The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App

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Part 1 of 3

Chapter 3: Diderot's Buddhist Brahmins

In the first volumes of the central monument of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie, there are several articles about Asian religions that are either signed by or attributed to Denis DIDEROT (1713-84). The most important ones in the first volumes are entitled "ASIATIQUES. Philosophie des Asiatiques en general" (1751:1.752-55), "BRACHMANES" (1752:2.391), and "BRAMINES" (1752:2.393-94). Today, these articles have such a bad reputation that they are often criticized and held up for ridicule. For example, Wilhelm Halbfass wrote,

In the article "Brachmanes," Diderot discusses what he calls "extravagances tout-a-fait incroyables," stating that the persons who had referred to the Brahmins as "sages" must have been even crazier than the Brahmins themselves. The article entitled "Bramines" is essentially a summary and in part literal paraphrase of the article "Brachmanes" contained in Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique; it also reproduces a mixup of Buddhism and Brahminism occurring in the original: citing the Jesuit Ch. LeGobien, Bayle described a Brahminic sect thought to be living in China as worshippers of the "God Fo." (Halbfass 1990:59)

Diderot's "inaccuracy and lack of originality" (p. 60), Halbfass argues, is evident in his use of "Bayle's and Le Gobien's portrayal of the Chinese 'Brahmins' and Buddhists" to conjure up a vision of "quietism" and love of "nothingness" among the Indians and thus to highlight "their desire to stupefy and mortify themselves" (p. 59). Halbfass cites the following passage from Diderot's article on the "Bramines" as an illustration:

They assert that the world is nothing but an illusion, a dream, a magic spell, and that the bodies, in order to be truly existent, have to cease existing in themselves, and to merge into nothingness, which due to its simplicity amounts to the perfection of all beings. They claim that saintliness consists in willing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing .... This state is so much like a dream that it seems that a few grains of opium would sanctify a brahmin more surely than all his efforts. (pp. 59-60)

Diderot's only contribution in this passage, Halbfass contends, was to add to his paraphrase of Bayle the reference to opium; but even this was not original since this is "a motif which we find also in the Essais de theodicee, which Leibniz published in 1710" (p. 60). As is well known, this "opium" motif reappeared in the nineteenth century "among Hegel and other critics of Indian thought" (p. 60) and, broadened by Marx to apply to religion in general, found its way into the minds of hundreds of millions of twentieth-century communists: religion as opiate for the people. Halbfass could also have cited the very first sentence of Diderot's article, which precedes the given quotation and presents his "mixup of Buddhism and Brahminism" in a nutshell:

BRAMINES, or BRAMENES, or BRAMINS, or BRAMENS, ... Sect of Indian philosophers anciently called Brachmanes. See BRACHMANES. These are priests who principally revere three things: the god Fo, his law, and the books that contain their constitutions. (Diderot 1752:2.393)

Diderot here clearly defines the subjects of his article, the Brahmins, as priests of the "god Fo" who, as we have seen, was already in the seventeenth century often identified as Buddha. Diderot's Brahmins believe in this Fo, preach his doctrine (the dharma or law), and value the books that contain his teachings. Today we are able to identify these three items as the "three jewels" or "three treasures" that are ceaselessly evoked and pledged allegiance to by Buddhists of all nations. While the first two (Fo = Buddha and law = dharma) clearly evoke the first two treasures, the third treasure is now known to be the sangha, that is, the Buddhist community, rather than its sacred scriptures. Historians of the European discovery of Buddhism, who tend to be rather unforgiving schoolmasters, of course also denounce Diderot's terrible "mixup." In 1952, Cardinal de Lubac used even stronger terms than Halbfass:

Diderot makes himself the echo of such phantasmagoric science. The diverse articles of the Encyclopedie that touch on Buddhism (several of which are by Diderot himself) rest on some superficial readings without the slightest attempt at critique.1 They range from 1751 to 1765 and are a bunch of hypotheses, gossip, and errors that are mutually contradictory. The Buddha, who is habitually named Xekia, or Xaca, or Siaka, supposedly is an African from Ethiopia (Diderot read the critical note of Abbe Banier about the text by Kaempfer and attempts to harmonize the two authors); or maybe he was a Jew -- at any rate, he had knowledge of the books of Israel. ... He supposedly founded, in Southern India, "the sect of Hylobians, the most savage of the gymnosophists" and is said to have written all of his exoteric doctrine on tree leaves. (de Lubac 2000:121-22)

Citing the beginning of Diderot's "Brahmin" article, de Lubac makes fun of Diderot's "sketchy comparatism" and of his claim that the Jewish kabbalists modeled their ensoph doctrine on the "emanatism of Xekia" (p. 122).

Here, instead of comparing and ridiculing information about Asian religions from many different Encyclopedie articles by Diderot and other authors, just three entries from the first two volumes will be analyzed: "ASIATIQUES. Philosophie des Asiatiques en general" (1751:1.752-55), "BRACHMANES" (1752:2.391), and "BRAMINES" (1752:2.393-94). They are likely to be from the pen of Diderot. At any rate, they present a mid-eighteenth-century view of Asian religions by an intelligent Frenchman who, while primarily relying on the work of Pierre Bayle (1702) and Johann Jacob Brucker (1742-44), made direct and indirect use of much of the information available in Europe at that time. Instead of the "monkey show" approach where historical views are held up for ridicule like chimpanzees dressed in human clothes who must show to the laughing public how far we have come along, this chapter will present the main points of Diderot's view of Asian religions in historical context. His "lack of originality," "sketchy comparatism," and especially his "mixup" of different religions are thus seen as worthy objects of study rather than ridiculous defects. Just as the island of Hokkaido ("Yeso") at the northern end of Japan was for a long time thought to be so gigantic as to stretch all the way to North America, the dimensions and confines of Asian religions were in Diderot's time still rather hazy. In this respect discoveries and explorations  of religions are not so different from those of barely known lands. Even a century after Diderot's articles, the historical and doctrinal dimensions of Asian religions were still far from clear, and many boundaries that have since been drawn (for example, those dividing "shamanism" from "Buddhism" in Tibet or "folk religion" from "Daoism" in China) are so problematic that some professors of religious studies would love to wipe them off the map. With regard to the discovery of Asian religions, parading "false" ideas (for example, about the founder of Buddhism) is far easier than understanding why those ideas arose and realizing the fragility of present-day certitudes. As a matter of fact, two centuries of "scientific" study have utterly failed to produce a consensus even about the centuries in which Buddhism's founder lived, and skeptics who argue that he is just one more legend that took on flesh and bones are not easily refuted. Was not the life story of a popular Christian saint of the Middle Ages, St. Josaphat, derived from legends about the Buddha and unmasked as a pious fiction, even though some of "his" bones are to this day revered in Antwerp's St. Andries Church? In 1997 the church's friendly sacristan got me a ladder so I could see how the Buddha legend calcified (see Figure 4).

As we will see in the present and subsequent chapters, variants of Diderot's idea of a pan-Asian religion or philosophy were very popular in his time and should hardly be fodder for reproaches and "monkey show" treatment. Indeed, anybody who believed in the Old Testament account of the deluge and the dispersion of peoples after Babel was bound to favor monogenetic hypotheses and to presuppose common roots of possibly unrelated phenomena. The idea of a pan-Asian religion or doctrine -- conceived either positively as an ancient theology or negatively as an ancient idolatry -- was not only common throughout Diderot's century but dominant. It is a subject well worth exploring; after all, almost every chapter of this book shows that this was a far more influential factor in the birth of Orientalism than the much-evoked and blamed colonialism. This chapter will describe key features of Diderot's "philosophie asiatique" and dig into the past to expose some of its main roots. If the previous chapter showed how deeply intertwined the European discoveries of "Brahmanism" and Buddhism in the first quarter of the eighteenth century were, the present chapter will expand the field of view both backward toward the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and forward to the mid-eighteenth century when Diderot compiled his first articles on Asian religions.


Figure 4. The bones of a legend: relics of Saint Josaphat (St. Andrieskerk, Antwerp; photo by Urs App).

Exoterica and Esoterica

We have seen in the previous chapters that the Jesuits of the Japan mission already began studying the Japanese varieties of Buddhism in the 1550s. This was not exactly a nineteenth-century philological workshop. In his letters from Yamaguchi of 1551, Cosme de TORRES (1510-70) distinguished several groups of Japanese heathens including worshipers of Shaka, Amida, and a sect called "Jenxus" (Jap. Zen-ska, Zen sect). According to Frater Cosme, who was the first European to mention this sect by name, Zen adepts teach in two ways [dos maneras]. The first is described as follows:

One way says that there is no soul, and that when a man dies, everything dies, since they say that what has been created out of nothing [crio de nada] returns to nothing [se convierte en nada]. These are men of great meditation [grandes meditaciones], and it is difficult to make them understand the law of God. It is quite a job [mucho trabajo] to refute them. (Schurhammer 1929:95)

According to Fr. Cosme's subsequent letter of October 20, 1551, these men held that "hell and punishment for the evil ones are not in another life but in this one" and "denied that there is a hell after a man dies" (p. 101). Numerous adepts of the Zen sect, both priests and laymen, informed the Jesuit missionaries that "there are no saints and that it is not necessary to search for a way [buscar su caminho] since what had come into existence from nothing could not but return to nothing [que de nada foi echo, nao puede deixar de se comvertir em nadie]" (p. 99). When the missionaries tried to convince these representatives of Zen that "there is a principle that constitutes the origin of all other things," the Japanese are said to have replied:

This [nothing] is a principle from which all things arise: men, animals, plants: every created thing has in itself this principle, and when men or animals die they return to the four elements, into that which they had been, and this principle returns to that which it is. This principle, they say, is neither good nor bad, knows neither glory nor punishment, neither dies nor lives, in a manner that it is a "no" [de manera que es hum no]. (p. 99)

Such views uncannily resemble the "internal teaching" described in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they confirm that its principal features emerged in Japan when the first missionaries engaged in conversations with representatives of the Zen denomination who might have told told them about Bodhidharma's legendary responses to Emperor Wu ("Empty, nothing holy"; "no merit") and kept uttering the word "mu" (nothingness). In contrast to the inner teaching, the second manner of teaching described by Frater Cosme seems to accept an eternal soul and transmigration:

There are others who say that souls [las animas] have existed and will exist forever and that with the death of the body each of the four elements returns to its own place, as does the soul that returns into what it was before it animated that body. Others say that, after the death of the body, the souls return to enter different bodies and thus ceaselessly are born and die again. (p. 95)

This teaching encapsulates essential elements of what later came to be known as the "exterior" teaching of Buddhism: an eternal soul and transmigration. Tutored by former Buddhist monks and knowledgeable laymen, the missionaries in the following decades gradually became more familiar with the sects, clergies, rituals, and doctrines of Japan's rich Buddhist tradition and learned of the distinction between an "outer" or provisional teaching for the common people (Jap. gonkyo) and an "inner" or true teaching (Jap. jikkyo). In the catechism of 1586, Alessandro VALIGNANO's entire presentation of doctrines and sects is based on the distinction between provisional (gon) and real (jitsu) teachings (Valignano 1586:4v).

Today we know that various forms of this "gon-jitsu" distinction played a major role in the history of Buddhism. During the first centuries of the common era, when the Indian religion took root in China, various classification schemes (Ch. panjiao) were created by the Chinese to bring order into a bewildering array of Buddhist doctrines and texts. Some made use of the Indian Buddhist "two-truths" scheme, which asserts that, apart from the absolute truth of the awakened, there is also a provisional truth designed to accommodate deluded beings and help them reach enlightenment. Others came to attach particular doctrines and texts to phases of the Buddha's life, and naturally those of one's preferred sect tended to be associated with particularly poignant events of the founder's life, such as the first sermon after his enlightenment or the ultimate teachings before passing away. Such schemes often employed, in one form or another, the distinction between a "provisional" (Jap. gonkyo) and "genuine" or "real" teaching (Jap. jikkyo), which is exactly what the Buddhist informers must have explained to Valignano and his fellow Jesuits. A related distinction is that between exoteric and esoteric teachings (Jap. kengyo and mikkyo) that was promoted, among others, by the famous founder of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, Kakai (734-835; Abe 1999:9). But in the sixteenth century most of this was unknown. However, through the inclusion of Valignano's catechism in Antonio Possevino's Bibliotheca selecta of 1593, the distinction between provisional and real (or exoteric and esoteric) teachings and sects in Japan gained a foothold in Europe among Jesuits, their students, and some sections of Europe's educated class.

As early as the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries also linked this distinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrines with phases of the Buddha's life. In 1551 Japanese Buddhists informed the Jesuit brother Juan Fernandez, who spoke some Japanese, that the founder of their religion, Shaka, "also wrote books so that they would pray to him and be saved." But at the age of 49 years, so Fernandez reported,2 Shaka had suddenly changed his approach and confessed that "in the past he had been ignorant, which is why he wrote so much." Based on his own experience Shaka thereafter discouraged people from reading his old writings and advocated "meditation in order to learn about oneself and of one's end" (Schurhammer 1929:82). In the first comprehensive report about Buddhist sects and doctrines that reached the West (the Sumario de los errores of 1556), certain Buddhist texts were thus associated with specific sects, and Shaka was said to have dismissed his earlier writings: "They said that many people followed him and that he had 80,000 disciples. And ultimately, after having spent 44 years writing these scriptures, he said that nothing of that was true and that all was fombem (Jap. hoben, expedient means]" (Ruiz-de-Medina 1990:664).

Translation of the Inscription on the Eastern compartment.

Thus spake king Devanampiya Piyadasi: — In the twelfth year of my anointment, a religious edict (was) published for the pleasure and profit of the world; having destroyed that (document) and regarding my former religion as sin, I now for the benefit of the world proclaim the fact. And this, (among my nobles, among my near relations, and among my dependents, whatsoever pleasures I may thus abandon,) I therefore cause to be destroyed; and I proclaim the same in all the congregations; while I pray with every variety of prayer for those who differ from me in creed, that they following after my proper example may with me attain unto eternal salvation: wherefore the present edict of religion is promulgated in this twenty-seventh year of my anointment.

Thus spake king Devanampiya Piyadasi:— Kings of the olden time have gone to heaven under these very desires. How then among mankind may religion (or growth in grace) be increased? yea through the conversion of the humbly-born shall religion increase.

Thus spake king Devanampiya Piyadasi: — The present moment and the past have departed under the same ardent hopes. How by the conversion of the royal-born may religion be increased? Through the conversion of the lowly-born if religion thus increaseth, by how much (more) through the conviction of the high-born, and their conversion, shall religion increase? Among whomsover the name of God resteth (?) verily this is religion, (or verily virtue shall there increase.)

Thus spake king Devanampiya Piyadasi: — Wherefore from this very hour I have caused religious discourses to be preached; I have appointed religious observances — that mankind having listened thereto shall be brought to follow in the right path and give glory unto god, (Agni.?)

***

1 / Devanampiya piyadasi Laja hevam aha. Duwadasa

2 / vasa abhisitename, dhammalipi likhapita 1 [The omission of the demonstrative pronoun iyam, this, which in the other tablets is united to dhammalipi, requires a different turn to the sentence, such as I have ventured to adopt in the translation: In the 12th year of his reign the raja had published an edict, which he now in the 27th considered in the light of a sin. His conversion to Buddhism then must have been effected in the interval, and we may thus venture a correction of 20 years in the date assigned to Piatissa's succession in Mr. Turnour's table, where he is made to come to the throne on the very year set down for the deputation of Mahinda and the priests from Asoka's court to convert the Ceylon court.] lokasa

3 / hitasukhaye 2: [I have placed the stop here because the following word, setam seemed to divide the sentence 'an edict was promulgated in the 12th year for the good of my subjects, so this having destroyed, or cancelled, I — ' setam seems compounded of sa employed conjunctively as in modern Hindi, and etam this.] setam apahaita 3, [Apahata [x] (is) abandoned: viz. the former dhammalipi setam (neuter) is perhaps used for [x] sa-iyam (feminine) so, that; or supplying the word [x] it may run in the neuter [x] and continuing [x] (Pali tam-tam) [x] this (being) as it were a sin according to dharma vardhi (my new religion, so), the expression being connected by tatpurusha samasa.] tamtam dhammavadhi papova

4 / hevam lokasa hetavakhati pativekhami 4. [The text has petavakhati, which may be either read hitavakhati (S. [x]) a description for the benefit; or hetu vakhati (S. [x]) 'description for the sake,' to wit [x] of mankind. 4. Pati vekhami (vakhami) S. [x] I now formally renounce, — the affix prati gives the sense of recantation from a former opinion.] Atha iyam 5:— [Lipi or katha understood to agree with iyam; atha iyam, may be rendered "furthermore."]

5 / natisu, 6 [Sanskrit, [x], among lords, companions, and lieges. The last word may also be read [x], among the sincere or faithful (adherents).] hevam patiyasannesu, hevam apakathesu

6 / kimankani sukham avahamiti 7; [Sanskrit, [x], 'how many pleasures I forego;' [x], 'and I altogether burn and destroy.'] tathacha vidahami; hemeva....

21 / anusasami 16. [[x] (sub. [x]) [x], 'at this time I have ordered sermons to be preached (or [x] to my sons? or [x] virtuous sermons) and I have established religious ordinances.'] Etam jane suta anupatipajisati 17 [[x] 'so that among men there shall be conformity and obedience.' It may be read [x], 'which the people having heard (shall obey), and I have preferred this latter reading because it gives a nominative to the verb.] agnim namisati 18. [The anomalous letter of the penultimate word seems to be a compound of gni and anuswara, [x] which would make the reading agnim namisati 'and shall give praise unto, Agni,' but no reason can be assigned for employing such a Mithraic name for the deity in a Buddhist document. A facsimile alone from the pillar can solve this difficulty, for we have here no other text to collate with the Feroz lat inscription. It is probably the same word which is illegible in the 19th line. The only other name beginning with [x] a, which can well be substituted, is [x] Aja, a name of Brahma, Vishnu or Siva, or in general terms, 'God.' Perhaps [x] Aja, 'illusion personified as Sakti—(Maya) may have more of a Buddhistic acceptation.]

-- Interpretation of the most ancient of the inscriptions on the pillar called the lat of Feroz Shah, near Delhi, and of the Allahabad, Radhia [Lauriya-Araraj (Radiah)] and Mattiah [Lauriya-Nandangarh (Mathia)] pillar, or lat, inscriptions which agree therewith, by James Prinsep, Sec. As. Soc. &c., 1837

However, Matteo Ricci's 1615 description of the sect of "sciequia or omitofo" (Shakya/Amitabha) and the corresponding Japanese teaching of "sotoqui" (Jap. hotoke, that is, buddhas) shows no trace of such a fundamental distinction between expedient and true teaching and exhibits little familiarity with Buddhism's "multitude of books" that, according to Ricci, "were either brought from the West or (which is more likely) composed in the Kingdom of China itself" (Ricci 1615:122). But the date of 65 C.E. from the preface of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, along with its tale of the transfer of this religion from India to China and of the translation of its texts, became fixtures in virtually all subsequent Western accounts. This sutra was thus, long before de Guignes's 1756 translation (see Chapter 4), instrumental in attaching a founder's name (Fo/Buddha), a place of origin (India), a date of the first transmission to China (65 CE.), a body of sacred scriptures including the sutra itself, and an eastward trajectory (from India to Siam, China, and Japan) for a large religion dominant in major parts of Asia. Ricci's account, as edited by Nicolas Trigault, was read all over Europe in schools and refectories and published in several languages. It was a work that opened up a whole new world for a surprisingly large public.

