Buddhism and Modernity

An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226391069
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We tend to think that the Buddha has always been seen as the compassionate sage admired around the world today, but until the nineteenth century, Europeans often regarded him as a nefarious figure, an idol worshipped by the pagans of the Orient. Donald S. Lopez Jr. offers here a rich sourcebook of European fantasies about the Buddha drawn from the works of dozens of authors over fifteen hundred years, including Clement of Alexandria, Marco Polo, St. Francis Xavier, Voltaire, and Sir William Jones.Featuring writings by soldiers, adventurers, merchants, missionaries, theologians, and colonial officers, this volume contains a wide range of portraits of the Buddha. The descriptions are rarely flattering, as all manner of reports—some accurate, some inaccurate, and some garbled—came to circulate among European savants and eccentrics, many of whom were famous in their day but are long forgotten in ours. Taken together, these accounts present a fascinating picture, not only of the Buddha as he was understood and misunderstood for centuries, but also of his portrayers.
 

CHAPTER ONE

From 200 to 1500

◆ St. Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 CE)

The earliest reference to the Buddha in European literature is found in the works of Clement of Alexandria, the Greek theologian and church father. Born circa 150 CE, he traveled from Greece to Alexandria around 180, where he would eventually become head of its catechetical school. His brief reference to the Buddha appears in his Stromateis (Miscellanies). In this work, he argues that Jewish wisdom is superior to Greek philosophy, in part because philosophy came to Greece from barbarians, beginning with the Egyptians. He also mentions the Chaldeans in Assyria, the Druids in Gaul, the Magi in Persia, and the gymnosophists or “naked philosophers” in India.

The precise identity of these Indian sarmanae (also called samanaeans) remains a question. The term seems to derive from the Sanskrit term śramaṇa, often translated as “ascetic” or “mendicant,” and appears in such ancient sources as the edicts of the emperor Aśoka in conjunction with the term Brahmin (brāhmaṇa). Taken together, the two terms refer to the priests and mendicants to be supported by a king, with Brahmin connoting those that we would today call Hindus, and śramaṇa connoting various non-Hindu ascetics, including Buddhist monks.

We do not know the source of St. Clement’s information. The “golden-mouthed” orator Dio Chrysostom, who died circa 120 CE, reports the presence of Indians in Alexandria, and Clement’s own teacher Pantaenus is said to have traveled to India. However, the most likely source is Megasthenes, the fourth-century-BCE Greek scholar who served as ambassador to the court of the Indian emperor Candragupta Maurya (the grandfather of Aśoka) and provided a detailed account of the country in his Indica, a work that Clement cites verbatim in the passage below. It is noteworthy, however, that Megasthenes does not mention the Buddhists by name in his discussion of the religion of India.

All this makes this famous first reference in the passage below both intriguing and puzzling. The Buddhists were decidedly not “naked philosophers.” In several Buddhist texts, those ascetics who go naked are mocked for their immodesty. It seems that Clement may be describing the Jains, whose “sky-clad” sect did go naked. Yet the name of the Buddha is clearly mentioned. Later in the text, Clement says that the gymnosophists “honor a kind of pyramid under which they believe the bones of some god are resting.” This seems to be a Buddhist stupa, the reliquaries in which the cremated remains of the Buddha were enshrined.

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The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called Sarmanae, and others Brahmins. And those of the Sarmanae who are called Hylobii “neither inhabit cities, nor have roofs over them, but are clothed in the bark of trees, feed on nuts, and drink water in their hands. Like those called Encratites in the present day, they know not marriage nor begetting of children.” Some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Boutta; whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours.1

◆ St. Jerome (ca. 347–420)

St. Jerome, often depicted in Renaissance paintings with his pet lion, is best known for translating the Bible into Latin. In 393, in a work entitled Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian), he condemned the heresies of Jovinian, a monk who came to reject asceticism. Jovinian had argued that married women and widows, once they had been baptized, were of equal merit to virgins; he also denied the perpetual virginity of Mary. This led Jerome into a long discourse on virginity, where the passage below appears (Adversus Jovinianum, I.42). Here, he alludes to the traditional story that the Buddha emerged from his mother’s right side, rather than by the usual route in being born. Buddhist texts do not say, however, that the Buddha’s mother, Queen Māyā, was a virgin.

