Chapter I: Voltaire's Veda
Francois Marie Arouet -- better known as VOLTAIRE (1694-1778) -- was a superstar in eighteenth-century Europe and for a time one of its most read and translated authors. His plays were performed across the continent, and his view of world history was so influential that the Russian Czar, upon reading Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs, sent an embassy to China to verify some of its claims. This chapter will highlight a little known side of this multifaceted man. Though current histories of Orientalism barely mention him,1 Voltaire played an important role in the genesis of modern Orientalism. Since some of Voltaire's sources and his particular approach are deeply connected with the missionary discovery of Asian religions and mission literature, relevant facets of this missionary basis will first have to be examined in some detail. In Voltaire's time, much of Asia was still called "the East Indies," and the focus of previous scholarly discussion on India proper and on religions that are today associated with the Indian subcontinent must be widened in order to understand eighteenth-century views and images. The influence and staying power of old ideas have hitherto been underestimated. Not just the study of the Orient in Voltaire's time but even modern Orientalism is shaped by earlier impressions and approaches in profound and sometimes pernicious ways. It is a mistake to regard -- in the manner of Schwab (1950), de Jong (1987), and many others -- the onset of modern Orientalism as a clean break from a "nonscientific" past. As the examples of William Jones (App 2009) and Anquetil-Duperron (see Chapter 7) show, the pioneers of modern Orientalism raised the curtains and set a new stage; but much of the stage set seems recycled from earlier productions, and many actors in this play wear costumes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries while expressing ideas that fit those times. The lack of appreciation regarding some of the crucial underpinnings of Voltaire's venture -- particularly of missionary approaches and sources -- gave rise to misunderstandings not only concerning his use of India-related sources but also the role he played in the genesis of modern Orientalism. Hence, the first task will be to discuss in some detail a number of facets of the missionary discovery of Asian religions that came to influence Voltaire's views and sources.
Valignano's Catechism
TABLE 1. EDICT OF THE DUKE OF YAMAGUCHI TRANSLATED FROM JAPANESE AND PORTUGUESE
English translation of Japanese text (actual content of edict) / Translation of published Portuguese text (how missionaries translated edict)
The bonzes[a] who have come here from the Western regions may, for the purpose of promulgating the Buddhist law, establish their monastic community [at the Buddhist monastery of the Great Way]. / [The Duke] accords the great Dai, Way of Heaven, to the fathers of the occident who have come to preach the law that produces Saints in conformity with their wish until the end of the world.
a. The term "bonze" (from Jap. bozu) has been in use since [he sixteenth century for Buddhist priests or monks (originally of Japan or China, but later increasingly as a generic term). In this book we will also encounter such equivalents as "heshang" for China, "lama" for Tibet, and "talapoin" for Southeast Asia.
Partly due to the summary dismissal of missionary portrayals of Asian religions as biased, some of the basic events of the missionary discovery of these religions are still ignored even by today's Orientalists. It is, for example, a fact that the first systematic exploration of non-Islamic Asian religions happened not in India or some other land at a manageable distance from continental Europe but at the very end of the world as it was known at the time, namely, in sixteenth-century Japan. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries had settled in India and subsequently in various parts of Southeast Asia; but these were regions where even knowledge of the local vernacular did not yet entail access to sacred literature. Besides, the heathen cults were regarded as works of the devil to be exterminated rather than studied. In Japan, by contrast, the need for study arose from the fiasco of Sr. Francis Xavier's Jesuit mission.2 FRANCIS XAVIER (1506-1552) and his Jesuit companions had arrived in the summer of 1549 in Japan with high hopes and accompanied by Anjiro, a Japanese man of modest education who served as their interpreter. He had translated "God" as "Dainichi" (the Sun-Buddha, the principal Buddha venerated by the Shingon sect of Buddhism), "heaven" and "paradise" as jodo (the Pure Land of Buddhism), and "Christianity" as buppo (the Buddha dharma or Buddhist law); consequently, the Japanese were convinced that the Jesuits were Buddhist sectarian reformers from India. They had indeed come to Japan from Goa in India, and the Japanese (whose world at the time ended in India alias "Tenjiku") consistently called Xavier and his companions "Indians" ("Tenjiku's" or "Tenjikujin") (App 1997a:55-58). The Japanese Shingon priests were so