Abstract: This article examines how Goethe places his reading about a Jesuit disputation with a Buddhist monk in seventeenth-century China within the context of German philosophical debates. Goethe immediately draws an analogy connecting Weimar debates between Kantians and idealists to the earlier Nanjing debate about Jesuit and Buddhism metaphysics. His inclination to perceive parallels between philosophy in China and Germany anticipates his later comments to Eckermann about the similarities between the Chinese and European novels that served as the basis for his pronouncements about Weltliteratur (world literature). A careful reading of Goethe and Schiller's letters shows that as a heretical thinker, Goethe was inclined to identify with the Buddhist dismissal of Christian theism; however, the emerging atheism controversy surrounding accusations made against Fichte's lectures at the University of Jena led him to cautiously avoid entering into yet another Enlightenment debate about religion.

Keywords: world literature, Chinese-German relations, Fichte's atheism controversy, Jesuit missionaries in China, analogy, similarity

ON JANUARY 3, 1798, Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote his best friend, Friedrich Schiller, that he had just come across a curious story in an old tome describing a debate held in Nanjing, China during a banquet in 1599 involving a Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and an unnamed Buddhist scholar, who today is identified as the renowned abbot Xuelang Hong’en (1545– 1607). The Jesuit texts refer to him as Sanhoi. Goethe wrote: “Dieser Fund hat mich unglaublich amüsiert und mir eine gute Idee von dem Scharfsinn der Chineser gegeben” (This discovery amused me unbelievably and gave me a good idea of how sharp witted the Chinese are). Typical for the way in which humanists combined friendship, letter writing, and intellectual labor, Goethe promised to send Schiller a handwritten copy of the passage. Three days later, Goethe followed through with his promise and went on to speculate how the Buddhist might have even more wittily turned the tables on the Jesuit Ricci. Rather than agreeing with the Jesuit arguments about the creation of the earth, Goethe takes the heterodox step of siding with the Buddhist—not a complete surprise, as he had resumed working on Faust the previous summer.