This is followed by an English translation of Burnouf's translation of the Sanskrit version of Chapter Five of the Lotus Sūtra. We recall that the Sanskrit edition used by Burnouf, unlike what would become the more famous Chinese version, contains both the parable of the herbs and the parable of the blind man. “The Preaching of Buddha” article in The Dial is anonymous, with no indication either of the French source of Burnouf's description and translation or of who translated them from the French. Although it was originally thought to be the work of Thoreau, it is now clear that it was the work of Elizabeth Peabody, who thus deserves a special place in the history of the reception of the Lotus Sūtra, and of Buddhism, in America.
But let us attend to the remarkable content of the article that appeared in Boston in January 1844. The Buddha described in the first half is clearly the Buddha of Burnouf as he portrayed him in his Introduction, which would appear in Paris later that same year; indeed the passage (with the important exception of the final paragraph) appears almost verbatim in Burnouf's great tome.27 Here, the Buddha is a reformer who wrested the religious truths that the corrupt Brahmans had jealously guarded for themselves, opening the path to liberation from suffering and rebirth to all. He did so with an authority that was based not on caste but on his virtues, perfected over many lifetimes, and he offered teachings that were moral rather than metaphysical. In doing so, Burnouf explains, “it does not appear that Buddha laid any claim himself to miraculous power. … This profound humility, this entire renunciation is the characteristic trait primitive of Buddhism, and was one of the most powerful instruments of its success with the people.” This is not the Buddha of the Lotus Sūtra, as Burnouf, having completed his translation of the entire sūtra in 1839, well knew.
The translation of Chapter Five of the Lotus contains a number of passages that would have appealed to the members of Hedge's Club and the readers of The Dial in New England in 1844. We find, for example:
With one and the same voice I explain the law, taking incessantly for my subject the state of Buddha, for this law is uniform; inequality has no place in it, no more than affection or hatred. … I fill the whole universe with joy, like a cloud which pours everywhere a homogeneous water, always equally well disposed towards respectable men, as towards the lowest, towards virtuous men as towards the wicked; towards abandoned men as towards those who have conducted most regularly; towards those who follow heterodox doctrines and false opinions, as towards those whose doctrines are sound and perfect.28
Still, all is not well. There is much here to give us pause. First, the passage from the Lotus Sūtra that appears in The Dial is not Chapter Five of the Lotus Sūtra; it is portions of Chapter Five, presented out of order. In the April 25, 1843, issue of Revue indépendante, Burnouf had published an article entitled “Fragments des prédications de Buddha.” It begins with the first two paragraphs that appear in The Dial (minus the final sentence). We know from Burnouf's translation of the Lotus Sūtra (and other translations from the Sanskrit) that the Sanskrit version contains two parables, the parable of the herbs and the parable of the blind man, with each presented first in prose and then in verse, with the parable of the herbs preceding the parable of the blind man. Burnouf's 1843 essay does not identify the passages as coming from Chapter Five, noting only that they come from the Lotus. And for reasons that are unclear, Burnouf rearranges the text. He begins his translation with the parable of the blind man, in prose, followed by the same parable in verse, omitting two of its thirty-eight verses (the seventy-second and eighty-second as he numbers them in his Lotus Sūtra translation) for some reason. He then moves to the parable of the herbs, omitting the prose portion entirely and providing all of the verses. Why Burnouf made these changes to his translation, which, as we recall, he had completed some years ago, is unclear.
In translating Burnouf's essay from French into English, Elizabeth Peabody made her own changes. After having translated the prose portion of the parable of the blind man, she omitted the verse portion, moving directly to the verse portion of the parable of the herbs but rendering it in running prose rather than in separate stanzas, as Burnouf had. The Lotus Sūtra, which had gone through so many stages of development in India, with all manner of additions, reiterations, and interpolations, seems to have continued to suffer this fate in Paris and in Boston.
