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THE
EUROPEAN DISCOVERY OF INDIAN BUDDHISM
Rev.
Jnana - Zen Dharma Teacher - IBMC
***
 A
Dharma Talk at the IBMC --- What we accept today as common
historical understanding in our knowledge of Buddhism in India
is information that was totally unknown in the West a mere 200
years ago. A sub-continent as rich in history as is India, has
for over 2,000 years, since the time of the Buddha, done much
to obliterate the record of its past. The great Buddhist kingdoms
of the first half of the first millennium came to be supplanted
by the rise of the Hindus and the historical memory of the Buddhist
kingdoms was almost erased. The Hindus, in turn, were conquered
by the Muslims and ruled by them until the early 18th
century. The subsequent revival of Hinduism did nothing to further
the preservation or discovery of Buddhist India.
It is only with the arrival of the British that the destruction
of India’s past was reversed and its recovery was begun,
thanks to the persistent efforts of a handful of brilliant and
inspired individuals. The British were the prime movers in this
effort but they were not entirely alone in (literally) unearthing
and deciphering the historical record. This morning we will
skim the surface of some of the key factors and events in the
rediscovery of Buddhism in India, achieved by a disparate cast
of physicians, engineers, surveyors, botanists, geographers,
assay specialists and merchants.
In setting the stage in India it is helpful to appreciate the
extremely limited and imperfect knowledge of Buddhism that was
available to the European world as a result of its colonial
expansion in the East beyond India.
Christian prejudice and misinformation colored the earliest
missionary-explorer-colonizer accounts of the practice in the
Far East of what is now known as Buddhism. Francis Xavier dismissed
the Rinzai Zen he observed in Japan in 1550-1551 as “a
fraudulent law and an invention of the Devil’. Another
Italian missionary traveling in China at the end of the 16th
century believed Chinese Buddhism to be a form of Pythagoreanism
brought from Greece by way of India.
Most shocking and disquieting were the reports from all of the
missionary-explorers in the 16th and 17th
centuries of the disturbing similarity between the rites and
trappings of the Church of Rome and those practiced throughout
Tibet and Mongolia. The Catholic Church’s response to these
comparisons was to demonize what it called Lamaism. Referring
to the Dalai Lama, one Catholic report accounts that “Strangers
at their approach fall prostrate with their heads to the ground,
and kiss him with incredible veneration, which is no other than
that which is performed upon the Pope of Rome; so that hence
the fraud and deceit of the Devil may easily and plainly appear.”
Around the end of the 18th century more significant
and accurate reports about Buddhism, primarily in Burma and
Ceylon, appeared and helped to establish the fact of the significance
and dispersion of the Buddhist religion and provided much useful
background information for the argument that Buddhism had indeed
originated in India. In 1797 a British surgeon and devoted amateur
botanist, Dr. Francis Buchanan, who had been a member of a British
diplomatic expedition to the Kingdom of Ava, in what is now
Burma, published the most extensive account of Buddhism in English
to that date. In doing so he unknowingly founded the discipline
of Buddhist studies, while using the word ‘Buddhism’
for the first time in print.
Buchanan’s essay, On the Religion and Literature of
the Burmese, established that Buddhism was indeed a religion
founded on a historical personage, though verification of its
origin in India had not been made explicit in his Burmese sources,
as Buddhism was known by these Burmese to have come to their
land from the island of Ceylon. Buchanan deduced that since
Buddhism had evidently existed in Ceylon for many centuries,
it was reasonable to assume that at some time in the distant
past it must also have flourished on the adjacent Indian landmass.
The appearance of Buchanan’s work led to the publication
four years later, in the same journal as Buchanan’s original
essay, of two papers from British officials in Ceylon that confirmed
the general accuracy of his findings while commenting on every
aspect of Sinhalese Buddhism. Neither of the authors writing
from Ceylon grasped the full meaning of the core teachings of
Buddhism, concentrating rather on what they could understand.
These new sources did, however, contain a reasonably accurate
dating of the time of the Buddha, as well as identifying the
significance of the Bodhi tree, including the story of its miraculous
origin in Ceylon. One of the Englishmen writing from Ceylon
was convinced that the religion of the Burmans, the Siamese
and the Sinhalese was the same and that they all worshipped
Boudhou, though he was known by a different name in each country.
