Chapter 2: Ziegenbalg's and La Croze's Discoveries
Studies about the European discovery of Buddhism tend to belong to one of two categories. The first depicts a gradual unveiling of what we today know about Buddhism (its founder, history, geographical reach, texts, rituals, art, and so forth) in form of a three-act play. Act I deals with antiquity and the Middle Ages, act 2 with the missionary discovery until about 1800, and act 3 with the "scientific" discovery of Buddhism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such a three-stage scenario characterizes, for example, the studies of de Lubac (2000) and Batchelor (1994). Lately this kind of scenario came to be replaced by one that begins in the early nineteenth century and features a single act with an inconsequential prelude. Such one-act scenarios claim that the "phenomenon" of Buddhism only became a reality for Europeans around 1820 when the term "Buddhism" (and its equivalents in other languages) came into common use in Europe. They underlie, for example, the studies of Almond (1988) and Droit (1997 and 2003). The first decades of the nineteenth century represent a crucial turning point in both scenarios since they mark the beginning of modern "scientific" study of Buddhism. Welbon's The Buddhist Nirvana and Its Western Interpreters devotes fewer than five pages to the eighteenth century and squarely focuses on the "beginnings of a scientific study" in the nineteenth century, which it portrays as a clean break from a worthless prelude of "fabulous reports, desultory descriptions, and unfounded conjectures" (Welbon 1968:23).
The ideas and discussions of pre-nineteenth-century "commentators" on Buddhism-whatever their interest may be for antiquarians of our own time -- patently had not been widely circulated, nor had they aroused sustained interest on the part of scholars and laymen. Only the most ingenious enthusiast would attempt to make a case for the ordered development of a body of knowledge concerning Buddhism before the end of the eighteenth century. (p. 23)
A similar "sudden" scenario has come to dominate portrayals of the discovery (or, to underline the break with the past, the "creation") of Hinduism by Europeans. Interestingly, this discovery is usually regarded as a separate play on a different stage and with a different set of actors. Since Buddhism was supposedly discovered later than Hinduism, publications about the discovery of Hinduism usually make no mention at all of Buddhism. Numerous recent publications place the "discovery" or "creation" of Hinduism some decades earlier than that of Buddhism. According to Will Sweetman, "the concept of a unified pan-Indian religion is firmly established by the 1770s, when 'Holwell's Gentooism' appeared," and the first use of the word "Hindooism" occurred in 1787 (200p63). In this view the identification of "Hinduism" as India's "national religion" ran parallel to the establishment of "India" as a meaningful geographical entity: "The concept of 'Hinduism' and the concept of 'India' in its modern sense, are coeval" (p. 163). This roughly coincides with the period when, according to Thomas Trautmann, a "new Orientalism" raised its head. It is characterized by a double shift: a shift of interest from "European fascination with China that was so marked in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries" to "a fascination with India" and, second, "a titanic shift of authority" (Trautmann 1997:30) involving the knowledge of indigenous languages and texts. This "new claim of authority" focused first on Persian and then on Indian texts; and the pioneers of this "new Orientalism" were, according to Trautmann, a Frenchman and three Englishmen:
The first works of the new Orientalism, prior to the formation of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, were mostly translations from Persian: Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron's translation of the Zend-Avesta (1771) with the help of Parsi scholars in India; John Zephaniah Holwell's Interesting historical events, relative to the provinces of Bengal, and the empire of Indostan (1765-71), which relies on Persian sources in part, although it also contains what purport to be translations from a mysterious ancient Hindu text, Chartah Bhade Shastah (Sanskrit, Catur veda Sastra), a work not heard of since; Alexander Dow's translation of Firishtah's Persian History of Hindostan (1768); and the Code of Gentoo laws (1776 translated by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed from a Persian translation of a Sanskrit digest of Hindu law compiled by pandits on commission from the East India Company. (Trautmann 1997:30)
Since it was "based on direct interchange with the pandits in India" who taught the pioneers the necessary languages, this new Orientalism "in its own propaganda ... drew its authority from its knowledge of the languages of India and opposed it to that of the travelers and missionaries" (p. 32).
