The Birth of Orientalism ENCOUNTERS WITH ASIA Victor H. Mair, Series Editor Encounters with Asia is an interdisciplinary series dedicated to the exploration of all the major regions and cultures of this vast continent. Its timeframe extends from the prehistoric to the contemporary; its geographic scope ranges from the Urals and the Caucasus to the Pacific. A particular focus of the series is the Silk Road in all its ramifications: religion, art, music, medicine, science, trade, and so forth. Among the disciplines represented in this series are history, archeology, anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. The series aims particularly to clarify the complex interrelationships among various peoples within Asia, and also with societies beyond Asia. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. The Birth of Orientalism Urs App university of pennsylvania press philadelphia . oxford Copyright ᭧ 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data App, Urs, 1949– The birth of orientalism / Urs App. p. cm. — (Encounters with Asia) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4261-4 (acid-free paper) 1. Asia—Religion—Study and teaching—History—18th century. 2. Orientalism—Europe—History—18th century. 3. Europe—Intellectual life—18th century. 4. Religions— Study and teaching—History—18th century. I. Title. BL1033.A66 2010 294—dc22 2010004556 To my sensei YANAGIDA Seizan (1922–2005) Fact Is Fiction—And Fiction Is Fact Contents List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Voltaire’s Veda 15 Chapter 2. Ziegenbalg’s and La Croze’s Discoveries 77 Chapter 3. Diderot’s Buddhist Brahmins 133 Chapter 4. De Guignes’s Chinese Vedas 188 Chapter 5. Ramsay’s Ur-Tradition 254 Chapter 6. Holwell’s Religion of Paradise 297 Chapter 7. Anquetil-Duperron’s Search for the True Vedas 363 Chapter 8. Volney’s Revolutions 440 Synoptic List of Protagonists 481 Notes 483 Bibliography 503 Index 537 Figures and Tables Figures 1. Inscriptions, Jesuit residence and church in Zhaoqing, 1584 21 2. Vishnu recovers the Veda from the sea 84 3. Schematic view of Ziegenbalg’s classification of religions 102 4. Relics of Saint Josaphat (St. Andrieskerk, Antwerp) 137 5. Kircher’s Indo-Japanese divinities 154 6. The earth formation cycle of Burnet (1684) 160 7. Diagram of Engelbert Kaempfer’s view of Asian religions 182 8. De Guignes’s hieroglyphs and Chinese characters 212 9. Stemma of major Forty-Two Sections Sutra editions 226 10. Bodhidharma crossing the sea on a reed 252 11. Adam’s skull underneath the cross 257 12. Newton’s map of Solomon’s temple 265 13. Yijing trigram charts by Pre´mare 287 14. Paradise near India on Osma world map 309 15. Chapter themes of Holwell’s Shastah translation 319 16. Holwell’s Shastah in review and published versions 321 17. Genesis of Holwell’s Chartah Bhade Shastah of Bramah 340 18. Christianity’s transmission line in Eusebius of Caesarea 388 19. Stages of Ezour-vedam creation and dissemination 395 20. Handwriting samples of Deshauterayes 413 Tables 1. Edict of the Duke of Yamaguchi 17 2. Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs and Asian religions 36 3. Voltaire’s edition of Ezour-vedam creation account 57 x figures and tables 4. First section of Holwell’s Shastah 71 5. Chinese sects in Visdelou’s text and Le Gobien’s 199 6. Brahmans in Visdelou’s text and Le Gobien’s 201 7. Section of de Guignes’s Forty-Two Sections Sutra translation 230 8. Beginning of de Guignes’s Forty-Two Sections Sutra preface 232 9. Inner and outer doctrines according to de Guignes 242 10. Text percentages in Holwell’s translations per theme 320 11. Do Couto’s Vedas and Holwell’s sacred scriptures of India 331 12. Contents of do Couto’s first Veda and first book of Holwell’s Shastah 333 13. Protagonists of Pondicherry Vedas and transmission lines 390 14. Buddhism in Ezour-vedam and Pons’s letter 399 15. Periodization of career of Pondicherry Vedas 403 16. Father Coeurdoux’s truthfulness confirmed 426 17. Anquetil’s draft translation of Oupnek’hat preface 436 18. Phases in genesis of Volney’s Ruins 459 Preface ‘‘Orientalism’’ has been a buzzword since Edward Said’s eponymous book of 1978. Critics have pointed out that Said’s ‘‘Orient’’ is focused on the Arab world and excludes most of what Westerners mean by the word. A more recent history of Orientalism, Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing, criticizes Said’s narrow view of orientalists as ‘‘those who travelled, studied or wrote about the Arab world’’ (2006:294) but goes on to use the same ‘‘somewhat arbitrary delimitation of the subject matter’’ (p. 6), which leaves out India, China, Japan, Tibet, Central Asia, North Asia, and Southeast Asia—in other words, most of what we mean by Asia and more than half of humankind. The