delighted with their new cousins from India that the Jesuits became suspicious; but even after Francis Xavier's departure toward the end of 1551, the missionaries were still viewed as a bunch of zealous Buddhist sectarians. The document that supposedly proves their most notable success, the donation of a "church" (in reality, a Buddhist monastery) by the regent of Yamaguchi, became an object of widespread interest in Europe as i( was printed in various letter collections all over the continent and became the first document in Chinese characters to be printed in Europe (Schurhammer 1928:26-27; App 1997b:236). The confrontation of the crucial portion of the published Portuguese rendering with my translation of the original Japanese text in Table 1 illustrates the heart of the problem: the Japanese regarded the missionaries as Buddhist bonzes intent on promulgating the Buddha dharma, whereas the Jesuit missionaries believed that the donation of a Buddhist temple signaled acceptance of (heir slated aim of producing Christian saints.3
Only in 1551, when Francis Xavier was getting ready to leave Japan in order to convert the Chinese, did the missionaries begin to use the word "Deus" instead of "Dainichi" (App 1997b:241-42). Their fiasco triggered a "language reform" that consisted in figuring out which terms were Buddhist, what they signified, and which were safe for use in a Christian context. This could only be achieved by some degree of systematic study and with the help of native informers familiar with Buddhist doctrine and texts. By 1556, eight years after the beginning of the Japan mission, the first report about the country's religions was sent via Goa to Europe, where it arrived in 1558 (Bourdon 1993:261).4 This Sumario de Los errores (Summary of Errors) contained a first survey of Japanese religions including Shinto and listed eight seers of Japanese Buddhism. They were all identified as belonging to "bupo" (Buddha dharma) and associated with a founder called Shaka (Shakyamuni Buddha) (Ruiz-de-Medina 1990:655-67). The Sumario also furnished information about the clergies of these sects, the texts they used, and some of their doctrines including a topic that was to have extraordinary repercussions well into Voltaire's time: the distinction between two significations of Buddhist doctrines, an exoteric or outer one for the simple-minded people and an esoteric or inner one for the philosophers and literati (pp. 666-67). The esoteric teaching, which was associated with Zen Buddhism and its use of meditation and koans, was said to lead to the realization that there is nothing beyond life and death and that "all is nothing" (p. 666). This is an early seed of the European misconception of an esoteric "cult of nothingness"5 with a secret teaching that later turned into the legend about the Buddha's deathbed confession (see Chapter 3).
When the Jesuit Alessand to VALIGNANO (1539-1606) visited Japan for the first time between 1579 and 1582, he quickly realized that the study of the native language and religions was of paramount importance. He reported, "The first thing that I addressed and ordered after arriving in Japan ... was that the European brothers study [the language] with great care and that a grammar and vocabulary of Japanese be produced" (Schutte 1951:321). Valignano promoted the admission of Japanese novices and, helped by P. Luis Frois who translated his words into Japanese, in 1580-81 held a course of intensive instruction for both European and Japanese novices (Schutte 1958:84-85). One of Valignano's eight new novices, the middle-aged Japanese doctor Paulo Yoho, was knowledgeable about Japanese religions and provided information about Buddhism to both Valignano and the novices. Together with his son Vicente Toin, Paulo helped Valignano craft a catechism whose overall structure interests us here. Since Valignano had studied Francis Xavier's fiasco and realized the importance of clearly separating truth from error, he decided to write a catechism and devote the first of its two books to the sects and religions of the Japanese in order to build a firm basis for their refutation through rational argumentation (Valignano 1586:3-76). It is a detailed presentation and critique of (mostly Buddhist) Japanese religious doctrine and shows how much knowledge the Jesuits had accumulated since the days of Francis Xavier. The catechism's second book then treats of Christian life and its basis in the Ten Commandments and other doctrines.
An interesting and influential observation that Valignano made at the beginning of the first part was that, in spite of the multitude of sects in Japan and the confusing doctrines of Buddhism, there was a key that facilitated understanding all of them. This key was the distinction between an "outer" or provisional teaching for the common people (Jap. gonkyo) and the "inner" or true teaching for the clergy (Jap. jikkyo) (p. 4V).6 Valignano's entire presentation of doctrines and sects is based on this "gon-jitsu" distinction, which he, of course, decries as "fallacious, mendacious, and deceptive" (fallax, mendax, hominum deceptrix) (p. 34v).