However, studies such as those by Rubies (2000) and Sweetman (2003) amply document that this "discovery" play of the latter half of the eighteenth century had significant earlier acts. For example, Sweetman shows that Jesuit letters of the early eighteenth century already exhibit an understanding of Hinduism avant la lettre and states that the speculations of Father Jean Venant Bouchet around 1702 (see Chapter I) "strongly suggest a unified conception of 'the system of religion recognized among the Indians'" (Sweetman 2003:140). But what about the "titanic shift of authority" that, according to Trautmann (1997:30), took place in the second half of the eighteenth century? Were Holwell's publications of 1765-71 really "one of the first statements of this new authority claim" (p. 33)? And was Anquetil-Duperron's translation of the Zend-Avesta of 1771 indeed "the first approach to an Asian text that was totally independent both of the biblical and the classical tradition," as Raymond Schwab claimed in his groundbreaking study La Renaissance orientale (1950:25)?
Many questions about the development of Western conceptions of "Buddhism" and "Hinduism" during the eighteenth century have either not yet been posed or remain unanswered. The retroprojection of a strict separation of "Hinduism" and "Buddhism" may form a major stumbling block. Other (seemingly solid) boundaries such as those between nations and languages are also frequently brought into play and led to book titles such as The British Discovery of Buddhism (Almond 1988), The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Marshall 1970), or Nirwana in Deutschland (Lutkehaus 2004). Regardless of their value as collections of sources, such endeavors convey the wrong impression that such discoveries had much to do with national boundaries and particular languages. The two protagonists of this chapter, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg and Mathurin Veyssiere de La Croze, show how effortlessly such boundaries were crossed. Ziegenbalg was a German working for a Protestant Danish mission in India whose correspondence was first published in German but found a broad pan-European readership through English, French, and Latin translations. La Croze was a multilingual Frenchman living in Berlin who wrote in French and Latin, was read by many intellectuals throughout Europe, and deeply influenced the Western perception of Asian religions from the 1720s well into the nineteenth century.
While Bartholomaus ZIEGENBALG (1682-1719) received some attention from Indologists and researchers of Hinduism (for example, Dharampal-Frick 1994, Jeyaraj 2003, and Sweetman 2003), the influence of his work on the discovery of Buddhism remains unexplored. Mathurin Veyssiere de La CROZE (1661-1739) usually plays no role at all in the fashionable "discovery of Buddhism" and "discovery of Hinduism" tales. He died in 1739, half a century before the first use of the word "Hindooism," and his Histoire du Christianisme aux Indes (whose sixth chapter we will mainly examine) was published in 1724, that is, a full century before -- according to Roger-Pol Droit -- the "word Buddhism" and the "phenomenon itself" were "simultaneously" born in the "scholarly gaze" of Europe (1997:36). What did Ziegenbalg and La Croze discover? Can one speak at all of a discovery of Hinduism and of Buddhism in the first decades of the eighteenth century? And if one can, how did such discoveries take place? Did they happen decades apart on separate stages and with different scripts, stage sets, and actors?
Indian Monotheism
Chapter 6 of La Croze's History of Christianity of the Indies has the title "Of the idolatry of the Indies," and it is worth noting that "idolatry" is in the singular and "Indies" in the plural. These are symptoms of La Croze's view of a pan-Asian phenomenon whose history, character, and dimensions will be explored in this chapter. He felt that this "idolatry of the Indies" merited at least as much attention by Europeans as its Greco-Roman counterpart, since "one finds in it vestiges of antiquity that lead to solid research about ancient history and the origin of errors in the field of religion" (La Croze 1724:425). The question of origins concerned not only idolatry but also monotheism. Like Voltaire three decades later, La Croze was convinced that vestiges of early monotheism could be found in the Indies and that they would throw light on the earliest phase of human history:
Nothing ... should evoke more interest for them [the Indians] than to see that, in spite of the grossest idolatry, the existence of the infinitely perfect Being is so well established with them that there can be no doubt that they have preserved such knowledge since their first establishment in the Indies. (p. 425)
Whereas with the Greeks and Romans "the existence of the true God" was "known only to a small number of philosophers and played no role at all in the religion of the people," evidence from India indicated to La Croze that the Indians not only had pure monotheism in the remote past but preserved it ever since. Their antiquity far surpassed that of the Greeks:
One sees them form a large crowd [multitude nombreuse] from the centuries when Greek history begins to emerge from the darkness of ancient mythology, and this -- in combination with other reflections -- gives one the right to regard them as one of the most ancient peoples of the world. (p. 426)
While La Croze did not want to discuss the exact origin of this monotheism and found that it would be "badly managed erudition" to pinpoint exactly which son of Noah had transmitted his religion to the Indies (p. 426), it is clear that the ark of Noah and the biblical creation Story loomed in the back of his mind. All signs indicated that Noah's pure religion had made its way to the Indies soon after the deluge and was preserved there:
