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Introduction

If the History of Buddhism tells us anything, it is that religion should not be reified either as dogma or as the product of a particular time and place. It is constantly adopting, conforming and making alliances with its environment. One of the reasons that Buddhism is a truly great and robust religion is because it has recognized this fact. The Dharma, as the Dalai Lama says is something that you ‘can never quite put your finger on’. Practising the Dharma means becoming one with it and not viewing it as a teaching or a consolation separate from life. But since it can never be organized in a rational way, living the Dharma means following a middle way between such extremes as ‘rationalism’ and ‘irrationalism’, ‘reason’ and ‘romanticism’, ‘intuition’ and ‘technique’.

In this talk I want to take us through a worldwind tour of the West’s encounter with Buddhism from the sixteenth century Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It’s a messy tour, and if we expect either the West or the Buddhist East to play sensible roles or if we expect a gradual progression of authentic Buddhist wisdom in the West, we are in for a disappointed ride. It’s a herky jerky kind of back and forthing with a lot of factors involved.

Historians, to which tribe I belong, try to organize these events and exchanges in a sensible way. But in so doing, they often obscure what is a very murky business. So I want you to know in advance that I am going to organize about 400 years under a very simplistic theme — the rise of nationalism — because that will allow me to give some structure to my ramblings and to set up what I think is the most important difference between the twentieth century and the world of the past — the triumph of globalism.

Renaissance Humanism

But History is full of ironies. The most profound intellectual movement in the sixteenth century west was Humanism and its origins were anything but nationalistic. The Humanists were reacting to the increasingly fossilized doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. They found religious teaching to be more obscure and less relevant to living real life in the real world. Moreover, they believed that Christianity in its present form was too intolerant towards the riches and experiences of this life. Thus, they began to refocus philosophy and literature back on human life as it was really lived and posited the then remarkable theory that one could only grow spiritually by learning, enjoying and moving beyond the things of this world. In order to learn about the things of this world — rather than how many angels one could get on the head of a pin — the Humanists rediscovered and devoured the writings of the Greeks and Romans. They began the process of translating and learning from classical western texts in order to provide an alternative vision of life. And they were particularly excited by the teachings of Plato who showed, for example, that earthly love and beauty were stepping stones to higher concepts.

This movement was, for its time, extremely internationalist. It encouraged people to look for wisdom outside of themselves and it stimulated a great curiosity about the world outside of central Europe. It began to focus scholarship on comparative literature and it revitalized a kind of historical curiosity about other societies that had lain dormant since the Greeks. It laid the groundwork for the modern university and the undogmatic search for knowledge and truth. But most of all it allowed for the freeing up of art and culture, the kind that you can see in Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel or his sculptures that detailed the beauty of the human body and, occasionally, the human spirit.

But as the Humanists were redefining beauty and affirming the ‘here and now’ of human existence, a totally different movement was emerging — nationalism. The humanists, as writers and artists, were quickly swallowed up by monarchs who were attempting to unify feudal kingdoms and to give the royal household and the courts greater clout and prestige. Thus, for example, Thomas More was employed and beheaded by Henry VIII in England. Machiavelli worked for the Italian princes and tried to get a job with the Borgias, the folks who kept poisoning their enemies in order to gain control of the state. All the while, the Pope, who felt the threat of rising monarchs, began to try to enter into the fray and to build up the power Papal States, by religious threat and, if necessary, physical force.

The popes had one real, but potentially difficult, ally in their own quest for temporal domination — a new international religious order that you have all heard about, the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits. Now there’s lots that can be said, both good and bad, about the Jesuits, but there’s only two things that I really want to focus on here. The Jesuits were influenced by humanism and tended to be internationalists; the internationalism of the Jesuits meant that they were much more inclined to try to learn about and to understand other cultures than most other westerners and it is from the Jesuits that we first begin to get more accurate information about other societies in the world. The second is that the Jesuits were often hated by rulers and even some popes because they went against national ambitions at precisely the same time that nations were growing more powerful. Thus, they were from time to time outlawed or banished from states, and even by the popes that they served. For the growing power of nations meant that countries like Spain or France could get their national candidates elected as popes.

The Jesuits, therefore, were the most influential anachronisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What is more, they followed the explorers to new societies in India, Ceylon, China and, eventually, Japan and Tibet. What they wanted to do was to make converts to Christianity. Francis Xavier, for example, set out in 1549 to convert Japan. He was the first to learn something about Japanese Buddhism and even provides us with a clumsy account of the way in which Japanese Buddhists of the Rinzai school were using koans. Of course we shouldn’t expect too much in the way of a deeper understanding of Buddhism from this Christian missionary, who basically regarded the Japanese as idolaters. But he and his friends were humanists enough to be able to appreciate the politeness and etiquette of their hosts, and Xavier even became friends with the Abbot of a Soto Zen monastery. The Jesuits were eventually able to convert a powerful Zen master Kesshu and to build up their mission in Japan. 50 years later, they had 200,000 Christians in Japan.