Without going into more detail, we note that this catechism is proof that Buddhism was already quite intensively studied by Westerners in the sixteenth century with the help of native experts. For his reform of the Jesuit Japan mission, Valignano even researched and copied some features of the organizational structure of Zen monasteries. Such study continued in the following decades until the expulsion of all missionaries from Japan in the early seventeenth century, and among its major fruits was a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary with about 32,000 entries (Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, 1603; Jap. Nippo jisho). In this dictionary, all Buddhist terms are identified by the marker "Bup," for buppa (Buddhism) -- which proves how aware the missionaries were of Buddhism's identity as a religion. This dictionary alone should lay forever to rest all claims that Buddhism was not perceived as a religion by Westerners before the nineteenth century. It is easy, however, to overestimate the influence of such mission documents since many of them soon ended up in dusty mission archives. While reports such as the Sumario de Los errores got relatively little public exposure, Valignano's catechism enjoyed the opposite fate. Its first edition, printed in Lisbon in 1586, is exceedingly rare, but the work was included almost unchanged in Antonio Possevino's Bibliotheca selecta of 1593, a major textbook for generations of Jesuits and for Europe's educated class (Possevino 1593:459-529; Muhlberger 2001:137-38). At the time, this was just about the most powerful megaphone anyone could wish for, and all the Jesuit protagonists in this chapter heard the message.
Ricci's Rebranding
When Matteo RICCI (1552-1610) arrived in China in the summer of 1582 and began to learn Chinese, he benefited from a special introduction to Asian religions since Valignano, who was also in Macao at the time, made him copy the conclusions ("Risolutioni") that he had drawn from his three-year stay in Japan (Schutte 1958:63). But when Ricci in the same year moved with another Italian missionary, Michele Ruggieri,7 to Canton and then to Zhaoqing in South China, history seemed to repeat itself with a vengeance: the two Jesuits adopted the title and vestments of the Chinese seng -- that is, they identified themselves and dressed as ordained Buddhist bonzes. Even their Ten Commandments in Chinese contained Buddhist terms; for example, the third commandment read that on holidays it was forbidden to work and one had to go to the Buddhist temple (si) in order to recite the sutras (jing) and worship the Master of Heaven (tianzhu, the Lord of devas).8 Ruggieri's and Ricci's first Chinese catechism, the Tianzhu shilu of 1584-the first book printed by Europeans in China -- also brimmed with Buddhist terms and was signed by "the bonzes from India" (tianzhuguo seng) (Ricci 1942:198). The doorplate of the Jesuit's residence and church read "Hermit-flower [Buddhist] temple" (xianhuasi), while the plate displayed prominently inside the church read "Pure Land of the West" (xilai jingdu).9 As can be seen in the report about the inscriptions on the Jesuit residence and church of Zhaoqing (Figure 1),10 Ruggieri translated "hermit" (xian), a term with Daoist connotations, by the Italian "santi" (saints), and the Buddhist temple (St) became an "ecclesia" (church). Even more interesting is his transformation of the Buddhist paradise or "Pure Land of the West" into "from the West came the purest fathers."11 This presumably referred to the biblical patriarchs, but it is not excluded that a double-entrendre Jesuit fathers from the West) was intended.
Figure 1. Inscriptions for the Jesuit residence and church in Zhaoqing, 1584.
Nine years later, in 1592, when Ricci was translating the four Confucian classics, he decided to abandon his identity as a Buddhist bonze (seng); and during a visit in Macao, he asked his superior Valignano for permission also to shed his bonze's robe, begging bowl, and sutra recitation implements. The Christian churches were renamed from si to tang (a more neutral word meaning "hall"), and in 1594 the final step in this rebranding process was taken when Ricci received Valignano's permission to present himself and dress up as a Chinese literatus (Duteil 1994:85-86).
What Is a Hostile Takeover?
The term hostile takeover refers to the acquisition of one company by another corporation against the wishes of the former. The company being acquired in a hostile takeover is called the target company while the one executing the takeover is called the acquirer. In a hostile takeover, the acquirer goes directly to the company's shareholders or fights to replace management to get the acquisition approved. Approval of a hostile takeover is generally completed through either a tender offer or a proxy fight.