One can even suppose, as a very probable fact, that in ancient times they had a quite distinct knowledge of the true God and that they worshipped him in an inner cult [culte interieur] that at the time was mixed with no profanation at all. Some of their sages who until today preserve this doctrine ... make this conjecture so probable that there seems to be no possible counterargument. (p. 426)
The other momentous transmission from the shores of the Mediterranean to larger Asia was that of idolatry. La Croze's view of it resembles that of Athanasius Kircher (1667) and of Francois Catrou (1708:54) and needs to be discussed briefly before we return to pure original monotheism and its vestiges in the Indies. La Croze was convinced "that the ancient Indians had been colonies of Egypt" and that "the origin of the superstitions of the Indies must be attributed to those of the Egyptians with which they maintain to this day a surprising conformity" (La Croze 1724:427). Among the superstitions mentioned by La Croze, we find not only "Egyptian-style" metempsychosis or transmigration of souls1 but also the mortifications that fascinated and repelled so many Europeans:
Furthermore, the Egyptians professed marvelous abstinence and treated their body as enemy. This is what we will later see practiced by the Indians, not only in antiquity but until the present times. No slackening whatsoever has since taken place in the observation of these mortifications that are so contrary to sane reason and to the affection that should make every human interested in self-preservation. (pp. 428-89)
La Croze also saw an Egyptian origin of Indian phallic worship, animal worship, the distinction of castes, vegetarianism, and monasticism complete with tonsure and celibacy (pp. 430-37). All this convinced La Croze -- who as a Protestant of course also remarked on the Egyptian origins of Catholic monasticism and rites -- that Egypt is "the mother and the origin of ancient superstitions and of all sorts of errors and idolatries" (p. 436). If this was the source of a misguided cult that "the Bramines entertain for their own particular interests" (p. 462), they were also the guardians of an ancient monotheistic teaching that the priests kept hidden from the common people (pp. 454-59). This theme of an exoteric and an esoteric teaching (the latter of which is hidden and encoded by priests) was already present in Plutarch's book on Isis and Osiris and was widely regarded as a characteristic feature of Egyptian religion. In Kircher's misguided efforts to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs -- for example, in his Obeliscus Pamphilius of 1650 -- it played a central role, since his whole method rested on the dichotomy of exoteric and esoteric teachings and the idea that the latter represented primeval monotheism encoded in sacred symbols. Kircher detected few signs of humankind's original monotheism in Asia and saw the continent as a vast repository of Egyptian superstition; but believers in a God with a less discriminatory revelation policy emphasized, in the footsteps of Matteo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili, the ancient monotheistic heritage of China and India.
Already in Ricci's and de Nobili's time, around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the claim surfaced that the Vedas of India were the repository of ancient Indian monotheism. Of course, the approach of Nobili and his successors in the Jesuit Madurai mission was anchored in the idea that India had once been a land reigned by pure monotheism; but the locus classicus for the monotheism of the Vedas is the description in Diogo do Couto's Decada Quinta da Asia of 1612 (124Vff.). Schurhammer (1977:614-18) has shown that Couto plagiarized the report by the Augustinian missionary Agostinho de Azevedo, but it was through Couto that this view of the Vedas as a monotheistic scripture, hidden by the Brahmans from the people to whom they preached polytheism, became popular. Since Couto's description was a central source for Holwell, I will discuss it in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6; here its summary by Philip Baldaeus will suffice:
The first of these Books treated of God and of the Origin and Beginning of the Universe. The second, of those who have the Government and Management thereof. The third, of Morality and true Virtue. The fourth of the Ceremonials in their Temples, and Sacrifices. These four Books of the Vedam are by them call' d Roggo Vedam, Jadura Vedam, Sama Vedam, and Tarawana Vedam; and by the Malabars Icca, Icciyxa, Saman, and Adaravan. The loss of this first Part is highly lamented by the Brahmans. (Baldaeus 1703:891)
Though various descriptions based on Azevedo and Giacomo Fenicio made the rounds, no European had yet managed to get access to more than fragments of these prized Vedas. Some hoped that eventually an apostate Brahman would communicate them in toto, and La Croze was certain that this would bring about a revolution in knowledge not only about India but also antiquity in general:
There is hardly any doubt that in this respect one could go much further if the Vedam, which is the collection of the ancient sacred books of the Brachmans, was translated into Latin or one of Europe's [living] languages. It is likely that one would find in it antiquities [Antiquitez] that the superstitiously proud Brahmins withhold from the people of the Indies whom they regard as profane and to whom nothing but the exterior [exterieur] of religion is conveyed, buried in fables that are at least as extravagant as those of Greek paganism. (La Croze 1724:427-28)
Figure 2. Vishnu recuperates the Veda from the sea (Baldaeus 1703:844).