Yet what is more fateful is not what happened to the chapter of the sūtra but, rather, what preceded it in The Dial. There we find a description of the Buddha that is very familiar today: the teacher of ethics who made the path to liberation open to all, denouncing the evil caste system of India. He is a humble Buddha, whose charisma derives from his renunciation, never claiming miraculous powers for himself. But this is the Buddha of Burnouf, the Buddha of the French (not the Indian) Enlightenment, the Buddha who taught liberty, fraternity, and equality. It is not the Buddha of Indian Buddhism, and it is surely not the Buddha of the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha whose miraculous powers, either displayed or extolled, appear on almost every page. Burnouf, of course, knew this. He had completed his translation of the sūtra years earlier. He would make it clear in his Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien that the human Buddha, the Buddha of the simple sūtras, was the real Buddha; the Buddha of the developed sūtras, which included the Lotus, was a later invention. Yet to place his description at the beginning of his translation of a chapter (or rearranged fragments) of the Lotus Sūtra seems a gross misrepresentation. Why would he do such a thing?
As it turned out, he did not. In the next month's issue of Revue indépendante (May 25, 1843), Burnouf had published an essay entitled “Considérations sur l'origine du Bouddhisme.” The long passage describing the Buddha in The Dial that precedes the translation from the Lotus Sūtra comes from this essay. It was appended to the translation by Elizabeth Peabody, not by Burnouf, turning the celebrated arrival of the Lotus Sūtra in America into a confusing, and quite misleading, pastiche.
In May of that same year, 1844, in the same city, Boston, the newly founded American Oriental Society held its first meeting. Among the speakers was Edward Eldridge Salisbury (1814–1901), a Congregationalist deacon and student of Burnouf, who had brought the study of Sanskrit from Paris to Yale in 1841. On May 28, he delivered a lecture entitled “Memoir on the History of Buddhism” to the American Oriental Society. His report, based largely on Burnouf's work (and published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society), was the first scholarly article on Buddhism to be written by an American. He explained at the outset, “My endeavor will be, by a critical use of all these sources of information, to settle some of the most important facts and dates of Buddhist history, in the hope that the results may serve as a useful framework, to be hereafter filled up by further investigation; not altogether neglecting, however, to notice the relation of historical facts to the principles of the religion of Buddha.” Among his conclusions was that “a plausible foundation of real individuality is discoverable in even the wildest fables which veneration for Buddha has invented; and that the most extravagant have originated out of India, while nearly all agree in making India his native land.”29 In the course of his fifty-one-page essay, Salisbury mentions many Buddhist texts. He does not mention the Lotus Sūtra.
And so 1844 was not a good year for the Lotus Sūtra, with its arrival in America complicated by all manner of things. It is clear to us today that “The Preaching of Buddha” in the January 1844 issue of The Dial is in fact the preaching of two Buddhas—and of two very different Buddhas. From the perspective of the Lotus Sūtra, the first Buddha, the Buddha born as a prince who practiced austerities and taught the four noble truths, the Buddha whom Burnouf called the Buddha of the simple sūtras, was an expedient, an emanation, a display, a phantom. The other Buddha was the Buddha who proclaimed that there is but one vehicle; the other Buddha was the Buddha who declared that his lifespan is limitless. However, unlike in the eleventh chapter of the sūtra, the two Buddhas did not sit amiably side by side. The Buddha of Burnouf pushed the Buddha of the Lotus Sūtra from the throne. He would not return for a long time.
And so the Lotus Sūtra all but disappeared from New England. But by the end of the twentieth century, it was back in Boston, in a form that Burnouf, or Elizabeth Peabody, or Thoreau, or Salisbury, would not have recognized, as we shall see in the final chapter.
The Lotus Sūtra would have two additional moments in nineteenth-century Europe, one expected and one rather unexpected. Beginning in 1879, Burnouf's student Friedrich Max Müller, now a professor of Comparative Religion at Oxford and soon to be the most famous Orientalist of the century, began a massive project called the Sacred Books of the East. Continuing until 1910, it included fifty volumes. Of these, ten were devoted to various Buddhist texts.