The Jesuits excelled as educators of missionaries. Matteo Ricci was a prize candidate and he was sent to convert the Chinese in 1578. China at that time had both Confucians and Buddhists with the state favouring the Confucians. Ricci went so far as to study Confucianism and to tress like a Confucian patriarch. He got along fairly well with them, even though he was thought of as unusual. The Christian emphasis on hierarchy and religious rule helped him understand Confucians but he had a harder time with Buddhists and refused even to learn the basics of the religion. What bothered the missionaries most about the deeper forms of Buddhism was the denial of a personal savour and soul and the desire to melt into Nirvana rather than to enter into a heavenly kingdom. Buddhism seemed particularly alien to the Western mind. Dialogue was limited.

The First European Zen Buddhist

The only reason that there was any dialogue at all was because the East was more tolerant than the West and did not have such a need to define heresy or to stamp out religious dissent. But the West and the East began to converge by the end of the sixteenth century and Eastern rulers too began to establish authoritarian political regimes and to increase state control over religious activity. The Japanese Buddhist church became subject to state controls and Buddhist monks became state administrators. Japanese nationalism and religious chauvinism was clearly on the rise when the Jesuit Christovao Ferreira made the mistake of trying to go to convert the Japanese.

Christianity had previously flourished in Japan but now came under scrutiny. As in many European countries, the Jesuits were considered particularly dangerous and outlawed. For a long time Ferreira ran the Japanese Church for the Jesuits from underground and lived a shadowy existence. Christians were now persecuted for their beliefs and Jesuit missionaries were high on the government’s hit list. At first, the Japanese authorities just killed those Christians it found most offensive, but they soon discovered that this created martyrs which increased the rate of conversion and strengthened those in opposition. So they began to devise ways to make the leadership turn.

And their favourite way was to hang people upside down in a big vat of excrement. The anestethized the brain by splitting the skull to keep people from passing out too easily and they made sure that people were not totally suffocated by the fumes. It could take many hours, and in some cases, days to die. But most Jesuits were tough customers and they simply died. They did not raise their one untied hand to indicate apostasy. That is all except for Ferreira. He lasted six hours before he apostatized. It was a big victory for state Buddhism in Japan and a severe blow to the mission, especially since Ferreira now began to write anti-Christian tracts for the government.

It is difficult to know if Ferreira ever became a true Zen Buddhist. His writings seem to indicate a blending of Confucian and Taoist beliefs. But his conversion is historically relevant only as an example of the way that religion was increasingly tied to the ambitions of secular rulers and how it was used to serve nationalistic ends. The Japanese were certainly no different from the Europeans in this respect. They were consolidating the state by using and controlling religion.

Similar events unfolded in other Buddhist countries. Buddhism was established as a theocracy in Tibet for the pure reason of consolidating the rule of a Mongol leader and later it was supported by Chinese Ming emperors for much the same reason. Spiritual men cut deals with secular leaders in order to promote their brand of Buddhism. The results could help the spread of the dharma In Tibet, for example, Jamchen Choje was able to create the largest 3 monasteries in the world, with over 20,000 monks. By the 1640s, Buddhist regimes had been established in Tibet, China and Japan. But the spirit of Buddhism, its essential core of teachings, was successively overlaid with formality, state concerns and a fossilizing of dogma.

The Mongols, perhaps because of the disconnected nature of their empire, were more internationalist and accepting of religious difference than most. Their intermittent power over Tibet allowed for some toleration, and the Jesuits were permitted to come in to preach in 1716. Once again they prepared to debate the merits of Christianity under the terms set by the Khan. But the Khan was a remnant of the past. The Manchu dynasty was the future. The Tibetans would only manage to shake of that yoke in 1912, but it would take only 40 years for the Chinese to return in the form of a powerful Asian government committed to communism.

Back in the late sixteenth century, internationalism was pretty much dead and the old humanist ideal of an international community could barely be glimpsed. In 1721, Rome ordered the Jesuits out of Tibet and sent the Capuchins in their place. In 1773 the Society of Jesus was suppressed throughout Europe and inconsequential in Japan.

The Legacy of Enlightenment

In order for cosmopolitanism and internationalism to arise again, there needed to exist a whole new set of conditions. And even then, you can imaging that the results would need to be complex and even messy, with all sorts of different developments and theories cris crossing in a way that makes the transmission of a complex and alien religious system difficult. But something did happen around the middle of the eighteenth-century that had an important impact on the exchange of ideas. It was a movement called the Enlightenment.