But after Ricci's death in 1610 and the publication of his view of Chinese religions by Trigault (1615), Ricci's critic Joao RODRIGUES (1561-1633) applied the distinction between exoteric and esoteric teachings more broadly to all three major religions of China and linked it to the ancient use of symbols in the Middle East and Egypt (see also Chapter I). Rodrigues's view of a common root of Asia's major religions and his conviction that all of them used symbols to hide the real content of their teaching from the general public were influential in several respects. Chinese "idolatry" was not an amorphous mass but consisted of several well-defined creeds, each with its sacred scriptures, doctrines, and particular history. But if one dug deep enough, their common root could be exposed. For Rodrigues this common root was lodged in Mesopotamia and associated with Zoroaster and the evil habit of the elites to mislead the common people by hiding the true doctrine under a coat of symbols. Mainly because of his opposition to Ricci-style missionary strategy, Rodrigues's writings were suppressed. Some of them got buried in archives and may still lie there; others were plagiarized by ideological opponents (for instance, Rodrigues's writings on Asian history and geography by Martino Martini) and then possibly destroyed; and much of the rest, especially Rodrigues's letters and reports, were noted in their time but forgotten by posterity. But overall, Rodrigues's writings are a splendid example of the influence of underground sources. His reports about Chinese religions were widely read by Jesuits and other orders and formed, as the basis of Niccolo Longobardi's treatise, a core argument of the opponents of the Jesuits in the Chinese Rites controversy. In this form they came to play a crucial but hitherto overlooked role in the downfall and prohibition of the Jesuit order in the eighteenth century.

The Buddha's Deathbed Confession

Rodrigues's ideas and scholarship burrowed their way into the minds of other missionaries. One of them was the Milanese Cristoforo BORRl (1583-1632) who lived in Saigon from 1610 to 1623. His report about Cochinchina, published in 1631, gave the distinction between the exoteric and esoteric teachings of Buddhism a fateful twist. He reported that Xaca had immediately after his enlightenment written books about the esoteric teaching:

Therefore returning home, he wrote several books and large volumes on this subject, entitling them, "Of Nothing;" wherein he taught that the things of this world, by reason of the duration and measure of time, are nothing; for though they had existence, said he, yet they would be nothing, nothing at present, and nothing in time to come, for the present being but a moment, was the same as nothing. (Pinkerton 1818:9.821)

He argued likewise about moral things, reducing everything to nothing. Then he gathered scholars, and the doctrine of nothing was spread all over the East. However, the Chinese were opposed to this doctrine and rejected it, whereupon Xaca "changed his mind, and retiring wrote several other great books, teaching that there was a real origin of all things, a lord of heaven, hell, immortality, and transmigration of souls from one body to another, better or worse, according to the merits or demerits of the person; though they do not forget to assign a son of heaven and hell for the souls of departed, expressing the whole metaphorically under the names of things corporeal, and of the joys and sufferings of this world" (pp. 821-82). While the Chinese gladly received the "external," modified teaching of Xaca, the teaching of nothing also survived, for instance, in Japan in the dominant "gensiu" (Jap. Zen-sha, Zen sect) (p. 822). According to Borri, it was exactly this acceptance in Japan that had the Buddha explain on his deathbed that the doctrine of nothingness was his true teaching:

The Japanese and others making so great account of this opinion of nothing, was the cause that when Xaca the author of it approached his death, calling together his disciples, he protested to them on the word of a dying man, that during the many years he had lived and studied, he had found nothing so true, nor any opinion so well grounded as was the sect of nothing; and though his second doctrine seemed to differ from it, yet they must look upon it as no contradiction or recantation, but rather a proof and confirmation of the first, though not in plain terms, yet by way of metaphors and parables, which might all be applied to the opinion of nothing, as would plainly appear by his books. (p. 822)

Of course, Borri's tale lacks all historical perspective and has the Buddha make decisions based on events (the introduction of Buddhism to China and Japan) that happened many centuries later. But for people who have no idea of the history of this religion, its attribution of motives to the founder must have sounded believable, and Borri's book was one of the early works on East Asia that was widely read and translated. This story, in my opinion, forms the kernel of the Buddha's "deathbed confession" tale. Borri appears to have spun it on the basis of information from Japan, from Rodrigues, and possibly also Vietnamese informants, in order to make sense of the different teachings of this religion whose founder is Xaca = Buddha. [???!!!] In the Cathechismus (sic) of Alexander de Rhodes, which was printed in Rome in 1651, the geographical references were removed, and the Story appeared in a more biographical form where not the Chinese but Buddha's immediate disciples rejected the original doctrine:

When he wanted to teach others this impious doctrine [of nothingness], so contrary to natural reason, they all abandoned him. Seeing this, he began, with the demons as his teachers, to teach another way filled with false stories in order to retain his disciples. He taught them the false doctrine of reincarnation, and at the same time taught the people the worship of idols, among whom he placed himself as their head, as if he were the creator and lord of heaven and earth .... Those who were more advanced in his impious doctrine were forbidden to divulge it to the public. ... As to his closest disciples, he led them to the abyss of atheism, holding that nothingness is the origin of all things, and that at death all things return to nothingness as to their ultimate end. (Phan 1998:250)

This tale soon mutated in an ominous way that again had its roots in early reports from Japan. Instead of first teaching about emptiness and subsequently "accommodating" Chinese or Indian sensibilities in a manner that resembles the Jesuit mission strategy, [???!!!] the founder of Buddhism was exposed as a liar and fraud who never told anyone about his nihilism and for forty-nine years preached an "exterior" doctrine he did not believe in. This resounded throughout Europe, thanks to the megaphone of Couplet's 1687 introduction to Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, and found its way into works such as Louis Daniel Lecomte's Nouveaux memoires sur l'etat present de la Chine (1696), Jean-Baptiste du Halde's Description de la Chine (1736), and scores of dictionaries, encyclopedias, travel accounts, and other books. Thus canonized, the Story presented the Buddha as a fraud, liar, and coward who needed to be prodded by the cold breath of death to reveal his nihilism and even then dared to do so only to his closest and dearest disciples. It combined elements from Jesuit letters and reports from Japan (particularly those regarding the Zen sect), Valignano's catechism, Rodrigues's reports, and Borri's and de Rhodes's tales and molded them into an easily understood deathbed confession story that not only exposed the founder's profound character flaw but also furnished a simple classification scheme for variants of his religion. The founder's disciples, so the story went, after his death formed two factions, an esoteric and an exoteric one. Soon a third faction that combined both teachings got added (App 2008a:29) and took care of whatever would not fit into the first two categories.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was especially the Treatise on Some Points of the Religion of the Chinese (written by Niccolo Longobardi in 1624-26) that created waves because it stood at the center of the Chinese Rites controversy. This internal Jesuit document, whose core consisted of Rodrigues's reports of the 1610s and 1620s, had been leaked and published in 1676 by the Dominican friar Domingo NAVARRETE(1618-89) and was read, among many other European intellectuals, by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (Leibniz 2002). Longobardi's treatise stated that the use of symbols "gave birth in all nations to two kinds of science: a true and secret one, and a false and public one" (Leibniz 2002:122). The first was only possessed by the learned and kept secret, while the second constituted "a false appearance of popular doctrine," a mirage that the people, attached as they are to the bark of words, "took for the true teaching" instead of recognizing it as a "gross shadow that disguises truth" (p. 122). Longobardi explained, following Rodrigues:

The three sects of the Chinese entirely follow this kind of philosophizing. They have two kinds of doctrine: a secret one that they regard as true and that only the learned understand and teach encoded in figures; and the vulgar one which is a figure of the first and is regarded by the learned as false in the natural meaning of the words. (p. 122)

Longobardi also followed Rodrigues's lead in putting the three great Chinese religions in the evil transmission line by declaring them to be forms of atheism going back to "Zoroaster, the magus and prince of the Chaldeans" (pp. 128, 141).

Even opponents of Rodrigues such as Martino MARTINI (1614-61), who In 1651 traveled to Europe to defend Ricci's approach, drew information about Chinese religions from Rodrigues. In the introduction to his Novus Atlas Sinensis of 1655, Martini described the sect of Shakyamuni as follows:

The second sect is the idolatric one, called Xekiao. This pest infected China shortly after Christ's birth. It admits metempsychosis. It is of two kinds; one is internal and the other external. The latter [external or exoteric kind] teaches the worship of idols, portrays the transmigration of souls after death as a punishment for sins, and continually abstains from [eating] anything that lives. It is a ridiculous law that is disapproved of even by the clergy of these sectarians who consider it necessary to keep the ignorant people away from vice and to incite them to be virtuous. The internal [teaching of] metempsychosis is excellent and one of the best parts of moral philosophy since it regards the passions, those depraved inclinations of the soul, as emptiness [vacuitatem] and aims at victory over them. As long as this [victory] is not obtained, so they believe, the souls of those dominated by such feelings continue to migrate in the bodies of brute animals. [The inner teaching] does not believe in any reward or punishment after death, just a void [vacuum]. It asserts that there is no truth in this life unless it can be touched and that good and evil are just different viewpoints. (Martini 1665:8)

Athanasius KIRCHER'S China Illustrata (1667) was even more instrumental in promoting the esoteric/exoteric divide. The chapter titled "Parallels Between Chinese, Japanese, and Tartar Idolatry" presented these two "manners" as the two main kinds of Japanese religion and confirms the divide's sixteenth-century Japanese mission roots and the close association of Zen with the esoteric doctrine. Kircher wrote:

Lest I seem to be asserting something only on my own authority, I will quote here some words of Fr. Ludwig Gusmann in his Spanish language account: There are many sects in Japan which have been, and still are, different from each other, but these can be reduced to two main ones. The first denies that there is any other life than that which we perceive with our senses and that there is any reward for good works or punishment for crimes which we do in the world except those we get while we live on the earth. Persons who profess this view are called Xenxus [Jap. Zen-shu, Zen sect] .... As regards those who believe in an afterlife, there are two principal sects, and from these have come an infinite number of others. (Kircher 1987:131)

Like Rodrigues and Borri, Kircher used this division as a tool to bring order into East Asia's idolatries[???]:

Since the Japanese have borrowed their idolatrous religion from the Chinese, they have as great a variety of sects as the Chinese. These can be summarized under two headings. The first of these is those who deny an afterlife and who believe that there is no future punishment or reward for good works or evil. They lead an Epicurean life. This sect is called Xenxus Gap. Zen-sha, Zen sect] .... The others, who believe in immortality of the soul and an afterlife, are similar to the Pythagoreans in their rites and ceremonies. Most of the Chinese sages follow this theory. They worship an idol by the name of Omyto, commonly called Amida. (p. 131)

This portrayal pitches, like the early Jesuit reports of 1551 mentioned above, the (esoteric) Zen adherents against the (exoteric) Pure Land worshipers of Amida and is thus an example of a practice that even today is rampant in academia, namely, the projection of Japanese distinctions on China.

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Part 2 of 3

Couplet's Atheist Contemplators

Two decades after Kircher, Philippe COUPLET (1623-1693) presented in the introduction to Confucius Sinarum Philosophus rather detailed information about Fo (whom he also calls Xe kia and Xaca) and Fo's religion. It is found in the introductory exposition that contains a very influential discussion of the content of Fo's doctrine (Couplet 1687:xxvii-xxix) that formed the focus of very detailed reviews in the most widely read European review journals. Couplet's views thus reached a surprisingly broad international readership. Major elements of it were cited, for example, in Bayle's famous "Spinoza" article of the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1702, vol. 3) -- a main source of Diderot's article "Asiatiques" in the first volume of the Encyclopedie (1751). Couplet's portrayal3 is a summary of Jesuit learning on the subject and forms a hinge between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century information (mainly from Japan, China, and Vietnam) and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the items of information that stunned Europeans was the sheer size of the religion of Fo and of its sacred literature. According to Couplet, Fo was born in central India in 1026 B.C.E., preached for forty-nine years, and gained as many as 80,000 disciples. Couplet's list of clergy appellations from various countries suggests a gigantic area that includes Japan, China, Tartary, and Siam and a sacred literature amounting to 15,000 volumes (pp. xxix-xxx).

In the second half of the seventeenth century, stories of "expedient means" and of a "true" teaching hidden from the masses had already coagulated into the above-mentioned attractive narrative about the last teachings of Shakyamuni that was ceaselessly repeated. The version contained in Couplet's Confucius Sinarum Philosophus of 1687 was seminal. Pierre Bayle cited it, based on an extensive book review, in his article on Spinoza. This entry is one of the most widely read and discussed articles ever to appear in a dictionary. Bayle's readers learned, among other interesting things, that Foe Kiao (Ch. Fojiao, Buddhism) was established in China in the year 65 C.E. by royal authority and that its founder, Xe kia (Shakya), the son of an Indian king, had revealed his true teaching only shortly before his death:

Having retired to the desert at the age of 19 and having put himself under the guidance of four gymnosophists to learn philosophy from them, he stayed under their tutelage until age 30 when, one day before dawn he contemplated the planet Venus, and this simple view suddenly gave him perfect knowledge of the first principle. Full of divine inspiration, or rather of pride and folly, he began to instruct people, had himself regarded as a God, and attracted as many as 80,000 disciples .... At the age of 79 years, when he felt close to death, he declared to his disciples that, during the forty years of his preaching, he had not told them the truth; that he had kept it hidden under the veil of metaphors and figures, but that it was now time to tell it to them. It is, said he, that there is nothing to seek and nothing to pin one's hopes on, just emptiness [le vuide] and nothingness [le neant], which is the first principle of all things. (Bayle 1702:2769, article "Spinoza")

The account of the Buddha's deathbed confession to his closest disciples (in which he called his earlier teachings untrue and only metaphorical) was used by Couplet as an introduction to his discussion of the "famous distinction of his doctrine into an exterior and interior one" (Couplet 1687:xxix). The exterior doctrine is compared to the wooden scaffolding used for building an arch: though useful for the purpose of construction, it becomes useless and is removed as soon as the edifice is completed (p. xxx). According to Couplet, this doctrine has the following content:

The main tenets [summa] of the exterior or provisional doctrine [supposititiae doctrinae] are that there is a real difference between good and evil, justice and injustice; that there is a future state with recompense and punishment and places for this; that happiness can be obtained by 32 figures and 80 qualities; that Fo or Xaca is a deity [numen] and the savior of mortals; that he was born for their sake out of compassion for their aberration from the way of salvation [via salutis]; that he has atoned for their sins; and that through his expiation they will attain salvation and rebirth in a happier world[!!!] (pp. xxx-xxxi)

Couplet also mentions the five Buddhist precepts (no killing of living things, no theft, etc.) and six good works (donations to monks, etc.), as well as transmigration via six realms into innumerable forms, and so forth. Such features of the exterior doctrine tended to be augmented and elaborated by subsequent authors; for example, Diderot (1751:1.753-54) listed a total of fourteen points that were in part also drawn from more recent sources such as Engelbert Kaempfer's description of Japanese Buddhism (1729; see here below). The full acceptance by 1750 of the two-fold doctrine view is confirmed by this statement of Diderot:

The Indians and the Chinese unanimously attest that this impostor had two sorts of doctrines: one designed for the people and the other a secret one that he only revealed to a few of his disciples. Le Comte, la Loubere, Bernier, and especially Kaempfer have notably informed us of the first which is called exoteric. (p. 753)

Diderot's account of the interior doctrine (1751:754), by contrast, differs so little from the one furnished by Couplet six decades earlier that it is a good summary of Couplet's view. Diderot described its essential points as follows:

I. Emptiness [le vuide] is the principle and end of all things.

2. It is where all humans have their origin and what they return to after death.

3. Everything that exists comes from this principle and returns to it after death; it is this principle that constitutes our soul and all elements. Therefore, all living, thinking, and feeling beings, regardless of their differences of capacities or shape, are neither different in essence nor distinct from their principle.

4. This principle is universal, admirable, pure, limpid, subtle, infinite; it can neither be born nor die nor dissolve.

5. This principle has neither virtue nor understanding [entendement] nor power nor any other similar attribute.

6. Its essence is to do nothing, think nothing, desire nothing.

7. He who wants to lead an innocent and happy life must make all efforts to become similar to his principle; that is, he must master or rather extinguish all his passions so that he will not be troubled or unsettled by anything.

8. He who attains this point of perfection will be absorbed in sublime contemplations without any use of his faculty of understanding, and he will enjoy the kind of divine repose that forms the apex of happiness.

9. When one reaches knowledge of this sublime doctrine, one must let others keep the exoteric4 doctrine, or at least adopt it just for show. (Diderot 1751:754)5

We have seen that most of these points are firmly rooted in sixteenth-century missionary accounts of Japanese Buddhist doctrine where they were usually linked to the teachings of the Zen sect. This genealogy shows not only how important and long-lived the first impressions from Japan were but also how old information from the missions was instrumental in shaping more recent, secular sources (such as Kaempfer) that later found its way into eighteenth-century encyclopedias such as Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, which prided themselves for their critical review of source materials, their secular perspective, and their accuracy.

