In February 1771, Coeurdoux at last responded with a gentle criticism of Abbe Mignot's idealization of Indian religion and his misunderstanding of the lingam cult and wrote that Abbe Mignot might profit from "following in the footsteps of another scholar and spending a few years in India" while promising, should he do that, to show him "the unity of God and the great event of the deluge in the Indian books" (Anquetil-Duperron 1808:49.68[- 82). He also responded to Anquetil-Duperron's central question about the Vedas:
I must now respond to your questions about the Vedams. We name them in Telugu and in the Samscroutane script of this region, Sama vedam, Ezour vedam, Roug vedam, Adharvana vedam. Several people say that this last Vedam is lost; I believe nothing of it. It is, one is assured, a book of magic; and this sort of books least of all gets lost in a heathen country where there are people everywhere who play themselves up as magicians. I saw a book of magic secrets that began with the first lines of the Adharvana vedam; but there was nothing more ... There are Brahmes of every Vedam, and each knows of which Vedam he is. Does it seem possible that those of the fourth could have permitted theirs to get lost? (pp. 684-85)
But now Coeurdoux added two remarks that not only confounded Anquetil-Duperron but puzzled many readers, including this writer:
I will add here what I have heard Father Calmette -- who knew the samscroutam [Sanskrit] and had much studied the books of Indian science -- utter more than once: that the true Vedam [le vrai Vedam] is of such an ancient samscroutam that it is almost unintelligible, and that what one cites is of the Vedantam, that is, of introductions and commentaries that were made of the Vedam. In effect, in a famous prayer named gai'tri, one understands only the word savitourou, the sun. (p. 685)
But it is the remark that immediately follows that led to accusations of lies and deception. Since this is a crucial passage, I quote also its original French:
D'un autre cote, le P. Mosac, qui n'a pas moins etudie la langue Samscroutane, pretend avoir decouvert le vrai Vedam. II Ie fait posterieur a la gentilite Indienne, dont il est la refutation detaillee. Cet ouvrage a pour auteur un vrai philosophe ennemi du polytheisme, tel que toute la terre en eut long-temps apres le deluge. Ce vaste ouvrage a ete traduit par le P. Mosac; et quel tresor pour vous, s'il vouloit vous le communiquer. [Google translate: On the other hand, Fr. Mosac, who has no less studied the Samscroutan language, claims to have discovered the true Vedam. It is a fact subsequent to the Indian Gentileness, of which it is the detailed refutation. This work has for its author a true philosopher, enemy of polytheism, such as the whole earth had long after the deluge. This vast work was translated by Fr. Mosac; and what a treasure for you, if he wanted to communicate it to you.]
On the other hand, the Father Mosac, who has studied the Samscroutane language not less [than Father Calmette], pretends to have discovered the true Vedam. He makes it posterior to Indian heathendom, of which it is a detailed refutation. This work has as its author a true philosopher and enemy of polytheism of the kind that the whole earth had for a long time after the deluge. This vast work has been translated by Fr. Mosac; and what treasure [would it be] for you if he were willing to communicate it to you! (p. 685)
Coeurdoux's juxtaposition of two "true" Vedas is breathtaking. He clearly takes the side of Fr. Calmette, who talked about the difficulty of the Veda's language and about its Vedanta commentaries. The second "true" Veda, by contrast, seems to be genuine only for Father Mozac who pretends to have discovered it and makes it posterior to heathendom. Yet Coeurdoux lauds Mozac's Veda author as a true philosopher and enemy of polytheism and calls it a vast work that Father Mozac has already translated.
Anquetil-Duperron, who added some comments on other pages of this letter, did not write anything in the margins of this page. But in the printed version of 1808, he explained in a note, "This work must be the Ezourvedam" and added a reference to his Zend Avesta (where he first quoted the Ezourvedam) and to the printed edition by Sainte-Croix of 1778.
It is clear that Coeurdoux, who had attentively studied Mignot's articles and provided some detailed criticisms, knew that the Ezour-vedam was in the Royal Library in Paris and that it was now used and cited by academics like Mignot. What he probably did not know was that Voltaire had sent it there; Mignot had mentioned only the librarian's name. This remark about Mozac's Veda was not in answer to any question, since Anquetil-Duperron had written nothing in his letters about the Ezour-vedam. Coeurdoux clearly was in the loop about the content of Mozac's Veda because he knows that it is "a detailed refutation" of Indian heathendom written by "a true philosopher and enemy of polytheism." We must therefore assume that the reason why Coeurdoux even mentioned Mozac's Veda and described it in a way that would immediately point to the Ezour-vedam was linked to his knowledge that the Ezour-vedam was making waves in educated Paris.
Had Coeurdoux known at this point that it was being used by Voltaire for his anti-Christian propaganda campaign, he would very likely have kept mum; he could have mentioned some information about the real Vedas and left it at that. But he decided, for some intriguing reason, to advertise Mozac's Vedas in such a manner that Anquetil-Duperron was certain to associate it with the Ezour-vedam. Not only that: he wanted Anquetil-Duperron to think that it is a genuine, though later text than the Veda described by Calmette and that it forms part of a different Vedam. There is no doubt that he must have anticipated that this unsolicited remark about a "vast work" in the generous hands of a missionary (who for many months had taken care of Anquetil-Duperron at the Chandernagor hospital and almost drew him into the Jesuit fold) would provoke the curiosity of the researcher who, as Coeurdoux knew, had been passionately chasing after the Vedas for years. There was no doubt that Anquetil-Duperron's next letter would bring a demand for this "vast work" that Coeurdoux dangled so conspicuously in front of the seeker of Ur-monotheism.