Yet her supposed virginity was immortalized by Jerome in the passage below. It appears the Buddha’s mother also found her way, via Jerome’s work, into Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, although she is not mentioned by name there. In the prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, Chaucer explains that Jankyn, the young clerk who was the last husband of the Wife of Bath, enjoyed reading Jerome’s Against Jovinian (or, in Chaucer’s Middle English, “agayn jovinian”), the work in which the Buddha’s mother is listed: “He hadde a book that gladly, nyght and day / For his desport he wolde rede always” (669–70). It was a book that extolled the virtues of virginity: “And every nyght and day was his custume / Whan he hadde leyser and vacacioun / From oother worldly occupacioun / To reden on this book of wikked wyves. / He knew of hem mo legendes and lyves / Than been of goode wyves in the bible” (682–87). This book, “bounden in o volume,” included a variety of Latin works, including one by “A cardinal, that highte seint jerome, / That made a book agayn jovinian” (674–75).

Here is the passage from Jerome.

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To come to the Gymnosophists of India, the opinion is authoritatively handed down that Budda, the founder of their religion, had his birth through the side of a virgin. And we need not wonder at this in the case of Barbarians when cultured Greece supposed that Minerva at her birth sprang from the head of Jove, and Father Bacchus from his thigh.2

◆ Socrates of Constantinople (b. ca. 380)

One of the chief rivals of Christianity in its early history was Manichaeism, the religion derived from the teachings of the Babylonian prophet Mani (ca. 216–276), who taught that light and darkness, good and evil, are in constant struggle. Mani described himself as a follower of Jesus, and according to some sources, claimed at different times to be the reincarnation of the Buddha, Krishna, and Zoroaster; he is said to have studied in Afghanistan, where Buddhism flourished during this period. He also claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus, and was thus the target of the fathers of the church. In these polemics, one “Buddas” is sometimes mentioned, a name that may derive from Buddha.

In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem provided an unflattering biography of Mani, explaining that there had been a Saracen (by which he likely meant a pagan from Arabia) named Scythianus, neither a Jew nor a Christian, who went to Alexandria and imitated the life of Aristotle. He intended to go to Judea, but God smote him with a deadly disease. Scythianus had a disciple named Terebinthus who spread the errors of his teacher in Judea, but was driven out. Terebinthus then went to Persia, but fearing that word of his humiliation in Judea may have spread there, he changed his name to Buddas. He lived with a widow there until God cast him from a precipice. The widow inherited his money, which she used to buy a slave boy named Cubricus. When the widow died, the slave boy changed his name to Manes (Mani). By the fifth century, the story had been expanded to include references to reincarnation, a central doctrine of Buddhism, and one that was rejected by the church.

What follows is the biographical passage from the Historia Ecclesiastica of Socrates of Constantinople.