For La Croze, the Vedas represented the monotheistic core of Indian religion that the Brahmans jealously guarded as a secret while feeding the exoteric surface to the crowds. But since this "interior" doctrine of the Vedas was still unknown, information from other sources was all the more important. As royal librarian of Prussia, La Croze could make use of a very broad range of publications, but as a linguist and philologist, he was partial to authors who could read local languages. Abraham ROGER (d. 1649), though "having given a kind of system" of the religion of the Brahmans in a "work that was composed with care" and "translated into several languages," is criticized because "he did not himself read the religious books of the Indians and admits having relied on what he learned from the mouth of a Brahmin called Padmanaba" (p. 444). Philip BALDAEUS (1632-72), the Dutch missionary and author of a description of South India and Ceylon (1672), is reprimanded for having "based his dissertations [Memoires] about the island of Ceylon on the manuscripts of Portuguese missionaries who disfigured the Indian pronunciation to accommodate their way of writing and in various respects were not exactly well enough informed about the facts" (pp. 444-45). Vincenzo MARIA (d. 1680), the Carmelite author of Il viaggio all'Indie orientali (1678) "also described at length the religion of the Indians in Malabar and even gave some extracts from some of their books"; but he "ignored the language of the land and frankly admitted to have done no more than copy the Portuguese dissertations communicated to him by Don Francis Garzia, the Jesuit archbishop of Cranganor" (p. 445).
Ziegenbalg's Evidence
While using all these major authors, La Croze prized the information furnished by Bartholomaus ZIEGENBALG most highly: "He is preferable due to his accuracy and the care he took to report only what he had himself observed and what he read in the books written in a language that had become as natural to him as the one he sucked with his mother's milk" (p. 445). This is exactly the kind of new authority claim that, according to Trautmann, characterized the rise of a "new Orientalism" in the second half of the eighteenth century (1997:32-34). But fifty years before the publication of Holwell's dubious work, La Croze had already corresponded with Ziegenbalg, who recommended the perusal of the manuscript of his Bibliotheca Malabarica (letter of February 1716; Jeyaraj 2003:317). This was an annotated list of 119 Indian texts in the Tamil language collected by Ziegenbalg in the two-year span between his arrival in India (1706) and 1708.2 A modern expert on Tamil literature, Kamil Veith Zvelebil, described this as "a relatively complete account of Tamil literature" (Zvelebil 1973:2), and we can imagine how impressed an early eighteenth-century linguist such as La Croze must have been.
The Bibliotheca Malabarica is an annotated catalogue of Tamil texts collected by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a Protestant missionary in Tranquebar, between July 1706, when he arrived in India, and August 1708, when he sent the catalogue to Europe. The catalogue consists of 165 entries in four sections, covering Protestant, Catholic, “heathen,” and Muslim works respectively. The third section is by far the longest, containing 119 entries for works of Hindu or Jaina provenance. After compiling the catalogue, Ziegenbalg continued to collect and a survey of his other works and letters reveals that he mentions in total no fewer than 170 Hindu and Jaina texts. We can be reasonably confident that Ziegenbalg had access to about 130 of the works he mentions, although it is possible—even probable—that he had other works too. Ziegenbalg’s fame as a pioneering scholar of Tamil Hinduism is based almost entirely on his detailed study of these texts. Although he conversed, and corresponded, with many Hindus, and travelled to a limited extent within the Tamil region, it is above all his study of these “heathen” texts which sets him apart from his contemporaries among European writers on Hinduism.