This is exactly what happened. In his reply of February 8, 1772, Anquetil-Duperron wrote again to Coeurdoux because Mozac never responded, and he made an attempt at flattering the silent father:
Even though the Father Mosac has not honored me with his response, I do not doubt for a minute of his friendship for me and that the communicative character that I know him to have will cause him to share with us his important research on the languages, the history, and the mythology of North India. We wait, among other works by this erudite missionary, for the translation of what he calls the true Vedam, which includes the refutation of polytheism. We count on Father Mosac to join the original to his translation and to accompany this precious treasure, as you justly call it, with critical discussions of the nature, author, and age of this Vedam, the country in which it was composed, and the regions where it is the law in preference to the four Vedas accepted on the Malabar coast, Coromandel, the Gujarat, etc. (p. 688)
Anquetil-Duperron also made a connection that Coeurdoux might not have anticipated: he suspected that the Vedam of Father Mozac was the corpus of texts that contained Holwell's Shastah!
Father Mosac has worked in Bengal, like Mr. Holwell; the one close to Cassimbazar and the other in Cassimbazar itself. Both speak of a Vedam or Bhade that is different from the four that we know: the Bengal and the neighboring countries seem the only regions of Hindostan where this Vedam is current. (p. 688)
But no amount of pleading could budge Father Mozac who never responded with a single word and did not even thank Anquetil-Duperron for the books he kept sending at great expense. Coeurdoux explained this silence as follows:
I have read to Father Mozac the part of your letter which regards him. My eloquence, combined with yours, has been useless to persuade him to communicate his vast and erudite collections. (p. 690)
This was the last word Anquetil-Duperron heard from the Pondicherry missionary about this question; after this, he never received another letter.
Coeurdoux's Missing Link
The question why Coeurdoux advertised Mozac's Veda is intriguing, and it is linked to another mysterious manuscript that Hans Rothschild, the owner of the Amsterdam bookshop Antiqua, sold in 1954 to the India Office Library in London. The manuscript is now in the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections of the British Library (APAC: Mss Eur D 22). In her fascinating two-volume study and edition of this 1987 manuscript, Sylvia Murr proved that its content stems from Father Coeurdoux and that a similar manuscript must have been plagiarized by Abbe Dubois for his famous book Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India (1817). In the nineteenth century, Dubois's book became a classic about Indian religions and dominated the public image in the West for many decades, and Murr's discovery showed how information gathered by missionaries in the eighteenth century was still very much in use in the nineteenth. Here we are only interested in a small part of her fascinating story. The manuscript is in the handwriting of a French artillery officer named Desvaulx. The young man, accused of having traveled without permission and neglected his duties in India, had to return to Paris in 1777 to explain his case and justify his actions. When he showed up before the authorities, he produced this manuscript and claimed that he had not been idly traveling but had spent much of his time doing research on Indian customs and religion. Whatever the plan was, it seems to have gone awry and the manuscript, which was written in Pondicherry around 1775-76, left no trace until it resurfaced through unknown avenues in Amsterdam and was bought by the India Office half a century ago.
Since this manuscript contains entire parts that are virtually identical with texts that Coeurdoux had included in letters to Anquetil-Duperron, there is no doubt that Desvaulx's manuscript, though written in the officer's hand, consists of material authored by Coeurdoux that was modified and shortened by the officer. One of the intriguing questions raised by this is whether Coeurdoux, whose eyesight was deteriorating to the point of blindness, had used Desvaulx as his secretary and planned to have his work published in France, or whether he wanted Desvaulx to publish the book under Desvaulx's name. Murr (1987:2.50) thinks that Desvaulx could not have used Coeurdoux's work without the missionary's approval. But did Coeurdoux want Desvaulx to copy and publish his original manuscript? Or did he "consent to let him abbreviate and modify it" (p. 50) in view of a goal that both agreed upon, namely, the defense of Christianity? Murr thinks it more likely that Coeurdoux and Desvaulx worked as author and secretary and that abbreviations and modifications were made with Coeurdoux's blessing (p. 51). Still, the question remains: did Coeurdoux also agree to modifications clearly designed to erase traces of authorship that were incompatible with Desvaulx's stay in India -- for example, the elimination of earlier dates and of events in towns that Desvaulx had never visited? This would mean that Coeurdoux consented to publication of his writings under Desvaulx's name -- in other words, a leak of his work for a good cause without implicating his name.
And this possibility is exactly what made me first think that Coeurdoux could have leaked not just this manuscript but also another one: the Ezourvedam. Both texts were slipped into Europe to be published by someone not associated with the Pondicherry Jesuits; both were relatively carefully edited to erase traces of original authorship and purpose; and both were directed at Europeans who undermine Christianity -- deists like Voltaire, for example. Voltaire was read in Pondicherry: after all, Maudave had studied Voltaire's 1756 edition of the Essai sur Lesmoeurs in India. Murr speculates that there could be a causal connection between the arrival of Desvaulx in Pondicherry at the end of 1772 and the abrupt end of Coeurdoux's correspondence with Anquetil-Duperron in October of that year. In her opinion, Desvaulx "substituted himself for Anquetil-Duperron, Jansenist and academician, who was suspected of furnishing to Voltaire and to the Encyclopedia scientific informations that were then utilized against the Church and its institutions" (p. 53).
