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The Adaptation of Buddhism to the West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Frédéric Lenoir
Frédéric Lenoir*
Affiliation:
CEIFR/EHESS, Paris
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Buddhism was not really known in the West until a little more than 150 years ago. Although since the thirteenth century there had been numerous contacts with local Buddhist traditions, the travellers and missionaries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had not yet brought to light the history of Buddhism and its unity across this immense diversity of worship and doctrine, disseminated through most of the countries of Asia. Of course, since the seventeenth century some Europeans had guessed at the Indian origin of the Buddha and they succeeded in pinning down his historical existence after a fashion. In 1691 and 1693 Simon de la Loubère, Louis XIV's envoy at the court of the king of Siam, published remarkable research which established the possibility of a link between the different regions of Siam, Ceylon, Japan and China and conjured up the possible existence of a single founder long before Christ. But this far too isolated knowledge had scarcely any impact in Europe. It was only with the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 that orientalism was to enjoy a rapid and decisive expansion. The word ‘Buddhism’ appeared from the 1820s onwards, and with it the first conceptualization of a tree with many branchings. But it was not until the publication, in 1844, of Eugène Burnouf's magisterial Introduction l'histoire du buddhisme indien, that more detailed knowledge became available, thanks to a critical scrutiny of the most varied sources. The works of the French scholar and of other pioneers in Buddhist studies - mainly Alexander Csoma de Koros and Edmond Foucaux on Tibet, Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat and Stanislas Julien on China, Christian Lassen and Spence Hardy on Ceylon - were to give rise to a tremendous craze for Buddhism in Europe. Since then there has been no break in the successive waves disseminating it right up to the present day, when the majority of Western countries appear to be so receptive to the message of the Buddha that for some years the media have been insistently questioning the reasons for this ‘Buddhist wave’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 187 , September 1999 , pp. 100 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

References

Notes

1. For instance in his Vie de saint François-Xavier, published at Lyons in 1666, Bartoli wrote: ‘it is certain in any case that Xaca was one of the most famous gymnosophists in India; his father was king in the Ganges Basin; his surname, Buddha, means wise and educated; he lived about 1000 BC' (p. 153).

2. Simon de la Loubère. (1691-1693). Description du royaume de Siam, 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie royale.

3. Among the very first occurrences, note the work of the Frenchman Michel-Jean-François Ozeray, Recherches sur Buddou ou Bouddou, instituteur religieux de l'Asie orientale. (Paris: Brunot-Labbé), who cites the word ‘Buddhism' in 1817. The term, which is not found in Asia, is sheer invention on the part of the first European orientalists. The spelling of the word varies considerably until the 1860s, when ‘Buddhism' (in English-speaking areas) and bouddhisme (in France) were finally established. As for the Asians themselves, they speak of dharma (Sanskrit) or dhamma (Pali) to describe the teachings and the law of the Buddha.

4. Eugène Burnouf. (1844). Introduction à l'histoire du buddhisme indien, vol. 1. Paris: Imprimerie royale.

5. The Hungarian Alexander Csoma de Köros published a Grammar and a Tibetan-English Dictionary contain ing 30,000 words from 1834 onwards, then from 1836 numerous articles in Asiatic Researches, the prestigious publication of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

6. Note especially his translation of Lalistavistara, a highly coloured account of the life of the Buddha, after the Tibetan version and the original in Sanskrit: Rgya tch'er rop pa, ou Développement des jeux, contenant l'histoire du Bouddha Cakya Mouni, 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1847-1848.

7. The publication in 1936, a year after his death, of Foé Koué Ki ou Relations des royaumes bouddhiques. (Paris: Imprimerie royale) revealed the first great Buddhist text to appear in Europe in its entirety.

8. Stanislas Julien. (1853-1858). Voyages des pèlerins bouddhistes, 3 vols. Paris: Imprimerie impériale.

9. Christian Lassen and Eugène Burnouf. (1826). Essai sur le Pali, ou Langue sacrée de la presqu'île au delà du Gange. Paris: Dondey-Dupré.

10. Spence Hardy. (1853). Manual of Buddhism and Its Modern Development. London.

11. This was the title of the front page of L'Exprèss, 24 October 1996.

12. This is a fact which has been effectively underlined by all the authors who have made a careful study of the reception of Buddhism in the West. See especially Guy Richard Welbon, The Buddhist nirvana and Its Western Interpreters (Chicago and London, 1968); Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cam bridge, 1988); Peter Bishop, Dreams of Power: Tibetan Buddhism and the Western Imagination (London, 1993); Roger-Pol Droit, Le culte du néant (Paris, 1997); Donald Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La (Chicago, 1998).

13. Frédéric Lenoir, La recontre du bouddhisme et de l'Occident (Paris, 1999).

14. We could cite in France today intellectuals such as the sociologist Edgar Morin, the philosopher André Comte-Sponville or the script writer Jean-Claude Carrière who claim to be ‘close' to Buddhism in a per spective which has no religious commitment about it and which remains solely philosophical.

15. René Remond, Introduction à l'histoire de notre temps. Le XIXe siècle (Paris, 1974), p. 201.

16. Nietzsche', L'Antéchrist (1888), para. 20, trans. Éric Blondel (Paris, 1994), p. 63 (author's emphasis).

17. T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhism: Being a Sketch of the Life and Teachings of Gautama, the Buddha (London, [1870]), pp. 208-209.

18. Marcus Dods, Mohammed, Buddha and Christ: Four Lectures on Natural and Revealed Religion (London, 1877), p. 177.

19. Henry S. Olcott, Le bouddhisme selon le canon de l'Église du Sud et sous forme de catéchisme (Adyard, 1881).

20. Alexandra David-Neel, Le modernisme bouddhiste et le bouddhisme du Bouddha (Paris, 1911), pp. 7-8.

21. Alexandra David-Neel, in an article in Buddhist Review, 8 no. 4 (October 1921), reprinted in Marc de Smedt (ed.), L'Orient intérieur (Paris, 1985).

22. Followed, accompanied or preceded by hundreds of high-ranking lamas, the dalai-lama took the road of exile for India in 1959. In 1960 Dagpo Rinpoché went to France and in 1967 Chogyam Trungpa founded the first Tibetan centre in the West in Scotland.

23. Frédéric Lenoir, Le bouddhisme en France (Paris, 1999).

24. Published in Frédéric Lenoir, Le Bouddhisme en France.

25. Matthieu Ricard and Jean-François Revel, Le moine et le phillosophe (Paris, 1997), p. 143.

26. Edgar Morin, Sociologie (Paris, 1984 and 1994), p. 369.

27. See especially Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoché's very virulent criticisms of Westerners' ‘spiritual materialism' in his Pratique de la voie tibétaine ([Paris], 1976) or, more recently, that of Droukchen Rinpoché in a vitriolic interview with the French periodical, Sangha (September-October 1994).

28. Luc Ferry, L'Homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie (Paris, 1996), p. 26.

29. Christmas Humphreys, one of the main proponents of Buddhism in Great Britain, proclaimed the arrival of a third vehicle, after Hinayana and Mahayana: that of Western Buddhism, which he calls ‘Navayana'.