An Introduction to Buddhism and Romanticism

Chapter 1

Enlightenment East and West: An Introduction to Buddhism and Romanticism

Your own self is your master; who else could be? (Buddha, The Dhammapada)

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage (Kant, What is Enlightenment?)

Critical Coincidence The first half of this chapter’s title offers a binary (“East” and “West”) at the core of concerns explored below yet also echoes the famous assessment of shared affinities between Eastern and Western approaches to the healing of psychological suffering offered by Alan W. Watts, one of the leading figures in the translation of Eastern mental approaches into Western terms and strategies in Psychotherapy East and West. The first term, “enlightenment,” and the short epigrams by Buddha and Kant also point to the convergence of philosophical forms of mental liberation pursued within the two large terms in the second half of the title (“Buddhism” and “Romanticism”). The confluence of historical and philosophical concerns binding those terms is worth intensified attention by scholars working in Romantic studies for several reasons. This examination of the broad contours of interaction between “Buddhism” and “Romanticism” during the late

M. S. Lussier, Romantic Dharma © Mark S. Lussier 2011 2 Romantic Dharma eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moves from historical encounters through linguistic engagements to intellectual and spiritual resonances. The temporal range for European Romanticism adopted here from Raymond Williams, roughly extending from the birth of William Blake to the death of William Wordsworth (Williams 30–2), coincides rather well with the historical emergence of Buddhism into Western consciousness, when Europe’s knowledge of the religion originating with Śākyamuni’s enlightenment evolved beyond early views as a religion of “Idolaters [with] many minsters [sic] and abbeys after their fashion” (Polo I.219) and toward the later view as a “philosophy . . . under the imputation of atheism” (Fields 47).1 Before this intensive phase of encounter, Buddhism, for even the most educated, well-read, and well-traveled Europeans, remained a somewhat dis- sonant presence within the sacred literature of Hinduism (e.g., Sir William Jones) and presented severe difficulties to separate its analytic structures, meditative practices, and ethical presumptions from its site of origin in India (Batchelor, Awakening 231–3). As Philip Almond, Stephen Batchelor, Rick Fields, Richard King, Donald Lopez, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Raymond Schwab exhaustively demonstrate in a group of exploratory works spanning two generations of research, the completion of Buddhism’s long passage into Western consciousness was achieved via increasingly intensified phases of punctuated encounter, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century and coming to final fruition “in the 1840s after the arrival of the Sanskrit and Pāli canons” (Schwab 24), after Eugene Burnouf published his definitive L’Introduction à l’historire du buddhisme indien in 1844 (Batchelor, Awakening 240), and after H. H. Wilson’s summative lecture on “Buddha and Buddhism” before the Royal Asiatic Society in 1854. The gradual emergence of the dharma flowed from a coincidence of energies as colonial functionaries in the trans- Himalayas and Indian subcontinent applied enlightenment epistemic techniques to an unruly body of practices and texts. Comparative enlightenment epistemologies fueled both the East India Company and the British governmental structure that supplanted it, and these two operations meet in the drive to establish economic monopoly and territorial dominion. These economic and colonial authorities acquired a massive amount of textual materials in little-known languages and that were gathered in the East and transmitted to the West, and these works required the dedicated efforts of Oriental scholars across Europe to cross those linguistic barriers, in the process bringing Buddhism into focus during the last stages of historical Romanticism. Enlightenment East and West 3

The culmination of these efforts ignited an “Oriental Renaissance,” to quote the phrase Raymond Schwab adopted from Edgar Quinet (11), and phrased in this way, the complexities of this topic come quickly into view, involving colonial encounters, enlightenment practices, Orientalist scholarship, and Romantic reception. The outward movement of colonialism took the form of both “transcontinental European empires [and] multinational trading companies [like the East India Company]” (Outram 8–9). In all spheres of colonialism, the outward movement, especially into India, returned people as well as commodities to the homelands in Europe, and “with the coming of Britain colonial rule over increasing parts of India, the number of Indians who made the journey to Britain would [continue to] expand” (Fisher 49). These “counterflows” (Fisher 1) formed a prominent by- product of colonial operations and established pathways for the subsequent flow of knowledge about cultural and religious practices. In the 150 years prior to the Romantic era, Oriental manuscripts and texts entered Europe at an ever-escalating rate through economic and colonial contacts, and “the emergence of the academic study of Buddhism in Europe and America [must be placed] within the context of the ideologies of empire” (Lopez, Curators 2). The returning flow of information that was established during the period immediately prior to Romanticism became “a canal . . . [connecting] thought and history” and through which passed “a torrent of narratives and accounts that nearly defied imagining” (Schwab 2, 25, 28). As Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi suggest, this type of concep- tual counterflow began almost immediately to exert considerable force within colonial homelands, thereby not only highlighting the necessity of exploring “the different role the ‘Orient’ played [in Europe]” (41) but also tracing the broader reception accorded to Buddhism within its art and philosophy across the second half of the nineteenth century. This reception reached its zenith with the 1879 publication of Light of Asia, Sir Edwin Arnold’s epic-scale poetic depiction of “the life and character [and] philosophy of that noble hero and reformer, Prince Gautama of India, the founder of Buddhism” (xix). Through the application of categorical and comparative imperatives energizing its own form of enlightenment philosophy, European colonial movements outward assured a corresponding inward counterflow of textual materials collected, catalogued, and transmitted to Europe and thereafter translated and codified within centers of Oriental studies in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, igniting a process that arguably extends to our own day, as the pan-global recognition of 4 Romantic Dharma