But I think there is a less convoluted explanation that involves another leak, namely, that of the Ezour-vedam. When Coeurdoux wrote his advertisement for Mozac's Veda -- which implied the genuineness of the texts in spite of their younger age and praised them as "great treasures" -- he probably was not yet aware of Voltaire's perversion of the Ezour-vedam. But Desvaulx, whom Murr describes as an ardent defender of Christianity and the Bible, must have informed Coeurdoux and Mozac after his arrival in the fall of 1772 about the latest brouhaha in France: Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature, rampant skepticism and atheism in the salons of Paris, and, of course, Voltaire's "Indian campaign," which must have confounded the missionaries. Both Coeurdoux and Mozac knew perfectly that the Pondicherry Vedas were authored by Jesuit missionaries; after all, the handwriting of these texts was, according to Henry Hosten, certifiably that of Mozac. According to my hypothesis, what happened was the following: Coeurdoux, for reasons described above, in the early 1750s, either leaked the Ezour-vedam himself or authorized it in order to confound European doubters with a "proof" of ancient Indian monotheism and possibly also to support or justify Jesuit mission methods. He thought it would be a kind of vaccine against skepticism and atheism. But in 1772 he learned that the vaccine not only did not prevent the disease but actually helped spread it. Indomania with its inflated world ages and idealization of Indian Ur-religion was infectious, and it rapidly appeared as a threat to biblical authority. Coeurdoux, of course, could not imagine that less than twenty years later Langles would openly declare that the Pentateuch was plagiarized from the Vedas; but he might have seen such horror scenarios in his nightmares. The main threat was that the biblical narrative, and in particular the story of the flood,28 would be undermined by alternative scenarios that would show the Old Testament to be a record of local events and-even worse-show God as a local divinity propped up by a local myth. The Ezour-vedam, from that perspective, had indeed a certain nocuous potential because, due to its origin as a non-Prangui missionary tool, it tried to keep things Indian and did not feature any link to the biblical line of patriarchs. Even Adimo, the Adam of the Ezour-vedam, was Indian, as Voltaire remarked with much glee before accusing the Jews of having plagiarized their creation Story from Indian sources.
Buy unmasking the Ezour-vedam was out of the question. The last thing the Jesuits needed in their dire straits29 was an indictment for forgery of ancient Indian texts. So Coeurdoux decided to encode the truth in those two paragraphs that have caused reactions ranging from consternation to outrage. I will now cite them once more and try to decode them. First of all, the Pondicherry Veda's real author, Calmette, needed to be protected, and this was best done by citing him (and not Pons or someone else) as the one who told the truth about the true Vedas:
I will add here what I have heard Father Calmette -- who knew the samscroutam [Sanskrit] and had much studied the books of Indian science -- utter more than once: that the true Vedam [le vrai Vedam] is of such an ancient samscrouram that it is almost unintelligible, and that what one cites is of the Vedantam, that is, of introductions and commentaries that were made of the Vedam. In effect, in a famous prayer named gai'tri, one understands only the word savitourou, the sun. (Anquetil-Duperron 1808:49.685)
The next paragraph on the same page contains the tricky part and is dissected in Table 16 where the left column contains Coeurdoux's statement and the right my interpretation of it.
TABLE 16. FATHER COEURDOUX'S TRUTHFULNESS CONFIRMED
On the other hand, the Father Mosac, who has studied the Samscroutane language not less [than Father Calmette], pretends to have discovered the true Vedam. / Calmette is out of the game since he represents the real "true Vedam" which is difficult to read and ancient. But Mozac is also an expert of Sanskrit; which suggests (without stating it and thus lying) that the texts he pretends to have discovered must be Indian. Coeurdoux does not say that Calmette really discovered them, which would also be a lie.
He makes it posterior to Indian heathendom, of which it is a detailed refutation. / This also has the appearance of truth and is Coeurdoux's way of telling Anquetil that the Ezourvedam is part of this body of texts. The content of the Pondicherry Vedas is described accurately. Coeurdoux knows it.
This work has as its author a true philosopher and enemy of polytheism of the kind that the whole earth had for a long time after the deluge. / This "true philosopher" is not named, but Coeurdoux knows that his name is Jean Calmette, S. J. He was a true enemy of polytheism who forged weapons against it (such as the Pondicherry Vedas) and, like all missionaries, belongs to those numerous men involved in this fight since the deluge.
This vast work / This signals to Anquetil that the Ezour-vedam is part of a larger body of texts, which is true.
has been translated by Father Mosac; / Coeurdoux only says that Mozac "translated" this vast work, not from what language. Only for those who (unlike Anquetil) know that Mozac translated from French to Sanskrit this is a true statement.
and what treasure [would it be] for you if he were willing to communicate it to you! / This tells Anquetil how extremely valuable these texts are (always tacitly including, of course, the Ezour-vedam). Coeurdoux knows very well that Mozac will not send them; thus he adds the big IF.
Having skillfully encoded the truth and proclaimed both the genuine and the Jesuit Vedas "true," Coeurdoux turned to the crux of the problem that was partly responsible for the mess: the need to establish a solid link between Noah's ark and ancient India, thus filling in some of the dotted lines in the Eusebius-related graph above (Fig. 18). This was one of those friendly takeover attempts that the famous forger ANNIUS of Viterbo (c. 1432-1502) had brought into fashion in Europe. Thanks to Annius, the invented founder of France, "Francus," got a pedigree that linked him to Japhet (Asher 1993), and a "Tuisco" with a long beard became Germany's mythical founder (Hutter 2000). In a sense this was an antidote to a virus contained in the Ezourvedam that Voltaire's incubator had set loose. It was not the Ezour-vedam itself that was the problem, only the missing link that Voltaire had so cunningly exploited.