In Zen Buddhist teaching, enlightenment is the moment that you intuitively understand the interconnectedness of all things, and the complete transparency of both mind and what we conventionally term the material world. The eighteenth-century European enlightenment was very different. It was about applying human reason systematically in order to understand nature and human nature. It was about discovering the laws of science and human psychology so as to change and improve the way we live. It had a deep commitment to historical evolution and progress, something that we still cling to very tightly in our western minds.

To a Buddhist, much of this would not be considered enlightenment and it differs dramatically from the intuitive mind that achieves kensho or enlightenment. But you should understand how liberating this form of Enlightenment seemed to people living in European nations. It meant prosperity, scientific advancement, and the power that seems to come from controlling one’s environment. To be fair to the Enlightenment theorists like Voltaire, Adam Smith, Condorcet and Beccaria, the Enlightenment was all about appreciating nature, achieving a moral society, and providing a higher standard of living for all members of a society. The emphasis on a universal human nature made these people tolerant; their desire to advance human civilization made them polite and sympathetic and their desire to understand nature led to extremely valuable scientific discoveries.

In their search to discover human nature, the Enlightened philosophers began to see the moral basis for all religions. They wanted to study these religions more closely in order to understand where spiritual values came from rather than simply to believe in dogma. They believed that human nature was fundamentally good and moral, so they looked for what was good and moral in other societies. This sense of toleration and curiosity was mitigated somewhat by their belief in progress — so it was natural for them to consider the economies and the philosophies of the East as inferior to those of the West. The West was higher in the evolutionary scale, something that seemed to be confirmed half a century later in that true product of the Enlightenment — Charles Darwin.

Enlightenment curiosity about other cultures was aided and abetted, therefore, by an entire process of colonization — bringing the benefits of western rationalism and civilization to the East. And while it cannot be said that the Enlightenment was much less chauvinistic in its attitude towards the East than the Renaissance, there was something very valuable in its desire to find out about others and to look at the data scientifically. As early as the mid seventeenth-century, the Jesuits and others had been buy composing Sanskrit grammars and working hard to solve the riddle of complex primitive languages. But now there was a much more concerted movement to speed up this kind of scholarship and to do it in a systematic way, characterized by a specialized division of labour. The Science of Philology was born and with it the Royal Asiatic Society.

And the kind of understanding of foreign cultures that the West now thought was far more conducive to increased understanding, for it wanted to penetrate past the dogma and the history of foreign cultures to a deeper meaning — it wanted to appreciate the spirit of the East. Of course, this was often a way of criticizing the inadequacies of a foreign culture, but you can’t let scholars loose on material without having some unexpected outcomes. They tend to fall in love with what they study and to see its advantages. Buddhism could never have made serious inroads into the West had it not been for some very peculiar and often quite dislikable scholarly men. The spread of the Dharma works in some very mysterious ways.

Philology, or the study of languages and symbols, had some very interesting beginnings in its contact with Buddha. In the first place, it gave the Buddha a name. But it tended to make him an Egyptian god, or a Teutonic god, or one of the lesser Hindu deities. Buddhist texts were in scarce supply, so everything discovered was subject to conjecture. But the Philologists were real enlightenment scholars in so far as they were looking for the source of all religions, and in the process what they found was sources — sources that had often been overlooked or overly glossed by present day Buddhists. The rediscovery and availability of those sources put Buddhism on the map. A man named Csoma de Koros spent years in Buddhist monestaries developing a grammar. For his efforts, he was officially canonized as a Bodhisattva in a Tokyo university in 1933. A man named Hodgson put Sanskrit Buddhist texts and Tibet on the Map. But the guy who really made Sanskrit studies the thing was a French academic by the name of Eugene Burnoff. He realized while translating Sanskrit and Pali texts that the historical and orderly Western mind would never understand Buddhism without a historical introduction, so in 1844 he composed one and its became the essential foundation on which all Buddhist studies since have been based. He may not even have been a Buddhist himself, but he was the link to taking on Buddhism on its own terms.

A Romantic Engagement

The Age of Enlightenment was cosmopolitan, commercial and international. But that does not mean that nationalism was dead. It was at precisely this period that so called enlightened countries proceeded to turn countries into colonies in order, not to save their souls, but to make them part of complex economic arrangements in which the mother country controlled and exploited the colony. At a time when Western society viewed itself as superior, there was little change of Eastern religions getting a fair shake, except among a small group of academic types.

But a new movement emerged directly on the heels of the Enlightenment and won many followers in the first half of the nineteenth century. This movement was opposed to the excessive rationalism of the enlightenment; they found the scientific view of the world limiting and they wanted to assert other and very different values. They were the romantics.

The romantics felt that beauty, emotion, feeling and the lust for life were all stifled by reason. They too tended to be nationalists, but they feared that all nations were becoming blurred by the blending of capitalism and bureaucracy. They wanted to reassert the unique, the passionate, the beautiful and the enchanting. In England, they condemned the machine age as soulless and affirmed tradition. In America and France, they demanded a return to nature. And in Germany, they affirmed the distinctive spirit of their nation.