-- Hostile Takeover, by Akhilesh Ganti
It was the year when Ricci finished his translation of the four Confucian classics, the books that any Chinese wishing to reach the higher ranks of society had to study. In Ricci's view, these books contained unmistakable vestiges of ancient monotheism. In his journals he wrote,
Of all the pagan sects known to Europe, I know of no people who fell into fewer errors in the early stages of their antiquity than did the Chinese. From the very beginning of their history it is recorded in their writings that they recognized and worshipped one supreme being whom they called the King of Heaven, or designated by some other name indicating his rule over heaven and earth .... They also taught that the light of reason came from heaven and that the dictates of reason should be hearkened to in every human action. (Gallagher 1953:93)
The Jesuit language reform in China took a different direction from the earlier one in Japan; instead of intensively studying the Buddhist and Daoist competition in order to defeat it, Ricci and his companions focused on cozying up to the Confucians. On November 4, 1595, Ricci wrote to the Jesuit Father General Acquaviva: "I have noted down many terms and phrases [of the Chinese classics] in harmony with our faith, for instance, 'the unity of God,' 'the immortality of the soul,' the glory of the blessed,' and the like" (Ricci 1985:14). Ricci intended to identify appropriate terms in the Confucian classics to give the Christian dogma a Mandarin dress and to illustrate his view that the Chinese had successfully safeguarded an extremely ancient knowledge of God. The portions of Ruggieri and Ricci's old "Buddhist" catechism dealing with God's revelation and requiring faith rather than reason were removed, while topics such as the "goodness of human nature" that appealed to Confucians were added (p. 15). Ricci systematically substituted Buddhist terminology with phrases from the Chinese classics. But rather than as a revision of his earlier "Buddhist" catechism, Ricci's True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven should be regarded as a new work reflecting his view of China's ancient theology. It was crafted in the mold of the first part of Valignano's catechism of 1586, and exactly ten years after the publication of that work, Ricci's supervisor Valignano examined and approved Ricci's new text for use in China. It was not a catechism in the traditional sense but a praeparatio evangelica: a way to entice the rationalist upper crust of Chinese society and to refute the "superstitious" and "foreign" forms of Chinese religion (such as Daoism and Buddhism) by logical argument while interpreting "original" Confucianism as a kind of Old Testament to Christianity. Ricci's "catechism" was thus not yet the Good News itself but a first step toward it. It argued that Chinese religion had once been thoroughly monotheistic and that this primeval monotheism had later degenerated through the influence of Daoism and Buddhism. In Ricci's view Christianity was nothing other than the fulfillment of China's Ur-monotheism.
Ricci decided to cast this preparatory treatise in Renaissance fashion as a dialogue between a Western and a Chinese scholar who discuss various aspects of Chinese religion. Ricci's Western scholar analyzes Daoist, Buddhist, and Neoconfucianist beliefs and practices and proceeds to demolish them by rational argument, thus exposing their inconsistency and irrationality. When Ricci's work was completed and his new manuscript began to circulate in preparation for the printing, the old "Buddhist" catechism was no longer used.
Rodrigues's Two Transmissions
When the first copies of Ricci's True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven arrived in Japan, one of Valignano's erstwhile novices, Joao RODRIGUES(1561-1633), studied it with much interest. Having arrived in Japan in 1577 at the young age of 16, he had at the turn of the seventeenth century already spent a quarter-century in the Far East and had become the best foreign speaker, reader, and writer of Japanese in the Jesuit mission. He had become not only procurator of the Japan mission but also court interpreter for Japan's autocratic ruler Tokugawa leyasu. When Valignano left Japan for the last time in 1603, Rodrigues was just putting the finishing touches on his remarkable Japanese grammar Arte da Lingoa de Iapam, which was first printed in 1604 (Cooper 1994:228). Like any educated Japanese of the time, Rodrigues had also studied classical Chinese and sprinkled his grammar with examples from Confucius's Analects. The depth of his knowledge of Japanese language and religion is apparent in his advice on letter writing style, which includes an introduction to the various kinds and degrees of Buddhist clergy and the correct ways of addressing them (Rodrigues 1604:199r-20rr). His grammar also features a masterly treatise on Japanese poetry that is "the first comprehensive description of Far Eastern literature by any European" and includes a section on the translation of Chinese poetry into Japanese (Cooper 1994:229-30). Rodrigues was very much interested in the origins of Asian religions and peoples, and for this a firm grasp of chronology was needed. The third part of his grammar (Rodrigues 1604:232v-239r) contains Rodrigues's chronological tables based on both Western and Far-Eastern sources.12 In the section on Chinese chronology, Rodrigues made the first known attempt to relate Japanese, Chinese, and Western chronologies. His aim was to position the founders of China's three major religions (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) in the framework of biblical history and its accepted chronological sequence (pp. 235f-236r).