Before he was to make his his later and most significant findings
in India Dr. Buchanan was dispatched to Nepal for a year, where
he eagerly sat about gathering material for his study of the
religion of Nepal. While in the Himalayan kingdom he noticed
distinct similarities between many non-Hindu Nepalese structures
and the pagodas and Buddha figures he had seen in Ava. He also
was able to establish that the Sakya Singha or the Lion
of Sakya of the Newar people of the Katmandu Valley was identifiable
with the Gautama Buddha of Ava and Ceylon.
All of these Buddhist-related findings in nearby countries greatly
impacted the pending discoveries in India, providing key historical
background not otherwise available at the time.
As the East India Company strengthened its position in Bengal
during the early and mid-18th century, a posting
with the Company became a much sought after foothold for the
younger sons of the English gentry. From among these young recruits
were to arise those few resourceful individuals and their successors
that would help identify and ultimately solve the mystery of
India’s lost religion. These individuals comprised a hard
core of India enthusiasts, less interested in colonial spoils,
than in learning as much as they could about the country, its
peoples, culture, history, languages and religions.
As these early British discoverers slowly fit together disparate
pieces of what evolved as the puzzle of Buddhist history in
India the individuals involved did not initially appreciate
that they were even dealing with what is now identified as Buddhism
or that it had any relationship to the religion practiced elsewhere
in Asia as described, however inaccurately, by their fellow
Westerners. They initially identified Buddha as God, rather
than a teacher. There was even no agreement on his name, as
the variations ranged from Bodoo, Boudh, Bhooddha, Boudhou,
to Bodou, among others.
But we return to our Dr. Buchanan, now a few years after his
stint in Nepal. The time is November 1811 and he and a small
band of assistants are heading south from Patna on a statistical
survey of Bengal, toward the town of Gaya and, just beyond,
a huddle of stone temples that went by the name of Bodh-Gaya.
In the town of Gaya Buchanan was struck by the fact that many
relatively modern buildings were built of obviously salvaged
materials, including stone carvings of the Buddha and portions
of granite pillars. The religious images employed in the local
architecture were considered by the Hindus to be nastik,
or unorthodox, that is work of the Buddhists.
Not surprisingly the partially restored ruins at Bodh-Gaya were
rich in stone carvings and ornamentation. The Hindu ascetics
living at Bodh-Gaya were aware of the antiquity of the site
and treated the images and inscriptions found there with considerable
respect, much more tolerant behavior than that exhibited by
most Hindus. Until recently the ascetics had no realization
of the site’s true religious significance. Two separate
delegations, a few years, apart from the King of Ava, to Bodh-Gaya
confirmed to the ascetics that the Burmese regarded the site
as holy, that it was here that their god Gautama had lived,
and here that the Bodhi, tree had given this same Gautama shade
as he sat and meditated. During the course of excavations and
exploration at Bodh-Gaya, the leader of the ascetics introduced
Buchanan to a local convert to Buddhism who was able to guide
him about the region and to inform him more fully. The convert
explained that at one time Bodh-Gaya had been the center of
religion in India, that a great Buddhist king named Ashoka had
once lived there and that it was he who built the Mahabodhi
temple. Even if Dr. Buchanan failed to grasp why Bodh-Gaya was
the center or religion in India, his conversation with the convert
had provided him with some extremely valuable clues about the
early history of Buddhism. Traveling a bit further afield with
the convert across southern Bihar, Buchanan discovered a few
miles from Rajgir extensive ruins with magnificent stone sculptures.
Drawings were made of some of the finest examples and the party
moved on, unaware of the fact that they had camped within the
ruins of Nalanda, once the largest and most renowned university
in Asia and the last beacon of Buddhism in India.
Four years after Buchanan returned to England for good, a party
of British officers, in 1819, on an afternoon hunting expedition,
made a remarkable discovery of what remains one of the great
monuments of Indian art. The monumental structures of the Great
Stupa of Sanchi were found still standing and, almost miraculously,
were largely undamaged. One of the British officers despaired
of doing justice to the ‘magnificence of such stupendous
structures and exquisitely finished sculptures’. Every
sculptural panel told a story, but what story the British had
no idea. Now, of course, we know the extraordinary panels at
Sanchi depict the life of Gautama Buddha and scenes from the
Jataka Tales, without ever portraying the Buddha in anthropomorphic
form.