His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama confirms.2 On the linguistic tide briefly mapped above, Buddhism flowed into Western consciousness, like a lotus floating westward on a stream toward the sunset. Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan manuscripts and texts then just emerging into European knowledge and languages allowed Western scholars to differentiate Buddhism from Hinduism, and by the end of this same periodic range (ca. 1850), Buddhism had assumed the status of a world religion within the Western enlightenment’s evolving sociology of knowledge, although only first appear- ing in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, in 1801 (Lopez “Ambivalent Exegete” 53). The pan-European Romantic movement—at least defined by a somewhat arbitrary temporal span of 100 years—could hardly be described as uniformly monologically, but for this work, the “Romantic” writers referred to reacted against those stifling elements within the West’s materially driven enlightenment epistemology, “the rationalistic theory of knowledge” (Cassirer 114) that entraps intellection through reliance on “reason as the system of clear and distinct ideas” (Cassirer 95) and that established reason as the primary hermeneutic faculty mediating inner and outer experience. Stephen Batchelor, Richard King, and Tomoko Masuzawa identify the drive of enlightenment forms of scientism as crucial both to the development of religious studies generally and to the establishment of Buddhism as a world religion specifically. The solidification of world religions within the West was concretized by the end of the nineteenth century and, as King argues, “was constructed upon a foundation of readily identifiable Enlightenment convictions” (47), a view embedded rather deeply in all forms of Orientalism. Through such “Orientalist scholarship, [which] had been discovering, edit- ing, and translating literary treasures of some of the most powerful nations known in history,” European colonial powers asserted “control” over these countries and their literatures, which “no longer seemed to possess the power and the prerogative to repre- sent their own legacy apart from this scholarship” (Masuzawa 17). Batchelor offers a similar assessment, suggesting that the slow emergence of understanding giving rise to “Buddhism” depended on three elements; “throughout the course of the eighteenth century three interconnected factors were gestating that would give birth to what we know as ‘Buddhism’ . . . the emergence of the rationalist Enlightenment, the decline of religious authority and the consoli- dation of colonialism” (Awakening 231). The development of this ideology during the eighteenth century came after China and Japan Enlightenment East and West 5 foreclosed on European entry into and operations within their prov- inces a century earlier, with some notable exceptions. Thereafter, the vanguard of encounter shifted to central Asian countries such as Nepal and Tibet impinging upon British colonial rule in India. In opposition to the enlightenment view, which placed at its foundation a sovereign subject defined by “individuality” (Seigel 4) engaged with an objective world (with dualism as its analytic core), the Romantic pursuit of enlightenment endorses “self- annihilation” (Blake Milton 44.2) as the vehicle of “anti-self-consciousness” (Hartman 52), approaching the realization of the state of “negative capability” defined as the experience of “no identity” (Keats 492, 501) that for these writers becomes the “fulfillment and [re]awakening of [Western] Enlightenment” epistemology (Brown “Romanticism” 38). Given that Buddhism long recognized the sovereign self as the primary impediment to enlightenment (as implied by the verse from the Dhammapada above), the epistemological connection between a broad range of Romantic writers and Buddhism becomes apparent, with Western thought arriving through a circuitous cognitive route at the same insight (as implied by the epigram drawn from Kant’s What is Enlightenment?), since the “so-called self occurs only in relation to the other” (Hayward and Varela 246). Buddhism and Romanticism share the recognition “that the human mind was its own trap” (30), to borrow Dennis McCort’s apt phrase, and strive “to convert [this trap] into an energy finer than intellect” (Hartman 48), a mental energy requiring an “unlearning” that re/cognizes the dualism of subject/object relations. Thus, Romanticism arrives at the same insight located in Buddhist thought “that our ordinary egocentric consciousness is a limited and impoverished consciousness without foundation in ‘reality’” (Watts 128). This recognition becomes an analytic vehicle capable of deconstructing what Blake termed the specter of selfhood by dismantling the “categorical structures of the delusive binarist mind” (McCort 34), a particular critique of the self undertaken intensely by several German Romantic writers. Novalis proposed that the self resides “where inner world and outer world touch,” a construct leading to the recognition that “the self, con- ceived as an autonomous entity, [is] relatively unreal” (McCort 167). Friedrich Schlegel, another member of the Jena group, pushes this view further still, arriving at a psychic state in which “antinomies” must be “understood as dynamic, transparent, mutually interpene- trating phases of the illumined consciousness” (McCort 34). The case argued here, then, is not one of direct influence or parallel development, since most Romantic writers manifesting this 6 Romantic Dharma coincidence of philosophical thought could not know with any specificity “anything about Buddhism . . . because no information on the subject was available in Europe” (Batchelor Verses 46). While Batchelor here actually overstates the case, as subsequent analysis will confirm, his sense that writers such as Coleridge and Keats could come to analogous conclusions from within Western epistemic modes identifies the trajectory along which Romantic Dharma argues its case. While the deep doctrines of Buddhism antecede Romanticism by some 2,300 years, the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reaction to “the basis of selfhood in Western [enlightenment] culture” (Seigel 5) moved in complementary directions to Buddhism’s commitment to uproot a sovereign self as the cure to collective suffering. Thus, the argument launched here remains somewhat elusive, the development of critical coincidence without direct “influence” at different temporal moments and only made apparent through direct cultural encounter (thus another form of synchronicity). Buddhism comes into critical resolution precisely at the historical moment when evolving Romantic views of enlightenment come into confluence with those already present in, and just then emerging from, Eastern elaborations of enlightenment embedded in works such as The Lotus Sutra (the first canonical work of Buddhism translated into a European language from Sanskrit). Tantalizing hints of this view were equally embedded in Hindu literature as well, as exemplified in the famous translation of the Bhagavad-Gita by Charles Wilkins (in 1783), the first work of Sanskrit translated into a European language. While Buddhism’s textual emergence into European understanding was somewhat slower than other world religions (due to the geopolitical and linguistic dispersion of the dharma across vast distances and into numerous languages widely separated from its source), its “positivistic” and “objective” (Nietzsche Twilight 129–130) approach to spiritual practice, once discerned, easily interacted with the evolving Romantic form of enlightenment epistemology that strove to supplant mechanical and dualistic views of intellection during the nineteenth century.3 Hopefully, the juxtaposed epigrams capture the convergent views of enlightenment within the philosophy and practice of Buddhism and Romanticism that this assay seeks to illuminate. In both its Romantic and Buddhist guises, self-annihilation serves as the primary path to enlightenment, thereby establishing inner revolution as the necessary boundary condition for all successful outer revolutions, a position long associated with Romantic writing published in the wake of the French Revolution and its varied by-products. Enlightenment East and West 7