After being forced out of Japan in 1610, he spent the rest of his life in China. He thus lived a total of thirty-three years in Japan and twenty-three in China. Even though his name is seldom if ever mentioned in books about the discovery of Oriental religions, it is clear that, during his fifty-six years in Asia, he became by far the most knowledgeable Westerner of his time about the religions of Japan and China. Even in his late teens, he had the chance of participating in Valignano's lecture series leading to the 1586 catechism and was instructed by Japanese experts on Buddhism.13 When Ricci's Chinese books made their way to Japan, Rodrigues thus was one of the few people capable of studying and criticizing them.14 He noticed a number of "grave things":
These things arose on account of the lack of knowledge at that time and the Fathers' ways of speaking and the conformity (as in their ignorance they saw it) of our holy religion with the literati sect, which is diabolical and intrinsically atheistic, and also contains fundamental and essential errors against the faith. (Cooper 1981:277)
Rodrigues's early doubts about Ricci's view of Confucianism as a vestige of primeval monotheism were reinforced when he spent two entire years (June 1613-June 1615) traveling in China "deeply investigating all these sects, which I had already diligently studied in Japan" (p. 314). His "three sects of philosophers" are Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, which Rodrigues not only studied in books but also through extensive field research: "To this end I passed through most of China and visited all our houses and residences, as well as many other places where our men had never been so far" (p. 314). The catechism that Rodrigues compiled (pp. 306, 315), a detailed atlas of Asia with tables of longitudes and distances (pp. 302-3), and a small report (p. 321) as well as a voluminous treatise (pp. 310, 277) about Far Eastern religions seem to be lost. However, some of their content survived. Maps and other geographical materials by Rodrigues were used without attribution by his ambitious fellow Jesuit Martino Martini,15 and his reports about Asia's religions formed a principal source of Niccolo Longobardi's famous essay that was written in the early 1620S but published in 1701 at the height of the "Chinese Rites" controversy raging in Voltaire's youth.16 A number of Rodrigues's letters from China survived and are of considerable help in our reconstruction of the basic direction of his argument.
Contradicting Ricci, Rodrigues maintained that all reigning religions of China, including Confucianism, were fundamentally atheist and thus incompatible with Christianity. Influenced by what he had learned about the provisional (outer) and true (inner) teachings of Buddhism in Japan (the gonjitsu dichotomy underlying the first part of Valignano's catechism), Rodrigues detected the same two types of doctrines in all China's religions (pp. 311-12). According to Rodrigues, Ricci's problems were a result of his failure to understand this fundamental distinction and of his ignorance about the inner teachings:
Until I entered China, our Fathers of China knew practically nothing about this [distinction between exoteric and esoteric teachings] and about the speculative doctrine. They knew only about the civil and popular doctrine, for there was nobody to explain it to them and enlighten them, The above-mentioned Fr. Matteo Ricci worked a great deal in this field and did what he could, but, for reasons only known to Our Lord, he was misled in this matter. All these three sects of China are totally atheistic in their speculative teaching, denying the providence of the world. They teach everlasting matter, or chaos, and like the doctrine of Melissus, they believe the universe to contain nothing but one substance. (pp. 311-12)
The disappearance of Rodrigues's religion report is very likely due to his fierce opposition to a Ricci-style accommodation with Confucianism that was the central bone of contention in the controversy about Chinese Rites that filled so many book shelves from the mid-seventeenth century onward. The whole question of the acceptability of Confucian rites depended on Confucianism's pedigree. If it could be traced to monotheism, as Ricci thought it could, then its ancient rites posed hardly a problem. But if Rodrigues was right and Confucianism's inner doctrine was pure atheism (complete with eternity of matter, lack of a creator God, and absence of providence), then any rite connected to such a religion was to be condemned.
In his letters from China and some of his printed works, Rodrigues identified all three major religions of China as descendants of ancient heathen cults of the Middle East. While Ricci viewed Confucianism as a child of original monotheism and the Chinese literati as relatively free from heathen superstition prior to the influence of Daoism and Buddhism, Rodrigues envisioned a very different pedigree reaching back to Chaldean diviners:
There does not seem to be any other kingdom in the whole world that has so many [superstitions] as this kingdom [of China], for it appears that all the ancient superstitions that ever existed have gathered here, and even modern superstitions as well. The sect of Chaldean diviners flourishes here. The Jesuits call it here the Literati Sect of China. Like them it philosophizes with odd and even numbers up to ten and with hieroglyphic symbols and various mathematical figures, and with the principal Chaldean deities, Light and Darkness, and these two deities are called the Virtue of Heaven and the Evil of Earth. This sect has thrived in China for nearly four thousand years, and it seems to have originated from Babylon when those people came to populate this kingdom. (p. 239)17
Daoism, by contrast, was identified as "the sect of the Magicians and Persian evil wizards" that "seems to be a branch of the ancient Zoroaster" and Buddhism as "the sect of the ancient Indian gymnosophists" that spread all over Asia but had Egyptian roots since it professes "a part of the doctrine of the Egyptians" (p. 238). This may well be the earliest example of an Egyptian genealogy for Buddhism -- an idea that had a great career in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4). For Rodrigues, all three Chinese religions thus had their roots in the Middle East: Confucianism in Mesopotamia, Daoism in Persia, and Buddhism in Egypt.
