The Birth of Orientalism

Urs App

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812200058
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern Orientalism is not a brainchild of nineteenth-century European imperialists and colonialists, but, as Urs App demonstrates, was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology.Based on sources from a dozen languages, many unavailable in English, The Birth of Orientalism presents a completely new picture of this protracted genesis, its underlying dynamics, and the Western discovery of Asian religions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. App documents the immense influence of Japan and China and describes how the Near Eastern cradle of civilization moved toward mother India. Moreover, he shows that some of India's purportedly oldest texts were products of eighteenth-century European authors.Though Western engagement with non-Abrahamic Asian religions reaches back to antiquity and can without exaggeration be called the largest-scale religiocultural encounter in history, it has so far received surprisingly little attention—which is why some of its major features and their role in the birth of modern Orientalism are described here for the first time. The study of Asian documents had a profound impact on Europe's intellectual makeup. Suddenly the Bible had much older competitors from China and India, Sanskrit threatened to replace Hebrew as the world's oldest language, and Judeo-Christianity appeared as a local phenomenon on a dramatically expanded, worldwide canvas of religions and mythologies. Orientalists were called upon as arbiters in a clash that involved neither gold and spices nor colonialism and imperialism but, rather, such fundamental questions as where we come from and who we are: questions of identity that demanded new answers as biblical authority dramatically waned.

Chapter 1

Voltaire’s Veda

François Marie Arouet—better known as VOLTAIRE (1694–1778)—was a superstar in eighteenth-century Europe and for a time one of its most read and translated authors. His plays were performed across the continent, and his view of world history was so influential that the Russian Czar, upon reading Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs, sent an embassy to China to verify some of its claims. This chapter will highlight a little known side of this multifaceted man. Though current histories of Orientalism barely mention him,¹ Voltaire played an important role in the genesis of modern Orientalism. Since some of Voltaire’s sources and his particular approach are deeply connected with the missionary discovery of Asian religions and mission literature, relevant facets of this missionary basis will first have to be examined in some detail. In Voltaire’s time, much of Asia was still called “the East Indies,” and the focus of previous scholarly discussion on India proper and on religions that are today associated with the Indian subcontinent must be widened in order to understand eighteenth-century views and images. The influence and staying power of old ideas have hitherto been underestimated. Not just the study of the Orient in Voltaire’s time but even modern Orientalism is shaped by earlier impressions and approaches in profound and sometimes pernicious ways. It is a mistake to regard—in the manner of Schwab (1950), de Jong (1987), and many others—the onset of modern Orientalism as a clean break from a “nonscientific” past. As the examples of William Jones (App 2009) and Anquetil-Duperron (see Chapter 7) show, the pioneers of modern Orientalism raised the curtains and set a new stage; but much of the stage set seems recycled from earlier productions, and many actors in this play wear costumes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries while expressing ideas that fit those times. The lack of appreciation regarding some of the crucial underpinnings of Voltaire’s venture—particularly of missionary approaches and sources—gave rise to misunderstandings not only concerning his use of India-related sources but also the role he played in the genesis of modern Orientalism. Hence, the first task will be to discuss in some detail a number of facets of the missionary discovery of Asian religions that came to influence Voltaire’s views and sources.

Valignano’s Catechism

Partly due to the summary dismissal of missionary portrayals of Asian religions as biased, some of the basic events of the missionary discovery of these religions are still ignored even by today’s Orientalists. It is, for example, a fact that the first systematic exploration of non-Islamic Asian religions happened not in India or some other land at a manageable distance from continental Europe but at the very end of the world as it was known at the time, namely, in sixteenth-century Japan. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries had settled in India and subsequently in various parts of Southeast Asia; but these were regions where even knowledge of the local vernacular did not yet entail access to sacred literature. Besides, the heathen cults were regarded as works of the devil to be exterminated rather than studied. In Japan, by contrast, the need for study arose from the fiasco of St. Francis Xavier’s Jesuit mission.² FRANCIS XAVIER (1506–1552) and his Jesuit companions had arrived in the summer of 1549 in Japan with high hopes and accompanied by Anjirō, a Japanese man of modest education who served as their interpreter. He had translated “God” as “Dainichi” (the Sun-Buddha, the principal Buddha venerated by the Shingon sect of Buddhism), “heaven” and “paradise” as jōdo (the Pure Land of Buddhism), and “Christianity” as buppō (the Buddha dharma or Buddhist law); consequently, the Japanese were convinced that the Jesuits were Buddhist sectarian reformers from India. They had indeed come to Japan from Goa in India, and the Japanese (whose world at the time ended in India alias “Tenjiku”) consistently called Xavier and his companions “Indians” (“Tenjiku’s” or “Tenjikujin”) (App 1997a:55–58). The Japanese Shingon priests were so delighted with their new cousins from India that the Jesuits became suspicious; but even after Francis Xavier’s departure toward the end of 1551, the missionaries were still viewed as a bunch of zealous Buddhist sectarians. The document that supposedly proves their most notable success, the donation of a “church” (in reality, a Buddhist monastery) by the regent of Yamaguchi, became an object of widespread interest in Europe as it was printed in various letter collections all over the continent and became the first document in Chinese characters to be printed in Europe (Schurhammer 1928:26–27; App 1997b:236). The confrontation of the crucial portion of the published Portuguese rendering with my translation of the original Japanese text in Table 1 illustrates the heart of the problem: the Japanese regarded the missionaries as Buddhist bonzes intent on promulgating the Buddha dharma, whereas the Jesuit missionaries believed that the donation of a Buddhist temple signaled acceptance of their stated aim of producing Christian saints.³