By the end of the nineteenth century, it was generally the opinion of European scholars that the Pāli tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia most closely represented the “primitive Buddhism” or “original Buddhism” that Burnouf had described, with the Mahāyāna, especially as it was found in China, Japan, and Tibet, being devalued. This is reflected in the Sacred Books of the East, where only two of the ten volumes dealing with Buddhism are devoted to Mahāyāna texts. The forty-ninth volume, called Mahayana Buddhist Texts, published in 1894, includes the Diamond Sūtra and the Heart Sūtra, as well as the short and long versions of the Sukhāvatīvyūha and the Amitāyurdhyāna, the main texts of the Pure Land schools of Japan (and likely included at the suggestion of Japanese students who studied Sanskrit with Müller at Oxford). Another text in that volume is Aśvaghoṣa's life of the Buddha, the Buddhacarita, which is not in fact a Mahāyāna text. The one other volume devoted to the Mahāyāna was volume 21, published in 1884, the Lotus Sūtra. Appearing in full in English for the first time, it was translated from the Sanskrit by the great Dutch scholar Hendrik Kern (1833–1917).
Like Burnouf, Kern was a philologist, and most of the thirty-one pages of his introduction to the translation are devoted to philological questions and to comparisons between the Lotus and various Hindu texts, including the Bhagavad Gītā. Kern does not discuss the importance of the Lotus Sūtra or why it should be counted as one of the sacred books of the East; he simply writes that “the Lotus being one of the standard works of the Mahāyāna, the study of it cannot but be useful for the right appreciation of that remarkable system.”30 And in defense of the sūtra against the critics of the Mahāyāna, he writes, “Whether the system of the Lotus can be said to agree with what is supposed to be ‘genuine’ Buddhism, it is not here the place to discuss. So far as the Northern Church is concerned, the book must be acknowledged as the very cream of orthodoxy; it is the last, the supreme, the most sublime of the Sūtras exposed by the Lord; it is, so to say, the śiromaṇi, the crown jewel, of all Sūtras.”31 He identifies the major teachings of the Lotus as “everyone should try to become a Buddha” and the Buddha “is not a certain individual having lived a short span of time somewhere in India, but the sublime being who has his constant abode on the Gṛdhrakūṭa.”32 Unlike Burnouf, Kern does not turn a blind eye to the supernatural elements that abound in the sūtra. In his single description of the style of the text, he writes that the Lotus Sūtra “bears the character of a dramatic performance, an undeveloped mystery play, in which the chief interlocutor, not the only one, is Śākyamuni, the Lord. It consists of a series of dialogues, brightened by the magic effects of a would-be supernatural scenery. The phantasmagorical parts of the whole are as clearly intended to impress us with the idea of the might and glory of the Buddha, as his speeches are to set forth his all-surpassing wisdom.”33 Kern speculates insightfully on the social circumstances of the composition of the sūtra, seeing the great emphasis placed on preaching as a sign of the importance of proselytizing for the survival and flourishing of the Mahāyāna.
