The Buddha in the west: From myth to history

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially in Victorian England, the Buddha met with almost universal acclaim . Esteem for the founder of Buddhism is discernible not only among those who, like Edwin Arnold and Richard Phillips, sympathised with his teachings, but also among those who had little appreciation of them . Jules Barthelemy St . Hilaire, although the doyen of its critics, nevertheless felt compelled to remark in 1860 that, `with the sole exception of the Christ, there does not exist among all the founders of religion a purer and more touching figure than that of the Buddha . In his pure and spotless life he acts up to his convictions ; and if the theory he propounds is false, the personal example which he gives is irreproachable' . 1 The impact that the Buddha made on Victorian England in the second half of the nineteenth century is yet more striking still when it is recognised that, until well into the 1840s, the figure of the Buddha was shrouded in what seems an almost impenetrable haze. This was because, for the first four or so decades of the century, the Buddha was not, in any modern sense of the term, an historical figure . Rather, he was one part in a complex comparative mythology and chronology, part of an Enlightenment predilection for all kinds of systematic classifications . It is the aim of this paper to illuminate the process by which the `mythological' Buddha became the `historical' Buddha in the first half of the nineteenth century .