We need to shift our attention to a specialized aspect of the
story which we’ve only touched on up to this point, the
crucial role of historical linguistics and the decipherment
of key inscriptions. In the case of India, without access to
the sacred texts, and the major literary, historical and legal
works of ancient India, all the inquisitive Western minds available
would soon have run into a dead end. In northern India in the
mid-18th century the Brahmans held a closely guarded
monopoly over Sanskrit, the language of the gods, which they
maintained as a secret, esoteric language. It was only after
the first book printed in an Indian native language, a grammar
of Bengali, appeared in 1778 to wide popular acclaim that the
Brahmans eventually relented. Even they wanted in on the miracle
of the printed word in their language. In the coming decades
there were several British amateur Indiologists eager to learn
the esoteric language and to study the religious and historical
texts made available to them.
The newly acquired knowledge of Sanskrit, combined with the
Englishmen’s pre-existing knowledge of classical Greek
historical and geographic texts relating to India, led to some
auspicious deductions. At first they would seem to have nothing
to do with Buddhism, but they helped unlock some significant
doors to the past. Initially significant among these discoveries,
in 1793, was the verification that modern Patna was built near
the ruins of the seat of a famous ancient king of northern India,
known to the Greeks as Sandrokottos. Careful study revealed
that Sandrokottos was the Greek translation of none other than
the Sanskrit name Chandragupta, later identified as the founder
of the Maurya dynasty and the great-grandfather of King Ashoka,
who was eventually understood as a seminal figure in Indian
Buddhism, both in documenting the Buddhist past and in supporting
Buddhism in his time.
The British were aware, from their earliest days in India, of
a huge sandstone pillar, ten feet round at the base and over
40 feet tall, in the countryside south of Delhi. It was known
from Arab chroniclers that the column have been brought to Delhi
on the orders of a 14th century Sultan Firoz Shah.
It was subsequently known as Firoz Shah’s Lat or
staff. What was truly unique about the column was that it was
covered by lines of inscriptions written in three different
scripts. British antiquarians in the late 18th century
ascertained that one of the scripts was a pre-cursor of the
more rounded form of pre-Devanagari Sanskrit. Most puzzling
were the pseudo-Greek looking characters, looking as much like
squiggles as letters. They remained a central mystery for some
years to come even as further evidence of the script’s
use was discovered on additional columns and rock faces scattered
across northern India. At least one of these inscriptions was
assumed to be Buddhist, as the Brahmins, who did not know its
meaning, referred to it with shuddering and disgust, speaking
of the time when the Buddhist doctrines prevailed and were otherwise
reluctant even to speak on the subject.
Two key figures now enter the picture. The first of these
is a British diplomat stationed in Nepal in 1820, where he remained
for the next 26 years. While most of his work was done from
Nepal, Brian Hodgson had a major role in helping to advance
the understanding of Indian Buddhism. Hodgson was an inveterate
collector of information on Buddhism. Late in his life he was
described by a French scholar as having provided Buddhist studies
with its first ‘true and most solid base’. In his
first four years in Nepal he dispatched no fewer than 218 Sanskrit
texts to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He developed a close
friendship with a learned Nepalese Buddhist sage who further
expanded his Buddhist knowledge. Hodgson was the first Westerner
to begin to understand the historic division of the Buddhist
world between Theravada and Mahayana. His reading of Sanskrit,
and later Tibetan, texts convinced him that Buddhism had emerged
out of Brahminical early Hinduism, rather than the other way
round and that its origins were entirely Indian.
The second key figure is one James Prinsep, Assay Master of
the Government Mint in Calcutta. Hodges had developed a regular
correspondence with Prinsep and many of their letters in the
mid-1830’s concerned inscriptions that had come to their
attention, recorded by others earlier or discovered by them
directly. It soon became clear that many of the inscriptions
were substantially the same. The outcome of this linguistic
comparison was the romanization of what came to be recognized
as the preamble to the standard compendium of the precepts of
Buddha, “The cause of all sentient existence in the versatile
world, the Tathagata hath explained.”