The link to the biblical transmission line was thus the appropriate antidote, and it was administered to Europe in two doses: first via Anquetil-Duperron and via the Academy to Abbe Mignot and the learned society of Paris, and second to a larger public through Desvaulx's book. The first dose reached its target and strengthened Anquetil-Duperron's (and Sainte-Croix's) belief that the Ezour-vedam is a genuine Indian text that was possibly a bit mangled in the translation and copying process. The second dose, however, was for some reason a dud; Desvaulx might have guessed that such a publication would raise questions that he could never answer; or his distracted superior said, "I shall have a look at it" and forgot to put it even into the administration files; or someone from Desvaulx's family sold the manuscript -- who knows? At any rate, it ended up in Amsterdam, and its neat handwriting can now be admired at the British Library. But a larger dose of the antidote remained in Pondicherry: Coeurdoux's complete manuscript. It was first extensively used by Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo and then plagiarized in its entirety by Abbe Dubois. Dubois, the very man who had introduced smallpox vaccination in southern India, was an ideal host who succeeded not only in introducing Coeurdoux's antidote to readers of English and French but in inoculating an entire generation through insertion into the textbooks and university classrooms of nineteenth-century Europe.
Father Coeurdoux's dose for Anquetil-Duperron consisted, apart from that bit of encoded truth, in a small treatise that also is contained "except for six words and some commas" in Chapter 46 of the Desvaulx manuscript and in Dubois (Murr 1987:2.30). It is a convincing proof that Coeurdoux was the author of the Desvaulx manuscript. The theme of Coeurdoux's treatise is exactly that missing link berween Noah's ark and the earliest Indians. He makes them migrate from the plains of Shinar via the mountains in the north to India and lets the Indians descend from Noah's son Japher. This is said to have happened at the beginning of the fourth yuga, which was within the chronological safety margin of the Septuagint's flood, and the patriarchs chosen for transmission of Noah's religion are "seven penitents" who are India's seven rishis:
The epoch of the beginning of this new age is exactly the end of the deluge, very distinctly marked in all Indian books. It destroyed all men except the seven famous penitents of India with their wives. Some [sources] add Manouvou, of whom I have already spoken and who appears to be Noah himself. They escaped the universal ruin by means of a ship whose builder was Vishnu himself. I do not believe that one finds the universal deluge more clearly attested to in the diverse authors of antiquity from almost all nations who have mentioned this great event, nor in a more similar manner to the recital of Moses. (Anquetil-Duperron 1808:49.693)
This is the antidote designed for the Ezour-vedam's soft spot that Voltaire had exploited, and by extension for the entire indomaniac vision of India as the cradle of civilization. Coeurdoux's Indian history confirms biblical history, and his portrayal of Indian religion exposes those of Voltaire and Holwell as completely baseless. The seven rishis of India are the country's ancient legislators and, as descendants of Noah's son Japhet, they guarantee that Ur-monotheism reached India long before the reigning polytheistic cults developed. This treatise thus reinforces the vision of a monotheistic pre-Vedic religion that forms the core of the Ezour-vedam and of Chumontou's teaching. Far from rejecting the Ezour-vedam, Coeurdoux sees its author Calmette as an excellent philosopher and as a fighter in true postdiluvian tradition against polytheism. But Coeurdoux was directing his attack not only at Voltaire. He was possibly even more concerned about Holwell, whose work, as we have seen, he also received courtesy of Anquetil-Duperron. Holwell had built his edifice almost entirely on an Indian basis and presented fragments of an Indian Old Testament that seemed designed to replace the Pentateuch. But Coeurdoux's reaction is not as dismissive as Joseph Priestley's Comparison of the Institutions of Moses with those of the Hindoos and other Ancient Nations two decades later (1799). At the end of the century, Priestley was already reacting against rampant indomania supported by the first translations of Sanskrit texts, especially Charles Wilkins's Bhagavad gita of 1785, and he saw no room whatsoever for a friendly takeover. By contrast, Coeurdoux tried to integrate India gently into his sacred history and to find "a gangway between the universal history of Bossuet and the Indians," as Murr (1987:2.173) put it. But his ultimate intention in releasing these materials certainly was the defense of biblical authority; and he was right in sensing, like Priestley, that both Voltaire's and Holwell's ventures were in the final analysis direct attacks on the Bible. As the fate of the Ezour-vedam shows, India had become much more than an exotic working field of missionaries. It was on the best way to turn into a battleground where not only the Jesuit order was at risk but the entire biblical basis of Christianity. And this danger seemed real. In 1771, the Swiss librarian Jean-Rodolphe SINNER von Ballaigues (1730-87) adduced all available "primary" sources he knew (Lord's Shaster, Roger, the Ezour-vedam, Holwell's Shastah, Dow's History of Hindostan, Hyde's Historia religionis veterum persarum) to prove that "the most part of the dogmas taught in the mysteries of the Egyptians and the Greeks appear to be drawn from the theology of the ancient Brachmanes of India" and to show "how these dogmas have passed from the Orient to Egypt and from there to Europe until the northern countries, and that it is very probable that the Purgatory of St. Patrick in Ireland is a vestige of this doctrine" (Sinner 1771:135-36)!