Such a shared fundamental principle would quite likely predict, if not predicate, the presence of other affinities, yet when seeking such connections in what initially seemed the most relevant body of criticism, published research concentrated on colonial conditions and their solidification into imperialism during the nineteenth century, I found little work directed toward illuminating this important phase of cultural encounter. Arguably, this critical “blind spot” first occurred in Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, which established a tightened focus on certain geopolitical zones of the Orientalist project—therein solidifying into hegemonic critical influence—and which continued in most subsequent Orientalist and colonialist studies post-Said.4 Within most discussions focused on colonialism and Orientalism, the sutras and commentaries flowing into Europe from Asia generally and from the trans-Himalayan region and the Indian subcontinent specifically, form a significant discursive and critical absence within those collective practices termed “Orientalism,” as they relate to Romanticism. In recent work focused more narrowly on colonial entanglements during the Romantic era, few direct connections are made between the terms “Buddhism” and “Romanticism.”5 While the encounter between Buddhism and European Romanticism certainly manifest structurally Said’s description of the Occidental striving to contain the Oriental through the projection “of power, of domination, [and] of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Said Orientalism 5), Buddhist dharma itself, once translated and circulated, revealed its own “narratives of emancipation and enlightenment” (Said Imperialism xxvi) capable of resisting enclosure by Western enlightenment epistemology precisely by manifesting its rational principles and proce- dures (systematic organization and analysis) as the very foundation for the exploration of individual experience (spiritual practice). After Buddha and Berkeley alike, “the human and the natural share the same absence of origin and essence, the same bodilessness, the same lack of density and mass, the same inaccessibility to conventional logic and intellect” (Rudy Wordsworth 6). Further still, the dharma began to exert considerable counterinfluence in Europe and America. Michael J. Franklin makes a similar point in relation to Sir William Jones’s exploration and reception of Hindu texts, with Orientalism often operating “as a cultural counter-sphere” capable of undermining “classical orthodoxy and Eurocentric prejudice” and thereby challenging “Western assumptions concerning the automatic cultural superiority of the colonizing power” (Jones 84–5). This resistance 8 Romantic Dharma resulted in a body of texts and practices adopted and adapted by phi- losophers and poets in the second half of the nineteenth century and, in its Tibetan and Zen forms, established that strong presence in the West that continues to this day. Given that renewed contact between Buddhism and Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century brought to a dramatic climax the second, intensive phase of encounter (interpenetration rather than encounter defined subsequent relations), the absence of critical attention might seem strange, yet historical conditions themselves help account for the discursive absence of Buddhism within Romantic studies concerned with colonialism, imperialism, and Orientalism. After all, the particular focus of Sir William Jones, the man most responsible for inaugurating the “Oriental Renaissance” that swept through Europe and the United States across the nineteenth century, was on Muslim law and Hindu mythology (as evidenced by the flow of translations and poetic adaptations that occurred in the wake of his arrival in Calcutta). As Rick Fields observes, in How the Swans Came to the Lake: “If Jones had wanted to converse with Buddhist scholars, as he had with Brahmins, he would have had to go north to Tibet or south to Ceylon, Siam, or Burma” (46). Although Jones’s surface knowledge of Buddhism kept it f irmly within the broad mythic framework of Hinduism (he continued to see the “Sage of the Shakyas” as “the ninth incarnation of Vishnu” [Fields 47]), he nonetheless established in his first two years in India the primary vehicles for the subsequent flowering of Buddhism into Western consciousness, creating the Asiatick Society of Bengal and its influential journal. The importance of the latter to the articulation of Buddhist work for European scholars can be seen in the journal’s premiere issue, which included “fairly reliable reports [on Buddhist texts and cultures] from Ceylon and Tibet” (Fields 47).6 Other historical conditions also rendered it difficult to gain a summative knowledge of Buddhism, difficulties deeply embedded in the complex geopolitical and cultural history of India and adja- cent nations for a millennium prior to Jones’s assumption of judicial authority in Calcutta. First, the teachings of the Buddha “had ceased to exist on the sub-continent” (Batchelor Awakening 232) and had been virtually eradicated from its homeland of India “by the fourteenth century” (Lopez 53). Second, as Buddhism came into contact with other cultures, revered figures often “morphed” through appropriation and transmutation, since Buddhist dispersal had always been accompanied by accommodation of receptive bodies of prior knowledge and local practices. The most visible example might be the Enlightenment East and West 9 transformation of the bodhisattva of compassion Avalokiteśvara into Kuan-yin in China and Chenrezig in Tibet (accompanied by a shift in gender in the former). Third, after Buddha’s parinibbānna (Pāli), his passage into “nirvāna” (Skt.) after his death, two major approaches to Buddhist practice emerged from “the first Buddhist council, held three months” thereafter (Bodhi 6): the Therevāda, (Pāli for “the way of the elders”) and the Mahāyāna (Sanskrit for “the great vehicle”), which focused respectively on individual versus collective liberation (Keown 300). Finally, the primary languages of the dharma were subsequently translated into national languages and their subdialects in the countries wherein Buddhist practice was established, which were widely dispersed throughout the Asian continent. Thus, long before the second phase of encounter during the Romantic era, the eradica- tion of Buddhism as a practice within its birthplace made it extremely difficult to discern, since its material traces resided in sparse architectural ruins and sculptural figures in northern India, and similar objects of veneration scattered across China, Japan, Mongolia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam. These architectural and sculptural traces took even longer to identify, only brought to light by Alexander Cunningham, who “secured the development of archaeology in India through the establishment of the Archaeology Survey” in 1861 (Schwab 42). The textual body of the dharma was, as well, dispersed across vast geophysical spaces and spread across numerous languages, although those primary to the emergence of the major sutras within Romantic Europe were Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan. The textual body through which Buddhism emerged into European consciousness, then, was itself a counterflow of books, manuscripts, and texts, with the dharma often returning to northern India through the same paths by which it had initially disappeared from its original location. Agents and the agency of British authority in Calcutta (the eastern seat of economic and political control exerted by the East India Company; current Kolkata) were prime players in the process and quite often pursued these ends with mixed motives difficult to categorize easily. Unlike the Islamic law and Hindu mythology that first occupied the attention of Jones, where a body of unified texts awaited scholastic scrutiny and cultural assimilation, the major treatises of Buddhism required on-site collection of widely varying manuscripts and texts subsequently transmitted to centers of Oriental philology for translation. Only then could scholar-adventurers com- pare canonical works received from numerous sources across vast geographical and linguistic divides and place them within a unified semiotic framework. The process of emergence was quite slow, 10 Romantic Dharma unfolding with deliberation shaped by complexity. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Buddhism was not only known in the West but had begun to exert a strange attraction on its Occidental Other. In order to place the intellectual coincidence of Buddhism and Romanticism in proper context, I will undertake a brief summary of the phased encounter, which can thereby establish the shifting cultural conditions that created an environment conducive for the flowering of the dharma in nineteenth-century Europe.

Initial Encounters between Buddhism and the West The process of encounter between Buddhism and the West was a slow one, with initial encounters projected as far back as the Eastern con- quests of Alexander the Great and made more complex by Buddhism’s exile from India through several phases of Islamic conquest. Buddhist doctrine and texts, originally recorded in Pāli and Sanskrit, were subsequently disseminated via the circulation of Buddhist sages and subsequent translation projects throughout Asia, moving northward into China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet and southeastward into Bali, Bhutan, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The theological colonialism of Catholicism inaugurated the long encounter leading to Romanticism, and the first recorded contact between a European and a “Buddhocratic government” (Batchelor Awakening 93) official occurred at the invitation of the Mönge Khan, who invited all religious leaders (including Pope Innocent IV) to send representatives to the Karakorum court in May 1254. The occasion was straightforward; the Khans sought presentations from all the world’s religions to assess that they would endorse to stabilize interior relations across their sprawling empire. As Stephen Batchelor indicates, “Both Christian and Buddhists had similar motives for being there: to persuade Mönge Khan—at the time the world’s most powerful man—to convert to their religion” (Awakening 82). This first “attempt at interfaith dialogue” (90) brought into Asia the Franciscan friar William of Rubrick, who bore the ideological banner of Christianity in the dialogue and whose authority rested on two papal bulls that challenged the mundane and spiritual authority of the Mongols. However, after only eight months and (given his papal charge) predictably intolerant behavior earning few converts, he was expelled for urging, in a report to Louis IX, that Europe wage “war against them [the Khans]” (91). Mönge Khan ultimately con- verted to Mahāyāna Buddhism in its Tibetan form. With the death of Enlightenment East and West 11