The Specter of Spinozism

Couplet's digest of the esoteric doctrine of Fo evoked an echo in Europe whose amplitude cannot be understood without taking into account the theological and philosophical climate of the late seventeenth century that Paul Hazard (1961) labeled "the crisis of European conscience." Here we glance only at a single aspect of this "crisis," namely, the early reception of Spinoza's thought and its role in publicizing what was portrayed as the Buddha's "inner" doctrine. Since Spinoza's writings were still insufficiently known, the term "Spinozism" will be used to designate Spinoza's philosophy as it was perceived at the time. To my knowledge, the Swiss theologian and publicist Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736) was the first European to see a link between Spinozism and Fo's esoteric doctrine. In his extensive review of Confucius sinarum philosophus in the widely read Bibliotheque universekke et historique (1688) he boiled this doctrine down to three points:

The inner doctrine -- which one never divulges to ordinary people because of the need, as these philosophers say, to oblige them to stick to their duty through the fear of hell and similar stories -- is indeed, according to them, the solid and genuine one. It consists in establishing as the principle and end of all things a certain emptiness [vuide] and a real nothingness [neant reel]. They say that [1] our first parents have come from this emptiness and return to it after death, and that the same applies to all humans: all dissolve into this principle at death; [2] that we along with all elements and creatures form part of this emptiness; [3] that therefore only a single and same substance exists which differs in individual beings only by virtue of the qualities or the interior configuration, like water that always remains water regardless of its form as snow, hail, rain, or ice. (Le Clerc 1788:348-9)

Immediately after this interesting summary, Le Clerc advises "those who would like to find out more about the philosophy of the Indians and the Chinese, which is not very different from the system of the Spinozists, if one can say that they have one" to inform themselves in the travel account of Bernier (p. 349). Le Clerc thus first triangulated the Buddha's "inner" doctrine with the information supplied by Prince Dara's pandit (as found in Bernier) and Spinozism. Since Spinozism was at the time equivalent to atheism and sympathizers risked their jobs or even their lives, this was an explosive charge. The origin and significance of this link would lead too deep into issues connected with the history of philosophy and will be discussed elsewhere, but in our immediate context it is of interest to note that replacing this "emptiness" by Spinoza's "substance" and "qualities or configuration" by "modification" suffices to arrive at Le Clerc's conclusion that the Buddha's inner doctrine is "not very different" from Spinozism. This line of argument was taken up and amplified by Bayle in the famous "Spinoza" and "Japan" articles of his Dictionnaire (1702). Thus the "inner" teaching of Buddhism with its Japanese Zen roots, the Sufi-Vedanta-Neoplatonic amalgam of Prince Dara as reported by Bernier, and the Spinozism that frightened Europe's churchgoers and theologians entered into a fateful alliance with tremendous repercussions. All of a sudden, much of Asia from Persia and India to China and Japan appeared as a gigantic motherland of atheism, and the philosophies of India and China became relevant to the burning questions and controversies of Europe. Bayle denounced the Buddha's teaching of a single substance with manifold configurations (Bayle 1702:3.2769; Couplet 1687:xxxi) and called it more absurd than Spinoza's philosophy:

If it is monstrous to assert that plants, beasts, and men are really the same thing, and to ground such an opinion on the pretension that all particular beings are not distinct from their principle, it is even more monstrous to utter that this principle has no thought, no power, and no virtue at all. Yet this is what these philosophers say when they place the supreme perfection of that principle in its inaction and absolute repose. . . . Spinoza was not so absurd: the unitary substance admitted by him is always acting, always thinking; and not even his most general abstractions could enable him to divest it of action and thought. (Bayle 1702:3.2769)

Couplet shocked his European readers by asserting that this extremely widespread and ancient esoteric doctrine firmly rejects central Christian doctrines such as divine providence, a future state with reward and punishment, and an immortal soul and thus has also no place for a savior (1687:xxxii). Instead it advocates reaching happiness by "chimerical contemplations," and according to Couplet, it even formed a sect for this purpose. He calls this sect Vu guei Kiao, the sect of nonaction [nihil agentium secta]."6 Founded about the year 290 C.E., this sect is said to be similar to the Indian gymnosophists (p. xxxii). In China it became so successful that even some of the most eminent men of the empire "adopted this insanity" and habitually "spent several hours without any movement of body and mind," declaring that such insensibility made them happier (pp. xxxii-xxxiii). As an illustration Couplet mentions the case of the twenty-eighth successor of Xaca, a man called Ta mo (Ch. Damo, Bodhidharma) who spent "a total of nine years facing a wall" and during the entire time "did nothing other than contemplate this chimerical principle of his, emptiness and nothingness [vacuum & nihil]" (p. xxxiii). For Couplet this "sect of the contemplators [contemplantium Secta]" was "engulfed in the most profound atheism" (p. xxxiii); but Bayle, who quoted some of Couplet's explanations and called it "the sect of idlers or do-nothings [la secte des oiseux ou des faineans]," wondered whether its doctrine of nothingness was correctly described. If these illustrious men of China really believed that "the nearer a man comes to the nature of tree trunk or a stone, the greater his progress and the more he is like the first principle into which he is to return," how did they conceive this principle of nothingness?

I tend to believe that either one does not correctly express what these people understand by Cum hiu [Ch. kongxu, emptiness] or that their ideas are contradictory. Some would have these Chinese words signify emptiness and nothingness [vuide & neant, vacuum & inane] and have fought against this sect pretending that nothingness [le neant] is the principle of all beings. I cannot persuade myself that this captures the exact sense of the word nothingness, and I imagine that it means something like when people say that there is nothing in an empty suitcase . . . . I believe that by that word they meant more or less what the moderns call space [espace]. (Bayle 1702:3.2770)

Couplet's link of this originally Indian "interior" doctrine to a popular "sect of contemplators" in China and to Indian gymnosophists was much noted and cited, starting with Le Clerc (1688) and Bernier (1688). Was Ta mo [Bodhidharma], the twenty-eighth successor of the Indian founder of the esoteric doctrine, the transmitter of this Indian doctrine to China? And what texts were associated with this transmission? For Diderot, writing fifty years after Bayle, this esoteric teaching of the "Budda or Xekia" was not transmitted via texts but rather, as in the Buddha's deathbed confession scene, by word of mouth to a select few. If in China this Indian system had formed the basis of a famous sect of contemplators, so Diderot thought, it was "very likely" that in Japan it also "gave birth to a famous sect" (Diderot 1751:754). He was thinking of the Japanese Zen sect described by Engelbert Kaempfer:

It teaches that there is only one principle of all things; that this principle is bright and luminous, incapable of accretion or diminution, without form, sovereign and perfect, wise, but without reason or intelligence resting in perfect inaction and supremely tranquil like a man whose attention is fixed on one thing without thinking of anything else. They also say that this principle is in all particular beings and communicates its essence in such a manner that they form the same thing with it and dissolve in it when they are destroyed. (p. 754)

By the mid-eighteenth century a vision of a twofold pan-Asian religious movement was thus well established. Much of the information about its doctrine -- which purportedly represented the teachings of Fo alias Xaca alias Xekia alias Budda -- was based on data and legends reported from Japan and China by Jesuit missionaries. Its inner doctrine was associated with sects of "contemplators" in both countries and linked to the deathbed instruction of an Indian founder figure (Fo, Shaka, Buddha) and to transmitter figures who in the first centuries of the common era brought this teaching from India to China (the Chinese ambassadors with the Forty-Two Sections Sutra; Bodhidharma). But the connection with Spinozism was not the only booster hurling Asia's "inner" doctrine into European consciousness. A second booster was its association with quietism, which was one more hot-button theme of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theology, and a third the link with the Kabbala.

Bernier's Asian Mysticism

Kircher's China Illustrata (1667) chapter on "The Ridiculous Brahmin Religion and the Teachings About the Origin of Man" begins with the statement that "the brahmins take their origin according to the Indian writers from Cechian or Xaca" and ends with a passage that soon acquired fame throughout Europe as the essence of the Indian theory of creation:

They say that a spider is the first cause, and he created the world by spinning a web with the threads coming from his stomach. Then he formed the heavenly spheres and he rules everything until the end of the world, which he will cause by pulling back into himself all of the threads in his web. (Kircher 1987:145)

Figure 5. Kircher's Indo-Japanese divinities: Dainichi/Brahma (left) and Amida (right).

Kircher collected information about Asian religions from diverse sources, but the input of his fellow Jesuit Heinrich ROTH (1620-68), a native of Augsburg and longtime resident of India, was crucial. Roth was one of the European missionaries who studied Sanskrit long before the British colonialists, and Kircher claimed that Roth "took these doctrines mainly from their arcane books" (p. 147). Some of these doctrines sounded rather familiar to those who had read about Fo's esoteric doctrine:

They say the universal is the nature of that supreme being itself. The particular is nature divided by particles into the variety of things. From this they conclude that there can be no generic or specific distinction of created things, but that everything is one and the same being. The natural universe is distinguished by particles, some of which may take the figure of a man, others a rock, and yet others a tree, and so on. They say that the matter worn by these particles is only a deception. (p. 148)

But Kircher's explanations were imbedded in such a plethora of disjointed facts and arguments that many readers may have remembered little more than the central narrative of an impostor called Xaca whose Brahmin missionaries spread from their base in India and eventually infected the whole of Asia with their pestilent idolatry.

In the year 1667 when Kircher's China Illustrata was published, another acquaintance of Fr. Roth, the French medical doctor and philosopher Francois BERNIER(1620-88) sent a long letter from Persia to Paris about "the superstitions, strange customs, and doctrines of the Indous or Gentiles of Hindoustan." Four years later, when this letter appeared in print as part of his Travels in the Mogul Empire,7 Bernier was already a man whose fame reached far beyond the frontiers of his native France. From 1654 he had traveled in Asia, first in Palestine and Syria, then in Egypt, and he subsequently sojourned for no less than eight years in India (1659-67). After his 1659 arrival in Surat during the succession struggles of the sons of the Mogul rulers Shah Jahan, he was for a short time the medical doctor of the crown prince, Mohammed Dara Shikoh (1615-59), the very man who commissioned and supervised in 1657 the Persian Upanishad translation whose Latin rendering Anquetil-Duperron was to publish under the title of Oupnek'hat in 1801 (see Chapter 7). After Prince Dara's execution (1659), Bernier worked at the court of a rich Indian named Daneshmend-khan and spent several years with one of India's most excellent scholars who had played a central role in Prince Dara's Upanishad translation project. Bernier reported,

My Agah [lord], Danechmend-kan, partly from my solicitation and partly to gratify his own curiosity, took into his service one of the most celebrated Pendets in all the Indies, who had formerly belonged to the household of Dara, the eldest son of the King Chah-Jehan; and not only was this man my constant companion during a period of three years, but he also introduced me to the society of other learned Pendets, whom he attracted to the house. (Bernier 2005:324)

Prince Dara had been interested in Sufi mysticism since his youth and had authored several books about this subject (App 2007). For him the Upanishads represented the esoteric essence of the Vedas, and he argued that a Koran passage mentioning a "hidden book that none but the purified can grasp" (Quran 56:78) referred to the Upanishads. They represent God's original revelation as transmitted to initiates, which is why Dara gave his translation the title Sirr-i akbar, that is, the Great Secret.8 Prince Dara's (and Bernier's) pandit, who had been instrumental in explaining this secret to Dara, was versed both in Sufism and Indian philosophy and spoke Persian. Bernier's Persian was so good that he could translate philosophical texts by Rene Descartes and Pierre Gassendi into that language. Though unable to read Sanskrit, he thus found himself in the enviable position of receiving first-hand information about the secret doctrine of the yogis and Sufis from one of the most learned Indians"

The trance, and the means of enjoying it, form the grand Mysticism of the sect of the Jauguis [Yogis], as well as that of the Soufys. I call it Mysticism [Mystere], because they keep these things secret among themselves, and I should not have made so many discoveries had it not been for the aid of the Pendet, or Indou Doctor whom Danechmend-kan kept in his pay, and who dared not conceal anything from his patron; my Agah, moreover, was already acquainted with the doctrines of the Soufys. (Bernier 2005:320)

Europeans suspicious of the reports by missionaries and by uneducated travelers were understandably delighted to get more trustworthy and objective information from Bernier, the learned disciple of the philosopher Gassendi. To judge by the number of Bernier quotations and references in other books, it is clear that the data from Prince Dara's pandit elicited pronounced interest among European readers. In particular, the spider allegory that is mentioned in the Upanishads was frequently cited and is an example of the influence of native informants. Bernier wrote about "the secret of a grand cabal that has lately made great noise in Hindustan because certain pandits or Gentile doctors have used it to infect the minds of Dara and Sultan Sujah, the two elder sons of [Moghul emperor] Shah Jahan" (Bernier 1699:2.163). What kind of infection was this? It was the doctrine of "a world-soul, of which they want our souls and those of animals to be part" (p. 163). Bernier calls this "the almost universal doctrine of the Gentile Pendets of the Indies" and regards it as "the same doctrine which is held by the sect of the Soufys and the greater part of the learned men of Persia at the present day" (Bernier 2005:346).

[They] pretend that God, or that supreme being whom they call Achar (immoveable, unchangeable), has not only produced life from his own substance, but also generally everything material or corporeal in the universe, and that this production is not formed simply after the manner of efficient causes, but as a spider which produces a web from its own navel, and withdraws it at pleasure. The Creation then, say these visionary doctors, is nothing more than an extraction or extension of the individual substance of God, of those filaments which He draws from his own bowels; and, in like manner, destruction is merely the recalling of that divine substance and filaments into Himself. (p. 347)

Individual beings are thus not real, and "the whole world is, as it were, an illusory dream, inasmuch as all that variety which appears to our outward senses is but one only and the same thing, which is God Himself" (p. 347).

But apart from a Persian Sufi book entitled "Goul-tchen-raz, or Garden of Mysteries,"9 Bernier could not name any textual sources containing this doctrine. The "extremely old" Indian Beths (Vedas) in "four sacred books" that according to the Indians were "given to them by God," and the Purane, which Bernier portrays as "an abridgment and interpretation of the Beds" (p. 335), were not available to him. He describes the Vedas as being "of great bulk" and "so scarce that my Agah, notwithstanding all his diligence, has not succeeded in purchasing a copy" (pp. 335-36). In this respect Bernier was dependent on Prince Dara's pandit and on Fr. Roth whose explanations were prominently featured in Kircher's China illustrata.

In the early progress of researches into Indian literature, it was doubted whether the Vedas were extant; or, if portions of them were still preserved, whether any person, however learned in other respects, might be capable of understanding their obsolete dialect. It was believed too, that, if a Brahmana really possessed the Indian scriptures, his religious prejudices would nevertheless prevent his imparting the holy knowledge to any but a regenerate Hindu. These notions, supported by popular tales, were cherished long after the Vedas had been communicated to Dara Shucoh [Shikoh], and parts of them translated into the Persian language by him, or for his use. [Extracts have also been translated into the Hindi language; but it does not appear upon what occasion this version into the vulgar dialect was made.] The doubts were not finally abandoned, until Colonel Polier obtained from Jeyepur a transcript of what purported to be a complete copy of the Vedas, and which he deposited in the British Museum. About the same time Sir Robert Chambers collected at Benares numerous fragments of the Indian scripture: General Martine: at a later period, obtained copies of some parts of it; and Sir William Jones was successful in procuring valuable portions of the Vedas, and in translating several curious passages from one of them. [See Preface to Menu, page vi. and the Works of Sir William Jones, vol. vi.] I have been still more fortunate in collecting at Benares the text and commentary of a large portion of these celebrated books; and, without waiting to examine them more completely than has been yet practicable, I shall here attempt to give a brief explanation of what they chiefly contain.

-- Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus, by Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Esq.

Bernier rarely mentions regions of Asia to the east of India; but in 1688, shortly before his death, he read Couplet's Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687) and published a paper about the "Quietism of the Indies." In it he connects his Indian Yogis and Fakirs with Couplet's Chinese sect of contemplators and furnishes the following explanation of the "mystery of the cabal" that he had written about two decades earlier:

Among the different Fakirs or idolatrous religious men of the Indies, there are some that are commonly called yogis which is something like saints, illumined ones, perfect ones, or men who are perfectly united with the sovereign Being, the first and general Principle of all things .... Above all they are engulfed in contemplation, and I say engulfed because they push themselves so much into it that they reportedly spend hours in ecstasy. Their outer senses seem without any activity, and they pretend to see the sovereign Being as a very bright and inexplicable light, with an inexpressible joy and satisfaction followed by contempt and complete detachment from the world. (Bernier 1688:47-48).

Bernier's explanations indicate that he regarded the doctrine of Sufis, Indian Yogis, and Fakirs as largely identical with that of Couplet's sect of contemplators:

Their ancient books teach that this first principle of things is very admirable; that it is something very pure, in their own words, and very clear and subtle; that it is infinite; that it cannot be created [engendre] nor corrupted; that it is the perfection of all things, sovereign perfection; and, what needs to be noted, [that it is] in perfect repose and absolute inaction-in a word, in perfect quietism. (p. 48)

As in the familiar descriptions of the esoteric teaching of Shaka/Fo, this first principle is said to be without any action and understanding and so on. Perfection consists in becoming exactly like this principle through "continuous contemplation and victory over oneself" (p. 49). Once all human passions are extinct, there is no more torment, and "in the manner of an ecstatic, one is completely absorbed in profound contemplation" and achieves "divine repose or quietism, the happiest state to be hoped for" (p. 49). It is only logical that the Buddhist "bonzes" and the Wuwei jiao ("secta nihil agentium" or sect of do-nothings) of Couplet's preface are thus presented as the Far Eastern cousins of Bernier's Yogis and Fakirs. Bernier mentions Couplet's Ta-mo (Bodhidharma) -- who brought this teaching from India to China and "looked at a wall for nine whole years" -- as a perfect example of this "mental illness" (p. 50). However, this "illness" is found not only in Asia but also, though with less extravagance, in the West: for Bernier, all quietism is characterized by "this abyss of contemplation, this great inaction, this great union of our soul with God," whether it is professed by the Spanish divine Miguel de MOLINOS (1628-97), by the Sufis of Persia, or by "the Joguis of the Indies, the Bonzes of China, or the Talapois of Siam" (pp. 50-51).

In Bernier's reflections on quietism, we see the outlines of a mysticism that transcends East and West. It is likely that in this respect Bernier was inspired by Prince Dara via his pandit, which once more points to the crucial role of native informers in the genesis of modern Orientalism. But contrary to their exalted idea of universal esotericism, Bernier regarded the "quietisms" of East and West as similarly suspect. Though it "might be more a case of exaggerated devotion and of extravagance," he wrote, the idea of a world soul "approaches atheism" because it envisions "a corporal God, and therefore a divisible and corruptible one" (Bernier 1688:51). But Bernier's critique was instrumental in connecting the "inner teaching" of Fo/Shaka with the practices of Sufism and Indian ascetics and putting a pan-Asian "quietism" with Indian roots on the map. At the end of his life, Bernier used Couplet's presentation of Fo's "inner teaching" to characterize Indian Yogis and Sufi mystics, yet he remained unable to furnish any textual evidence from India other than what was decades ago included in the books of Henry Lord (1630) and Abraham Roger (1651).

Both in Diderot's article on "the philosophy of the Asians in general" and in that on the "Brahmins" Bernier plays a central role. The first cites Bernier's entire passage about emanation with the spider allegory (Diderot 1751:1.752) and identifies it not only with the teaching of "Persian Sufis whom he [Bernier] names cabalistes" but also with "the doctrine of the Pendets, heathen of the Indies" (p. 753) and "the doctrine of Xekia" whose esoteric teaching of "the origin of things through emanations from a first cause" also influenced Jewish kabbalists and their idea of "En-soph or the first infinite being which contains all things" and "distributes itself through emanation" (p. 754).