Sainte-Croix's Buddhist Veda
To the relief of Voltaire's many fans in Europe who had read about this text for almost two decades, the year of the writer's death finally saw the Ezour-vedam appear in print. Once again Switzerland was the stage of Ezour-vedam promotion. Voltaire's Indian campaign headquarters had been at Ferney near Geneva, and now the Ezour-vedam was printed in Yverdon in 1778. It was a long-awaited work, and its German translation appeared the following year in the Swiss capital of Berne. The preface to this German edition (Ith 1779:22) divulged the identity of the unnamed editor, Guillaume E. J. G. de Cleremont-Lodeven, baron de SAINTE-CROIX (1746-1809). The Bernese philosopher Johann ITH (1747-1813), who translated the text from the French, hailed this publication as a milestone:
We expect full light from the publication of primary sources of Indian religion that are found in various European libraries, but particularly from the great number stored at the Royal Library of France. Such a work we present to the German public through this translation of the Ezour-Vedam (pp. 13-16).
The Monthly Review (Griffiths 1780:500-505) struck a similar tone and compared the Ezour-vedam favorably to the publications by Roger (1651), Dow (1768), and Holwell (1765-71):
The relations of Rogers, however interesting, have only for their object the popular religion of India: the accounts of Dow and Holwell contain, indeed, the most ingenious explications of the Indian fables, which they allegorize into a pure and rational series of theological doctrines; but these explications are destitute of sufficient authority; they seem to have been the inventions of certain Brahmins, who were ashamed of their absurd mythology; and they are contradicted by the commentaries and explications of others. It is only a translation, of the canonical books of Indians (of which, many extol the wisdom and antiquity, without knowing much about them) that can fix our ideas on this subject. (pp. 500-501)
Finally, the time seemed to have arrived when not just speculations but real translations from primary sources became available. The Monthly Review informed its many readers that Baron de Sainte-Croix had made a first step by publishing a translation "made by a Brahmin of Benares, who was a correspondent of that Academy [the Royal Academy of Inscriptions in Paris]" whose manuscript, a gift of Voltaire to the king's library, had been compared and supplemented "from another copy of the same translation, made by M. Anquetil du Perron, from one in the possession of the nephew of M. Barthelemy" (p. 501). But the title page of the Ezour-vedam only states that the book "contains the exposition of the religious and philosophical opinions of the Indians, translated from the Samscretan by a Brahmin." On page ix, this translator is identified by Sainte-Croix as the "grand-pretre ou archi-brame de la pagode de Cheringham," but the English reviewer promoted him to the status of correspondent of the illustrious Royal Academy in Paris. Not even Voltaire would have dared to go that far; he left it at "correspondent of the French Compagnie des Indes." Ith, who published the German translation, was skeptical about Sainte-Croix's claim and noted that it depends "almost entirely on the reputation of such an unreliable writer as Voltaire" (Ith 1779:25-26). But Sainte-Croix had apparently discussed this with Anquetil-Duperron and assured Ith that he was personally convinced of the text's authenticity (pp. 26-27). Regarding Ith's doubts about the francophone Indian translator, Sainte-Croix informed him that, according to Anquetil-Duperron's opinion, the office of correspondent of the French Compagnie des Indes was not incompatible with the position of chief Brahman (pp. 27-28). Coeurdoux's antidote was effective.
Sainte-Croix begins his two-volume edition of the Ezour-vedam with some remarks about previous work on Indian religion that show his familiarity with most of the available literature in European languages. He criticized "Holwell and Dow who, penetrated by admiration for the philosophy of the Brames and zealous defenders of the purity of their dogmas, published interesting excerpts of some Shasters that they believed to be sacred and authentic" (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.vi). Sainte-Croix, by contrast, could proudly present the Ezour-vedam, "the first original work published until today about the religious and philosophical dogmas of the Indians" (p. xii).
His "Preliminary observations" open with the following declaration of faith:
Theism has been the primitive religion of humankind. The progressive march of polytheism would suggest this truth even if other facts were not demonstrating it. With the Indians, as with all other peoples on earth, one perceives, behind fables and fictions of the most bizarre kind, a cult that was pure in its origin and corrupted in its course. (pp. 13-14)
This statement already presents the Ezour-vedam's content in a nutshell since, as we have seen, the teacher Chumontou stands for the pure monotheism of the origin, and his interlocutor Biache for the bizarre cult into which it degenerated. Sainte-Croix was perfectly in tune with Calmette on this basic point. In no less than 160 introductory pages, Sainte-Croix then presents his vision of the origin and history of Indian religion. This is his attempt to synthesize an enormous amount of often contradictory information about Indian religion and fashion a coherent Story line that explains the history and content of Chumontou's and Biache's teachings, while addressing the question of the text's authorship.
Sainte-Croix was fundamentally in accord with de Guignes, whose papers on Indian religion, which were published in 1781, he was able partially to consult in manuscript form (pp. 52-53, 59). Rejecting Mignot's opinions, Sainte-Croix followed La Croze and de Guignes in discerning Egyptian influence on India (pp. 32-34). He did not mention the biblical narrative of the deluge or the dispersion of people even once. Nevertheless, the region north of Mesopotamia, where according to tradition the ark landed, had (as later in William Jones) a special role (App 2009). It is in Ariana and Bactria, that is, in the region linking Persia to India, that he located the cradle of two groups, "members of one family," which had migrated to India (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.45). The first to arrive were "the brachmanes who seemed to have made their principal residence near the Ganges and in the adjoining mountains" where some of their descendants have maintained their independence to this day in a "district to the west of Burdwam" (pp. 46-47). Sainte-Croix's source for this country "governed by the ancient laws" is, the reader might have guessed it, the ideal country around Bisnapore (see Chapter 6) from Holwell's first volume (p. 47).