TABLE 1. EDICT OF THE DUKE OF YAMAGUCHI TRANSLATED FROM JAPANESE AND PORTUGUESE

English translation of Japanese text (actual content of edict)	Translation of published Portuguese text (how missionaries translated edict)
The bonzes^a who have come here from the Western regions may, for the purpose of promulgating the Buddhist law, establish their monastic community [at the Buddhist monastery of the Great Way].	[The Duke] accords the great Dai, Way of Heaven, to the fathers of the occident who have come to preach the law that produces Saints in conformity with their wish until the end of the world.

^a The term “bonze” (from Jap. bōzu) has been in use since the sixteenth century for Buddhist priests or monks (originally of Japan or China, but later increasingly as a generic term). In this book we will also encounter such equivalents as “heshang” for China, “lama” for Tibet, and “talapoin” for Southeast Asia.

Only in 1551, when Francis Xavier was getting ready to leave Japan in order to convert the Chinese, did the missionaries begin to use the word “Deus” instead of “Dainichi” (App 1997b:241–42). Their fiasco triggered a “language reform” that consisted in figuring out which terms were Buddhist, what they signified, and which were safe for use in a Christian context. This could only be achieved by some degree of systematic study and with the help of native informers familiar with Buddhist doctrine and texts. By 1556, eight years after the beginning of the Japan mission, the first report about the country’s religions was sent via Goa to Europe, where it arrived in 1558 (Bourdon 1993:261).⁴ This Sumario de los errores (Summary of Errors) contained a first survey of Japanese religions including Shinto and listed eight sects of Japanese Buddhism. They were all identified as belonging to “bupō” (Buddha dharma) and associated with a founder called Shaka (Shakyamuni Buddha) (Ruiz-de-Medina 1990:655–67). The Sumario also furnished information about the clergies of these sects, the texts they used, and some of their doctrines including a topic that was to have extraordinary repercussions well into Voltaire’s time: the distinction between two significations of Buddhist doctrines, an exoteric or outer one for the simple-minded people and an esoteric or inner one for the philosophers and literati (pp. 666–67). The esoteric teaching, which was associated with Zen Buddhism and its use of meditation and kōans, was said to lead to the realization that there is nothing beyond life and death and that “all is nothing” (p. 666). This is an early seed of the European misconception of an esoteric “cult of nothingness”⁵ with a secret teaching that later turned into the legend about the Buddha’s deathbed confession (see Chapter 3).

When the Jesuit Alessandro VALIGNANO (1539–1606) visited Japan for the first time between 1579 and 1582, he quickly realized that the study of the native language and religions was of paramount importance. He reported, “The first thing that I addressed and ordered after arriving in Japan . . . was that the European brothers study [the language] with great care and that a grammar and vocabulary of Japanese be produced” (Schütte 1951:321). Valignano promoted the admission of Japanese novices and, helped by P. Luis Frois who translated his words into Japanese, in 1580–81 held a course of intensive instruction for both European and Japanese novices (Schütte 1958:84–85). One of Valignano’s eight new novices, the middle-aged Japanese doctor Paulo Yōhō, was knowledgeable about Japanese religions and provided information about Buddhism to both Valignano and the novices. Together with his son Vicente Tōin, Paulo helped Valignano craft a catechism whose overall structure interests us here. Since Valignano had studied Francis Xavier’s fiasco and realized the importance of clearly separating truth from error, he decided to write a catechism and devote the first of its two books to the sects and religions of the Japanese in order to build a firm basis for their refutation through rational argumentation (Valignano 1586:3–76). It is a detailed presentation and critique of (mostly Buddhist) Japanese religious doctrine and shows how much knowledge the Jesuits had accumulated since the days of Francis Xavier. The catechism’s second book then treats of Christian life and its basis in the Ten Commandments and other doctrines.