2It is the third section of Ziegenbalg’s Bibliotheca Malabarica which has also been of most interest to other scholars. Kamil Zvelebil, the great Czech scholar of Tamil literature, describes this section of the work as “a relatively complete account of Tamil literature.”1 By contrast, Hans-Werner Gensichen, a leading historian of mission, characterised it as a jumble of “grammatical and mythological works, songs and stories, philosophy and pornography, astrology and theology.”2 The truth, perhaps, lies somewhere between the two. Ziegenbalg’s collection is not representative; he has few early works and was only minimally aware of the canonical works of the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava tradition, the Tirumuṟai and Nālāyira-Tivyappirapantam. The character of his collection was to some degree determined by happenstance—Ziegenbalg states that he acquired whatever books he could and certainly there were works he acquired without having read, so that he would have had to rely on others’accounts of their content. Nevertheless the collection is not entirely eclectic either. It was driven both by his own interests, and—as shall be argued here—by the nature of his connections with the Tamils who provided texts for him.
-- Bibliotheca Malabarica, by Institut Francais de Pondichery
While the larger European public got news about the Danish Malabar mission mainly via the Malabar Correspondence and related materials that were first published in German and then partly translated into English (Philipps 1717; Ziegenbalg and Grundler 1719) and French (Niecamp 1745), La Croze enjoyed full access to all the major manuscripts that Ziegenbalg had sent to Europe: his travel account, the Bibliotheca Malabarica, the translations from Tamil morality books, the Malabar Correspondence, the manuscript of the Malabar Heathendom, and of course also the manuscript of the second main work of Ziegenbalg, the Genealogy of Malabar Divinities (Jeyaraj 2003:318).
Ziegenbalg had studied Baldaeus (1672) before arriving in India as a young man of twenty-four years, and in his first letter (September 2, 1706); he described "the content of the four books of law [Vedas] according to his opinion" (Ziegenbalg 1926:14). But he soon realized that Baldaeus "got most [of his information] from the Portuguese fathers who were forced to leave it when they were chased out of Ceylon by the Dutch" and that the rest stemmed "from his dealings with Brahmans who oftentimes know very little of their dogmas" (pp. 14-15). His own work, so the young man decided, would not be such a pastiche (Schmierewerck) cobbled together from other authors but had to be based on reliable sources: "Everything that I have written I have either transcribed word for word from their own books and translated from the Malabar language into German, or I have heard it during frequent discussions from the very mouth of the heathen and had it told to me by people of understanding" (p. 15). That Ziegenbalg knew very little about the Vedas is evident from his manuscript on Malabar heathendom (1711) where he described them as "four small books of law" called "I. Urukkuwedum. 2. Iderwedum. 3. Samawedum. 4. Adirwannawedum" (p. 34).3 But while "the four law books and the six Sastirangol [castirankal] get into the hands of few persons and are only found with some priests who show such books to nobody," he wrote, "the eighteen Paranen [puranas]and other history books are ubiquitous, and parts of them can also be found with the common people" (p. 36).
It was thus not in Vedic literature that Ziegenbalg found support for his idea of Indian monotheism but rather in certain Tamil texts (see below) and in assertions of his Indian informants. Via the Malabar Correspondence in the Hallesche Berichte, its translations and summaries, and through passages of Ziegenbalg's works quoted in La Croze, such information from southern India eventually reached the desks of men like Voltaire, Joseph de Guignes, Anquetil-Duperron, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, William Jones, and Constantin-Francois Volney.4
While partly modeling his Genealogy of Malabar Divinities of 1713 on the lists of gods in the "Diwagaram [Tivakaram]" (p. 286), Ziegenbalg omitted the "symbol of Tamil religiosity," Murukan, from his list (p. 299). Instead he began his Genealogy in the manner of a Christian theology book, with a chapter on "Barabarawastu" who in Ziegenbalg's view is "the supreme divine being and origin of all divinities" [das hochste gottliche Wesen und der Ursprung aller Gotter] (p. 37), even though it is not listed in the Tivakaram. As natural monotheists, so Ziegenbalg thought, the Indians must since antiquity have worshiped a supreme divine being who was not just one god among others but rather the very origin of all gods and the world.
These heathen know by the light of nature that there is one God. This truth has not only been communicated to them by Christians but is so firmly implanted in their mind [Gem lithe] by the evidence of their conscience that they would regard it as the greatest impiety [Gottlosigkeit] if they would learn that there are people in this world who do not posit a divine being who is the origin of everything, preserves everything, and reigns over everything-the kind of atheism [Atheistrey] that has found entry even among Christians and particularly among learned people here and there. (Ziegenbalg 2003:37).