Mönge, his younger brother, Kublai, assumed authority and assured “the rise of Tantric Buddhism” (Drew 185) by investing political authority to Sakya Pandita, a high Tibetan lama who through this “investment” of authority established the presence of Buddhism in Mongolia to this day and secured the Buddhocratic structure of the Tibetan government (a structure only ended by the Chinese occupa- tion in 1959). Thus, Sakya Pandita, who translated numerous sutras from Sanskrit into Tibetan, is not only a crucial figure for the “renaissance of Buddhism in Tibet” (Davenport 2) through the exchange of scholars and scholarship between India and Tibet but a mediating figure chiefly responsible for the dispersion of the dharma into northern Asia.7 One of the critical synchronicities from which Romantic Dharma emerged is located in the confluence of the historical encounter between and the critical examination of Orientalism undertaken by John Drew’s pioneering work India and the Romantic Imagination and its chapter-length discussion of “Coleridge: ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Rise of Tantric Buddhism.” Drew’s exploration of the historical period at the foundation of the poem, the political and theological intrigue unfolding within the Karakorum court of the Khans in the thirteenth century, provides solid groundwork to establish historical connections between Buddhism and Romanticism reflected in Coleridge’s poem, since its cultural setting coincides with the opening of the first phase of systematic and intensive encounter. Drew offers the most tantalizing traces of potential overlap between Buddhism and Romanticism and aptly describes the counterflow of information from the circumference to center of colonial endeavors. The textual dynamic of counterflow provides the critical context within which to understand the linguistic and textual paths by which Buddhism emerged fully into European consciousness, since the process “was concerned above all with texts” (Lopez 52).8 For Coleridge’s “frag- mented” “Kubla Khan,” the evocation of the Orient flows directly through the Occidental work Purchas’ Pilgrimage (1614), which Coleridge evokes in the work’s preface, but other works as diverse as The Works of Marco Polo, Cook’s narrative of his second voyage, the works of Thomas Burnet, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night have also been identified as subsources by relentless scholarly attention after Jonathan L. Lowes’s famous study The Road to Xanadu (Milligan 36–41, 128 n. 18). When these direct influ- ences are supplemented by the poet’s knowledge of poetic works published by Jones and the scholastic codification of Oriental work in his newly launched Asiatick Journal, convergent literary and linguistic 12 Romantic Dharma currents are established that feed those fluid and fleeting impressions of “the Tarter court” (Drew 194) that dominate the dreamscape of Coleridge’s opiated vision of Xanadu (Drew 194–201; Milligan 36–45). More important for this study, Drew persuasively argues that Coleridge was aware, “as few in his time were[,] of . . . the Buddhist lamas of Tibet” and even suggested “the image of the Dalai Lama” as the epitome of “the incarnate Buddha” (Drew 224). While contact between Europeans and Buddhism was rather spotty after Friar William’s departure from Karakorum, spiritual colonialism, which placed Catholic countries on the frontline of contact, intensified during the next 300 years and defined the first intensive phase of contact. This spiritual endeavor reached a momentary crescendo in the middle of the sixteenth century with the arrival of Francis Xavier in Goa in 1549, who sought “to evangelize the newly acquired territories of south India” (Batchelor Awakening 161) that were placed under Portuguese authority after the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 (when Pope Alexander VI literally divided the world between Portugal and Spain into zones of Catholic control). Unlike the failure experienced by Friar William, Xavier experienced considerably more success in the conversion of people to Christianity in India, and Xavier’s experience, on first contact with Zen Buddhists (in 1549), seemed to offer the promise of further conversionary opportunities, although founded on a mistaken perception of strong intersec- tions between spiritual commitments and practices in Buddhism and Christianity. In a curious case of meconassaince (misrecognition), the Shingon monks with whom Xavier came into contact (and know- ing of his arrival from India) mistook his Christianity “for a form of Buddhism unknown in Japan,” while the in-depth study of Ch’an (Zen) through Dogen’s works convinced the Jesuit to conclude that Buddhism might be a mutated “form of Christianity” (167). Although a short span of shared intellection and mutual trust ensued, this quickly collapsed as misrecognition gave way to better knowledge and eventually to open hostility, especially after Xavier explained the Trinitarian foundation of Catholicism, which was ridiculed by the monks. Nonetheless, Xavier’s spiritual force was considerable, and he achieved notable converts during his two-year residency in Japan, including to the shock of monks the Zen master Kesshu. In 1551 Xavier returned to Goa and prepared to augment his theological gains by seeking entry into China, yet when he sought entry to the mainland, imperial authorities denied him access (quite likely due to reports of recent success in India and Japan). He died on a small island off the Canton coast in 1552. Other Jesuits, notably Enlightenment East and West 13

Matteo Ricci (in Peking) and Christovao Ferreira (in Kyoto), assumed the mantle and continued the Jesuit mission: in the former, one can discern shadows of those shared attributes that come into coincidence in the nineteenth century; in the latter, one finds the most infamous early European convert to Buddhism (Batchelor Awakening 169–83; Cieslik 1). While initial misrecognition seemed to disclose shared affinities between Buddhism and Christianity, the Jesuits, including Xavier, u lt i mately v iewed t he for mer a s “a v u lga r idolat r y i n spi red by t he dev i l” (Batchelor Awakening 171), a statement echoing the views expressed earlier by Marco Polo, and perceived it as the primary obstacle to its own theocolonial aims in the East. The formidable Ricci arrived in Goa in 1578 and settled at the new Portuguese outpost of Macao in 1582. He perfectly embodied the Jesuit ideal achieved during the Renaissance: he was thoroughly versed in the arts and sciences; he was gifted in the acquisition of languages and dialects; he was totally dedicated to papal authority, and he was physically capable of with- standing the rigors of spiritual colonialism. After his five-year stay in India, Ricci entered China in 1583 and achieved fluency in Chinese after almost twelve years of arduous study, and he then crafted a book of maxims “drawn from various classical authors and from the church fathers,” which he offered as a gift to “a prince of the Ming ruling house who was living in Nanchang” (Spence 3). Ricci plunged deeply into both “the Confucian classics” and Buddhist doctrine, coming to conclude that their shared views of “non-self and transparency” led analytically to “nihilism” (Batchelor Awakening 171), a view made more interesting in that the first full presentation of these concepts within Europe unfolded through the circulation of a Tibetan document across the entire span of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries that defied the best efforts at translation by Oriental philologists in Russia and France. He also drafted a book explaining the mnemonic technique of the “memory palace,” a mental edifice erected through creative visualization of “images” made popular during the Renaissance, written in fluent Chinese, which he presented to Jiangxi, the head of an empowered family “at the apex of Chinese society” (Spence 5–6). This technique found fertile ground, especially given that the practice of Buddhism itself already involved an analogous process of creative visualization in contemplative meditation. This use of the creative imagination, as it came to be known in Romantic Europe, forms a significant element of mental discipline later connecting the practice of Buddhist and Romantic modes of enlightenment. Ricci also 14 Romantic Dharma adopted, somewhat surprisingly, a policy of relative tolerance regard- ing indigenous spiritual practices, an approach later taken up by the British in India during the administration of Warren Hastings.9 Even as Ricci lay dying in Peking, the Portuguese Christovao Ferreira set sail for Asia, and following his arrival in 1600 to Goa, he undertook a period of study in philosophy and theology required by those selected as spiritual warriors in the competition for colonial hegemony that began to develop between Catholicism and Protestant countries entering the arena (i.e. England and Holland). Upon completion of his studies, Ferreira was transferred to Macao, where he was ordained and assigned to the mission in Japan. Within seven years of his arrival in Japan, Ferreira had a masterful command of Japanese, but the Japan within which Ferreira operated was vastly different from that experienced by Xavier. Beginning in 1614 the Jesuits experienced escalating persecution from the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate (Cieslik 2–7), who were also pursuing trade agreements with the Dutch. He ultimately became procurator for the Jesuit mission in 1620 and leader of the Japanese Diocese in these repressive times, lamenting that “the reasons the shogun gives for the persecution, namely, the interests of the state . . . [were fed] by the Dutch heretics” (quoted in Cieslik 7). Ferreira’s view unveils another aspect of this first phase of contact, since the efforts directed from Lisbon, Madrid, and Rome faced increased competition as spiritual gave way to economic colonialism. Across this time frame, “Christianity was increasingly perceived as a potentially subversive movement [in Japan]” (Batchelor Awakening 178), and the ruling shogun finally suppressed Christianity by strict enforcement of a previously unim- plemented 1608 edict. Ferreira was arrested in 1633, apostatized (following five hours of torture), and eventually changed his name to Sawano Chūan, an act that sent shockwaves through Catholic missions in Asia and Europe alike and that helped compromise the legitimacy of Christianity in Japan and beyond. The appearance of Ferreira’s/Chūan’s anti-Christian A Disclosure of Falsehoods (Kengi- roku) three years later offered a point-by-point refutation of Christian doctrine, and with his death in 1650, the 100 year engagement between Catholic colonialism and the far east drew to a close. The third shogun, Iemitsu, in 1639, began to more intensely enforce the earlier expulsion edict, and shortly thereafter Japan and China simply closed its borders to all Catholic countries and its Jesuit shock troops. The zone of contact thereafter shifted increasingly to the Indian subcontinent and its trans- Himalayan region, with England, France, and Russia primarily replacing Portugal and Spain at the vanguard Enlightenment East and West 15 of contact as enlightenment modes of economic colonialism replaced those driven by theological modes of conversion. Most relevant to subsequent discussion in the last section of this and the heart of the next chapter focused on Alexander Csoma de Körös, the Jesuits had already moved into Tibet, establishing an early mission in Guge. By 1628, the Jesuit missions had penetrated as far as Shigatse before being expelled “on the advice of the 10th Karmapa” (Batchelor Awakening 190). This closed state of affairs continued into the opening decades of the eighteenth century, as geopolitical realignments among China, Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet solidified the negative view toward European intrusion into numerous regions throughout the Asian theater of operation, a situation that shifted somewhat with the arrival of the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri to Lhasa in 1716. Desideri’s journey to Tibet anticipates in several details the journey later undertaken by Csoma. However, unlike Csoma, who sought on his own to seek the origins of the Hungarian language and people in central Asia, Desideri received his charge directly from the papal authority of Clement XI and actually made it to the city of the Dalai Lamas. Upon his arrival to Lhasa, the Jesuit was presented to Lhazang Khan, who instead of expelling him encouraged his culti- vation of Tibetan (and for reasons precisely parallel to the interfaith conference arranged by Mönge Khan in 1254). Within nine months the intrepid Desideri had completed an exposition of Christianity in Tibetan and immediately thereafter took a six-year plunge into the canonical elaborations of Tibetan Buddhism entitled Kangyur and Tengyur (Tibetan translations of the Buddha’s sutras and major Indian commentaries on those sutras, respectively). Ironically, as Stephen Batchelor notes, “Desideri never realized that what he was studying was Buddhism” (193), and more ironically still, the geopoli- tics of Europe, rather than overt hostility from indigenous political and religious regimes, disrupted Desideri’s mission and returned him to Rome in 1728, with his record of contact remaining undiscovered until 1875 and unpublished until 1904. By this time actual Tibetan texts began to circulate among European capitals of Oriental scholarship (ca.1710–1834), including St. Petersburg, and Russian imperialism began to play an enhanced role in the next phase of Buddhism’s slow emergence into European consciousness.