The second group that came from Ariana via Bactria to India were the Samaneens, whose founder was "without any doubt Boutta or Budda" (pp. 47-48) and whose religion stretches from that region all across Asia to Japan (pp. 55-56). Sainte-Croix mentions many countries including Ceylon, Siam, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia where the religion of Budda now reigns; and he thought, following La Croze, that they had brought literacy to India. They also "showed great disdain for the cult of Vishnu and Shiva and did not want to subject themselves to the ancient Indianism which they sought to destroy" (p. 70). They fought against the superstitions and polytheism that had disfigured the once pure patriarchal religion. These valiant reformers who wanted to reestablish original monotheism were unjustly accused "by the ignorant and fanatic priests that were then the brachmanes" of being "philosophers of atheism, gross idolaters, and worshippers of their master Budda" (pp. 71-72). Eventually, as reported by Ziegenbalg via La Croze, the Brachmanes even "made a horrible massacre of the unfortunate Baudistes" (p. 72), whereupon some of them carried their religion to other countries in Asia.
If for La Croze the Buddhists had turned into atheists, the roles were here reversed: for Sainte-Croix the Brachmanes had become degenerate polytheists, whereas the Buddhists had preserved their original monotheism. This was based on Brucker's interpretation of esoteric Buddhist doctrine as a kind of mystical monotheism, de Guignes's assertion of the monotheism of the Samaneens (supported by his mistaken translation of the term "world-honored one" at the beginning of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra), Freret's conception of a monotheism professed by both the Buddhist and Brahmanic "sects of Indian religion," and Mignot's monotheistic interpretation of Buddhist emptiness. Convinced by such views, Sainte-Croix believed that the Buddha's esoteric doctrine, a monotheism of the purest kind, had also survived in India:
In spite of the efforts of the brames and the feeling of horror that they wanted to inculcate for the Baudistes or Samaneens, several books of these philosophers are still respectfully preserved on the Malabar coast, and the different coasts of India have, if we may dare to say so, shared their doctrine. The Ganigueuls, the Wanaprasthas, the Avadoutas, the Jogis and the Saniassis have adopted the manner of living of the Baudistes and openly profess the majority of their dogmas. (pp. 76-77)
Since the Baudistes or Samaneens brought literacy to India, they were, of course, also the authors of the sacred scriptures of India:
The first books of the Samaneens were with great likelihood written in this [Sanskrit] language. We know that the sectarians of Budda, who sometime after the birth of Jesus Christ went to China, took along a book which explained their principles in a language and characters that differed from those of the Chinese. Three hundred years passed before the bonzes translated the doctrine of the Indians into Chinese. (pp. 108-9)
Sainte-Croix had picked up such information from de Guignes's still-unpublished manuscripts whose content was described in Chapter 4. He criticized that, instead of translating the most ancient Indian texts, Holwell and Dow had presented the systems of the sects of their informants rather than "the doctrine of the ancient books" (p. 139). The ancient doctrine and books he referred to were brought by the Samaneens from Ariana to India where they were safeguarded by small groups of strictly monotheistic philosophers like the Gnanigols or Ganigueuls (see Chapter 2).
Everywhere in the Ezour-vedam, we find the principal articles of the doctrine of the Ganigueuls which we will discuss, and consequently one cannot doubt that a philosopher of this sect has composed this work. In it, a man enveloped by the gloom of idolatry reports, under the name of Biache, the most accredited fables of India and exposes the entire system of popular theology of his country. (p. 146)
By contrast, Chumontou represents for Sainte-Croix the true original monotheism transmitted by the Samaneens to the Ganigueuls. In this way the Tamil Siddhas identified by Ziegenbalg as Gnanigols (see Chapter 2) became -- at least in Sainte-Croix's scenario that was heavily inspired by de Guignes yet unpublished "Chinese Veda" papers -- successors of the Buddha's strict monotheism whose teaching is preserved ... you have guessed it ... in the Ezour-vedam!
Responding to the questions of Biache, the Ganigueul philosopher [Chumonrou] explains his doctrine about the unity of God, creation, the nature of the soul, the dogma of punishment and recompense in a future state, the cult appropriate for the supreme Being, the duties of all classes [etats], and so forth. Particularly those [duties] of the contemplatives attract Chumonrou's attention; and in this respect his principles entirely conform with those of the Samaneens and the ancient sectarians of Budda. (pp. 147-48)
Of course, Sainte-Croix does not fail to refer here to the two texts that de Guignes had associated with the Samaneens: "the extract from the Anbertkend" and "the translation of the work attributed to Fo, or Budda" -- the Forty-Two Sections Sutra in de Guignes's History of the Huns (see Chapter 4). Though the attentive reader might suspect he or she is hallucinating, there is no doubt-based on what we have learned about all this in Chapters 2, 4, and 7 -- that Fr. Calmette, who through his Ezour-vedam authorship had already shed his black Jesuit attire for an Indian disguise and a Brahmin tuft of hair, thanks to Sainte-Croix now appears before us with the shaved pate of a Buddhist monk who is indoctrinating us about the mystical meaning of the ultimate teaching of the Buddha: God's emptiness!