Of Burnouf's translation, Kern writes:
In the first place, I must declare that I cannot speak in too warm terms of the benefit I have derived from the French translation by the illustrious Burnouf. I have taken that work throughout for my model, without having been able to reach its excellency. The material discrepancies between his translation are partly due to my having followed other MSS., partly to another interpretation, especially of frequently corrupt and difficult Gathas. If some reader not acquainted with the peculiar difficulties of those Gathas should wonder at the occurrence of numerous discrepancies, I would repeat the words of the preface to the Chinese version from A.D. 601, and request him “not to have any suspicion about these differences.” Let him compare the fragment from Kumâragîva's [sic] rendering on page xl with the corresponding passages in the French and English translations, and he will observe that the difference between the work of the learned Buddhist of the fourth century and the two European versions is far more considerable than between the latter.34
Between 1908 and 1912, Kern, with the collaboration of the Japanese scholar Nanjō Bun'yū (Nanjio Bunyiu, 1849–1927)—although the two never met—produced a critical edition of the Sanskrit text of the Lotus Sūtra; it appeared in five parts in Bibliotheca Buddhica, published in Saint Petersburg. Describing the importance of this translation, we find the following in the November 1948 issue of the Japanese Buddhism periodical Daihōrin (Great Wheel of the Dharma):
In order for the Lotus Sūtra to be published, first the men of genius in Europe had to turn their attention to the study of Sanskrit, to lay the groundwork for the birth of Eugène Burnouf; then the dedicated collection [of texts] by Hodgson and others had to create the opportunity for the French translation of the Lotus Sūtra by the genius Burnouf; then Burnouf's enthusiasm had to spread to Max Müller and his disciples; and then it had to be expounded by Nanjō, Kasahara, and others who came to study [in Europe] all the way from the Far East. We must keep in mind that a single great cooperative project of East and West, as well as the workings of rare karmic connections, made this work possible.35
In 1925, Burnouf's translation was republished in Paris in two volumes (translation and notes in the first volume, appendices in the second volume), an edition otherwise identical to the original 1852 work, apart from the addition of a brief preface by Sylvain Lévi, one of the leading European scholars of Buddhism of the day. The preface is largely an homage to Burnouf. About the appendices, Lévi writes, “With regard to the memoranda that follow the translation and that elucidate obscure terms, they not only stand as sources of ever valuable information; they remain consummate models of scientific discussion. They assist us not only in comprehending the text, they assist us in penetrating the delicate processes of thought dedicated entirely to the search for the truth.”36
Kern's translation of the sūtra from Sanskrit into English is still well regarded for its accuracy. This is not to suggest that Burnouf's French translation had remained unread.
On June 24, 1871, Gustave Flaubert wrote to his childhood friend Frédéric Baudry, a philologist, student of Sanskrit, and translator of the Brothers Grimm; thirty years earlier Baudry had studied with Burnouf. Flaubert wrote:
O Bodhisattva! O youth of gentle birth! O perfect Buddha!
Like an old stork, I am sorrowful and dejected in spirit; like an old elephant fallen into the mire, I lack strength.
I need, O youth of gentle birth, the fourth of the medicinal plants that induce well-being in any situation, whatsoever it may be.
I have read the Lalitavistara, O Bodhisattva, I have read The Lotus of the Wonderful Law, O youth of gentle birth!
But I would spend innumerable (hundreds) of myriads of Kotis of Kalpas, without understanding, O holy name of God, in what Buddha consists.
I search within myself, to whether I may not possess the thirty-two qualities of the imbecile.
In short, I'm going to send to you at the end of next week for the Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire. Thank you for the legend of the deer, but what I especially lack is the theology of Buddhism, the very doctrines of Buddha.
You will probably see me toward the end of July or the beginning of August.
If you see Renan, give him my warm thanks for his book.
It seems to me that politics are calming down. Ah, if people could accustom themselves to living without “principles,” i.e. without dogmas—what progress!
Here are two lines from The Lotus of the Wonderful Law that drive me crazy! They concern a house haunted by demons: “Seizing the dogs by their feet, they overturn them onto their backs; and growling they squeeze them by their throats and take pleasure in choking them to death.” What a picture! How one sees it! Doesn't it make you want to do the same?
Adieu, old Richi. O, the Law! O, the Assembly!37
Flaubert signed the letter, “Your disciple.”
Flaubert was clearly a student of Buddhism. At the time that he wrote this letter, he was working on the final version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which would be published in 1874. In the fifth chapter of this great work, the idols of all the nations appear to Saint Anthony and Hilarion. These include the Buddha, who gives a lengthy, and accurate, account of his life and teachings. Flaubert was also working on his posthumous masterpiece, Bouvard et Pécuchet, where he would have his comic heroes speak approvingly of Buddhism, much to the alarm of their guests. In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, he defines Buddhism as “False religion in India,” reproducing what appeared in the first edition (1842) of the Dictionnaire Bouillet. We know from his letters that in preparation for the section on the Buddha in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Flaubert studied Burnouf's Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien as well as his translation of the Lotus Sūtra.