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A Saracen named Scythian married a captive from the Upper Thebes. On her account he dwelt in Egypt, and having versed himself in the learning of the Egyptians, he subtly introduced the theory of Empedocles and Pythagoras among the doctrines of the Christian faith. Asserting that there were two natures, a good and an evil one, he termed, as Empedocles had done, the latter Discord, and the former Friendship. Of this Scythian, Buddas, who had been previously called Terebinthus, became a disciple; and he having proceeded to Babylon, which the Persians inhabit, made many extravagant statements respecting himself, declaring that he was born of a virgin, and brought up in the mountains. The same man afterwards composed four books, one he entitled The Mysteries, another The Gospel, a third The Treasure, and the fourth Heads [Summaries]; but pretending to perform some mystic rites, he was hurled down a precipice by a spirit, and so perished. A certain woman at whose house he had lodged buried him, and taking possession of his property, bought a boy about seven years old whose name was Cubricus: this lad she enfranchised, and having given him a liberal education, she soon after died, leaving him all that belonged to Terebinthus, including the books he had written on the principles inculcated by Scythian. Cubricus, the freedman, taking these things with him and having withdrawn into the regions of Persia, changed his name, calling himself Manes; and disseminated the books of Buddas or Terebinthus among his deluded followers as his own. Now the contents of these treatises apparently agree with Christianity in expression, but are pagan in sentiment: for Manichæus being an atheist, incited his disciples to acknowledge a plurality of gods, and taught them to worship the sun. He also introduced the doctrine of Fate, denying human free-will; and affirmed a transmutation of bodies, clearly following the opinions of Empedocles, Pythagoras, and the Egyptians.3

◆ Anonymous (ninth century)

After late antiquity, the first version of the life of the Buddha to reach Europe came, like so many other important works, from the Islamic world. From Arabic sources, we learn that in Baghdad in the second century of the Hijra, that is, in the late eighth or early ninth century, a book called Kitāb Bilawhar wa Būḏāsf, the “Book of Bilawhar and Būḏāsf,” was translated from Middle Persian (Pehlevi) into Arabic. It tells the story of a king who is a persecutor of ascetics and wishes to save his son from asceticism. The Buddhist elements are clear to anyone who has read the famous story of Prince Siddhārtha’s chariot rides outside the city, during which he encounters an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and an ascetic. The Buddhist provenance of the story is further confirmed by the fact that the Arabic name of the prince, Būḏāsf, is derived from the Sanskrit bodhisattva, the term commonly used in Buddhist texts to describe the Buddha in the years before his enlightenment at the age of thirty-five.

Bilawhar and Būḏāsf does not mention the Prophet Muhammad, and there is only one brief reference to Islam. The narrator calls the ascetic religion persecuted by King Gunaysar and adopted by the king’s son Būḏāsf simply “the Religion.” Both father and son claim to be followers of al-Budd (derived from Buddha), and debate about how best to follow his teachings, with the prince receiving instruction from an ascetic named Bilawhar, who has come from the island of Sarandib (Sri Lanka). The various Arabic versions begin with the birth of Būḏāsf, and their description of the prince’s early life and his death is similar to the Buddhist accounts.

The passage that follows shows the clear influence of Buddhist accounts of Prince Siddhārtha’s departure from the palace, his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, his teaching the dharma to his father, and his passage into nirvana. The passages in italics have been added from another version of the Arabic text.

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Then God—blessed be His Name!—sent an angel to Būḏāsf. The angel waited until he could find him alone, then revealed himself and spoke, standing before Būḏāsf. “Happiness, health, and greetings, O you who are man among beasts, a captive among oppressors, virtuous among the corrupt, and wise among ignorant men. I bring you greetings and salvation from the God of creation. I have been sent to warn you and to announce good news, to reveal what is hidden from you about your life in this world and the next, and to show you the beginning, the middle and the end. Receive my counsel and my good news! Break with the world! Distance yourself from its pleasures! Renounce ephemeral royal succession and earthly power that does not endure and that ends in signs and regrets! Seek the royalty that never ends and the repose that never changes! Be truthful and virtuous! You will be this world’s guide.”

Būḏāsf rejoiced at the angel’s words. He fell prostrate before him, confident in his words, and said: “I obey God’s commandment. He is Powerful and Great, and I understand His will and am ready to follow it. Command me as you will. I praise you and I thank He who sent you to me. For He has been gracious and merciful to me, and He has not abandoned me among my enemies. I am ready for whatever you bring me.”

The angel responded, “I will come to you in a few days and I will ask you to leave. Prepare for your departure, purify your heart and your soul! But do not let anyone learn about what you are doing.”

Būḏāsf prepared then and did not tell anyone of the angel’s prediction. He waited several days.