The Ezour-vedam's Amazing Career
In sum, the Ezour-vedam is one of the most interesting and revelatory documents of nascent Orientalism. Created by European residents of India who pioneered the study of the Vedas, it is an extraordinary window to diverse premodern views of Asian religions and a mirror of Europeans' anxieties, hopes, passions, and obsessions as they struggled to understand their own origin and worldview. After humble beginnings as mission material for catechetes in South India, it soon became obsolete. Some missionary must have decided to give it a second lease on life and a new mission in the struggle against European deists, skeptics, and atheists by letting French laymen make copies of it. After its arrival in France this mission backfired when Voltaire turned the text into a weapon against Judeo-Christianity and for his brand of deism. In defense, Coeurdoux attempted to link the text via the seven rishis to the biblical patriarchs. But Mignot and Anquetil-Duperron saw it as a testament of Ziegenbalg's monotheistic Gnanigols. Sainte-Croix concurred but regarded these Gnanigols as representatives of the ancient esoteric doctrine of Buddhism that in his view was a mystical form of Ur-monotheism. Soon enough, various doubters raised their voices and called the text a fake or "Pseudo-Veda." In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this opinion prevailed, and the Jesuits were accused of a heinous act. Now, however, the text is about to acquire a new valuation as a fascinating record of the early Western study of Indian scriptures, a testament to the diversity and extreme changes characterizing eighteenth-century European views of Asian religions, and a showcase for the twisted fate of religious texts. The biography of the Ezour-vedam presents us with a sequence of events that even a novelist might have trouble imagining: the mystical marriage of a wrongly translated, pieced-together, fifth-century Chinese Buddhist text, tuned up and put into the Buddha's mouth by an eighth-century Chinese Zen master, with the fake -- yet oh so true! -- Yajur Veda (Ezour-vedam) authored by a French Jesuit calling himself Sumantu who criticizes the Veda and whom Sainte-Croix portrayed as a Gnanigol heir of the Buddha's deathbed teaching of God's emptiness. The mind-boggling fate of this text deserves a place of honor in the history-of-ideas hall of fame and is a perfect embodiment of a bon mot of the great researcher of Zen to whom this book is dedicated, the late Seizan Yanagida: "Fact is fiction, and fiction is fact" (App 2008b:7).
The Perfect Theology
In December 1776, Anquetil-Duperron received a package from India sent by his friend colonel Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil, the French envoy at Oudh (Awadh). It contained a voluminous Persian manuscript entitled Sirr-i akbar, the Great Secret. While reading its preface, Anquetil-Duperron already sensed that his search for the Veda, that most ancient record of divine revelation and master key to the "Indian religion" that had conquered Asia, was coming to an end. He translated the Persian preface by Prince Dara (see Chapter 3), written in 1657, word for word to make sure that he did not miss anything. It brought the confirmation that the book's fifty Upanishads contain the very essence of the Vedas.
TABLE 17. ANQUETIL'S DRAFT TRANSLATION OF PART OF PRINCE DARA's OUPNEKHAT PREFACE
Anquetil's draft French translation (Bibliotheque Nationale, NAP 8857, Vols.4-5) / English translation of Anquetil's draft French translation (App) / English translation by Hasrat from the Persian (de Bary 1958:440)
Apres la certimde de ces degres (de cela), il a ere scu que dans certe secre ancienne, avant tous les Livres celestes quarre Livres celestes qui (sont) le Ragbeid er le Djedjer Beid, et le Sam Beid, et l'Athrban Beid, aux Prophetes de ce tems que le plus grand d'eux est Brahma qui est Adam choisi de Dieu, sur lequel soit le salut, avec tous les preceptes de conduite: et ce sens est paraissant de ces livres memes / After the certitude of these degrees (of that), it was known that in this ancient sect, before all the heavenly books, four heavenly books which (are) the Ragbeid, and the Djedjer Beid, and the Sam Beid, and the Athrban Beid, to the prophets of this time that the greatest of them is Brahma who is Adam chosen by God, on whom be salvation, with all the precepts of conduct: and this meaning is apparent from these books themselves. / And after verifications of these circumstances, it appeared that among this most ancient people, of all their heavenly books, which are the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda, and the Atharva Veda, together with a number of ordinances, descended upon the prophets of those times, the most ancient of whom was Brahman or Adam, on whom be the peace of God, this purport is manifest from these books.
Et l'essentiel (la partie la plus pure, la substance) de ces quatre livres, tout les secrets de conduite (religieuse) et la meditation sur l'unite pure y sont renfermes, et on le nomme Oupnek'hat. / And the essence (the purest part, the substance) of these four books, all the secrets of (religious) conduct and the meditation on the pure unity are included in it, and it is called Oupnek'hat. / And the summum bonum of these four books, which contain all the secrets of the Path and the contemplative exercises of pure monotheism, are called the Upanekhats [Upanishads].
The first two columns of Table 17 provide a taste of Anquetil-Duperron's style. His Latin has been called cryptic and impossible to understand, but sometimes it is clearer than his French in these translations, whose grammar sometimes has even native speakers scratching their heads. The Latin summary of this preface made the central point of this preface much clearer: after having studied the three celestial books (the Books of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the Evangile of Christ), Prince Dara found the four Vedas, which he saw as God's earliest revelation to Brahma (who is identical with Adam). These four Vedas contain the truth of unity (unitatis veritas), and their essence (cremor) is found in the book called Oupnek'hat, the Upanishads (Anquetil-Duperron 1801:7).30 Anquetil-Duperron first announced his discovery in a 1778 book on Oriental legislation:
Schahdjehan [Shah Jahan, 1592-1666], son of Djehanguir Uahangir, 1569-1627] permits all religions as long as they serve the growth of his empire. Dara Shako [Mohammed Dara Shikuh, 1615-59], the eldest son of Shahdjehan, shows publicly his indifference for Islam. In Delhi in 1656, this prince has brahmins of Benares translate the Oupnekat, a Sanskrit work whose name signifies The Word that must not be enounced (the secret that must not be revealed). This work is the essence of the four Vedas. It presents in 51 sections the complete system of Indian theology of which the result is the unity of the supreme Being [premier Etre] whose perfections and personified operations have the name of the principal Indian divinities, and the reunion [reunion] of the entire nature with this first Agent. I plan to publish as soon as possible the translation of this important work which I received in 1776 from North Bengal from Mr. Gentil, Chevalier of St. Louis and Captain of cavalry in the service of France. This work appears for the first time in Europe; no traveler has mentioned it until now. (Anquetil-Duperron 1778:21)
Nine years later, on March 18, 1787, he finished his French translation of all fifty Upanishads with the exclamation "oum oum oum oum oum," and the revision of the entire 862-page manuscript took him until July 3.31 In the same year, he inserted his translation "into barbaric French" of four Upanishads into a book on Indian geography with the excuse that it would offer the reader "a break from the course of the Ganges" at Benares, the city of philosophers (Anquetil-Duperron 1787a:2.297). The translation's title clearly shows what the Persian Upanishads of Prince Dara represented for him: "The Basis of Indian Theology, drawn from the Vedas" (p. 297). Anquetil-Duperron's first four Upanishads of 1787 appeared in German translation in 1791 in a book published in Zurich by an anonymous editor; I suspect that it was the very Johann Ith who in 1779 had already proved his interest in Asian religions by translating Sainte-Croix's Ezour-vedam into German. They were contained in Europe's first collection of religious texts from the "Indian religion" that Freret, de Guignes, Diderot, and numerous other authors had described, which was the very religion in search of whose key Anquetil-Duperron had gone to India.