British Entanglements with Tibet To open the eighteenth century, the Vatican formally prohibited Ricci’s practice of relative tolerance for indigenous religious practices, 16 Romantic Dharma which had become the accepted approach as the activities pursued by Desideri indicated. Once missionaries began to ridicule Chinese customs and values and even destroy statuary and other idols, the Confucian Manchu emperor simply closed China’s border, thereby concluding the spiritual colonial phase of Europe’s relationship with countries where Buddhism was prominent and widely practiced. Spiritual colonialism drew to a close once the states of China and Japan barred entrance to visitors from Catholic European countries, a development cited by Kant in his utopian Project for a Perpetual Peace, which acknowledged the wisdom of “the Chinese and Japanese, whom experience has taught to know the Europeans [and] wisely refuse their entry into the country” (Manuel 175). However, alternative paths of encounter developed rapidly throughout the trans-Himalayan regions of northern India (where British and Russian interests pursued economic and territorial, rather than the impure mixture of economic and spiritual colonialism) and the southEastern coast of India and the island of Ceylon (current Sri Lanka) and beyond (where Britain faced growing Dutch and French competition in the increasingly important countries of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and numerous island groups across in the South Pacific). Well before Sir William Jones arrived in India, British colonial authorities were already responding to various “internal and external pressures” emerging from administrative strategies of containment and control, especially as these pressures were applied by Russian imperial efforts directly north of the regions under British control.10 As well, one can detect an easing of tension in colonial relations with independent states such as Nepal and Tibet, and only one decade prior to the arrival of Jones, first contact between Tibet and the British government in Bengal (The East India Company) was inaugurated by the third Panchen Lama (then known as “the Teshoo Lama”), who was acting at the time as Regent for the very young Dalai Lama.11 On March 29, 1774, Warren Hastings received a poorly translated letter from the Teshoo Lama seeking to resolve a border dis- pute that erupted in 1772 and that brought British military force to the borders of Tibet. A Bhutanese “desi” or lord named Zhidar (one of the Lama’s subjects) created the conflict when he attacked the autonomous country named Cooch Behar. When he invaded this “small state on Bengal’s northern borders,” Zhidar unwittingly created the conditions that turned the British colonial gaze northward and that led, ultimately, to the expansion of “British influence in the Himalayan region” (Teltscher “Lama” 91). The complexities involved Enlightenment East and West 17 in and evolving out of this communiqué require quoting it at some length:

I have been repeatedly informed, that you have engaged in hostilities against the Dêh Terria, to which, it is said, the Dêh’s own criminal conduct, in committing ravages and other outrages on your frontiers, gave rise. As he is of a rude and ignorant race, past times are not des- titute of instances of the like faults. . . . Nevertheless his party has been defeated, many of his people have been killed, three forts have been taken from him, and he has met with the punishment he deserved. It is evident as the sun, that your army has been victorious . . . should you persist in offering further molestations to the Dêh Terria’s country, it will irritate both the Lama and all his subjects against you. Therefore, from a regard to our religion and customs, I request you will cease from all hostilities against him; and in doing this, you will confer the greatest favour and friendship upon me.12

As Kate Teltscher notes, the deposed Raja of Cooch Behar, appeal- ing for and receiving “military assistance from the British,” ceded by necessity the “sovereignty of the state to the East India Company” in exchange for direct intervention in the conflict (Teltscher Road 16–7). With the British success in defeating Zhidar came the potential threat, from the Tibetan point of view, of further northward expansion, upon which the Panchen Lama sought to foreclose through his function as “mediator” (Turner xi). The letter, while self-effacing and humble, while graceful and loquacious, while filled with solicitude and salutation, also conveyed the implied threat of overt hostilities and widespread rebellion in its view that British failure to suspend military activity would rouse the resistance of “both the Lama and all his subjects against you” (Turner xi). Following receipt of the letter and an extremely short period of considered reception, the Governor-General “presented the Panchen Lama’s letter to the Bengal Council the same day” (Teltscher Road 19), Hastings and the Council responded with a letter requesting that a delegation led by the Scotsman George Bogle be received in Lhasa to formalize relations. After initial rejection, Hastings’s offer was finally accepted, granting British access to Bhutan and Tibet. Upon his arrival to Desheripgay, Tibet, on October 12, 1774, George Bogle became “the first British traveler to enter the region” (Teltscher “Lama” 91), and he remained with the Teshoo Lama for almost seven months (returning to Bengal on April 8 of the following year). Again as noted by Teltscher, Hastings certainly had 18 Romantic Dharma imperial reasons for the mission, since he was “motivated by a desire for information, the kind of empirical evidence favored by theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment. The mission was both an exercise in reconnaissance and an intellectual project” (Teltscher “Lama” 94). Yet Bogle and Hastings both viewed the delegation as functioning beyond purely venal colonial aspirations, since Hastings argued that the mission “was as much textual as commercial or diplomatic” and further hoped to “imprint on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence” (quoted in Teltscher “Lama” 94, 95) through such texts. Bogle shared this view of indigenous literature and culture as well, an attitude articulated much later in a letter to his brother, when he expressed his aspirations to provide “to the whole world an Account of a Country hitherto little known” (quoted in Teltscher “Lama” 95). While Bogle’s narrative offered an enlightened and generous appraisal of the Teshoo Lama, another narrative of similar mission, written by Captain Samuel Turner, very much highlights the colonial imperatives at work in the background during the second British mission to Tibet. While Bogle and the Lama established a warm personal relationship, the machinations of Turner achieved material advantages for the East India Company and the British government in Calcutta:

I have obtained the Regent Chanjoo Cooshoo’s promise of encourage- ment to all merchants, natives of India, that may be sent to traffic in Tibet, on behalf of the government of Bengal. No impediment, therefore, now remains in the way of merchants, to prevent their carrying their commercial concerns into Tartary. (Turner 374)

The appendices attached to Turner’s Narrative are equally illuminating of the somewhat contradictory aspects of his first delegation, since within these attachments one can see the play of a more familiar colonial agenda. The first appendix offered “views taken on the spot” (Turner “Title Page”) compiled by Lieutenant Samuel Davis, which assessed the military, political, and social conditions defining Tibetan cultural processes and which, therein, provided the type of intelli- gence sought by the government in Calcutta. As well, in a summation offered by the naturalist Robert Saunders (“Observations Botanical, Mineralogical, and Medical”), one can clearly see the type of calcula- tion of material resources at the core of colonial endeavors across the Indian subcontinent in its older guise. Indeed, Saunders’s tables of commodities (Turner 381–4) are organized by Tibetan imports and Enlightenment East and West 19 exports with its surrounding countries and foreground items such as “gold dust, diamonds, pearls, coral, musk, and wool” (Turner 381). Strangely, given the rather successful outcome of the first mission, the collapse of colonial pretensions was occasioned by a personal situation (another synchronistic incident). All narratives, letters, and reports agree that during his seven-month stay at Desheripgay, George Bogle developed a warm and close relationship with the Panchen Lama based on mutual respect, which clearly clashed with the view of Tibetan lamas as “little better than shamans of superior dignity” voiced by t he Scott ish doctor John Bell—who much ea rlier had accompanied a Russian delegation through Mongolia and China (Teltscher “Lama” 100). Bogle’s attitude much more closely resembled that to be pursued by Jones, and as Turner reported, “Mr Bogle so ingrati- ated himself into [the Teshoo Lama’s] confidence, as to be intrusted [sic], some time after, with considerable remittance in money, for the purpose of building a temple and a dwelling house, for the accommodation of his votaries to Bengal” (Turner xv), which was accomplished by 1779. The hope of establishing permanent ties between the gov- ernments of Bengal and Lhasa ended somewhat abruptly, once Bogle returned to India. When the Panchen Lama agreed, several years later and after long solicitation, to visit the Emperor of China, he actually invited Bogle to join him in Peking (quite likely hoping to use British influence as a buffer against Chinese control), yet the potential long- term relationship, founded upon the personal rather than colonial, collapsed in a curious synchronicity:

Unfortunately, however, the death of the Lama [upon arriving in Peking] and that of Mr. Bogle, which happened at nearly the same time, clouded this fair prospect, and completely frustrated every expec- tation which had been formed. I am sorry to add too, that events, of a much more recent date, have concurred to throw almost insuperable difficulties in the way of re-establishing our intercourse with Tibet, at least for some considerable time to come. (Turner xvi)

With these two deaths, the hopes for establishing formal relations with Tibet collapsed just as Turner predicted, and although during the period that British contact with Tibet was lost, British authority continued already-established “political relations with Nepal” (Marshall 60, 452). The relations of these countries (Nepal and Tibet) erupted into war in 1792. Thus, more particular knowledge of Tibet as the repository of Buddhist texts would await the efforts of 20 Romantic Dharma a solitary figure, Alexander Csoma, who compiled and published the first Tibetan-English dictionary with the help of the Asiatick Society, which was founded by Sir William Jones the same year as Csoma’s birth.

From Orientalism to Romanticism The pace of literal and intellectual contact between Europeans and Buddhist practices and texts quickened “with the arrival of English civil servants in Calcutta around 1780,” and this British authority (shortly to shift from the East India Company to the Crown) understood that “languages would be the key to dominion” (Schwab 33). However, language itself would also provide a vehicle for instability in the passage from colonialism to imperialism, an insight emerging from the exportation to Great Britain of Indian culture and Hindu literature in the form of aesthetic, cultural, historical, philological, philosophical, and poetic works by Sir William Jones. When Jones was appointed to the judgeship that carried him to India, he had already seen service on the subcontinent and welcomed the oppor- tunity to escape “the seemingly insoluble problems of England” and to seek his “wealth” in a locale allowing him to combine “law and Oriental studies” (Cannon Oriental Jones 194). Yet somewhat surprisingly, Jones’s thinking from the beginning of his relocation indicated a “startling [additional] motivation” (Cannon 194) for one so deeply embedded in the colonialist enterprise—one actually linked to his endorsement of the “Enlightenment principle of association” and the application of “new scientific techniques” (Franklin Jones 84, 120) to the language and literature of India. Jones’s arrival created the conditions shifting Orientalism into a phase not solely governed by crass commercialism but newly expressive of a positive passion for “the dynamism and diversity of Indian culture.“13 As well, his approach to legal revisions sought to “establish a system whereby legal disputes in India would be adjudicated by Indian laws” (Weir 21). This relatively benign form of colonialism would collapse with the trial of Hastings and the expansion of a conversionary ideology thereafter. However Jones was inspired by an intuitive “cultural empa- thy” (Franklin Jones 120) ignited during his initial engagement with Indian literature (even before mastering Sanskrit) and informed by a “respectful and sympathetic response to Hindu culture” (Franklin Jones 118). As Garland Cannon suggests, Jones thought “he could Enlightenment East and West 21 really serve people . . . [and] serve humanity, a goal [that required] his return to Orientalism” (Cannon 194, 195). Cannon’s summation reflects the argument that Jones mounted at the end of his essay “On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations,” which was appended to his volume of Poems (1777) prepared prior to his arrival to India:

If the principle writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our public libraries, were printed with the usual advantages of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our places of education, where every branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be open for specula- tion; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind; we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes, and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate.14