term ‘‘Orientalism’’ also has many other connotations, for example, in the context of ‘‘oriental’’ fashions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries or the imitation of oriental styles in garden architecture and painting. The Orientalism whose birth process is examined in this book is modern Orientalism, that is, the secular, institutionalized study of the Orient by spe- cialists capable of understanding oriental languages and handling primary- source material. Its genesis—and, more generally, the history of premodern Europe’s encounter with Asia—is still barely known. The present book does not claim to furnish a history of Orientalism as a whole. Its much more modest aim is to elucidate through relatively extensive case studies a crucial phase of the European encounter with Asia: the century of Enlightenment. The focus is on the European discovery of the regions east of Said’s and Irwin’s ‘‘Orient,’’ in particular on Europe’s discovery of non-Islamic Asian religions. The facets of Asian religions treated are, needless to say, determined by the interests of the protagonists of the included case studies. Unlike Im- manuel Kant (App 2008a), they showed little interest in Tibetan religion; hence there is little discussion of it in this book. Why the focus on religion? Because the role of colonialism (and generally of economic and political interests) in the birth of Orientalism dwindles to insignificance compared to the role of religion. Modern Orientalism is the xii preface successor of earlier forms of Orientalism involving the study of Asian lan- guages and texts. Christian Europe had been wrestling with Islam for many centuries; from the sixteenth century many of its universities prided them- selves on having an ‘‘orientalist’’ professor who specialized in Hebrew and other Bible-related languages such as Aramaic, Syriac, and sometimes even Arabic or Persian. Such premodern academic Orientalism was generally a handmaiden of Bible studies and theology—which explains its almost exclu- sive focus on regions, languages, and religions that play a role in the Old and New Testaments. Studies of Oriental texts and languages beyond the ‘‘bibli- cal’’ region usually—though not exclusively—occurred in the context of Christian missions. The eighteenth century brought a momentous change that opened the door to a new kind of Orientalism, less shackled by theology, Bible studies, the frontiers of the Middle East, and Europe’s time-honored Judeo-Christian worldview. This new or ‘‘modern’’ Orientalism was prepared by a growing interest in India as the cradle of civilization, an interest that was promoted by Voltaire (1694–1778) in his quest to denigrate the Bible and destabilize Christianity (see Chapter 1). After the appearance of a number of purportedly very ancient texts of Indian origin in the 1760s and 1770s (Chapters 6 and 7), the idea of Indian origins of civilization gained ground. The research by early British Sanskritists in Calcutta and their articles in the Asiatick Re- searches added oil to the fire, and in 1795 Europe’s first secular institution for the study of Oriental languages was established: the E´cole Spe´ciale des Lan- gues Orientales Vivantes in Paris. Its first director, Louis-Mathieu Langle`s (1763–1824), was inspired both by Voltaire’s idea of Indian origins and the new approach of the British gentlemen scholars, and he regarded the Bible as an imitation of the far older Veda (see Chapter 8). With the support of Constantin-Franc¸ois Volney (1757–1820), the noted Orientalist and author of the law expropriating the French Catholic Church, the E´cole Spe´ciale offi- cially sought to divorce the study of Asia, its languages, and its textual heri- tage from the realm of theology and biblical studies. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this school quickly became the Mecca of secular Orien- talist philology, and further progress was made with such developments as the creation of the first European university chairs in Indology and Sinology (Paris, 1814). However, as the recent studies of Mangold (2004), Polaschegg (2005), and Rabault-Feuerhahn (2008) show for the case of Germany, the emancipation of Orientalism from theology and its establishment as a disci- pline in its own right required many decades. Indeed, the complicated rela- preface xiii tionship between ‘‘theology,’’ ‘‘religious studies,’’ and ‘‘Asian studies’’ in today’s academic environment would indicate that this emancipation process is far from finished. It is easily forgotten that even in the 1820s Europeans believed with few exceptions that the world is only a few thousand years old, that all the world’s peoples can be traced back to Noah’s Ark, and that Christianity is the ful- fillment and goal of all religion.