The editor's emphasis of the need to present to the public not so much interpretations but rather translations of primary sources was a sign of a new age, while his view that his "Indian religion" is "about the same with the peoples hither and yonder the Ganges" (Anon., Sammlung asiatischer Original-Schriften, 1791:xiii) marks the end of a period. This Zurich collection appeared just before the effect of the first volumes of the Asiatick Researches on the European continent began. The editor planned a series of volumes with "original scriptures of Asia" and even suggested publishing these texts also in their original languages by using print shops in London for Sanskrit, Paris for Persian, and Berlin for Tamil texts (p. x). But probably because of the Orientalist revolution triggered by the work of the British in India (see Chapter 8), only one volume of the planned collection ever appeared under the title Indische Schriften (Indian Scriptures). In conformity with the editor's conception of "Indian religion," we find in this interesting volume German translations of Maridas Poulle's Bagavadam (pp. 1-216); La Loubere's Life of Tewetat and his Buddhist monastic rules "Patimuk" (pp. 217-56);32 de Guignes's "Book of Fo" (the Forty-Two Sections Sutra; pp. 257-68)33 and his summary of the Anbertkend (pp. 361-76); Anquetil-Duperron's four Upanishads (pp. 269-316); the Dirm Schaster and Neadirsen by Dow (pp. 389-410); the Schastah-Bhade by Holwell (pp. 419-32); Henry Lord's Schaster (pp. 433-52); and some additional materials, including text translations from the Danish India mission (pp. 453-94).
The editor of this Swiss book was a bit skeptical about Anquetil-Duperron's claims that the Upanishads represent the essence of the Vedas, and he commented that the words of the "four Bedes" [Vedas] seem only to be cited sporadically; but he gave Anquetil-Duperron the benefit of the doubt by stating that "if it is as [Anquetil-Duperron says], these Upnekhat will be doubly important because part of the content of the Vedas will then be no more subject to doubt" (pp. xiv-xv). For Anquetil-Duperron, by contrast, no doubt was possible; and he saw his view reinforced by comparing the "system" he had discovered in Prince Dara's Upanishads with the first European translation from a classical Sanskrit text: Charles Wilkins's The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (1785). Anquetil-Duperron had received a copy of it just before delivering his 1787 manuscript with the four Upanishads to press and decided to add an "Appendix about the Bhagvat Ghita" in which he asserts that Wilkins has not quite understood the true import of the text he translated (Anquetil-Duperron 1787a:571).
Anquetil-Duperron subsequently decided to translate the whole book into cryptic Latin. In some sense, this brings home to Europeans the exclusivity of the ancient Sanskrit text in India; after all, this book was a secretum tegendum and not food for hoi polloi! This is reflected in its esoteric mix of languages where cryptic Latin is explained by Greek: "Nomen Dei semper (X) in ore Brahmanum, et propria lingua, [x], id est, samskretice pronunciatum, est Oum" (The name of God always in the mouth of the Brahmins, and pronounced in their own language, their own voice, in Sanskrit, is Oum) (Anquetil-Duperron 1801:1.cv). But the content of this explanation is also emblematic: both for Anquetil-Duperron and for Prince Dara, the Oupnek'hat's theology is the true message of Oum = Allah = God to humankind, his first and most perfect revelation to Brahma = Adam as recorded in the world's oldest book, the Veda, whose essence they happened to hold in their hands. It is a record of God's Ur-message whose traces are found in all ancient sacred texts. In his introduction to the Oupnek'hat, Anquetil-Duperron therefore stresses that "the very same dogma of a single parent of the universe and unique spiritual principle" is described "clearly and transparently" in "the books of Solomon, the ancient Chinese Kims [Ch. jing, classics], the sacred Beids [Vedas] of the Indians, and the Zend-avesta of the Persians" (p. viii).34
This is why, in his defense of the genuineness of the Ezour-vedam at the very end of his life, Anquetil-Duperron insisted that "in the Oupnek'hat one finds the supreme Being, his word, his spirit" (1808:3-419). Even if he had not become the perfect theologian and had to strike through the word "perfect" from the dream of his youth, he had been blessed to find the oldest extant record of God's revelation, the "doctrina orientalis" par excellence, the perfect theology, his religion. OUM!