Ziegenbalg compared such European atheists of the early eighteenth century with "heathen" Indians who are not only naturally monotheist but even profess faith in the very same God that the German pastors evoked in their sermons: "a God who created everything, reigns over everything, punishes evil, rewards good deeds, and who must be feared, loved, worshipped, and prayed to" (p. 37). The faith in this God had not only led the Indians to "establish a law and write many books of religion" but also to "introduce all kinds of sacrifices, build pagodas, and establish everywhere in their lands a formal service that in their opinion serves God" (p. 37). Because they relied exclusively on reason that "since the Fall is entirely misguided and spoiled," they eventually "let themselves be seduced by Satan in various ways." Nevertheless, from time immemorial, they fundamentally accept and worship an invisible divine being and have texts to prove this:
Such truth gained from the light of nature is not a recent thing with them but a very ancient one; they have books that are said to be more than 2000 years old. These form the basis of their opinions in these matters, and they hold that their religion is the oldest of all; it may have originated not long after the deluge. They not only believe in one God but have by the light of nature come so far as to accept no more than one single divine being as the origin of all things. Even though they worship many gods, they hold that all such gods have sprung from a single divine being and will return therein; so that in all gods only that single divine being is worshipped. Those among them who are a bit learned will defend this very obstinately even though they cannot deliver any proof of it. (pp. 37-38)
The best among the Indians regard "this Barabarawastu, which means Highest Being [Ens Supremum] or Being of beings [Ens Entium]" as an immaterial being [unmaterialisches Wesen] without any shape. They have hundreds of names for it, for example "Savuvesuren, the Lord over everything; Niddia Anander, the eternally supreme one; or Adinaiagen, the first lord of all who is supreme" (pp. 38-39).5 Asked what this supreme God or Being of all Beings (Wesen aller Wesen] is, an Indian informer wrote in a letter to Ziegenbalg:
The supreme God, or the Being of all Beings, has a form yet is without form. He cannot be compared to anything. One cannot describe him nor say that he is this or that. He is neither male nor female, neither heaven nor earth, neither man nor any other creature. This God is not subject to destruction or death. He does not need to rest or sleep. He is omnipotent and omnipresent. He is without beginning and remains unchanged in eternity. His form can neither be seen nor described nor pronounced, etc. (pp. 39-40)
Together with excerpts from Indian scriptures, such letters by Indian "heathen" to Ziegenbalg constituted evidence that deeply impressed European readers including Voltaire. The Malabar Correspondence contained numerous Indian descriptions of God and prayers that for the first time gave voice to the Indians themselves. Bothered by resistance both of Danish administrators in Tranquebar on India's southeastern coast and of Pietist Europeans who questioned the value of the mission, Ziegenbalg and his companion Johann Ernst Grundler had decided to drum up support by having Indians answer written questions and ended up sending translations of no fewer than 104 such letters by Indians to Europe. Ninety-nine of them were published in two installments (1714 and 1717). Some of them appeared also in English and French, and central passages (such as the one just cited) were quoted in Ziegenbalg's manuscripts and in La Croze's book. Given the deist leanings of many European intellectuals, including Voltaire, such documentation of natural monotheism in one of the world's oldest nations did not go unnoticed and substantially contributed to eighteenth-century Europe's gradual shift of interest from China to India. It probably also formed a reason for August Hermann FRANCKE (1663-1727) to decide against the immediate publication of Ziegenbalg's manuscripts. Ziegenbalg may have been unaware of this problem, and his introduction to Malabar Heathendom shows him more concerned about atheists than deists:
The fourth reason [for transmitting such information] is that teachers and preachers of atheism, which is fashionable among many in Europe, can be refuted through the principles of these heathen. Even though they are heathen, one will see consistently in these books that they believe in a divine Being who created all, reigns over everything, and eventually will reward virtue and punish evil; and that bliss awaits the faithful and damnation the evil. All of this, as a matter of fact, is denied by many Christians who rely on chance [fortuitum] and live much worse than the heathen. (Ziegenbalg 1926:13)
This sounds a bit like Voltaire's "Ambrosian" method of praising the heathen Indians in order to chastise degenerate European Christians. We have seen in Chapter 1 that, in order to support his claims of ancient Indian monotheism, Voltaire first used Indian prayers and quotations from Indian texts that he found in La Croze; subsequently, it was the Ezour-vedam that provided additional evidence; and finally, Voltaire lionized the pure monotheism of the "Indian" texts by Holwell and Dow. Though Ziegenbalg's admiration for monotheism in India resembles that of Voltaire, the German clergyman's mission was more straightforward. But he also had a little problem with his sources.