Burnet's Sapientia Orientalis


Figure 6. The earth formation cycle of Burnet (1684)

In 1792, barely four years after Bernier's seminal paper on quietism, a much-cited book with the intriguing title Archaeologicae philosophicae: sive Doctrina antiqua de rerum originibus appeared in England. Its author, Thomas BURNET (1635-1715), was famous for having written one of the great books about origins, namely, The Sacred Theory of the Earth (Telluris theoria sacra, 1680). In the Sacred Theory he proposed a stunning theory of earth formation that attempted to bridge his interpretation of the Bible's creation Story and scientific knowledge. See Figure 6. Burnet explained in detail how our globe first coagulated from a mass of chaotic particles of matter into the shape of an egg, how it then gained a perfect spherical form, how a crust completely free of irregularities hardened on this structure, and how this crust was gradually baked by the action of the sun. He described the result of this process as follows:

This smooth, perfect surface, over which the air was perennially calm, serene, and free of those disordinate movements that are caused by winds and the existence of mountains, coincides -- all of it -- with the terrestrial paradise. This world was an inhabited world, for antediluvian humanity lived in it in simplicity, purity, and innocence. (trans. Rossi 1987:34-45)

Noah's flood played a central role in Burnet's theory since it completely changed the face of the earth and turned the ubiquitous paradise into the earth as we know it: a globe with seas, mountains, and valleys -- "the image or picture of a great Ruine" and "a World lying in its rubbish" (Burnet 1694:193).10

If the Sacred Theory had tried to reconstruct the earth's golden age before the deluge by investigating the results of the deluge-for example, geological fallout or "rubbish" like mountains-Burnet's Philosophical Archaeology of 1692 attempted an analogous feat, namely, the reconstruction of the wisdom of paradise through the study of its vestiges in the religions and philosophies of the world. As a disciple of Ralph Cudworth, the author of The True Intellectual System of the Universe (J678), who had detected monotheism in just about any religion of the world (including atheism), Burnet was well informed about Egypt and the religions of European antiquity. He was dissatisfied with attempts (such as the one by Pierre-Daniel Huet) to regard all ancient religions as Bible rip offs; yet he also opposed the opinion that the religions of such countries as Egypt and India had arisen without any outside influence. Instead, Burnet opted for a common source of all ancient religions and philosophies and an orderly transmission process:

When we abandon these prejudices we must go back farther to search for the origin of barbaric philosophy. Farther than Moses and farther than Abraham: to the Flood and to Noah, the common father of the Jews and the Gentiles .... Why not believe that from this source, from this original man have descended to posterity, that is to say, to postdiluvian man, those principles of theology and philosophy that can be found among antico-barbarian peoples? (trans. Rossi 1987:39)

Since the "origin and seat of ancient wisdom" had to be traced back to "Noah's bosom, and from there to his sons and their descendants" (Burnet 1694:296), for Burnet "barbaric philosophy" had to form part of ur-wisdom and play a prominent role in his philosophical archaeology. According to him, remnants of such wisdom can be detected not only with the "Indians under whose name several ancient peoples are confusedly comprehended" (p. 297) but also with the Scyths in the North, the Celts and their druids in the West (p. 298), and the Egyptians and Ethiopian gymnosophistae in the South (p. 300). But the religious vestiges of the Indies attracted Burnet's particular interest because "it was there that the postdiluvial men had their first seat and that the origins of mankind's wisdom and writing must be sought" (p. 302). This interest is also apparent in an appendix to Burnet's philosophical archaeology entitled De Brachmanis hodiernis apud Indos, eorumque dogmatibus ("On today's Brachmans in the Indies and their doctrines"), pp. 471-74.

One year after its first publication (1692), this appendix already appeared in an English translation by Charles Blount that publicized Burnet's argument that the modern Brachmins "descended from the ancient Race" as well as Burnet's view of the transmission of Noah's religion to various parts of Asia:

Under the name of Indies, we here comprehend, besides the Chineze Empire, and Kingdom of Indostan, or Dominion of the Great Mogul, the Kingdoms of Siam, of the Malabars, of Cochinchina, of Coromandel, and whatever others are known to us in the East, that have in some measure shaken off their Barbarity. Now in each of these are a certain sort of Philosophers or Divines, and in the Kingdoms of Indostan, Siam and the other adjacent Parts, there are some who seem to be the Progeny of the ancient Brachmins, being different and distinguished from the rest of the People by their Manner and Way of Living, as well as by a Doctrin and Language wholly peculiar to themselves. (trans. Blount 1693:78)

These descendants of the ancient Brachmins are said to have "a certain Cabala, or Body of Learning," that is, a secret doctrine transmitted "from one to the other" that treats "of God, of the World, of the Beginning and Ending of Things, of the Periods of the World, of the Primitive State of Nature, together with its repeated Renovations" (trans. Blount 1693:78).

Focusing on "the Mogul's Kingdom call'd Indostan" that is "extremely large," Burnet honed in on its "Tribe or Order of Men, who bear the Title, and perform the Offices of Sages, Priests or Philosophers" (p. 79):

They have a Language peculiar to themselves, which they call Hanscrit, or the pure Tongue; in this Language they have some very ancient Books, which they call Sacred, and say were given by God to the Great Prophet Brahma; as formerly the Law of the Israelites was to Moses. Athan. Kircher gives you an Alphabet of this Brachmins Language, written by the Hand of Father Henry Roth, who for several Years in the Indies apply'd himself to the learning of Brachmins. And in this they not only write and conceal their Divinity, but also their Opinions in Philosophy of all Kinds: besides the metempsychosis, and the epoche empsychon, which are Opinions of a very ancient Date. (Burnet 1694:471-72; trans. Blount 1693:79-80)

The descendants of the ancient Brachmins in India and the surrounding Asian countries have a striking resemblance to Egyptian priests: like their Egyptian counterparts who encoded and concealed their monotheist doctrine in hieroglyphs, the Brachmins "conceal their Divinity" in a tightly guarded secret language (Sanscrit, or in Burnet's spelling Hanscrit). Furthermore, both clergies have particular doctrines regarding the soul and its transmigration- which form the core teachings associated by Burnet with the "oriental doctrine." But as an attentive reader of Kircher and Bernier, Burnet was also familiar with a second ancient, secret teaching of the Brachmins about the origin and the end of the world: "They likewise Philosophize after the manner of the Ancients, upon the Creation of the Universe, together with its end and Destruction; for they explain these Things by the Efflux or Emanation of all things from God, and by their Reflux or Restoration into him again: But this they propound in a Cabalistical Mythological way" (trans. Blount 1693:80). Burnet here refers to the allegory of the spider and its cosmic web as reported in Kircher and Bernier:

For they feign a certain immense Spider to be the first Cause of all Things, and that she, with the Matter she exhausted out of her own Bowels, spun the Web of this whole Universe, and then disposed of it with a most wonderful Art: whilst she herself in the mean time sitting on the Top of her Work, feels, rules and governs the Motion of each part. At last, when she has sufficiently pleas'd and diverted her self in adorning and contemplating her own Web, she retracts the Threads she had unfolded, and swallows them up again into her self; whereby the whole Nature of Things created vanishes into nothing. (p. 80)

Noting that -- provided that "taking off the fabulous Shell, we go to the Kernel" -- this idea of emanation from and return to One does not differ much from the opinions of other ancients, Burnet encourages his readers to find out more about this "in Henry Lord, F Bernier, and other Travellers, who have more diligently enquired into their Literature" (pp. 80-81). He also adduces the ideas of "Siamese Brachmins" about the end of the world through fire from Guy Tachard's Relation of the voyage to Siam (1687h688) and notes their agreement with his theory:

Tis really a most wonderful thing that a Nation half barbarous should have retained these Opinions from the very times of Noah: for they could not have arrived to a Knowledge of these things any other way, than by Tradition; nor could this Tradition Bow from any other Spring, than Noah, and the Antediluvian Sages. (Burnet 1694:473; trans. Blount 1693:82)

Burnet identified several additional features of ancient oriental wisdom in the book of Abraham Roger (1651) and claimed that they confirm his theory:

Now they affirm that there are several Worlds which do at one and the same time exist in divers Regions of the Universe: and that there are several successive ones; for that the same World is destroyed and renewed again according to certain Periods of Time. They say also that our Terrestrial World began by a certain Golden Age, and will perish by Fire. Lastly, they retain the Doctrin of the Ovum Mundanum comparing the World to an Egg; as did the ancients both Greeks and Barbarians. (Burnet 1694:473; trans. Blount 1693:83)

In China Burnet found a similar comparison of the world to an egg, but he doubted that the Chinese "derived their Philosophy of History from the Brachmins" even though they reportedly value Indian letters highly, regard the Indian's "secret Alphabet" as sacred and extremely ancient, and use it "to inscribe them on their idols" (trans. Blount 1693:84). However, Burnet lamented that much of the old glory of Asia was only found in secret teachings and ancient texts. Though "by Tradition from their Ancestours" there remain "some Footsteps of the most ancient Tenents" among Asia's "Modern Pagans," Burnet could not but "pitty the Eastern World" and lament that "the place which was the first habitation of wise men, and one day a most flourishing Emporium for Learning should for some ages past have been changed into a wretched Barbarity," leading him to pray to God that Europe "may not undergo the same Vicissitude" (pp. 85-86).

Essential facets of Burnet's notion of Oriental wisdom (sapientia orientalis) are the distinction of exoteric and esoteric knowledge and the use of a sacred language (in India: Sanskrit) for the latter; the progression from a golden age to degeneration and regeneration; emanation from oneness to multiplicity and the return of multiplicity to oneness; ancient revelation and its transmission; the notion of a world egg and cycles of creation and destruction of multiple worlds; and the idea of a world soul and of metempsychosis. In his view, the vestiges of this sapientia orientalis could serve as signposts for the reconstruction of antediluvial or early postdiluvial religion, an idea that reverberated in the writings of various eighteenth-century authors from John Toland and Andrew Ramsay to William Jones and Thomas Maurice.

Among the authors who amply quoted Burnet's Philosophical Archaeology were also Pierre Bayle and Johann Jakob Brucker, the two authors Diderot most heavily relied on when writing his articles on Asian religion in the first volumes of the Encyclopedie. Major features of Burnet's sapientia orientalis -- the ideas of emanation, of a world soul, of transmigration, and of mystical annihilation and return to oneness -- are all present in Diderot, who criticized some of them along the lines of intellectual heavyweights like Bayle and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim. Some critics tended, as we have observed, to emphasize the exclusive role of the Hebrews and to line up Asian religions on an axis of idolatry reaching from Egypt -- which often was seen as the origin -- via India to China and Japan. Others, by contrast, believed like Burnet that the Orient harbors genuine vestiges of primeval god-given wisdom and assumed a transmission of it not only to the Hebrews but also to other ancient people. This more inclusivist group included, as we have seen, many missionaries including Ricci, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg, and the authors of the Ezour-vedam (see Chapter 7). Of course, they were, on another level, usually also exclusivists since they tended to believe in Christianity as the sole path to salvation. We will see in subsequent chapters that the idea of a "doctrina oriental is" or an "oriental system" played an important role in the genesis of modern Orientalism. These possible vestiges of humankind's oldest religion were deemed most important subjects of study, and such study necessitated the systematic study of ancient oriental languages and texts.

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Part 3 of 3

Diderot's Oriental Blend

As explained at the beginning of this chapter, Diderot's encyclopedia article on the "Bramines" (1751:2.393-94) portrays them as "priests of the god Fo" who "principally revere three things, the god Fo, his law, and the books containing their constitutions." His description of these priests combines characteristics of Fo's esoteric teaching (as reported by Japan and China missionaries) with facets of Indian religions, for example, the doctrines of emanation, cosmic illusion (maya), and ascetic quietism as described by Bernier. According to Diderot, the Brahmin priests of Fo "assert that the world is nothing but an illusion, a dream, a magic spell, and that the bodies, in order to be truly existent, have to cease existing in themselves, and to merge into nothingness, which due to its simplicity amounts to the perfection of all beings" (trans. Halbfass 1990:59-60). Thrown into the blender were also some lumps from missionary reports about Zen as well as the Forty-Two Sections Sutra (see next chapter), for example, the notion that "saintliness consists in willing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, and removing one's mind so far from any idea, even that of virtue, that the perfect quietude of the soul stays unaltered" (Diderot 1751:2.393).11 Diderot's Brahmins pretend, as in Kircher, to have sprung from the head of the god Brahma, to possess "ancient books that they call sacred," and to have preserved the ancient language of these texts (p. 393). Diderot also associates these "Brahmin priests of Fo" with some of the doctrines that form the staple of descriptions of Indian religion since Henry Lord (1630) and Abraham Roger (1651).Under Diderot's label of philosophie asiatique, the readers of the Encyclopedie thus found a blend of "Asian" teachings and practices that were all associated with Brahmins who propagated the religion of Fo.

Such is the background of Diderot's famous "mixup." But what was the immediate source for his notion that the Brahmins are priests of Fo? It was Bayle's article on the Brachmanes that -- apart from much information from Europe's classical sources (Bayle 1702:1.689-91) -- furnishes the following information:

The Brachmanes still subsist in the Orient. The third sect which is current among the Chinese can be called the Religion of the Brachmanes or Bramenes, and they give themselves this name. These are the priests who revere principally three things: the God Fo, his law, and the books containing his particular regulations. They have bizarre sentiments about nothingness and morals that show much conformity with the visions of our quietists. (p. 691)

Much of Diderot's "Oriental blend" philosophy was thus already present in Bayle's 1702 description of the Brachmanes who remained in India:

The report of Father Tachard shows that the Brachmanes or Bramines of Bengal lead a very austere life, walk barefoot and with uncovered head on the burning sand, and live from herbs alone. The Brachmanes of Hindostan have very ancient books that they call sacred and pretend that God gave to the great prophet Brahma. They preserve the language in which these books are written and make exclusive use of them in their theological and philosophical explanations. By such means they prevent the common people from knowing them. They believe in metempsychosis and eat no meat. They say that the production of the world consisted in that all things came out of God and that the universe will perish through the return of these things to their first origin. A spider serves as emblem to explain this opinion. (p. 692)

In turn, Bayle's description is reminiscent of one of his main sources, namely, Bernier's report of "the almost universal doctrine of the Gentile Pendets of the Indies" which is also "held by the sect of the Soufys and the greater part of the learned men of Persia at the present day" (Bernier 2005:346). However, based on information by Guy Tachard and Thomas Burnet, Bayle also located such Brachmanes or Brahmins in Thailand:

The Brachmanes of Siam believe that the first humans were taller than those of today and lived several centuries without any illness; that our earth will one day perish through fire; and that from its ashes another world will be born where there will be no sea and no vicissitudes of seasons but an eternal spring. (Bayle 1702:1.692)

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the notion of an extremely large pan-Asiatic religion with exoteric and esoteric branches and with many local variations was apparently already well ensconced. But a religion with many millions of believers and with a huge clergy in India, China, and their surrounding countries obviously also had to have something like a bible. Bayle's Brahmins possess sacred scriptures in the ancient sacred language of India, Sanskrit, so it is a safe bet that by these scriptures Bayle meant the Vedas. These Vedas would therefore be the books containing the laws and particular regulations of Fo followed by the Brahmins of India, China, and other regions of Asia. For a European familiar with the transmission and translation history of the Bible, it would only be natural to assume that the Chinese Brahmin priests of Fo had translated the sacred scriptures of their religion into Chinese and would thus have Chinese translations of the Vedas. We will see in the next chapter that this is exactly what Joseph de Guignes proposed in the 177os, and Chapter 7 will show an altogether surprising outgrowth of this same thought. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Bayle wrote his article about the Brachmanes, so little was known about the Vedas and about China's Brahmin priests of Fo that such speculation was not yet possible.

Unlike Diderot, Bayle clearly identified his direct source of what modern scholars have called "the mixup": the Histoire de L'edit de L'empereur de la Chine (1698) by Charles LE GOB1EN(1671-1708).12 Its unpaginated preface presents a brief description of the four "sects" of China: (1) ancient monotheism; (2) Neo-Confucianism; (3) "the religion of the Brachmanes or Bramenes"; and (4) "the religion of the Bonzes" (Daoism). What interests us here is China's third religion. Le Gobien's description of it begins in a way that should by now sound familiar:

The third religion current among the Chinese is the religion of the Brachmanes or Bramenes, and they give it themselves this name. Because Polomen, [the word] they use, is the Bramen of the Indians that they could not pronounce and that they apparently travestied in their language. Nevertheless, they ordinarily call these false priests Hochan [Ch. heshang, Reverend], which signifies people united from various countries. These priests revere principally three things: the God Fo, his law, and the books containing their particular regulations. (Le Gobien 1698; unpaginated preface)

Le Gobien thus unequivocally identifies the Brahmans -- or Polomen, as the Chinese call them -- as priests of Fo and uses the very terms later adopted by his readers Bayle and Diderot.13 Le Gobien reports that the enemies of these Polomen, the Neoconfucian philosophers of China, are particularly indignant that "these Bramenes maintain that the world is only an illusion, a dream, a semblance." In order truly to exist, they assert, one must cease to be oneself and "confound oneself with nothingness which by virtue of its simplicity represents the perfection of all Beings." Their morality is described as "even more outrageous than that of our Stoics":

They push this apathy or indifference, to which they attribute all their sanctitude, so far that one must turn to stone or become a statue to acquire perfection. Nor only do they teach that the sage must not have any passion, but he may not even have any desire. Thus he must continually apply himself to will nothing, think of nothing, feel nothing, and to banish any idea of virtue and holiness so thoroughly from his mind that nothing in him is contrary to perfect quietude of the soul. (unpaginated preface)

Once this state is reached, so these Brahmin priests of Fo teach, one is no more subject to change and metempsychosis: "For him there is no more transmigration, no more vicissitude, no more fear of the future, because he is in the proper sense nothing; or, if one wants that he still is something, he is sage, perfect, happy -- in a word, he is God and perfectly similar to the God Fo: which definitely is a bit crazy" (unpaginated preface).

In his article on "Asiatic philosophy," Diderot connected the teachings of the "Persian Sufis whom he [Bernier] names cabalistes," with those of "the Pendets, heathen of the Indies" and "the doctrine of Xekia." The latter's esoteric teaching of "the origin of things through emanations from a first cause," in turn, is said to have influenced Jewish kabbalists and their idea of "En-soph or the first infinite being which contains all things" and "distributes itself through emanation" (Diderot 1751:1.752-54).