The statement indicates the presence of materials already catalogued in libraries as a result of prior counterflows of indigenous materials to the homeland, asserts the importance of further study of such works for a better understanding “of the human mind,” and expresses the hope that such materials will provide “a new set of images and similitudes [that] future poets might imitate.” Of course, the enlightenment roots of Jones’s education shine through these hopes, and they indicate his frame of mind upon arrival to Calcutta five years later. In spite of such motives, which upon occasion eerily echo the sense of “white burden” articulated late in the Romantic period and codified across the Victorian Age (the specific shift from Romantic to Modern modes of Orientalism), Jones remained embedded in the power structure of the colonizer and implicated in the imperial process as “a scholar and judge in the Hastings administration in Bengal” (Makdisi 106). His primary function, through his judiciary activities, literally established Jones as its arm of law. Yet, even as Jones “put his knowledge of India directly to work for Hastings and the East India Company,” his assimilation and imitations of Hindu poetic subjects and forms created “an ‘excess’ of knowledge that served no immediate administrative purpose” (Makdisi 106–7) and that shaped a significant current of the counterflow that impacted a broad range of British Romantic writing in its second generation, as Nigel Leask (2–12), Saree Makdisi, and others have analyzed in detail. 22 Romantic Dharma

The arrival of Jones made official a type of administrative revalua- tion reflective of an essential change, one that pursued the accumula- tion of cultural rather than economic commodities to be transported to Britain (Makdisi 108–9). One of Jones’s first acts, the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and its influential and widely disseminated journal the following year, created vehicles for the intellectual and scholarly pursuit of ideas, rather than material goods, and in the process, through its journal, created a linguistic and textual counterflow through which Buddhism—as a distinct body of thought and practice from Hinduism—slowly emerged into European consciousness. As Franklin argues with considerable force, Jones ingeniously applied the comparative dimension of enlightenment thought and methods to forge direct connections between Indian and European languages and their cultural and literary forms, crafting through this research a mechanism by which the colonized “subject” provided a vehicle to critique the abundant colonial abuses “of British oppression in India” (Cannon 194):

Orientalism might operate as a cultural counter-sphere to attack classical orthodoxy and Eurocentric prejudice. . . . The appropriation of Indian culture as opposed to Indian loot would not only help reform of colonial administration, but also question Western assumptions concerning the automatic cultural superiority of the colonizing power (Franklin Jones 84–5).

Jones’s notion, again noted by Franklin, “was in many respects a rev- olutionary idea,” since such a view would recognize “that servants of colonial power might prove moral agents of administrative reform and cultural renaissance” (Franklin Jones 118). The arrival of Jones crystallized a rather dramatic shift in Britain’s view of the Orient (as metonymized by India), a shift from one paradigm (the development and economic exploitation of the East) to another (the understanding and intellectual importation of the East). Makdisi argues in similar fashion, proposing that “the romantic period marked a transitional moment between . . . opposed sets of colonial projects” (Romantic Imperialism 101). As discussed in the following chapter, the “transitional moment,” especially as embodied in the institutional establishment of the Asiatic Society, proved crucial for the “re-emergence” of Buddhism from European centers of Oriental scholarship. Given such a change in imperial administrative direction, the engagement with and representation of indigenous materials across the Indian subcontinent cannot be reduced, as Edward Said seems Enlightenment East and West 23 to propose in Orientalism, to a problematic “form of antihumanism” (Otterspeer 195). Said’s influential text proposes that the primary ideological aspect of Orientalist practice reifies “the sense of Western power over the Orient” (46), yet this view becomes untenable relative to the emergence of Buddhism itself, which capably exerted a broad counterinfluence in Europe across the nineteenth century. Quite clearly, given the paucity of attention paid to Buddhism in most critical analyses of historical Orientalism from Said to the present, this aspect of Orientalism needs additional scholarly attention, especially since it coincided with shifts in British imperial goals and the explosive emergence of Romanticism: “The relationship between the Orient and Romanticism is less a local and temporal one than an essential one” (Schwab 482). Furthermore, unlike almost all other Eastern religions and systems of thought, Buddhism has cast long shadows across the West, even—in the case of Tibetan Buddhism—finally establishing a significant presence within it. Jones himself seems to propose using Indian literary and cultural forms in a deconstructive fashion to critique British imperial pretensions and intentions (expressive of a deconstructive element as one dimension of modern Orientalism itself), and as Leask has argued, “the internal and external pressures determining and undermining such representations are more various than Said’s thesis will allow” (2). Indeed, in Franklin’s assessment, Said, in ignoring the dynamic and far-reaching alterations inaugurated by Jones, actually places under erasure “co-operative process and the rich opportunities it presented for transculturation” (Franklin Jones 119). This very trans cultural exchange—linguistically driven and textually embodied—demarcates a significant shift in the British view of the Orient. In the solid assessment offered by Peter J. Kitson, “Jones’s Orientalism did not simply impose a colonialist discourse upon India, facilitating British administration. It also partially fostered Indian nationalism by helping in the process of liberating its writing from Brahman control” (Fulford and Kitson 16). In the apt expression offered by Tzvetan Todorov, “It is only through talking to the Other (as opposed to issuing orders), that the Other is granted a subjectivity comparable to the Self” (quoted in Teltscher High Road 92). Jones, and to a lesser extent Warren Hastings (immediately prior to his trial and ultimate acquittal before parliament), seemed to embody this new dialogic relationship and provided physical mechanisms to bring the Other home through the counterflow of textual translations, appropriations, and transmutations. Equally relevant to this discussion of the emergence of Buddhism into the West, again as proposed 24 Romantic Dharma by Kitson, is that this “new system of British imperialism appears to have been emerging at roughly the same time as what we know as Romanticism began to appear” (13), and those direct epistemic changes converge with “a major overhaul in imperial policy” (Makdisi 110) adopted by Hastings, who “was no puppet of Church and State” (Weir 25). At this time, Russia emerged as England’s chief competition in the Great Game unfolding in trans-Himalaya, eclipsing waning French influence. Russian colonial motivations derived from the deathbed vision of Peter the Great of global dominion: “From his death bed, it was said, he had secretly commanded his heirs and successors to pur- sue what he believed to be Russia’s historical destiny—the domination of the world. Possession of India and Constantinople were the twin keys to this, and he urged them not to rest until both were firmly in Russian hands” (Hopkirk 20). Knowledge of this provocative inspira- tion circulated widely in Europe, and like Great Britain, Russia strove to extend its influence in the region, while also solidifying its influence in Mongolia. The expansionist-oriented Catherine sought to honor Peter’s hopes, and in 1791, she “carefully considered a plan to wrest India from Britain’s ever-tightening grip” (Hopkirk 21). While colonial, economic, and political relations between England and Russia intensified in the regions north of India, the East India Company continued to function as the primary economic engine in the region. However, faced with mounting debt and internal challenges to the “virtual monopoly [on India’s] commerce” (Hopkirk 24) it enjoyed at the beginning of the Romantic age, “the directors faced ever- mounting debts and the perpetual threat of bankruptcy” (Hopkirk 25) after the turn of the century. The Company’s long-established prag- matic practice of “toleration of the indigenous religious and cultural practices of the subcontinent” shifted under the influence “of the Evangelical movement in the 1790s,” with the corporation adopting “a newly hostile stance towards Asian religions” (Franklin Jones 223), a reaction no doubt motivated by continued intellectual drift toward theological relativity implicit within European enlightenment’s “general programme of demystifying both religion and the religions” (Yolton 447). Such attempts at objectivity required an intellectual and ethical “relativity to local [religious] conditions” in order to further the quest for “an unwritten moral code common to all humanity” (Hampson 106), an implicit motive within comparative religion in the nineteenth century. The evolving nature of colonialism itself created altered linguistic demands, since attention shifted to languages—Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan—located on the northern and southern fringes Enlightenment East and West 25 of British colonial control, and this linguistic shift of emphasis became the material source for those semiotic streams down which Buddhism continued to flow into Western knowledge.