Finally the day of his departure arrived. The angel came in the middle of the night while people were sleeping. He said to Būḏāsf, “Get up and leave, do not tarry.”

Būḏāsf left his bed. He did not reveal his secret to anyone except a faithful minister. He went toward the palace door, accompanied by the angel who had come to announce the good news. At the palace door, his squire was waiting on duty, and he told him to bring his horse. As he was about to mount, a young man came and prostrated himself before him saying, “Where are you going, fortunate, noble, and perfect son of the King? You leave us and you leave your kingdom and your country, whereas since your birth, we have not ceased to hope for the days of your reign!”

Būḏāsf said, to reassure him, “You should stay in your country, but I must go where I am sent and do what I have been ordered to do. If you help me, you will have a part in what I go to do.”

He mounted his horse and went as far as he should, then he got off his horse and went on foot, leaving his minister to lead the horse. Then Būḏāsf said to him, “Take my horse back to my parents.”

The minister began to weep and said, “With what face should I greet your parents? With what eyes should I look at them? By what tortures will they make me die? And you, how will you have the strength to walk and live in hardship, when you are not used to it? How will you endure the solitude, you who have never been alone, even for a single day? How will you bear the fatigue, the hunger, and the thirst? How will you have the strength to sleep in discomfort on the ground in the dust?”

But Būḏāsf reassured and consoled him.

Then the horse stopped in front of him and began to kiss his feet. And having been given the power to speak by God, the Powerful and Great, the horse began to speak, “Do not abandon me, take me with you, do not leave me behind! I will never again have any happiness, and I will not allow any other to ride me. If you leave me and do not take me with you, I will go into the desert and live in the place of wild beasts.”

To reassure him, Būḏāsf said, “Expect only good for yourself! For I will have you taken back and I will send you to the king, recommending to him that he treat both of you, my minister and you, with honor and goodness. And you will not belong to any rider after me.”

Then Būḏāsf took off the royal vestments he wore and his jewels and gave them to his minister, saying: “Wear my clothes.”

Then he gave him the ruby that he had worn on his head, and said to him, “Leave, and take my horse with you. When you arrive at my parents’ home, prostrate yourself before them for me. Give the ruby to my father and give him and the Nobles many greetings on my behalf. Tell them that ever since I have understood the difference between the eternal and the ephemeral, and I have desired the eternal and renounced all that will perish. And when I saw clearly the difference between my allies and my enemies, I turned toward my allies.”

Then he said to his minister, “When my father sees the ruby, he will rejoice, and when he sees you in my clothes, my cloak, my hat, and my jewels, he will recognize my love and affection for you, and that will prevent him from suspecting you or doing you any ill.”

Then the minister turned away, leading his horse and weeping. He presented himself to Būḏāsf’s parents, and did what Būḏāsf had ordered.

As for Būḏāsf, he walked north and arrived at a great plain. Raising his eyes, he saw an immense tree beside a spring. It was the largest tree in existence, with the most beautiful branches, and the most savory sweet fruit. An incalculable number of birds were assembled in its branches. The sight of the tree cheered Būḏāsf and filled him with happiness. He went toward the tree, and he began to explain the vision and interpret it for himself. He compared the tree to the Good News, the source of Wisdom and Knowledge, to which he would call men, and the birds were the men who would assemble and receive the Religion from him.

As he was standing there, four angels came to him. They walked before him and he followed their footsteps. Then they carried him up into the air. They showed him all things, and he saw them as one sees his face in a mirror. They gave him the Wisdom and Knowledge necessary to know what to command and what to prohibit. Then they brought him back down to earth between the East and the North, and they gave him one of the angels as his companion. He dwelled in the country...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: From 200 to 1500
• CHAPTER TWO: From 1501 to 1600
• CHAPTER THREE: From 1601 to 1700
• CHAPTER FOUR: From 1701 to 1800
• CHAPTER FIVE: From 1801 to 1844
• Notes
• Footnotes
• Index