Whether it was conceived as a vestige of ancient monotheism or a poisonous seed of paganism, around the beginning of the eighteenth century the idea of a pan-Asian doctrine linked to the founder figure Fo or Xaca had taken root in Europe. Sieur de la Crequiniere's argument about Fo's profound influence even in the West is an early symptom of a reversal of traditional eurocentric scenarios: he explained in his Agreement of the Customs of the East-Indians with those of the Jews (1704),

'Tis pretended, that the Cabala has taken a great part of its Follies from the Philosophy of Phoe, which we mention'd in the Article of Metempsychosis: And in this confus'd Heap of Rabbinism and Magick, something is discover'd, that comes near to the Doctrine of the Learned Chinese, concerning Heaven and the Etherial Matter, into which Phoe said that the Souls were resolv'd, after their separation from the Body: For if this Philosopher believ'd, that our Souls are dispers'd in the Air, of which according to him they are Part, the Cabalists had no less strange Idea's about the Marter of which the Heaven is fram'd; they believe this Matter to be animated, and pretend that the Queen of Heaven, Regina Coeli, mention'd in Jerem. C. 44. is the Soul of this Material Heaven which appears to our Eyes. 'Tis thought also, that the Cabala deriv'd many things from Plato's Philosophy, which is deduc'd from that of Phoe. (Crequiniere 1999:102-3)

Here Pythagoras is no more the teacher who introduces his Indian students to the idea of transmigration. Rather, the reader is bound to imagine Pythagoras sitting at the feet of the Brahmin priests of Fo in India before returning to Greece and imparting such wisdom to his fellow Greek philosophers. Crequiniere, a traveler who had sojourned in India, in effect suggests that Fo's religion not only conquered most of Asia but also infected some movements in Judaism and Greek philosophy, thus turning even the divine Plato, whose philosophy was blossoming anew among the Cambridge Platonists, into a follower of Fo. This was just one of the early signs of a trend to locate the origins of human culture and religion in India. It is exactly this trend -- boosted by the likes of Voltaire, Abbe Vincent Mignot, John Zephaniah Holwell, and Louis-Mathieu Langles -- that formed the soil for the "indomania" of the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Toland's Twofold Philosophy

Frank Manuel's chapter on the English deists' "two-fold philosophy" in his thought-provoking study The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959:65- 69) shows little awareness of the influence of missionary literature from Asia but correctly describes the popularity of this idea:

In one form or another the double-truth doctrine was entertained by episcopal worthies like Warburton, avowed pantheists like Toland, cautious philosophical sceptics like Hume, grand Deist lords like Bolingbroke, abbes like Le Batteux, scholarly authors who specialized in the mystery cults like Sainte-Croix, that most outrageous materialist Dr. La Memie, the most popular orthodox scientific writer, Abbe Pluche, the revolutionary atheist Charles Dupuis. Wherever a sounding is made one comes upon the idea that there were always two pagan religions: gross polytheism, with human sacrifices, brute-worship, even cabbage-worship, for the masses; secret monotheism, a religion of virtue, love, adoration of the First Cause, for an elite. (pp. 65-66)

Yet the material presented so far in this book indicates that the European discovery of Asian religions, and in particular the deeply intertwined discoveries of Hinduism and Buddhism, played a major role in the exploding popularity of such views. The earliest nonclassical source for this double-truth doctrine adduced by Frank Manuel is the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth who "in 1678 already described the simultaneous existence among the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Indians of a 'Vulgar and Fabulous Theory and an Arcane and Recondite Theology'" -- a doctrine Out of which "Toland made a program of action" (p. 67). But we have seen that Valignano's Catechism us christianae fidei of 1586 had already presented both the theory and a program of action; and one might argue that Renaissance writers like Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno (who touted hermetic texts of "Egyptian" pedigree) had analogous agendas. Yet this does not diminish the validity of Manuel's point that what he calls "the twofold philosophy" or "the double-truth doctrine" played a central role in the deist movement and the eighteenth-century European perception of religion in general. In particular, Manuel highlighted the importance of John TOLAND (1670-1722), "a magnificent stylist whose pungent writings in Latin and translations from the English dominated the continental debate for more than a century" and who influenced such eighteenth-century luminaries as Voltaire and David Hume (p. 66). It is probably no mere coincidence that Toland's first extensive discussion of this theme occurs in his Letters to Serena (1704), a book that appeared while he was working on the English translation of La Crequiniere's 1704 work. Toland did not subscribe to Crequiniere's idea of Fo's role and the Indian origin of the notion of an immortal soul that led to the conception of transmigration. Rather, he advocated an Egypt-based scenario:

Thus have I shown you, Madam, how this Opinion of the Souls Immortality, and the Consequences of the same, was introduc'd from the Egyptians among the Grecians, spread by the latter in their Colonys in Asia and Europe, and deliver'd to the Romans, who from the Greeks had their Religion and Laws. I mark'd the Progress of it among the Scythians, Germans, Gauls, and Britains. I have likewise prov'd how from Egypt, the Place of its Birth, it travel'd to the Chaldaeans and Indians, and from them over all the Eastern Parts of the World. (Toland 1704:52-53)

Toland's description of heathen legislators-who "did not believe it themselves" while teaching to common people that the wicked would be punished in the other life and the good rewarded-has a close match in ideas about Fo from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, Toland's description of Pythagoras's double teachings is eerily reminiscent of the Buddha's deathbed "confession":

Pythagoras himself did not believe the Transmigration which has made him so famous to Posterity; for in the internal or secret Doctrin he meant no more than the eternal Revolution of Forms in Matter, those ceasless Vicissitudes and Alterations, which turn every thing into all things, and all things into any thing, as Vegetables and Animals become part of us, we become part of them, and both become parts of a thousand other things in the Universe, earth turning into Water, Water into Air, Air into Aether, and so back again in Mixtures without End or Number. But in the external or popular Doctrin he impos'd on the Mob by an equivocal Expression, that they shou'd become various kinds of Beasts after Death, thereby to deter 'em the more effectually from Wickedness. (p. 57)

However, for Toland the origin of such doctrines still lay in Egypt rather than India. He proclaimed that he could "with very small pains ... manifestly prove that in Egypt Men had first, long before others, arriv'd at the various beginnings of Religions" (p. 70) and outlined a genealogy of religion that proceeded from the roots of Egyptian superstition in the worship of the dead (p. 72) to the institution of priestcraft (p. 101), the invention of hell (p. 105), the cult of saints (p. 123), and various other customs that show "how almost in every corner of the world Religion and Truth cou'd be chang'd into Superstition and Priestcraft" (p. 129). The gist of Toland's deist genealogy of religion is, as he put it, "elegantly comprehended in those four Lines which are in everybody's mouth" (pp. 129-30):

Natural Religion was easy first and plain,
Tales made it Mystery, Offrings made it Gain;
Sacrifices and Shows were at length prepar'd,
The Priests ate Roast-meat, and the People star'd.

Kaempfer's Oriental Paganism

In the light of such Egypt-based or Egypt-related genealogies of religion, it is hardly surprising that the founder of Asian idolatry and propagator of transmigration and the twofold doctrine should eventually get a genuinely Egyptian pedigree. Athanasius Kircher's idea of an axis of idolatry linking Egyptian origins to a pan-Asiatic religion propagated by the India-based Xaka or Shaka (Shakyamuni Buddha) was particularly potent. Fifty years after Kircher and in spite of much more accurate conjectures about the religion of the followers of Buddha, Mathurin Veyssiere de La Croze also had ideas about the Egyptian origin of this religion that resemble Kircher's. The same is true for another reader of Kircher who became one of Diderot's main sources, the German Engelbert KAEMPFER (1651-1716) who died eight years before La Croze's book was published. After his departure from Sweden in 1681 at age 30, the well-educated Kaempfer had honed his skills as an observer of Asian countries and cultures during srays of more than four years in Persia, six months in southwest India (1688), a year in Indonesia (1689-90), and one month in Siam (1690). In Siam, Kaempfer had the unique chance of observing Thai Buddhism immediately before embarking for Japan. Though his sojourn in Japan lasted only two years (September 1690 to October 1692) and was mostly spent confined to a trading post on the Dejima island off Nagasaki, Kaempfer was very successful in collecting information about the secluded country. Much of his extraordinarily detailed (and more often than not surprisingly accurate) information about Japan's religion and history stemmed from a very knowledgeable Japanese servant and interpreter, Imamura Gen'emon Eisei (Katagiri 1995, Van der Velde 1995). The role of Asian informants in Europe's budding Orientalism was absolutely crucial, and Imamura is only one figure in a long line of knowledgeable natives that include Ziegenbalg's Aleppa, Etienne Fourmont's Huang, and Prince Dara's/Bernier's Indian pandir. Imamura and some other Japanese collaborators supplied Kaempfer nor only with oral information but also with a number of Japanese books; and since he knew little Japanese, he had them translate relevant portions into Dutch. Kaempfer's extant notebooks in the British Library show that translations and transliterations from Japanese sources were made with the utmost care and formed a solid basis for his redactions between his return to Europe in 1693 at age 42 and his death in 1716 at age 65.

In 1694 Kaempfer submitted a dissertation at Leiden University and was awarded a doctorate, and in 1712 he published a long-awaited, richly illustrated 900-page work called Amoenitates Exoticae. In its preface he also mentions a finished manuscript about Japan, but after his death in 1716, that manuscript lay unpublished among his belongings. After its sale to the learned collector Hans Sloane in London, it was translated into English by a young Swiss doctor of philosophy, Johann Caspar Scheuchzer. Scheuchzer's qualifications, apart from his mastery of English, consisted in a famous naturalist father and a dissertation about, of all things, the biblical deluge. But he was a quick study, and his beautifully illustrated English translation of Kaempfer's Japan manuscript was published in 1727.14 For half a century, all subsequent translations into other languages (including French and German) were based on this English version rather than Kaempfer's German manuscripts.15 On the European continent the French version of 1729 was particularly influential; it not only deeply marked Diderot and his fellow encyclopedists but also Voltaire, Kant, Herder, and many other luminaries of the age of Enlightenment.

A thorough evaluation of Kaempfer's knowledge about Asian religions and his influence on European perceptions would necessitate a detailed comparison of the extant manuscript of his Japan work (British Library, Sloane 3060) 16 with various translations and editions and especially also with his notes and his Japanese textual sources (Imai 1982). This would be a worthy subject for a monograph. Here the focus will be on Kaempfer's impact on Diderot, an attentive reader of the French version of 1729. Kaempfer's opening chapter was of particular importance. Right at the beginning of his book, the doctor takes his description of Siamese religion as an occasion to present his views about the origin and character of "Oriental paganism" ("Orientalisches Heydenthumb"). In Scheuchzer's translation, however, Kaempfer's introductory chapter is preceded by an account from Kaempfer's diary of the journey from Batavia to Siam. Kaempfer's first translator thus took the liberty of creating a first chapter from extraneous materials and relegating Kaempfer's opening chapter, edited and with some added material,17 to secondary status. Scheuchzer's habit of "improving" Kaempfer has made him the target of severe critique. The new English translation of Kaempfer's Japan book by the best informed of these critics, Beatrice Bodart-Bailey (1999), is generally more reliable than Scheuchzer's. But it introduced a new kind of tampering with Kaempfer's text that may be even more detrimental to the understanding of his view of Asian religions. Claiming that Kaempfer did not plan to include the opening chapter with his description of Siam in the Japan book and that this was Scheuchzer's idea (p. 34), Bodan-Bailey translated only a few lines. But there is no way around the fact that Kaempfer's extant manuscript at the British Library opens with the chapter on Siam (fols. 27r-45v) in which the author not only describes Thai Buddhism but also presents an overall vision of Asian religions that furnishes the context for his portrayal of Japanese religions. Kaempfer's interest in origins and in the history of religions is also apparent in the first book's fifth chapter ("On the origin of the inhabitants") that includes the doctor's reflections on the origin of Japan's religions. Interestingly, that chapter was also considered unfit for translation by Bodart-Bailey who only rendered Kaempfer's tantalizing summary:

Summarizing, we may say that in the first age of plurality after the Babylonian discord of minds and languages, at a time when the Greeks, Goths, Slaves, and Celts left for Europe, when others scattered and spread in Asia, while still others even entered America, the Japanese set out on their journey. Perhaps wandering for many years and suffering great deprivation, they finally reached this furthest corner of the earth. Therefore, according to their roots and earliest beginnings, the Japanese must be regarded as an independent nation, owing nothing to the Chinese with respect to their origins. Even though they adopted their code of conduct, liberal arts, and learning -- as the Latin people did from the Greek -- they never accepted a conqueror or hegemon from China or any other nation in the world. (Bodarr-Bailey 1999:50)

Kaempfer's interesting argument that the Japanese do not stem from the Chinese and came directly from Babylon rests on two main pillars: language and religion. According to Kaempfer, language is "without dispute the most certain indicator of the origin of peoples" (British Library, Sloane 3060:74r-v); but religion comes as a close second. Due to Bodart-Bailey's misguided censorship, readers of English are even today forced to refer to Scheuchzer's translation of this chapter, which contains the following explanation about Japanese Shinto and Buddhism ("Bupo"):

The old, and probably, original Religion of the Japanese, which is by them call'd Sintos,18 and the Gods and Idols, worship'd by its adherents, Sin, and Came,19 is peculiar only to this Empire, nor hath it ever been admitted of, nor their Gods acknowledged and worship'd, nor the religious way of life of the Japanese followed by the Chinese, or indeed any other heathen Nation. It was the only one establish'd in Japan during a succession of many ages. For the foreign pagan doctrine of Siaka, which the Japanese now call Bupo, or Budsdo,20 and the Gods which it commands to worship, Buds and Fotoge,21 tho' ever since its early beginnings it met with uncommon success, and speedily spread over the best part of Asia, yet it was not introduc'd into Japan till sixty years after our Saviour's nativity under the reign of the Emperor Synnin, when it was brought over from Corea. (Kaempfer 1906:I.137)22

Leaving aside Kaempfer's confusion of Buddhism's legendary introduction to China around 60 C.E. (as described in the preface of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra) with its arrival in Japan, we note that Kaempfer contrasts Shinto, the "old, and probably, original Religion of the Japanese," with the "foreign pagan doctrine of Siaka," that is, Buddhism. Based on biblical authority, Kaempfer surmised that Shinto must be rooted in ancient Babylonian religion:

If then our Japanese Colony did reach that part of the World, which Divine providence assign'd for their future abode, as soon as the Chinese, Tunquinese, and other neighbouring Nations did theirs, it must be suppos'd that they fortunately fell in with such a road, as could with safety and speed bring them to the Eastern extremities of Asia, from whence there is but a short passage over to Japan. In order therefore to trace out what road it is probable they took, we must consider the first Babylonians in the condition, they were in, after that dreadful confusion of Languages. (p. 139)

Kaempfer's opening chapter thus traces not only his own path to Japan but also that of the entire Japanese people and its religions. While warning that these were "conjectures, for as such only I deliver them" (p. 146), Kaempfer opted for an itinerary of the ancient Japanese from Mesopotamia through eastern Tartary and the Country of Jeso (which supposedly linked northern Japan's isles to the continent and possibly even to America).

At any rate, Kaempfer traced the Japanese people and their language straight to the biblical Babylon:

The difficulty now remaining to be clear'd up, is, how, and from what parts of the world, to trace out their true original descent. In order to do this we must go up higher, and perhaps it is not inconsistent with reason, and the nature of things, to assert, that they are descended of the first Inhabitants of Babylon, and that the Japanese language is one of those, which Sacred Writs mention, that the all-wise Providence hath thought fit, by way of punishment and confusion, to infuse into the minds of the vain builders of the Babylonian Tower. This at least seems to me the most probable conjecture, whatever way they went to Japan, or whatever time they spent upon this their first peregrination. (p. 138)

Japan's ancient Shinto religion was also given a Babylonian pedigree. Like the ancient Persians and other neighboring nations, the Chaldean denizens of the region around Babylon worshiped "the Luminaries of the Heavens, particularly the Sun, and the Fire, as being its Image" (p. 66).

For as it cannot be suppos'd, that these sensible Nations liv'd without any Religion at all, like the brutal Hottentots, it is highly probable, that they rever'd the divine Omnipotence by worshiping, according to the Custom of the Chaldeans, the Sun, and other Luminaries of the Firmament, as such parts of the Creation, which most strike the outward senses, and fill the understanding with the admiration of their unconceivable proprieties. (p. 66)

Kaempfer also deemed it "probable" that the ancient Indians "had the same kind of worship with the neighbouring Chaldeans and Persians" (p. 66). If much of ancient Asia between Mesopotamia, India, and Japan "rever'd the divine Omnipotence" through sidereal worship and a symbolic fire cult, one must assume that Kaempfer thought it once was (at least to some degree) the home of a monotheist religion. However, about six centuries before Christ's birth another religion with roots in ancient Egypt began to sweep the continent. First India and then large parts of Asia including Tartary, Tibet, Burma, Siam, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Korea, and Japan were invaded by this religion that Kaempfer calls "general paganism" (p. 63) or "Eastern Paganism" (p. 66). It "is to be distinguished" from the sun and fire worship of Chaldaea which has a semblance of monotheism" (p. 63) and has "two articles ... which were most religiously maintained": "the Transmigration of Souls, and a Veneration for Cows, particularly for the holy Cow at Memphis, call'd Apis, or Serapis, which had divine honours paid her, and was serv'd by Priests" (p. 67):

Both these Articles are still observed by the Asiatick Heathens, particularly those that inhabit the West-side of the Ganges; for no body there dares to kill the least and most noxious Insects, as being animated by some transmigrated human Soul; and the Cows, whose Souls they think are by frequent transmigrations, as it were, deified, are serv'd and attended with great veneration, their Dung being burnt to ashes is turn'd into holy Salve, their Urine serves for holy Water, the Image of a Cow possesses a peculiar Chapel before their Temples, is every day honour'd with fresh flowers, and hath sweet-scented oyl poured upon her. (p. 67)

Since Kaempfer had spent half a year in southwest India, he was familiar with such customs and had also observed the veneration of human monsters (such as Ganesha with his elephant head). But how had such "Egyptian" forms of worship reached far-away India? As a careful reader of Athanasius Kircher, Kaempfer was thoroughly familiar with the notion of a pagan axis stretching from Egypt to Japan and also knew that Kircher's main culprit was a man called Xaca. Furthermore, he had read in Kircher's China illustrata (1667) that some Egyptian gods are worshipped all over Asia and that such cults were brought to India after the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses:

The statues of the gods were pounded into dust. The great obelisks were overthrown. Apis, the greatest Egyptian god, a sacred bull who was cared for in a certain enclosure, was killed by Cambyses himself. The whole crowd of priests and hieromants was cut to pieces or destroyed in the same fire that ruined their hieroglyphic monuments, or they were driven into exile. Since the land routes were filled with bands of the enemy who would not allow them safe passage, they finally made their way along the Arabian Gulf, which borders on Egypt, and so reached India, today called Hindustan. (Kircher 1987:141)

This is how "the doctrine of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls from animal to animal, was first spread to the world by the Egyptians" (p. 141). According to Kircher, the Egyptian priests and hieromants found in their Indian exile "a very sinful Brahmin" who "was not content just to spread the doctrine but even added to it so much that there is scarcely any one who is able to describe the doctrine or to write about it." Kircher had identified this person as the "imposter known allover the East" and explained that "the Indians called him Rama, the Chinese Xe Kian, the Japanese Xaca, and the Turks Chiaga" (p. 141). He reportedly had as many as 80,000 disciples who spread his noxious teachings all over Asia.

Thus prepared, Kaempfer saw during his sojourn in Siam many statues of the founder of this huge religion. Noting his usual sitting posture with crossed legs and particular positions of his hands, he had no doubt that this man-whom the Siamese call Prah (saint), Prahpuditsau (saint of high descent), Sammana Khutama (the Man without Passions), Budha, Putha, etc. -- is identical with the divinity venerated in other parts of Asia under various names: Budhum in Ceylon; Sacka, or Siaka, Fotoge, or Si Tsun in Japan and China; and so on (p. 64). However, discrepancies regarding the period in which this founder lived led Kaempfer to conjecture that there must have been two such founder figures. The older figure, whom the Indians regard as an incarnation of the god Vishnu, was called Budhum or Budha. Probably a mythological figure, as the dates of 100,000 or 20,000 years B.C.E. indicate, he is represented as a man with four arms sitting on a Tarate flower and "praising the supreme God ever since 21,639 years (reckoning from the present 1690 year of Christ)" (p. 65). The younger figure, on the other hand, is the "God Prah, or Siaka," described in "whole Books full of the birth, life, and miracles" (p. 65).