The Instance of a Fragment The punctuated and intermittent path by which knowledge of Buddhism crystallized in European consciousness is best captured, in my view, through the tale of a solitary textual fragment that circulated within learned centers of Oriental learning for over 100 years before receiving a definitive translation in 1831. This tale can serve as a transi- tion to the following chapter’s intensified focus on Alexander Csoma de Körös, who provided the translation. The tale also shows Russia’s entry as a key player in the “great game” of colonialism, demonstrates the circulation of textual materials to major centers of Oriental scholarship, and thereby functions as a metonymy for much of the discussion in this chapter. On July 4, 1832, H. H. Wilson, then secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, introduced the translation to members in order to highlight the work of a remarkably Romantic figure, Alexander Csoma, at the linguistic forefront of Tibetan Buddhism’s transmission/ translation into English, although the humble scholar was a Hungarian national (Csoma, Tibetan Studies, 9–12). As Wilson’s brief remarks recount, the history of the fragment (an appropriate state of textuality as a symbolic connection to Romantic form evoked by “Kubla Khan”) unfolded across some of the terrain mapped previously. The extremely difficult yet visually beautiful script had first entered European hands when the Eastward movement of Peter the Great’s colonial forces encountered sacked temples and ruined monasteries, and Ivan Licharov, Peter’s envoy, was dispatched to assess the situation (Batchelor Awakening 226–8), since the enlightenment czar hoped to discover gold in these newly occupied territories. However, the fantasized city of gold materialized as the abandoned “Buddhist temple of Ablaikit,” and Licharov returned with only a few trinkets and a few loose pages of script in an unknown language (Batchelor 227). Since the script proved indecipherable to Peter’s Imperial Librarian, the first page of the loose bundle was shipped to the German philolo- gist J. B. Menke, without notable results, and the page returned to St. Petersburg. His curiosity now piqued, and perhaps fueled as well by the vision revealed on his deathbed, Peter sent the page to Abbé Bignon in Paris, who confirmed the text as Tibetan with the help of Etienne Fourmont (who was cataloguing a steady flow of central Asian manuscripts and texts transmitted to the Academie des Inscriptions). 26 Romantic Dharma

Fourmont offered a preliminary Latin translation of the fragment, aided by a poor Tibetan-Latin dictionary compiled by the Capuchin priest Domenico de Fano, and returned it to St. Petersburg. At that point, Peter ordered the collection of additional Tibetan manuscripts and books, a command that went unheeded after his death in 1725. And yet the manuscript in question actually continued its slow circulation through the major European centers of Oriental knowledge (Csoma Tibetan Studies 13–5). In 1747, a full generation after earlier attempts to translate it, this peculiar work received another translation by one Herr Müller (not to be confused with the late nineteenth-century Oriental scholar Max Müller) in Commentatio de Scriptus Tanguitics, which severely criti- cized Fourmont in the process. Müller proposed that the Commenatio offered marginal improvement and revealed it benefited from “the double aid of a Tangutan priest . . . and a Mongol student” working in the Imperial College in St. Petersburg (Wilson “Remarks” 9). Antione-Augustin Giorgi followed with further corrections of the page, which he appended to his Alphabetum Tibetanum (a copy of which was given to Csoma by William Moorcroft before his entry into Tibet), but the French sinologist Abel Rémusat, writing later during the Romantic period, found “nothing to admire” in all prior efforts, since neither “interpreters and commentators” had completely cracked the code of Tibetan and therefore lacked the proper frame of reference within which to place the enigmatic content of the fragment (Wilson “Remarks” 10; Batchelor Awakening 227–8).15 Without such a code and context, these scholars were ill-prepared to recognize, even after a century of concentrated effort, that the scrap of text encoded the first European appearance of the interrelated concepts of compassion and transparency placed at the foundation of all Buddhist systems. As mentioned above, the point of Wilson’s presentation was to introduce not only the translation but the translator, the remarkable Csoma, who lived modestly in an almost monk-like state in the base- ment of the Asiatic Society and served as its occasional cataloguer and librarian. Batchelor has now identified the translated fragment as part of the Sutra on the Adherence to the Great Mantra, a Tibetan translation of a now lost Sanskrit “discourse by the Buddha Vairocana on the use of mantras to reach enlightenment” (Batchelor Awakening 229). Csoma’s translation, although revisited by scholars East and West, nonetheless retains its linguistic integrity:

Ignorant men do not know that all these (doctrines) have been thus explained by Chom dan das (the supreme [One]), the knower of all Enlightenment East and West 27

and possessor of all, who in remote ages, through compassion for all [sentient] beings, addressed his mind to meditation upon the affairs of animate existence. The ignorant do not perceive the moral significance of moral things. It has been distinctly taught (by the Buddha) that the essential principle of morality is the non-entity (or transparency) of matter. (Csoma Tibetan Studies 12).

During the strongest phase of spiritual colonialism, such concepts were held in disdain by Xavier and other Jesuits. However, in the European intellectual context of enlightenment epistemology, the reception of these views had concord with George Berkeley’s examination of phenomena and noumena, and he presents this position in his opening argument for “Of the Principles of Human Knowledge,” suggesting that “the existence of an idea consists in being perceived” (Turbayne 23). The Berkeley position crystallized in his phrase that “esse is percipi” and asserted that “[it is not] possible they [objects of sensation] should have any experience out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them” (23), an empirical analysis that established that “all sensible qualities, including tangible qualities, are mind-dependent” (Atherton 222). Another important figure of the enlightenment, David Hume, had launched a critique of the “sovereign self” in A Treatise on Human Nature (1739): “But self or person is not any one impression . . . there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea” (299). Hume’s empirical analysis concluded in uncertainty, where “questions concerning personal identity can never be decided, and are regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties” (310). Hume’s argument, as Jerrold Seigel indicates, should not be “taken too easily as his last word on the subject” (125), although the analysis has tended to dominate subsequent discussions of his critique of the self. For this study, however, Hume’s empirical analysis closely resembles that undertaken through the prajñapāramitā (Sanskrit for perfection of wisdom) literature of Buddhism, which placed the movement away from “a fixed identity” (Batchelor Verses 44) and the embrace of a “no-self” model at the core of Eastern forms of enlightenment (see chapter 3). To open the nineteenth century, the French jurist and student of Oriental religions Jean-Denis Lanjuinais perceived precisely this connection between Asiatic concepts of self-emptying and self-overcoming, 28 Romantic Dharma seeing considerable compatibility between “Illuminism, Spinoza and Berkeley” and the views emerging from “India” (Schwab 161). Berkeley and Hume exerted extended influence across European philosophy and British Romanticism, and through them Western philosophic thought could locate its own arguments for the mediated state of the material world, one requiring participation rather than elaboration, one highly skeptical of purely mechanical models of mind and matter, one deeply suspicious of the sovereign self, and one, therefore, increasingly in accord with Eastern views of the “non-entity (or transparency)” of materiality and the “moral significance” achieved by overcoming “the reified splitting of self and other” (Low 263). With this emergent view, enlightenment epistemology moved into a second phase further fueled by Romantic art and philosophy in Britain, France, and Germany.