This discovery, pieced together with recent translations from
the Tibetan, based on original texts provided by Hodgson, provided
to the handful of curious Europeans a great deal more information
on the life and death of Gautama Buddha that confirmed and added
to that already obtained by Buchanan and others.
Thus, by the end of 1836 the Indian origins of Buddhism had
been established beyond doubt, together with the main biographical
facts of the philosopher who had come to be called Gautama Buddha,
Tathagata, Sakyamuni and more than a score of other names. It
was now apparent why the Mahabodhi tower had been raised at
Bodh-Gaya, why there was a stupa at Sarnath-and why the envoys
from Ava had come looking for the holy places associated with
Gautama Buddha. Much had been learned but much more still remained
undiscovered— other key Buddhist historic sites and the
manner in which Buddhism had evolved and spread through Asia
in the centuries following the death of its founder had still
to be established-as had the reasons for its disappearance from
India. Even more puzzling was the knowledge of who had ordered
the mysterious pseudo-Greek inscriptions, still untranslated,
to be carved on the polished columns and great boulders whose
diverse locations suggested ever more strongly the existence
of some unknown Buddhist civilization in India’s past.
The discovery of this missing key to much of India’s Buddhist
past is the final element in our story this morning.
We’ve already made note of the mysterious inscriptions
having initially been found on Feroz Shah’s Lat
in Delhi. James Prinsep, the last individual we’ve introduced
in to our narrative, had received copies of an inscription from
Brian Hodgson, which he had found on another pillar near the
Nepalese border. It turned out to be exactly the same as the
mysterious script from Delhi, which Prinsep had termed “Delhi
no. 1”. Two more inscriptions in Delhi no. 1 were identified
as well, both of these appearing on large rocks located on opposite
sides of the country. Finally, some inscriptions from the Great
Stupa at Sanchi were identified as containing the same characters
as well. Prinsep was a brilliant amateur linguist and, working
in 1837, made the intuitional judgment that the inscriptions
were likely records of donations. By a process of logical deduction
he speculated that certain identical characters at the end of
each inscription meant gift. Following this logic he was able
to deduce the characters and sounds of these characters, relying
on his understanding Sanskrit. From here it was relatively easy
for someone with his knowledge of ancient alphabets to piece
together the rest of the letters in the inscriptions. It became
clear to Prinsep that he was dealing with an early vernacular
form of Sanskrit, now known as Prakrit, found in all early Buddhist
literature and with very close links to Pali.
Still the translation of all of the texts was not yet clear.
It was apparent that they all appeared to begin with a declaratory
formula of a royal edict, reading in English akin to ‘Thus
spake King Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods’. The expectation
then was that the rest of the text would reveal the doctrine
of some great reformer, such as Shakyamuni. Instead, the texts
as eventually translated, were clearly the work of a monarch
whose rule had extended far and wide, and a monarch profoundly
influenced by the Buddhist teachings.
Yet, who was the great ruler Piyadasi? The answer to this question
came serendipitously in a communication to Prinsep from a fellow
Englishman working on translations of Pali chronicles in Ceylon.
A Pali text, brought to Ceylon from Siam in 1812, made reference
to the fact that “Here then we find that Asoka
was surnamed Piyadassi….” Prinsep had his answer
and to this day, James Prinsep’s unlocking of the Delhi
no. 1 script remains unquestionably the greatest single advance
in the recovery of India’s lost past.
Even with all of this new knowledge much still remained unknown
in 1837: the location of Lumbini, where the Buddha was born;
the whereabouts of his father’s capital, Kapilavastu, where
he spent his first twenty-nine years; and the locations of Sravasti,
the capital of Kosala where the annual rainy season retreat
was spent, of Vaisali, where he gave his last sermon, and Kushinagar,
where the Buddha entered into his paranirvana. How these discoveries
came about is a further story for another time.
[The content of this dharma talk is largely based on the book
The Search for the Buddha; the men who discovered India’s
lost religion by Charles Allen. New York: Carroll &
Graf Publishers, 2003]
Also
by - Rev. Lynn "Jnana" Sipe
Reflections
on Mara
Mudras
In Buddhism
Buddhism
In the Numbers
An
Irreverent Look at Zen in America
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