Kaempfer explains how he came up with his innovative two-Buddha theory:

I am at a loss how to reconcile these various and opposite accounts, which I have gather'd in the abovesaid Countries, unless by supposing, what I really think to be the true opinion, viz. that the Siamites and other Nations lying more Easterly have confounded a younger Teacher with Budha and mistaken the former with the latter, which confusion of the Gods and their names is very frequent in the Histories of the Greeks and Egyptians; so that Prah or Siaka, is not the same with Budha, much less with Ram, or Rama, as he is call'd by Father Kircher in his Sina Illustrata, the latter having appear'd many hundred thousand years before, but that he was some new Impostor who set up about five hundred years before Christ's nativity. (pp. 65-66)

Subsequent "two-Buddha" theories such as the one proposed by Agostino Giorgi in 1762 (App 2008a:I8-20) also had the aim of reconciling discrepancies of dating and descriptions of the founder figure. Building on the erudite fantasies of Kircher and noting that the Thai date of the Buddha's birth matches exactly that of Cambyses's invasion of Egypt, Kaempfer transformed Kircher's sinful Brahmin Xaca into a curly-haired Memphis priest of the sixth century B.C.E. Fascinated by the dark color, curly hair, and "Egyptian" lotus base of the founder's statues, Kaempfer favored -- against all Asian evidence pointing to Ceylon, India, or Siam -- an African origin of the "younger" Buddha. If Giorgi's two Buddhas went on to confuse such eminent men as the Orientalist William Jones, the geographer Carl Ritter, and the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, Kaempfer's pioneer version also had a brilliant career as it found its way into many publications23 including the Encyclopedie.

Seduced by Kaempfer's "Egyptian" theory, Diderot summarized in his article on the philosophy of the Asiatics the four main points of Kaempfer's argument as follows:

1. The religion which the inhabitants of the Indies received from this legislator is very much connected with that of the ancient Egyptians because all these peoples represented their gods in the form of animals and monstrous humans.

2. The two principal dogmas of Egyptian religion were the transmigration of souls and the cult of Serapis whom they represented in the form of a bull or a cow. Now it is certain that these two dogmas also form the basis of the religion of the Asian nations .... What is remarkable is that the closer these barbarian nations are located to Egypt, the more they are attached to these two dogmas.

3. One finds with all these peoples of East Asia the majority of Egyptian divinities, though under different names.

4. What confirms Kaempfer's conjecture above all is that 536 years B.C. Cambyses the king of Persia invaded Egypt, killed Apis ... and chased all the priests from the land. Now if one examines the chronology of the Siamese which begins with the death of Xekia, one sees that it coincides precisely with the time of Cambyses's expedition, which makes it very probable that Xekia got refuge with the Indians and taught them his Egyptian doctrine. (Diderot 1751:1.755)

Diderot was so utterly convinced by Kaempfer's arguments that he concluded that "there is no room whatsoever to doubt that Xekia was African and that he taught the Indians the dogmas he himself had drawn from Egypt" (p. 755). For Diderot as for Kircher and Kaempfer, the figure of Xaca/Xekia/Buddha thus became the very incarnation of Egyptian origins, complete with "frizzy hair like a negro" (Kaempfer 1729:33). In their view, the journey of this Memphis priest to India in the sixth century B.C.E. had a fatal effect on the religious landscape of Asia. Apart from introducing the ancient Indians (who originally worshiped God in the symbolic form of sun and stars) to the veneration of animals and the belief in transmigration, his fame led to the fatal mixup of the younger "Egyptian" Shaka with the older "Indian" Budha. It was this mixup that fueled the explosive growth of the religion that Kaempfer called "Oriental paganism" -- the religion of Buddha. This religion took many different forms as it spread from its Indian base to other countries. Its clergy achieved dominance in large swaths of Asia: the Brahmans in India, the talapoins in Burma and Thailand, the lamas in Tartary, the bonzes in China and Japan, and so forth (Figure 7). Against this background, the first sentence of Kaempfer's description of Siamese religion and Asia's "general paganism" appears in a new light -- as do Diderot's Brahmin priests of Fo:

The Religion of these [Siamese] People is the Pagan Doctrine of the Brahmans, which ever since many Centuries hath been profess'd amongst all Nations from the River Indus to the extremity of the East, except that at the Court of the Grand Mogul, and in his great Cities, as also in Sumatra, Java, Celebes, and other neighboring Islands the Mahometism has gain'd so much ground, that it seems to prevail above it. This general Paganism (which is to be distinguished from the Religion of the old Persians worshipping the Sun, now almost extinct) tho' branch'd our into several Sects and Opinions, according to the various Customs, Languages and Interpretations, yet is of one and the same Origine. The Siamites represent the first Teacher of their Paganism in their Temples, in the figure of a Negro sitting, of a prodigious size, his hair curl'd, the skin black, but as it were out of respect gilt over, accompanied on each side by one of his chief Companions, as also before and round about him by the rest of his Apostles and Disciples, all of the same colour and most in the same posture. They believe according to the Brahmans, that the Deity dwelt in him, which he prov'd by his Doctrine, Way of Life, and Revelation. (Kaempfer 1906.1:62-63).

Figure 7. Engelbert Kaempfer's view of Asian religions (Urs App).

This conception of "Oriental paganism" -- or, as we would call it today, "Buddhism" -- laid out by Kaempfer in his opening chapter is thus crucial for an understanding of his view of Asian religions including those of Japan. Through his introductory reflections about the pan-Asiatic religion of Budha/Siaka, he laid the groundwork for the understanding of Japan's "Budsdo, or Foreign Pagan Worship" in his Chapter 6:

The origine of this religion, which quickly spread thro' most Asiatick Countries to the very extremities of the East, (not unlike the Indian Figtree, which propagates itself, and spreads far round, by sending down new roots from the extremities of its branches,) must be look'd for among the Brahmines. I have strong reasons to believe, both from the affinity of the name, and the very nature of this religion, that its author and founder is the very same person, whom the Brahmines call Budha, and believe to be an essential part of Wisthnu, or their Deity, who made its ninth appearance in the world under this name, and in the shape of this Man. The Chinese and Japanese call him Buds and Siaka. These two names indeed became in success of time a common Epithet of all Gods and Idols in general, the worship of whom was brought over from other Countries: sometimes also they were given to the Saints and great men, who preach'd them new doctrines. The common people in Siam, call him Prah Pudi Dsai, that is, the Holy Lord, and the learned among them, in their Pali or holy language, Sammona Khodum. The Peguans call him Sammana Khutama. (Kaempfer 1906:2.56-57)

Diderot's Pan-Asiatic Philosophy

Diderot made especially heavy use of Kaempfer's sixth chapter "On Budsdo or the foreign paganism and its founder in general." In its French translation, Diderot read that Budsdo "in its literal sense signifies the way of the foreign idols, i.e., the manner to render a cult to the foreign idols" (Kaempfer 1729:1.208). We have seen above that Diderot's presentation of the esoteric doctrine of the pan-Asiatic religion of "Budda or Xekia" was mainly based on sources stemming from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit literature as presented by Bayle and Brucker. For the exoteric doctrine of the Brahmin priests of Fo, by contrast, he almost exclusively relied on Kaempfer's description of the Japanese "Budsdo" (Diderot 1751:1.753).

Some of Kaempfer's detailed information about this religion was based on Japanese books and chronicles such as the Dai nihon odaiki.24 But Kaempfer also relied on reports of Japanese informers, personal observation, and the study of European sources after his return to Europe. An example is his biography of Buddhism's founder in which "Safen" (Jap. zazen, seated meditation) and "Satori" (Jap. satori, enlightenment) are mentioned. Kaempfer's description of the founder's teaching does not even mention the widely publicized legend of the founder's deathbed confession and the distinction between exoteric and esoteric teachings. Instead he related the Buddha's life as the Japanese knew it and drew a colorful portrait of the beliefs of popular Japanese Buddhism. His report about the Buddha's exoteric teachings was boiled down to fourteen points by Brucker, and as in the case of the esoteric teachings, Diderot translated Brucker's Latin synthesis of Kaempfer's explanations into French.25

Since no mention was made by Kaempfer of the famous "nothingness" from which everything comes and to which everything returns, Diderot assumed like Brucker that the Budsdo described by Kaempfer corresponds to the "exoteric" teaching of Budda or Xekia, the man who in the Indies "is regarded as the greatest philosopher ever" (Diderot 1751:1.753). Such teachings for the common people (pp. 753-74) begin with the notion that (I) there is a real difference between good and evil and that (2) the souls of men and animals are immortal. Once these souls are separated from their bodies after death, they (3) are rewarded or punished according to their actions. The place of rewards (4) is called "gokuraku" (Jap. gokuraku, paradise), and the rewards are proportional to the accumulated merits during one's lifetime (5). The governor of this place of delights is Amida, "the sole mediator who can obtain for men remission of sins and eternal life" (6).26 Amida gives happiness to those who followed the law of Xekia (7). This law has five precepts that are "very famous in all of South and East Asia" (pp. 753-74): no raking of life, no theft, no incest, no lies, and no intoxication (8). The place of torment, on the other hand, is called "dsigoku" (Jap. jigoku, hell) where punishment is meted out according to the amount and kind of the evil deeds one committed (9). The governor and judge of these horrible prisons (10) is "Jemma O" )Jap. Emma O, King Yama). Those who are tormented in hell can be helped by the prayers of the living and by sacrifices of the clergy addressed to Amida (II) who can to some degree diminish punishments and speed up the transmigration of souls into other bodies (12). Depending on the former deeds, souls can also transmigrate into animal bodies (13), and in the process of purification, they may eventually animate another human body and either grasp the chance of gaining eternal joy in paradise or undergo another cycle of punishment and transmigration (14).

In this light, Diderot's "mixup" of Brahmanism and Buddhism must be reevaluated. His portrait of the "Brahmin priests of Fo" represents an important phase in the European discovery of Buddhism in which some major features of this pan-Asiatic religion gradually emerged. They include information about its founder, his different datings in Southeast Asian and Sino- Japanese Buddhist traditions, clergy in various countries and their practices, some popular beliefs, and bits and pieces of Buddhist texts and philosophy (for example, the "emptiness" of Mahayana thought and the "no-thought" of Zen). Though the name of this religion was by no means fixed, Kaempfer's "Budsdo" (or "Budso" in the French translation of 1729) soon became a convenient label. In Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix's History and General Description of Japan (1736), the term "Budsoistes" is already frequently used to refer to the adherents of this religion, for example, in the description of the "great pilgrimage of the Budsoistes" (p. 119) or in the statement that the language of the prayers of this religion "seems older than the introduction of Budso in the empire but was adopted by the Budsoist ministers" (pp. 123-24). The enormous difference between the portrait of this religion in Charlevoix's History of Christianity in the Empire of Japan (1715) -- written before the publication of the works of La Croze (1724) and Kaempfer (1727) -- and his History of 1736 shows the great and immediate impact of these two works and the importance of La Croze and Kaempfer for the construction of its identity in the European mind.

Based on Ziegenbalg's data, La Croze had correctly concluded that the religion of the "disciples of Budda" that reigned in vast stretches of Asia was different from that of the "Brachmanes" and had vanished long ago from India. In this respect La Croze was far ahead of his time. The vast majority of other authors -- for instance, Rodrigues, Kircher, Kaempfer, Charlevoix, and Diderot -- were under the impression that the Buddha's religion was still dominant in India and that its clergy, the Brahmins, had from their Indian base missionized large parts of Asia. From their perspective, India's Brahmins were -- regardless of their ultimate origin -- simply the oldest representatives of a pan-Asiatic religion that in each region had taken on vastly different local coloring. Europeans had no trouble understanding what a difference even a few hundred leagues and a different language can make, and to them it was only natural that an extremely old religion would undergo fundamental changes over such vast time spans and geographical as well as cultural and linguistic chasms.

The described Western discovery of what we call "Buddhism" forms part of a long and complicated process that stretches into our time, and the assertion of some modern writers that European Orientalists "created" or "invented" Buddhism in the first half of the nineteenth century27 is a problem of faulty optics rather than history. The case of Diderot shows once more that the retroprojection of modern knowledge (such as the strict separation of Buddhism from Hinduism) not only is unhelpful for the reconstruction of discovery processes but almost inevitably leads to the kind of "monkey show" treatment mentioned at the outset of this chapter. Diderot was only one of many eighteenth-century luminaries who regarded "Brahmanism" as a form of "oriental paganism" that has many elements congruent with what we today call "Buddhism." Diderot's view presents a snapshot of an important stage in the discovery process.

Of course, some of its aspects, for example, the speculation about Egyptian origins, seem misguided or even ridiculous from today's viewpoint. But in the historical context, this link made a lot of sense; and for us today the Buddha's multifaceted career in the West is, among other things, a looking glass into Europe's evolving worldview and the changing vision of its origins and identity at the intersection where biblical judaeomania and Enlightenment egyptomania met growing indomania. It also shows how many different observations, motivations, and ideas underlie a simple sentence such as Diderot's opening phrase of the "Brahmins" article. The same applies to the twofold doctrine that by the mid-eighteenth century had become the most prominent characteristic of a perceived pan-Asian religion. This rich religious and ideological background is also bound to remain invisible when looking through the coarse lens of preconceived ideas such as Edward Said's Orientalist "colonialism" or Western "exploitation."

In 1787, almost forty years after Diderot's early Encyclopedie articles, the German grandfather of Indomania, Johann Gottfried HERDER (1744-1803), surmised that the "Religion des Schaka" (Shakyamuni Buddha) is the largest religion on earth. Dominant in Tibet, Mongolia, and Manchuria, Herder saw it also extend far to the South and East:

Also toward the South this religion is widespread; the names Sommona- Kodom, Schakscha-Tuba, Sangol-Muni, Schigemuni, Buddo, Fo, Schekia are all one with Schaka; thus this sacred monastic tradition ... is found in Hindustan, Ceylon, Siam, Pegu, Tonkin and up to China, Korea, and Japan. (Herder 2002, 3/1:407)

Like Diderot, Herder thought that Brahmanism was a subform of the pan-Asiatic religion we now know as "Buddhism"; theirs was therefore less a "mixup" of two entities than an overestimation of the boundaries of one religion. That religion, regardless of its name ("Oriental paganism," "Budsoisme," "Bupo," etc.) is usually traced back to a single founder (Buddha, Shakya, etc.), and its characteristics and geographical distribution leave no doubt that we are mainly dealing with the tradition that is today called "Buddhism." Herder's chapter on India -- which exerted great influence on German Romanticism and romantic Orientalism -- presents this view in an initial statement that used to puzzle researchers: "Even though the teaching of the Brahmans is nothing but a branch of the widespread religion that, from Tibet to Japan, has formed sects or governments ... " (p. 411). Thinking that Herder's "Buddhism" and "Hinduism" correspond to the Buddhism and Hinduism we know today, the author of the only monograph on Herder's reception of Asian religions demonstrated how easy it is to get such things completely wrong: "When Herder expresses himself about the mythology and religion of the Indians, we do not get to hear anything about Buddhism. Rather, the subject is then Hinduism" (Faust 1977:152).

If anything, the reverse is true; like Diderot, Herder thought that the Buddha's religion adapted itself in every country to local circumstances and cultures and developed a vast variety of different forms and branches. The indophile Herder liked its "brahmanic" branch best:

In contrast with all the sects of Fo that dominate the Eastern world of Asia, this [Brahmanic] one is the blossom; [it is] more learned, more humane, more useful, more noble than all the bonzes, lamas, and talapoins. (Herder 2002, 3/1:415)

Diderot's view of Asian religions was thus neither an exception nor a careless mistake. Rather it reflects the growing consensus of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers and researchers. Herder, for example, did not base his view on Diderot but on another influential Frenchman whom he had as a young man visited in Paris and whose numerous papers he wanted to see published in German translation: the famous orientalist Joseph de Guignes who is the protagonist of our next chapter.

[admin]

Part 1 of 4

Chapter 4: De Guignes's Chinese Vedas

The "invention," "discovery," or identification of major Asian religions (in particular, Hinduism and Buddhism) is often situated in the "longer" nineteenth century during which, as a recent book claims, "the Invention of World Religions" took place. Its author states that toward the end of the nineteenth century Buddhism "had only recently been recognized as 'the same' tradition existing in diverse regions of South, South-east, East, and Central Asia," and that until that time European observers had not ''thought of these divergent rites and widely scattered institutions as constituting a single religion" (Masuzawa 2005:122). The discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] of Buddhism is characterized as being "from the beginning, in a somewhat literal and nontrivial sense, a textual construction," so much so that "one might say that Buddhism as such came to life, perhaps for the first time, in a European philological workshop" (p. 126). Such arguments are based on several assumptions that merit questioning. We have already seen that the emergence in the European mind of a pan-Asiatic religion (that we now readily identify as Buddhism) did not happen overnight in some nineteenth-century study. Such scenarios of a nineteenth-century "creation" of Buddhism grew on a soil fertilized by several biases. The "Indian" bias links the European discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] of Buddhism to India as Buddhism's country of origin, the "textual" bias to the study of Buddhist texts in Indian languages, and the "colonialist" bias posits that such discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] and study were primarily linked to colonial interests. This accounts for the exaggerated role of British "pioneers" in recent studies. Charles Allen's "men who discovered India's lost religion," for example, are without exception British colonialist "Sahibs" (Allen 2002). But even scholars with a much broader perspective suffer from similar biases. For example, J. W. de Jong's Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America (1997) fails to mention Joao Rodrigues (see our Chapter 1), La Croze (see Chapter 2), and the protagonist of the present chapter, Joseph de Guignes. Even the most informative study to date, Henri de Lubac's La rencontre du bouddhisme et de l'Occident (1952/2000), ignores that de Guignes's 1756 French rendering of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra was the first published translation in a Western language of a Buddhist sutra.

Related to these "Indian" and "Sanskrit" biases is one that pitches "science" against missionary "protoscience." It assumes that the onset of "modern" Orientalism in the first decades of the nineteenth century was a clean break from the "missionary" past. The pre-nineteenth-century discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] of Buddhism is thus divorced from its "scientific discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] and the latter is portrayed as a "new start from almost nothing" (Droit 1997:29). Unlike the installation of a new operating system on a computer, which guarantees at least some continuity of data, Droit regards this new start as a total break with the past and generalizes: "It is a permanent feature of the West's relation with the doctrines of Buddhism that, in the very long run, information does not accumulate" (p. 29). For Droit, the decisive "new start" and thus Buddhism's discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] in the proper sense" only happened "from the moment when the languages of its canonical scriptures were deciphered and the fundamental texts translated in a systematic manner" (p. 36). When did this happen, and what languages were in play? Droit explains:

Now, even though Sanskrit had been known since the 1780s, the Buddhist treatises in Sanskrit were only discovered during the 1820s in Nepal by Brian Houghton Hodgson; Pali was only deciphered by Eugene Burnouf and Christian Lassen during the same period; and the Chinese Buddhist texts were only at this moment studied by Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat, who was soon followed by the Hungarian Alexander Csoma de Koros's study of Tibetan. (p. 36)

If such bias is combined with constructivism, the 1820s become the "turning point" that "led Europe from ignorance to knowledge" and the crucial moment when the word "Buddhism" and the "phenomenon itself" were simultaneously "born in the scholarly gaze" (p. 36). In contrast to such a clean-cut birth by Caesarian section in the lecture halls of state-sponsored Orientalist academia, we have seen that the discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] of a large Asian religion with a specific founder, history, geographical presence, body of teachings, and sacred texts was a rather messy and protracted event that began long before the moment in the 1820s when European scholars began to read Sanskrit and Pali Buddhist texts. Contrary to Droit's assertion, much information gradually accumulated over several centuries, and the permanent feature of the West's relation with Buddhism was that information, once it was collected or invented, was rarely forgotten but rather tended to be endlessly repeated and widely accepted. The above-mentioned Story of the Buddha's deathbed confession is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Moreover, Buddhist texts were studied and even translated long before Sanskrit entered the picture. To mention just a few examples: in 1574 the Jesuit Japan missionaries Organtino Gnecchi-Soldo and Luis Frois devoted two hours per day to the study of the Chinese text of the Lotus Sutra under the guidance of a former Buddhist abbot and persisted for a whole year (Frois 1926:452); the first partial translation of a Buddhist text from Pali was published by Simon de la Loubere in 1691; Ippolito Desideri studied and translated Tibetan Buddhist texts in the early eighteenth century; and the first Buddhist sutra to be published in Europe, the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, was translated by de Guignes from the Chinese in the 1750s. All of this happened long before Europeans became aware of Buddhist Sanskrit texts.

