Early Modern European Encounters with Buddhism

Abstract

Unlike the consolidated research of Buddhism in Western countries from the 19th century onwards, the investigation of Early Modern European encounters with Buddhism still represents a demanding field of study. Academic works exclusively dedicated to systematically and chronologically exhaustive research into the subject are the exception and numerically disproportionate to isolated information and insights scattered over a vast literature for which Early Modern European encounters with Buddhism are a subordinate matter within a wider thematic framework. A series of interrelated factors is responsible for the relative unsatisfying state of the art. One reason is that Early European modernity is roughly dated between the mid-15th and the late 18th centuries, a period twice as long as the following centuries of Western-Buddhist encounter. A further intellectual obstacle has to do with the fact that although most of the relevant first-hand knowledge was produced by Christian missionaries and therefore had a religious background, the encounters were embedded in a complex interplay of economic and political forces. As a tiny minority in an alien cultural context, the missionaries’ activities were frequently threatened by non-friendly or even hostile reactions of local authorities. This bilateral constellation is a constitutive element for the field under investigation and represents an additional challenge for any researcher interested in a full understanding of the subject. A further difficulty has to do with the nature of the primary sources. In the remote widely unknown parts of the world, the missionaries assumed the role of cultural mediators gathering any information supposedly useful for their readers. In their letters and accounts, mostly written in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, or Latin, details about Buddhism rarely appear in an easily identifiable separate section but in the midst of data referring to geography, climate, politics, general cultural habits, etc. Moreover, due to the predominance of economic and political interests of the European overseas enterprise, not all of the Asiatic regions were equally important. Japan, for example, became highly attractive, while countries such as Cambodia played only a minor role. This hierarchy of relevance not only determined the moment of the Christian missionaries’ arrival and the duration of their sojourn but also the visitors’ production of knowledge in both quantitative and qualitative terms. All these elements represent the heuristic background for a substantially balanced bibliography on the Early Modern European encounter with Buddhism.