As the above letter indicates, Flaubert had been studying Buddhism rather seriously and had read Burnouf's translation of the Lotus Sūtra rather carefully, evoking its style, including its use of the vocative. Referring to the four plants that the physician gathered from the Himalayas in the parable of the blind man in Chapter Five, he says that he is weary and dejected and needs such a plant. He has studied the Lalitavistara, the extravagant biography of the Buddha that had been translated into French from Tibetan by Philippe Édouard Foucaux, another student of Burnouf, and published in 1847. He has read Burnouf's translation of the Lotus Sūtra, published in 1852, and not just the translation but the extensive appendices, where one finds a lengthy discussion of the thirty-two marks of the superman (mahāpuruṣa) with which the Buddha is endowed. Flaubert fears that his inability to understand the Buddha, even if he were to spend koṭis of kalpas, is because he is endowed with the thirty-two qualities of the imbecile. He tells Baudry that he is going to ask him to send him the book by Barthélémy Saint-Hilaire, yet another student of Burnouf, who wrote several books about Buddhism, including Le Bouddha et sa religion (1860). He asks that his thanks be conveyed to Ernst Renan, the great biblical scholar (still another student of Burnouf). Despite these studies, he laments that he does not understand the doctrines of Buddha, nor does he understand “in what Buddha consists,” certainly one of the great mysteries of Buddhism and a question that has vexed readers of the Lotus Sūtra for centuries. But because he is Flaubert, who described the demons who tempted Saint Anthony in such vivid detail, he cites a passage from the Lotus Sūtra that is rarely cited elsewhere. Among the many horrors in the burning house where the children blithely play in Chapter Three is the presence of kumbhāṇḍas, dwarfish demigods known for their giant testicles. Flaubert is captivated by the description of these demons strangling dogs: “Doesn't it make you want to do the same?”
Burnouf's Buddha would not remain dormant inside his stūpa. Indeed, that stūpa would burst forth from beneath the earth—not the earth of India but the earth of Europe, where the Buddha would be transformed from a long-maligned idol, worshipped by pagans, to a philosopher of flesh and blood, to be honored by savants. Clearly, this Buddha, the Buddha whom Burnouf invented in Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien, was, from the perspective of his Chinese and Japanese devotees, the Buddha of the first half of the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha who was but an apparition, the Buddha who as a prince pretended to renounce the world, the Buddha who pretended to seek, and find, the path to nirvāṇa. Burnouf, unaware of the East Asian exegetes, would in fact invert their hierarchy. The Buddha who left the palace and taught the four noble truths was the true Buddha; the Buddha who denounces those teachings and claims that he can live forever is the false Buddha. In Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien, Burnouf specifically addressed the godlike qualities of the Buddha in the Lotus Sūtra and declares that he is not God:
One does not find there the least trace of the idea of God, nor of any buddha superior to the last of the human buddhas, to Śākyamuni. Here, as in the simple sūtras, it is Śākya who is the most important, the first of beings; and although the imagination of the compiler endowed him with all the perfections of science and virtue accepted among the Buddhists; although Śākya already takes on a mythological character, when he declares that it has been a long time since he fulfilled the duties of a buddha, and that he must still fulfill them for a long time despite his imminent death, which does not destroy his eternity; although in the end he is depicted creating buddhas from his body who are like ideal images and reproductions of his mortal person, nowhere is Śākyamuni called God.38
As discussed above, we can read Burnouf's entire project as two books, three books, or one book. The two books, as noted, are the Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien and the Lotus Sūtra, the first published in 1844, when Burnouf was alive, the second published in 1852, when he was dead. However, there is another way of dividing the books into two, one closer to their chronology and perhaps closer to Burnouf's heart. Here, the translation of the Lotus Sūtra, without notes and appendices, is the first part, and Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien and the notes and appendices to the Lotus are the second part. And here also, the hierarchy is reversed: The false Buddha appears in the first part; the true Buddha appears in the second part. And this second Buddha, this human Buddha, the Buddha who died in India 2,500 years ago, perhaps only pretended to die. For he lives today.