Since no one except Noah and his family had survived the great deluge, all three religions could not but have their ultimate origin with someone on the ark. The usual suspect was Ham, the son of Noah who had seen his father naked while drunk and whose son Canaan had been cursed by Noah (Genesis 9:25). According to Rodrigues, the Chinese people were descendants of Belus who "is the same as Nimrod, the grandson of Ham" who began to reign just after the confusion of tongues in Babel. The Chinese settled in their land after traveling "from the Tower of Babel straight after the Confusion of Tongues" and were "the first to develop ... astrology and other mathematical arts and other liberal and mechanical arts" (Rodrigues 2001:355). Especially the "science of judicial astrology" that Chinese Confucians still practice "after the fashion of the Chaldeans with figures of odd and even numbers" was "spread throughout the world by Ham, son of Noah" (p. 356). All this led Rodrigues to the expected conclusion:
According to this and the other errors that they [the Chinese] have held since then concerning God, the creation of the universe, spiritual substances, and the soul of man, as well as inevitable fate, the Chinese seem to be descendants of Ham, because he held similar errors and taught them to his descendants, who then took them with them when they set off to populate the world. (p. 356)
But how did such knowledge reach China? As Noah's descendants dispersed to populate the world after the Confusion of Tongues in Babylon, "the wiser families" according to Rodrigues took along such knowledge (and possibly also books) and proceeded to spread them throughout the world. In some places this knowledge was lost, but in others (like China) it was preserved (p. 378). If the transmission of genuine religion extended from God via Adam, Seth, and Enoch to Noah, how about the antediluvian transmission of false religion?
In addition to this astrological truth acquired through experience by the good sons of Seth, the wicked sons of Cain invented many conceits, innumerable superstitions, and errors .... they would commit many evil deeds and offences against God with the encouragement of the devil, to whom they had given themselves. For as it is written about him [Ham] and Cain, they were the first idolaters in the world and inventors of the magical arts. As he was evilly inclined, Ham, the son of Noah, was much given to this magical and judicial art, which he learnt from Cain's descendants before the Flood. (p. 378)
While the Chinese had safeguarded some useful scientific knowledge and the use of writing (p. 331) from the good transmission and thus had possibly managed to develop the world's earliest true writing system (p. 350), their religions, including Confucianism, unfortunately carried the strong imprint of Ham and the evil transmission. Rodrigues knew little about India, which he had only briefly visited on the way to Japan as a teenager. For him India's naked philosophers or gymnosophists and the Brahmans were all "disciples of Shaka's doctrine" (p. 360), and since Shaka (Shakyamuni Buddha) had "lived long before them," it was from him that they had learned such mistaken doctrines as that of a multitude of worlds (p. 360) -- one of the views, nota bene, that around this time (1600) landed Giordano Bruno on the stake. Rodrigues thus regarded all three religions of China as descendants of the Hamite line that ultimately goes back to Cain, the slayer of his brother Abel. Though Buddhism was transmitted via India and reached China later than Confucianism and Daoism, it had the same ultimate root and atheist core. As we will see in Chapter 3, Rodrigues's vision of an underlying unity of Asian religions had a great future in the eighteenth century.
While Rodrigues fought against the ancient theology of Ricci and other Jesuits in China, a similar battle unfolded on the Indian subcontinent. In India, too, missionaries who were convinced that India's ancient religion belonged to the evil transmission fought against colleagues who believed that India had once been strictly monotheistic. The latter saw it as a land of pure primeval monotheism that, alas, had in time become clouded by the fumes of Brahmanic superstition.18 The most famous Jesuit in India to hold the latter view was Roberto DE NOBILl (1577-1656), who was later falsely accused of having authored Voltaire's Ezour-vedam. The real authors of the Ezourvedam, French Jesuit missionaries in India,19 were also partisans of Indian Urmonotheism -- and so was their contemporary and critic in France, Voltaire.
Abrahamic Brahmans
One of Voltaire's favorite teachers at the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand in Paris was Father Rene Joseph DE TOURNEMINE (1661-1739), the chief editor of the journal Memoires de Trevoux. Father Tournemine had been involved in the controversy about the Chinese Rites that culminated in 1700 with the banning of several books on China at the Sorbonne. This so-called Querelle des rites [Google translate: Quarrel of rites.] had been accompanied by the publication of reams of pamphlets and books and is a striking example of public attention to oriental issues in Voltaire's youth and of their impact on the established religion in Europe (Etiemble 1966; Pinot 1971; Cummins 1993).