The European obsession with origins and Bible-like canonical texts contributed to the bias for India, Sanskrit, and Pali. However -- just like wars -- discoveries happen as they actually do and not as one might wish they should; and it is a matter of historical fact that Sanskrit entered the stage rather late. But a fundamentalist obsession with "genuine" Buddhist "bibles" from India led from the late nineteenth century to the view that the Buddhisms of distant countries such Japan, China, and Tibet are "degenerate" and their texts incomparably inferior to those of mother India. It is as if researchers of Christianity would regard Roman Catholicism or Syriac orthodoxy as degenerate and inferior because they are removed from Christianity's Aramaic and Greek origins. When European missionaries ventured to Asia, Buddhism had long vanished from India and flourished in distant countries such as Mongolia, Japan, China, Tibet, Siam, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, Vietnam, and Laos. To no one's surprise, these were exactly the countries where the Europeans discovered [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] Buddhism, and de Guignes is an excellent example for the impact of literature from such non-Indian countries. The discovery [Lib. Com.: "invention"/"creation"] of long-vanished Indian Buddhism, by contrast, indeed happened to a large extent in the nineteenth-century "European philological workshop" (Masuzawa 2005:126). The present chapter will show, however, that prior to that there were "workshops" not manned by Sanskritists but rather by French missionaries and by academics who studied and translated Arabic and Chinese sources long before the first British colonialists began to dabble in Sanskrit.1

Fourmont's Dirty Little Secret

When Joseph DE GUIGNES (1721-1800) at the young age of fifteen was placed with Etienne FOURMONT (1683-1745), Fourmont enjoyed a great reputation as one of Europe's foremost specialists of classical as well as oriental languages. As an associate of Abbe Bignon (the man so eager to stock the Royal Library with Oriental texts), Fourmont had met a Chinese scholar called Arcadius HOANG (1679-1716) and had for a short while studied Chinese with him (Elisseeff 1985:133ff.; Abel-Remusat 1829:1.260). In 1715 the thirty-two-year-old Fourmont was elected to the chair of Arabic at the College Royal. Hoang's death in 1716 did not diminish Fourmont's desire to learn Chinese, and in 1719 he followed Nicolas FRERET (1688-1749) in introducing Europe to the 214 Chinese radicals. This is one of the systems used by the Chinese to classify Chinese characters and to make finding them, be it in a dictionary or a printer's shop, easier and quicker.

Thanks to royal funding for his projected grammar and dictionaries, Fourmont had produced more than 100,000 Chinese character types. But in Fourmont's eyes the 214 radicals were far more than just a classification method. Naming them "clefs" (keys), he was convinced that they were meaningful building blocks that the ancient Chinese had used in constructing characters. For example, Fourmont thought that the first radical (-) is "the key of unity, or priority, and perfection" and that the second radical (׀) signifies "growth" (Klaproth 1828:234). Starting with the 214 basic "keys," so Fourmont imagined, the ancient Chinese had combined them to form the tens of thousands of characters of the Chinese writing system. However, as Klaproth and others later pointed out, the Chinese writing system was not "formed from its origin after a general system"; rather, it had evolved gradually from "the necessity of inventing a sign to express some thing or some idea." The idea of classifying characters according to certain elements arose only much later and resulted in several systems with widely different numbers of radicals ranging from a few dozen to over 700 (Klaproth 1828:233-36).

Like many students of Chinese or Japanese, Fourmont had probably memorized characters by associating their elements with specific meanings. A German junior world champion in the memory sport, Christiane Stenger, employs a similar technique for remembering mathematical equations. Each element is assigned a concrete meaning; for example, the minus sign signifies "go backward" or "vomit," the letter A stands for "apple," the letter B for "bear," the letter C for "cirrus fruit," and the mathematical root symbol for a root. Thus, "B minus C" is memorized by imagining a bear vomiting a citrus fruit, and "minus B plus the root of A square" may be pictured as a receding bear who stumbles over a root in which a square apple is embedded.

Stenger's technique, of course, has no connection whatsoever to understanding mathematical formulae, but Fourmont's "keys" can indeed be of help in understanding the meaning of some characters. While such infusion of meaning certainly helped Fourmont and his students Michel-Ange-Andre le Roux DESHAUTERAYES (1724-95) and de Guignes in their study of complicated Chinese characters, it also involved a serious misunderstanding. Stenger understood that bears and fruit were her imaginative creation in order to memorize mathematical formulae and would certainly not have graduated from high school if she had thought that her mathematics teacher wanted to tell her stories about apples and bears.

But mutatis mutandis, this was exactly Fourmont's mistake. Instead of simply accepting the 214 radicals as an artificial system for classifying Chinese characters and as a mnemonic aide, he was convinced that the radicals are a collection of primeval ideas that the Chinese used as a toolset to assemble ideograms representing objects and complex ideas. Fourmont thought that the ancient Chinese had embedded a little story in each character. As he and his disciples happily juggled with "keys," spun stories, and memorized their daily dose of Chinese characters, they did not have any inkling that this fundamentally mistaken view of the genesis of Chinese characters would one day form the root for a mistake of such proportions that it would put de Guignes's entire reputation in jeopardy.

Apart from a series of dictionaries that never came to fruition, Fourmont was also working on a Chinese grammar. He announced its completion in 1728, eight years before the arrival of de Guignes. The first part of this Grammatica sinica with Fourmont's presentation of the 214 "keys" and elements of pronunciation appeared in 1737. The second part, prepared for publication while de Guignes sat at his teacher's feet, contained the grammar proper as well as Fourmont's catalog of Chinese works in the Bibliotheque Royale and was published in 1742. When Fourmont presented the result to the king of France, he had de Guignes accompany him, and the king was so impressed by the twenty-one-year-old linguistic prodigy that he endowed him on the spot with a pension (Michaud 1857:18.126).

Work on the Chinese language

Helped by the young Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749), he began the hard work of pioneering a Chinese-French dictionary, a Chinese grammar, employing the Kangxi system of 214 character keys.

In this work, they were joined by Nicolas Joseph Delisle (1683–1745), a friend of Fréret, who gave a more cultural and geographical tone to their work and discussions. Deslisle's brother, Guillaume Delisle, was already a renowned geographer. Delisle encouraged Arcadio Huang to read Europe's best known and popular writings dealing with the Chinese Empire. Huang was surprised by the ethnocentric approach of these texts, reducing the merits of the Chinese people and stressing the civilizing role of the European peoples.

A third apprentice, by the name of Étienne Fourmont (imposed by Abbé Bignon), arrived and profoundly disturbed the team. One day, Fourmont was surprised copying Huang's work.

Debate after his death

After the death of Huang on 1 October 1716, Fourmont became officially responsible for classifying papers of the deceased. He made a very negative report on the contents of these documents and continued to criticize the work of Huang. Continuing his work on the languages of Europe and Asia (and therefore the Chinese), he took all the credit for the dissemination of the 214 key system in France, and finally published a French-Chinese lexicon and a Chinese grammar, without acknowledging the work of Huang, whom he was continuing to denigrate publicly.

-- Arcadio Huang, by Wikipedia

But de Guignes's teacher Fourmont had a dirty little secret. He had focused on learning and accumulating data about single Chinese characters, but his knowledge of the Chinese classical and vernacular language was simply not adequate for writing a grammar. By consequence, the man who had let the world know that a genius residing in Europe could master Chinese just as well as the China missionaries decided to plagiarize -- what else? -- the work of a missionary. No one found out about this until Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat in 1825 carefully compared the manuscript of the Arte de La lengua mandarina by the Spanish Franciscan Francisco Varo with Fourmont's Latin translation and found to his astonishment that Fourmont's ground-breaking Grammatica sinica was a translation of Varo's work (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.298). In an "act of puerile vanity," Abel-Remusat sadly concluded, Fourmont had appropriated Varo's entire text "almost without any change" while claiming that he had never seen it (1826:2.109).2

While de Guignes helped prepare this grammar for publication, Fourmont continued his research on chronology and the history of ancient peoples. During the seventeenth century, ancient Chinese historical sources had become an increasingly virulent threat to biblical chronology and, by extension, to biblical authority. As Fourmont's rival Freret was busy butchering Isaac Newton's lovingly calculated chronology, de Guignes's teacher turned his full attention to the Chinese annals. These annals were in general regarded either as untrustworthy and thus inconsequential or as trustworthy and a threat to biblical authority. However, in a paper read on May 18, 1734, at the Royal Academy of Inscriptions, Fourmont declared with conviction that he could square the circle: the Chinese annals were trustworthy just because they confirmed the Bible.

The Square within the Circle [is one of] the most potent of all the magical figures.

--The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

***

"As the sky with its stars and constellations is nothing separate from the All but includes the All, so is the 'firmament' of Man not separate from Man; and as the Universal Mind is not ruled by any external being, likewise the firmament in Man (his individual sphere of mind) is not subject to the rule of any creature, but is an independent and powerful whole." -- This fundamental truth of occultism is allegorically represented in the interlaced double triangles. He who has succeeded in bringing his individual mind in exact harmony with the Universal Mind has succeeded in reuniting the inner sphere with the outer one, from which he has only become separated by mistaking illusions for truths. He who has succeeded in carrying out practically the meaning of this symbol has become one with the father; he is virtually an adept, because he has succeeded in squaring the circle and circling the square. All of this proves that Paracelsus has brought the root of his occult ideas from the East.

-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.

***

Our scientific procedure is obviously the negation of the Absolute. That was an acute and happy remark of Goethe's: "He who devotes himself to nature attempts to find the squaring of the circle."

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain

***

The geometrician does not know the square of the circle.

-- De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri

***

It is impossible to square the circle perfectly because of its arc.

-- The Convivio, by Dante Alighieri

***

Arnesen proclaimed in a firm voice that all of the challenges in aquaculture would be mastered, including the biggest one of all: how to convert salmon to vegetarianism? The carnivorous predator fish need large amounts of animal protein. The feed concentrate dumped into the cages by the ton is made mainly of fishmeal and fish oil. It's a negative cycle: 4-6 kilograms of wild fish are killed and made into meal to produce one kilo of salmon flesh. More than half of the world's fish catch now goes to making feed concentrate for salmon and other animals. Farm-bred salmon consume more animal protein than they produce. How can that be sustainable? "We see the problem the same way the WWF does," conceded Petter Arnesen. "We're experimenting with increasing the share of vegetable protein in the feed, using soy, for example." The company was determined to achieve this, he said, as the fish reserves of the world's oceans were already "exhausted". The trouble is, when there is too little fish product in the feed the salmon raised on it no longer contain as much healthy omega 3 fatty acids. That's not the kind of salmon the retailers want. The poor Technical Director has the daunting task of circling the square -- luckily the WWF can lend him a hand: by simply designating the whole thing "sustainable".

-- Panda Leaks: The Dark Side of the WWF, by Wilfried Huismann

***

Although the CIA knew that the estimated 120,000 VC Self-Defense Forces (which Westmoreland described as "old men, old women and children") were the integral element of the insurgency, Carver, after being shown "evidence that I hadn't heard before," cut a deal on September 13. He sent a cable to Helms saying: "Circle now squared .... We have agreed set of figures Westmoreland endorsed." In November National Security Adviser Walt Rostow showed President Johnson a chart indicating that enemy strength had dropped from 285,000 in late 1966 to 242,000 in late 1967. President Johnson got the success he wanted to show, and Vietnam got Tet.

-- The Phoenix Program, by Douglas Valentine

Dismissing Freret's and Newton's nonbiblical Middle Eastern sources as "scattered scraps," he praised the Chinese annals to the sky as the only ancient record worth studying apart from the Bible (Fourmont 1740:507-8).

But Fourmont's lack of critical acumen is as evident in this paper as in his Critical reflections on the histories of ancient peoples of 1735 and the Meditationes sinicae of 1737. In the "avertissement" to the first volume of the Critical reflections, Fourmont mentions the question of an India traveler, Chevalier Didier, who had conversed with Brahmins and missionaries and came in frustration to Paris to seek Fourmont's opinion about an important question of origins: had Indian idolatry influenced Egyptian idolatry or vice versa? Fourmont delivered his answer after nearly a thousand tedious pages full of chronological juggling:

With regard to customs in general, since India is entirely Egyptian and Osiris led several descendants of Abraham there, we have the first cause of that resemblance of mores in those two nations; but with regard to the religion of the Indians, they only received it subsequently through commerce and through the colonies coming from Egypt. (Fourmont 1735:2-499)

For Fourmont the Old Testament was the sole reliable testimony of antediluvian times, and he argued that the reliability of other accounts decreases with increasing distance from the landing spot of Noah's ark. Only the Chinese, whose "language is the oldest of the universe," remain a riddle, as their antiquity "somehow rivals that of Genesis and has caused the most famous chronologists to change their system" (1735:1.lii). But would not China's "hieroglyphic" writing system also indicate Egyptian origins? Though Fourmont suspected an Egyptian origin of Chinese writing, he could not quite figure out the exact mechanism and transmission. He suspected that "Hermes, who passed for the inventor of letters" had not invented hieroglyphs but rather "on one hand more perfect hieroglyphic letters, which were brought to the Chinese who in turn repeatedly perfected theirs; and on the other hand alphabetic letters" (Fourmont 1735:2.500). These "more perfect hieroglyphs" that "seemingly existed with the Egyptian priests" are "quite similar to the Chinese characters of today" (p. 500).

Fourmont was studying whether there was any support for Kircher's hypothesis that the letters transmitted from Egypt to the Chinese were related to Coptic monosyllables (p. 503); but though he apparently did not find conclusive answers to such questions, the problem itself and Fourmont's basic direction (transmission from Egypt to China, some kind of more perfect hieroglyphs) must have been so firmly planted in his student de Guignes's mind that it could grow into the root over which he later stumbled. Fourmont's often repeated view that Egypt's culture was not as old as that of countries closer to the landing spot of Noah's ark made it clear that those who regarded Egypt as the womb of all human culture were dead wrong and that China, in spite of its ancient culture, was a significant step removed from the true origins.

Though the Chinese had received their writing system and probably also the twin ideas that in his view "properly constitute Egyptianism" -- the idea of metempsychosis and the adoration of animals and plants (p. 492) -- Fourmont credited the Chinese with subsequent improvements also in this respect: "My studies have thus taught me that the Chinese were a wise people, the most ancient of all peoples, but the first also, though idolatrous, that rid itself of the mythological spirit" (Fourmont 1735:2.liv). This accounted for their excellent historiography and voluminous literature:

I said that the Chinese Annals can be regarded as a respectable work. First of all, as everybody admits, for more than 3,500 years China has been populated, cultivated, and literate. Secondly, has it lacked authors as its people still read books, though few in number, written before Abraham? Thirdly, since few scholars know the Chinese books, let me here point out that the Chinese Annals are not bits and pieces of histories scattered here and there like the Latin and Greek histories which must be stitched together: they consist of at least 150 volumes that, without hiatus and the slightest interruption, present a sequence of 22 families which all reigned for 3, 4, 8, 10 centuries. (p. liv)

While Fourmont cobbled together hypotheses and conjectures, the Bible always formed the backdrop for his speculations about ancient history. A telling example is his critique of the Chinese historian OUYANG Xiu (1007-72), who argued that from the remote past, humans had always enjoyed roughly similar life spans. Lambasting this view as that of a "skeptic," Fourmont furnished the following argument as "proof" of the reliability of ancient Chinese histories:

We who possess the sacred writ: must we not on the contrary admire the Chinese annals when they, just in the time period of Arphaxad, Saleh, Heber, Phaleg, Rea, Sarug, Nachor, Abraham, etc., present us with men who lived precisely the same number of years? Now if someone told us that Seth at the age of 550 years married one of his grand-grand-nieces in the fourteenth generation: who of us would express the slightest astonishment? ... It is thus clear that all such objections are frivolous, and furthermore, that attacks against the Chinese annals on account of a circumstance [i.e., excessive longevity] which distinguishes them from all other books will actually tie them even more to Scripture and will be a sure means to increase their authority. (Fourmont 1740:514)

No comment is needed here.[???]

Immediately after Fourmont's death in 1745, the twenty-four-year-old Joseph de Guignes replaced his master as secretary interpreter of oriental languages at the Royal Library. It was the beginning of an illustrious career: royal censor and attache to the journal des Scavans in 1752, member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1753, chair of Syriac at the College Royal from 1757 to 1773, garde des antiques at the Louvre in 1769, editor of the Journal des Savants, and other honors (Michaud 1857:18.(27). De Guignes had, like his master Fourmont, a little problem. The pioneer Sinologists in Paris were simply unable to hold a candle to the China missionaries. Since 1727 Fourmont had been corresponding with the figurist China missionary Joseph Henry PREMARE (1666-1736), who, unlike Fourmont, was an accomplished Sinologist (see Chapter 5). Premare was very liberal with his advice and sent, apart from numerous letters, his Notitia Linguae sinicae to Fourmont in 1728. This was, in the words of Abel-Remusat,

neither a simple grammar, as the author too modestly calls it, nor a rhetoric, as Fourmont intimated; it is an almost complete treatise of literature in which Father Premare not only included everything that he had collected about the usage of particles and grammatical rules of the Chinese but also a great number of observations about the style, particular expressions in ancient and common idiom, proverbs, most frequent patterns -- and everything supported by a mass of examples cited from texts, translated and commented when necessary. (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.269)

Premare thus sent Fourmont his "most remarkable and important work," which was "without any doubt the best of all those that Europeans have hitherto composed on these matters" (p. 269).

But instead of publishing this vastly superior work and making the life of European students of Chinese considerably easier, Fourmont compared it unfavorably to his own (partly plagiarized) product and had Premare's masterpiece buried in the Royal Library, where it slept until Abel-Remusat rediscovered it in the nineteenth century (pp. 269-73). However, Fourmont's two disciples Deshauterayes and de Guignes could profit from such works since Fourmont for years kept the entire China-related collection of the Royal Library at his home where the two disciples had their rooms; thus Premare was naturally one of the Sinologists who influenced de Guignes.4 So was Antoine GAUBIL (1689-1759), whose reputation as a Sinologist was deservedly great.

But there is a third, extremely competent Jesuit Sinologist who remained in the shadows, though his knowledge of Chinese far surpassed that of de Guignes and all other Europe-based early Sinologists (and, one might add, even many modern ones). His works suffered a fate resembling that of the man who was in many ways his predecessor, Joao Rodrigues (see Chapter 1) in that they were used but rarely credited. The man in question was Claude de VISDELOU (1656-1737), who spent twenty-four years in China (1685-1709) and twenty-eight years in India (1709-37). One can say without exaggeration that the famous Professor de Guignes owed this little-known missionary a substantial part of his fame -- and this was his dirty little secret.