An interesting and influential observation that Valignano made at the beginning of the first part was that, in spite of the multitude of sects in Japan and the confusing doctrines of Buddhism, there was a key that facilitated understanding all of them. This key was the distinction between an “outer” or provisional teaching for the common people (Jap. gonkyō) and the “inner” or true teaching for the clergy (Jap. jikkyō) (p. 4v).⁶ Valignano’s entire presentation of doctrines and sects is based on this “gon-jitsu” distinction, which he, of course, decries as “fallacious, mendacious, and deceptive” (fallax, mendax, hominum deceptrix) (p. 34v).

Without going into more detail, we note that this catechism is proof that Buddhism was already quite intensively studied by Westerners in the sixteenth century with the help of native experts. For his reform of the Jesuit Japan mission, Valignano even researched and copied some features of the organizational structure of Zen monasteries. Such study continued in the following decades until the expulsion of all missionaries from Japan in the early seventeenth century, and among its major fruits was a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary with about 32,000 entries (Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, 1603; Jap. Nippo jisho). In this dictionary, all Buddhist terms are identified by the marker “Bup,” for buppō (Buddhism)—which proves how aware the missionaries were of Buddhism’s identity as a religion. This dictionary alone should lay forever to rest all claims that Buddhism was not perceived as a religion by Westerners before the nineteenth century. It is easy, however, to overestimate the influence of such mission documents since many of them soon ended up in dusty mission archives. While reports such as the Sumario de los errores got relatively little public exposure, Valignano’s catechism enjoyed the opposite fate. Its first edition, printed in Lisbon in 1586, is exceedingly rare, but the work was included almost unchanged in Antonio Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta of 1593, a major textbook for generations of Jesuits and for Europe’s educated class (Possevino 1593:459–529; Mühlberger 2001:137–38). At the time, this was just about the most powerful megaphone anyone could wish for, and all the Jesuit protagonists in this chapter heard the message.

Ricci’s Rebranding

When Matteo RICCI (1552–1610) arrived in China in the summer of 1582 and began to learn Chinese, he benefited from a special introduction to Asian religions since Valignano, who was also in Macao at the time, made him copy the conclusions (“Risolutioni”) that he had drawn from his three-year stay in Japan (Schütte 1958:63). But when Ricci in the same year moved with another Italian missionary, Michele Ruggieri,⁷ to Canton and then to Zhaoqing in South China, history seemed to repeat itself with a vengeance: the two Jesuits adopted the title and vestments of the Chinese seng—that is, they identified themselves and dressed as ordained Buddhist bonzes. Even their Ten Commandments in Chinese contained Buddhist terms; for example, the third commandment read that on holidays it was forbidden to work and one had to go to the Buddhist temple (si) in order to recite the sutras (jing) and worship the Master of Heaven (tianzhu, the Lord of devas).⁸ Ruggieri’s and Ricci’s first Chinese catechism, the Tianzhu shilu of 1584—the first book printed by Europeans in China—also brimmed with Buddhist terms and was signed by “the bonzes from India” (tianzhuguo seng) (Ricci 1942:198). The doorplate of the Jesuit’s residence and church read “Hermit-flower [Buddhist] temple” (xianhuasi), while the plate displayed prominently inside the church read “Pure Land of the West” (xilai jingdu).⁹ As can be seen in the report about the inscriptions on the Jesuit residence and church of Zhaoqing (Figure 1),¹⁰ Ruggieri translated “hermit” (xian), a term with Daoist connotations, by the Italian “santi” (saints), and the Buddhist temple (si) became an “ecclesia” (church). Even more interesting is his transformation of the Buddhist paradise or “Pure Land of the West” into “from the West came the purest fathers.”¹¹ This presumably referred to the biblical patriarchs, but it is not excluded that a double-entrendre (Jesuit fathers from the West) was intended.

Nine years later, in 1592, when Ricci was translating the four Confucian classics, he decided to abandon his identity as a Buddhist bonze (seng); and during a visit in Macao, he asked his superior Valignano for permission also to shed his bonze’s robe, begging bowl, and sutra recitation implements. The Christian churches were renamed from si to tang (a more neutral word meaning “hall”), and in 1594 the final step in this rebranding process was taken when Ricci received Valignano’s permission to present himself and dress up as a Chinese literatus (Duteil 1994:85–86). It was the year when Ricci finished his translation of the four Confucian classics, the books that any Chinese wishing to reach the higher ranks of society had to study. In Ricci’s view, these books contained unmistakable vestiges of ancient monotheism. In his journals he wrote,

Of all the pagan sects known to Europe, I know of no people who fell into fewer errors in the early stages of their antiquity than did the Chinese. From the very beginning of their history it is recorded in their writings that they recognized and worshipped one supreme being whom they called the King of Heaven, or designated by some other name indicating his rule over heaven and earth. . ....