On the losing side of the rites controversy, which came to a peak one century after Ricci in Voltaire's school years, were those who agreed with his idea that the ancient Chinese had from remote antiquity venerated God and abandoned pure monotheism only much later under the influence of Persian magic (Daoism) and Indian idolatry (Buddhism). They liked to evoke Ricci's statement about having read with his own eyes in Chinese books that the ancient Chinese had worshipped a single supreme God. In order to explain how this pure ancient religion had degenerated into idolatry, they cited Ricci's Story about the dispatch in the year 65 C.E. of a Chinese embassy to the West in search of the true faith (Trigault 1617:120-21). Instead of bringing back the good news of Jesus, the story went, the Chinese ambassadors had stopped short on the way and returned infected with the idolatrous teachings of an Indian impostor called Fo (Buddha). In the following centuries, this doctrine had reportedly contaminated the whole of East Asia and turned people away from original monotheism. Since Ricci's Story20 was told in one of the seventeenth century's most widely translated and read books about Asia, Nicolas Trigault's edition of Ricci's History of the Christian Expedition to the Kingdom of China (first published in Latin in 1615), it had an enormous influence on the European perception of Asia's religious history.
Ricci's extremist successors, the so-called Jesuit figurists (see Chapter 5), sought to locate the ancient monotheistic creed of the Chinese not just in Confucian texts but also in the Daoist Daodejing (Book of the Way and Its Power) and of course in the book that some believed to be the oldest extant book of the world, the Yijing (or I-ching; Book of Changes).
Figurism was an intellectual movement of Jesuit missionaries at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, whose participants viewed the I Ching as a prophetic book containing the mysteries of Christianity, and prioritized working with the Qing Emperor (rather than with the Chinese literati) as a way of promoting Christianity in China.
Since Matteo Ricci's pioneering work in China in 1583–1610, the Jesuit missionaries in China worked on a program of integrating Christianity with Chinese traditions. Ricci and his followers identified three "sects" present in China – Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. While viewing Buddhism and Taoism as "pagan" religions inimical to Christianity, Ricci's approach – predominant with the Jesuits in China throughout most of the 17th century – viewed Confucianism essentially as a moral teaching that was compatible with, rather than contradictory to, Christian beliefs. They viewed Confucian rites, such as those having to do with the veneration of the dead, as essentially civil functions meant to edify the people in virtuous morals, rather than as religious rites. On this basis the Jesuits centered their work in China on the interaction with the Chinese Confucian literati, trying to convince them of their theories and consequently convert them to the Christian faith. When addressing the European public, the China-based Jesuit missionaries strove to present Confucianism, as represented by its Four Books, in a favorable light. The effort culminated with the publications of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus by Philippe Couplet (Paris, 1687).
-- Figurism, by Wikipedia
These figurists included the French China missionaries Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730), the correspondent of Leibniz, and younger Jesuit colleagues like Joseph-Henri Premare (1666-1736) and Jean-Francois Foucquet (1665-1741), the man to whom Voltaire later falsely attributed the translation of his own "Chinese catechism."21 The Jesuits of the Ricci camp thought that since genuine monotheism had existed in a relatively pure state at least until the time of Confucius, their role as missionaries essentially consisted in reawakening the old faith, documenting its "prophecies" regarding Christ, identifying its goal and fulfillment as Christianity, and eradicating the causes of religious degeneration such as idolatry, magic, and superstition. Ritual vestiges of ancient monotheism were naturally exempted from the purge and subject to "accommodation."
By contrast, the extremists in the victorious opposite camp of the Chinese Rites controversy held that -- regardless of possible vestiges of monotheism and prediluvian science -- divine revelation came exclusively through the channels of Abraham and Moses, that is, the Hebrew tradition, and was fulfilled in Christianity. This meant that the Old and New Testaments were the sole genuine records of divine revelation and that all unconnected rites and practices were to be condemned. From this exclusivist perspective, the sacred scriptures of other nations could only contain fragments of divine wisdom if they had either plagiarized Judeo-Christian texts or aped their teachers and doctrines.