The Germans were perhaps the most upset of all the Western nations with the philosophy of enlightened progress. The reason for this is simple. They industrialized late; it was painful; and they deeply felt the loss of the old society that was passing away. They succumbed as a nation to romantic yearnings for a largely mythical and powerful past. And it showed in their music (Wagner), their mysticism (Novalis), and in their idealistic philosophy (Hegel). The tensions are particularly acute in the poet-philosopher Frederich Nietzsche, and he’s an important figure in the development of existentialism and, eventually, postmodernism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is fascinating in that it looks forward rather than backwards to a new society that is governed by individuals who have risen above tradition and developed an entirely new concept of human achievement without a god and based upon mind alone. Nietzsche is not of much concern to those of us who are interested in the spread of Buddhism although his idealism in fascinating. The persona that we want to look at is Arthur Shopenhauer.

Shopenhauer, like most Germans, was profoundly unhappy with the materialistic society that he saw emerging all around him. He longed for a richer and more spiritually motivated society, and he discovered it in India. Lots of romantics had already been discovering alternatives in Eastern society, but most of them concentrated on Hinduism. It was Shopenhauer who helped make Buddhism something of a household word among the educated classes of the 1850s. Shopenhauer was particularly impressed by Buddhism’s denial of God. He believed that Eastern religion had shown great brilliance by moving both beyond the concept of God, and beyond the notion of earthly or heavenly happiness. Buddhists recognized the all important fact of human suffering and did not shrink from it. They also recognized that morality did not derive from godly commandments but from the capacity of individuals to identify with one another and that the highest morality was one where the barrier between self and others was totally annihilated. Another aspect of Buddhist genius was the notion that the ‘will’ or ‘spiritual force’ in the universe was totally unknowable. Because people thought that they knew God’s will, they were constantly striving to achieve unrealizable goals.

The payoff for Shopenhauer, and presumably for many Germans, was that this purposeless striving could be suspended by contemplation. For him, the contemplation was on art, music and other forms of culture than through meditation. But it allowed him to appreciate the moment without necessarily clinging to it. Other romantics also dipped into the Buddhist manner of relating to a transparent world. The artist Van Goth was impressed by the way that Buddhist artists could focus on something as simple a single blade of grass rather than having to elaborate a system.

Westerners were beginning to find real value in Buddhist thought. Of course, they focused on what interested them and saw Buddhism through the eyes of their own problems and dilemmas. But they were finally picking up real information and beginning to delineate the teachings of the Buddha. Many thinkers began to view the orient as the source of vital human wisdom, in a similar way to the Humanists’ discovery of Greek and Latin texts. Notions of Western superiority were not easily eclipsed however, and many a Buddhist koan or sutra found itself included in a theory of human progress that put the West at the top. Nietzsche liked Buddhism much more than he did Christianity, but he still described it as a “wise but tired” religion that was developed at the end of a powerful civilization.

It must be mentioned that Nietzsche, unwittingly, and others much more willingly built orientalism into completely new theories of nationalism and nihilism. Many of those forces were in tern cooped by the racist nationalism and spiritual fantasies that contributed to the spread of fascism. French and German orientalists began to trace their descent from an Indian ‘Aryan’ or Teuton tribe that had presumably become corrupted, first by Semitic influences and they by scientific rationalism and democratic ideas. But these nationalistic urges were already present in many of the societies that grasped at orientalism, and we should not blame Eastern religions for Western excesses and psychoses.

More important for our present purposes, a centuries old Western Wall had finally been broached, and now the writings, symbols and concepts came rushing in. Orientalism came into vogue, and it has never quite gone out. The Buddhist religion was been revived in parts of the East where it was growing stagnant and introduced into the West.

Conclusion

In our next talk, I want to discuss the strange history of Buddhism in North America in order to show you how ideas can be transformed when they are absorbed by another culture. But I hope that you are beginning to see how Buddhism was adapted in order to fit in with cultural ideas and national aspirations already present in given societies. I also hope that you will see that the introduction of new religious ideas can sometimes have unexpected results. Buddhism was well received partly because it met the nationalistic needs of rulers or powerful individuals who felt disenfranchised by modern materialism and progress. Yet Buddhism’s ideas of transparency, interconnectedness and selflessness can contribute to a very different view of the world, where the difference between I and You is minimized and the practice of unselfish behaviour is encouraged. Religion even has the power to help change an intensely nationalistic world into an international community. If a religion has deep meaning for its followers, the dharma will shine through all the permutations, constrictions and contortions.

These lectures are based on Stephen Batchelor’s book ‘The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture’.