But China was not the only country whose religious pedigree was questioned. As early as the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) had pored over the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistos and oracular texts reputed to contain vestiges of pre-Judaic monotheism. In those days the focus of interest was mostly on Egypt, which (at least in heathen circles) had long been regarded as the cradle of humankind. After the discovery of the Americas ("West Indies") (1492) and the exploration of the "East Indies" following Vasco da Gama's circumnavigation of Africa and arrival in India (1498), the possibility of finding pre-Mosaic texts containing vestiges of God's revelation in other civilized regions had to be considered seriously. Following the lead of Epiphanius, who had first identified the Brahmans as descendants of Abraham and Keturah (Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo 1797:63), Guillaume Postel ([510-81) speculated in his interesting book De originibus (On the Origins) that the Indian Brahmans ("Abrahmanes") are direct descendants of Abraham (Postel 1553b:68-69). Postel was the first to suggest that India might harbor extremely ancient scriptures that could finally bring "absolute clarity" to the Mosaic narrative (p. 72). He thought that India was a land in which "infinite treasures of history and antediluvian books are hidden" and surmised that Enoch's books could be found there (p. 72). Though his idea was not exactly orthodox, Postel clearly stayed within the biblical framework since Enoch is one of the antediluvian heroes praised in the Bible and revered in Christianity as a pre-Judaic "pagan saint."22 However, the emphasis on antediluvian texts by Enoch and possibly even older figures such as Seth, the good son of Adam, could also be interpreted as an attack on Mosaic authority and the Old Testament. At any rate, Postel postulated two Abrahamic transmissions: a familiar one in the Middle East and an alternative one to the "sons of the Orient" (p. 64) who were none other than the Indian Brahmans. Though it remained unclear what texts and doctrines this oriental lineage of Abraham had actually transmitted or produced, the tantalizing possibility remained in the air that a kind of alternative (and possibly more ancient) Old Testament could exist in India.
Postel's Abrahamic Brahmans soon became the object of criticism, for example, in Henry Lord's A Discoverie of the Sect of the Banians, which asserted that the Indians had never heard of Abraham (Lord 1630:71-72). Despite the criticism, in Voltaire's time there were still supporters of this rather effective way of incorporating the Indians (and other Asians linked to them) into the biblical lineage. One of them was Isaac Newton,23 who wrote in his famous Chronology that was studied by Voltaire,
This religion of the Persian empire was composed partly of the institutions of the Chaldaeans, in which Zoroastres was well skilled, and partly of the institutions of the ancient Brachmans; who are supposed to derive even their name from the Abrahamans, or sons of Abraham, born of his second wife Keturah, instructed by their father in the worship of ONE GOD without images, and sent into the east, where Hystaspes was instructed by their successors. (Newton 1964:5.247)
Another supporter of Postel's hypothesis was the Jesuit Jean Venant Bouchet (1655-1732), one of the major contributors to the large collection of Jesuit mission letters entitled Lettres edifiantes et curieuses, which was required reading for men like Voltaire, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Constantin-Francois Volney, William Jones, and anyone interested in Asia and its religions. The India part of this collection contains a total of nine letters by Boucher. By far the most famous and influential ones are those to the bishop of Avranches, Pierre-Daniel Huer (1630-1721). Huer's Demonstratio evangelica of 1678 attempted to prove the unbearable antiquity of the Old Testament by asserting that all pagan gods derive from Moses (and occasionally other Hebrew patriarchs) or from Moses's wife or sister. D. P. Walker ([972:216) wrote of being "lulled into a coma by the monotony of 'Vulcanus idem ac Moses. Typhon idem ac Moses ... Zoroastres idem ac Moses ... Apollo idem ac Moses. Pan idem ac Moses .. .'.[Google translate: Vulcan is the same as Moses. Typhon is the same as Moses... Zoroaster is the same as Moses... Apollo is the same as Moses. Pan is the same as Moses.] "24 Huer's purpose was not the coma of his readers but the fortification of his (and some readers') wobbling faith in the trustworthiness of Moses. The onslaught could not be ignored: there were, of course, Isaac La Peyrere (1596-1676) with his theory of pre-Adamites (1655) and Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) with his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), who both attacked the Old Testament's value as a textual source. But hardly less dangerous were assertions by the likes of Martino MARTINI (1614-1661), the Jesuit missionary who shocked Europe by his report that Chinese historical records reached back to antediluvian times (Martini 1658; Collani 2000). Huer's herculean effort had filled his house with so many books that it ended up collapsing, and Boucher's letters from India may have been designed to prevent Huer's precarious faith (Walker 1972:219) from suffering the same fate. Additionally, these letters mark the onset of a gradual shift from interest in China -- which had dominated the second half of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century -- to the focus on India promoted by Voltaire that fed the orientalist revolution described in this book.