De Visdelou's Brahmins

The fact that the reader has already encountered one of de Visdelou's seminal ideas without realizing it is symptomatic. De Visdelou was the direct source of Le Gobien's "Brahmin followers of Fo" mixup that reached, as we have seen in the previous chapter, such a large European readership via Bayle's and Diderot's "Brachmanes" articles. After his arrival in China in 1685, the linguistically gifted Frenchman made such fast progress in learning Chinese that even China's crown prince was astonished. In a letter dated January 20, 1728, De Visdelou remembers a scene from the year 1790:

When I was five years in China and had begun to devote myself to reading Chinese books for barely four years, emperor Kangxi ordered me and one of my companions to come from Canton to Beijing. We were directly led to the palace. The emperor was gravely ill, and we could not see him. The crown prince of the empire who conducted affairs in place of his father was told that a European had arrived who within four years had acquired knowledge of the canonical books and the classics. The prince soon appeared at the door asking where that foreigner was. Here he is, I answered, after I had prostrated in the manner of the land. The prince immediately ordered that a volume of the canonical book called Shujing be brought, i.e., the Canonical History. Opening it at random, he asked me to stand up and read it; I did so and explained it in the presence of several persons who accompanied the prince. Since the Chinese have a high opinion of themselves and their products, the prince was in admiration and said the following words: "Ta-ting, i.e., he understands very well."[???] The crown prince did not leave it at this verbal testimony but also wanted to provide an authentic attestation, written in Chinese characters on a piece of satin one aune in length and half an aune in width. It said: "We recognize that this man from Europe is loftier in intelligence [lumiere] and in the knowledge of Chinese characters than the clouds floating above our heads, and that he is more profound in penetration and knowledge than the abyss on which we tread." [?another forgery?] (de Visdelou 1760:341-42)

Seven years after this incident, de Visdelou dictated a few pages about the religions of China to the visiting Mr. Basset in order to explain the background of a regional persecution of Christians. Basset's notes made their way to Paris and into the hands of Father Le Gobien who edited and used them as introduction to his book about the edict of tolerance issued by the Chinese emperor (1698), which was then used by Bayle and Diderot. Already the first few lines show the extent and character of Le Gobien's editorial interference. He was an inclusivist in the line of Matteo Ricci who shared the opinion of the vast majority of Jesuits that the ancient religion of China (and Confucianism as its successor) had venerated the true God. De Visdelou, by contrast, was one of the few dissenters in the line of Joao Rodrigues who thought that ancient Chinese religion and Confucianism were forms of atheism. Already the initial paragraphs of de Visdelou's report as taken down by Basset were heavily edited by Le Gobien and exhibit an immense difference of opinion. De Visdelou only discussed modern Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism and lost no word about an ancient Chinese monotheism. The latter was added by Le Gobien, who claimed that this ancient Confucianism was still extant with the Chinese emperor as head; see Table 5, where major differences are highlighted in gray.

TABLE 5. CHINESE SECTS IN VISDELOU'S DICTATION TEXT AND LE GOBIEN

De Visdelou's dictation text (c. 1696) [a]

I cannot dispense myself from providing a general idea of the different sects of China. Without this one would not understand the thinking of the Viceroy who compares them among themselves and with the Christian religion. It is sufficiently known that there are three principal ones of which the first is that of the philosopher scholars (I mean the modern philosophers, not the ancient ones). The second one is that of the brachmanes, and the third that of the bonzes.

The first is the dominant one [!!!] ... [etc.]

The second sect which I call that of the brachmanes of China (they themselves take this name. Because the name of polomen, which they give to themselves, is the Indian brahmen travestied as Chinese, [and] because [this religion] has really been brought from the Indies to China by the brachmanes.) It has many names in China.

Le Gobien's published text (1698)

Since the history I write concerns only religion, I cannot dispense myself from providing to my reader a general idea of the different sects that are current in China. There are four principal ones.

The first is of those who, less by a feeling of piety than by respect for the ancients, recognize in the world a superior spirit, eternal, almighty, and much like the one known in the first centuries of the monarchy as the Lord of Heaven. It must be admitted that the number of these veritable worshippers is not very great, even though the Emperor is their head and has often declared that it was to God that he offered the sacrifices in the temples and not to those inferior and imaginary spirits with which the people is so ridiculously infatuated.

The second is the dominant one ... [etc.]

The third sect current among the Chinese can be called the religion of the Brachmanes or Bramenes, and they themselves call it by that name. Because Polomen, which is [the word] they use, is the Bramen of the Indians which they could not pronounce and that they apparently travestied in their language.

a. English translation of text in Archives de La Societe des Missions Etrangeres (vol. 418:277-82) as reproduced in Timmermans 1998:578-88.

Leaving aside the missionary's discussion of Neoconfucianism (de Visdelou's first and Le Gobien's second religion), we will here focus on the passages that for the first time provided support from the Chinese side for Kircher's idea that the Brahmins were the missionaries who brought Xaca's religion from India to China. Though Basset, who wrote down the text dictated by de Visdelou, appears to have left out a few words, the overall meaning of de Visdelou's statement is clear: it is de Visdelou who calls this "sect" that "has many names in China" by the name of "brachmanes of China." In the parentheses he adduces two reasons to justify his choice: (1) its representatives call themselves polomen, which is the Chinese pronunciation of brahmin; and (2) this religion was brought from the Indies to China by the brachmanes. Today we know that boluomen seng (Brahmin monk) was mainly used for Buddhist monks who had come from India to China and that on some occasions it served as a generic honorific for monks (as the Italian "monsignore" would flatter Catholic priests of any country). De Visdelou's choice to call Chinese Buddhism "the sect of the brachmanes of China" was not based on Chinese custom but rather on the Western idea, popular since the publication of Kircher's China illustrata (1667), that the religion of Xaca/Fo (that is, Buddhism) had been brought to China by Brahmins. In fact, after the parentheses explaining his reasons for this choice, de Visdelou clearly states that this religion "has many names in China" and that its priests are commonly called hochan (Ch. heshang, reverend) and not polomen. In Le Gobien's published text, de Visdelou's "I call" becomes "can be called," and de Visdelou's choice turns into an official nomenclature since "they themselves call it by this name." Under Le Gobien's pen, de Visdelou's "sect of the brachmanes of China" loses both the "of China" and its "many names" and turns straight into Brahmanism by becoming "the religion of the Brachmanes or Bramenes" -- and there can be no doubt about this since "they themselves call it by that name." These changes might be regarded as minor, but they are not. As the explanations continue, de Visdelou keeps calling the priests of this religion by the name they use themselves, namely, hocham, whereas Le Gobien changed this into Bramenes.

This was not de Visdelou's (or Basset's?) only confusing sect name; he called his third religion (which we now call Daoism) the sect of the "bonzes," a term usually employed for Buddhist priests. Here, de Visdelou once more emphasizes that this is his choice rather than that of the Daoists, and in the first section of Table 6 he justifies this by pointing once more to the origin of the "sect" (which in this case is China).

De Visdelou's hochans are transformed by Le Gobien into Bramenes, and this choice of words contributed to the "mixup" that filled the critics of Bayle and Diderot with so much indignation. But Le Gobien's confusion is understandable. As the second section of Table 6 shows, de Visdelou seems to have held that the religion brought by brachmanes from India to China has priests called hochan, and that hochan from different countries venerate three identical treasures: Buddha, dharma, and "the rule of the brachmanes."

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Part 2 of 4
 

TABLE 6. BRAHMANS IN VISDELOU'S DICTATION TEXT AND LE GOBIEN'S

The third sect which I have called that of the bonzes because it has its origin in China is ordinarily called the sect of the Taossee or the doctors of the law.

Their morals are quite in accord with those of the Epicureans. They bring back everything to indolence, which really is a half-hearted apathy; because they are not nearly as severe as the hochans.

The most common [name] one gives to these false priests is hochan, which signifies people reunited from various countries by the preference they give to three precious things which are the Fa, the law of Fo, and the rule of the brachmanes.

The fourth sect is that which is named the religion of the Bonzes; it has its origin in China and its priests call themselves commonly Taosse: which in Chinese means the doctors of the Law.

Their morals seem hardly different from those of our Epicureans; they do not plunge man's spirit into that exaggerated indifference of the Bramenes[/but are content to banish the vehement desires and despondent passions.

Nevertheless they ordinarily call these false priests Hochan, which signifies people reunited from various countries. These priests worship principally three things, the God Fo, his law, and the books containing their particular rules.

Like Rodriguez and Kircher, de Visdelou thus seems to have thought that the religion of Fo had been brought to China by Indian Brahmins and that the old "rule of the brachmanes" was still operative in China. But he neither mentioned a "God Fo" nor "books" containing "particular rules." Instead of simplifying things as he intended, Le Gobien added another layer of confusion. Hardly anybody had access to de Visdelou's dictation text or knew that de Visdelou was the source of this information. Bayle, Diderot, de Guignes and others could thus only refer to Le Gobien's description with its clear-cut identification of Indian Brahmanism with Fo, his law, and his "books." The identification of the religion of India's ancient Brachmanes with the religion of Fo in China, where it was imported by Brahmins (polomen), was the first seminal idea of de Visdelou that shaped de Guignes's outlook.

Huns from Shinar

Claude de Visdelou got much unattributed exposure in Paris when Le Gobien's book on the Chinese emperor's edict (whose introduction, as we have seen, is a heavy-handed edition of de Visdelou's dictated words about Chinese religions) became the joint subject of a hearing at the Sorbonne on July 1, 1700. One of the five propositions that was condemned on October 18 of the same year was from Le Gobien's Histoire de l'edit de l'empereur de La Chine (1698) and the rest from Lecomte's Nouveaux memoires sur l'etat present de La Chine (whose 1698 edition also contained Le Gobien's book, as previously mentioned) and his Lettre au due du Maine sur les ceremonies de la Chine. The central point of contention of all five condemned propositions is exactly the "first religion" that Le Gobien had added to de Visdelou's report. De Visdelou, like Rodrigues before him, was familiar enough with Chinese literature and religion to realize that Ricci's and his successors' monotheistic idealization of ancient Chinese religion and of classical Confucianism was a pipe dream. He was also staunchly opposed to Bouvet's, Premare's, and Foucquet's attempts to somehow make the Yijing (Book of Changes), the Daodejing (Book of the Way and its Power), or other Chinese classics into a kind of Asian Old Testament where the Dao would appear as creator God and prophecies of lambs, sacrificed saviors, and virgin mothers abounded.

De Visdelou's opposition to such views and his willingness to furnish proofs from Chinese sources to those who fought such figurist and accommodationist fantasies eventually led to his consecration as a bishop, his ouster from China and the Jesuit order, and twenty-eight years of exile in southeast India. The French government did not allow him to return to France, and he was forced to spend the rest of his life (1709-37) in exile at the house of the French Franciscans in Pondicherry. There he used his large library of Chinese books to produce works, reports, and translations of rare quality. Unlike his colleagues in the China mission, he could devote almost all his time to study, and unlike the scholars in Paris scavenging his work, he had twenty-four years of China experience under his belt and was arguably the most competent Western Sinologist of his time. Like Fourmont (his junior by seventeen years) and later de Guignes, de Visdelou was able to use sources not only in the major European languages and Chinese but also in Arabic and Persian. He was thus perfectly positioned to correct and supplement the famous Bibliotheque Orientale of seventeenth-century Europe's foremost Orientalist, Barthelemy D'HERBELOT DE MOLAINVILLE (1625-95), one of de Guignes's eminent predecessors as holder of the chair of Syriac from 1692 to 1695. De Visdelou remarked that d'Herbelot's Turkic, Arabic, and Persian sources contained much information about Central and East Asia that was either incorrect or questionable, and he decided to "redress the Mahometan histories in what they falsely assert about China and Tartary" by furnishing alternative or supplementary information from Chinese sources.

The resulting work by de Visdelou, written at the beginning of the eighteenth century, only saw publication in 1779. De Visdelou gave it a title that almost says it all:

Abbreviated history of Tartary, containing the origin of the people who appeared with verve in this vast land more than two thousand years ago; their religion, their manners, customs, wars, and the revolutions of their empires together with the chronological and genealogical sequence of their emperors; all of this preceded and followed by critical observations on several entries of the Bibliotheque Orientale. (1779:46)

His manuscript came in four tomes that -- according to the geographer Jean- Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1776:33) -- were sent from Pondicherry to the Academician and economic historian Jean-Roland Mallet.

D'Anville, whose New Atlas of China appeared in the year of de Visdelou's death (1737), appreciated de Visdelou's manuscripts for their precious information about many places in Central and North Asia whose Chinese names de Visdelou had managed to identify and whose descriptions from Chinese sources he furnished and expertly translated.5 D'Anville must have been particularly interested in de Visdelou's additions to d'Herbelot, his summary and translations from Chinese dynastic histories about the nations north and west of China, and his Latin translation of the history of the Mongols (Herbelot et al. 1779:4.333). If both the academician Mallet (who died in 1736) and d'Anville (member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature) had their hands on these precious manuscripts, it is likely that fellow Academy member Fourmont -- at the time the only man in Paris reputed to be expert in both Arabic and Chinese -- and/or his disciples de Guignes and Deshauterayes were also in the loop. Apart from his work on Tartary and the Mongols, de Visdelou had also sent an annotated translation of the Shujing (Classic of History; unpublished but used by Deshauterayes), an annotated translation of the eighth-century Nestorian stele of Xi' an (partly published by Voltaire's nephew Abbe Vincent Mignot in 1760), and a long letter about the Yijing or Book of Changes (used by Mignot in 1761-62 and published by de Guignes in 1770). De Visdelou's four-volume work on Tartary and the inserted manuscript with his annotated translation of the Nestorian stele somehow ended up in The Hague where Jean Neaulme, the well-known publisher of Voltaire and Rousseau, purchased them for 400 Dutch florins and communicated them to the bibliophile Prosper Marchand (c. 1675-1756) and others (Herbelot et al. 1779:4.iii).

Jean Neaulme resided in Paris between 1740 and 1750 (p. iv) and sought the advice of specialists regarding its publication. In the course of this examination, the inserted small manuscript containing Visdelou's expertly annotated translation of the Nestorian stele of Xian was also discovered. Neaulme asked several professors for advice (the names s'Gravensande and de Joncourt are mentioned, p. iii); and if anybody in Paris would be consulted for this prospective publication involving Chinese as well as Arabic and Persian, it would have been Fourmont or his disciples de Guignes and Deshauterayes. Abel-Remusat6 and others had long suspected that de Guignes had used de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript; but only in the summer of 2008 did I find the conclusive proof of this among the papers of Fourmont at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The Fourmont dossier contains dozens of pages in de Guignes's hand, copied word for word from de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript. The notes contain references indicating that these copies from de Visdelou's manuscript were very voluminous.7

In 1751 de Guignes published a 24-page prospectus for a large work on the origin of the Huns and Turks (Memoire historique sur l'origine des Huns et des Turks, adresse a M. Tavenot) whose central argument and methodology eerily resemble those of de Visdelou's manuscript on the Tartars. In various places in his manuscript, de Visdelou had advanced the idea that the Xiongnu, a horse-mounted nomad people of the steppe that had for many centuries invaded and threatened the Chinese empire, might correspond to the people known to Europe as "the Huns."8 The first section of de Visdelou's Abbreviated History of Tartary in the same manuscript deals exactly with the empire of the Xiongnu and begins as follows:

The Toum-hou, or Oriental Tartars, recognize as first father of their nation Yen-yue, son of the emperor of China named Kao-sin who began his reign 2,432 years before the Christian era .... The Hioum-nou or Occidental Tartars (which may be the Huns whom the Greeks called [x] and the Romans Hunni) drew their origin from Chun-vei, son of a Chinese emperor of the Hia dynasty, which ended in the year 1767 before the Christian era. (Herbelot et al. 1779:48)

De Visdelou then goes on to cite at length Chinese historians about the Xiongnu and concludes that this people (which the Chinese eventually labeled Hioum-nou [Xiongnu]) "may be those who appeared in Europe in the fourth century under the name of Huns" (p. 51).

De Guignes's Visdelou-inspired view that the Xiongnu are identical with the Huns formed the basis of his 4-volume magnum opus: Histoire generale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des autres tartares occidentaux, & c. avant Jesus-Christ jusqu a present. It was an immediate success and received praise from many eminent men including Edward Gibbon, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who called it a "great history" and praised de Guignes for having "laid open new and important scenes in the history of mankind" (Pocock 2005:110). Such interest was understandable since the hitherto isolated islands of Chinese dynastic histories and the history of the late Roman Empire received a connecting link that showed the origins of Europe in a new, far more global light.

But where did the Chinese and the Huns ultimately come from? De Guignes addresses this question at the beginning of his second volume. Like his teacher Fourmont, de Guignes's vision of origins was thoroughly biblical: "Only Moses has in few words reported the sequence of generations before the deluge, and it is a fact worthy of mention that the histories of all nations stop in unison around the times that approach this great catastrophe" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.2). As the fictions of antiquity-obsessed Egyptians and Chaldeans had supposedly all vanished under the gaze of critical scholars like Fourmont, it was now de Guignes's turn to confirm that the histories of the Chinese "do not at all contradict the account of Moses" but rather "indirectly confirm it" (p. 2).

The Huns do not seem less ancient than these famous people. They are mentioned in the history from the first beginnings of Chinese monarchy; they thus are part of those colonies that abandoned the plains of Shinar shortly after the deluge. One might be tempted to believe that these two nations [the Huns and the Chinese] stem from the same people. (p. 2)

Though de Guignes was reluctant to discuss topics without any base in some historical record, he developed a scenario that traced the course of the Chinese people from Shinar in Mesopotamia to Persia and along the Silk Road to China. Another colony turned north from Shinar toward Armenia where it split into a western and eastern branch. The first went on to form the ancient Europeans, whereas the second formed the Tartar nations including those that the Chinese from the Han period onward called Hiong-nou or Huns (pp. 3-13). These Huns had reportedly established an empire as early as 1230 B.C.E. (p. 21), and de Guignes spent much of the rest of his four volumes tracing their fate.

In the nineteenth century, de Guignes's view of the identity of the Huns and their connections with the Mogols and Turks came under heavy fire and was no longer accepted. But de Visdelou's and de Guignes's conjecture of an initial identity has recently found unexpected support through the analysis of a few letters that Sir Aurel Stein dug out of the desert sand 55 miles west of Dunhuang. These "Sogdian Ancient letters" confirm "a long-suspected but never proven link between the Xiongnu of old Chinese sources and the Huns unleashed on Europe from 370," even though they "do not imply that the Huns of Europe or Central Asia after A. D. 350 are themselves descendants of the Xiongnu" (de la Vaissihe 2004:22). On the other hand, the Bible-inspired scenario linking the Chinese and the Huns to the plains of Shinar was abandoned by its author de Guignes barely two years after publication. In 1758, just before the fourth and last volume of his History of the Huns went to press, de Guignes had the printer set the following stunning announcement on the last page of his work:

At the beginning of the second part of the first volume of this work, I made some reflections about the origin of the Chinese. I then believed that these peoples came directly from the plains of Shinar. New researches oblige me to change my view and to beg the reader not to pay any attention to what is said about this subject in the first two or three pages. The Chinese are only a rather modern colony of the Egyptians. I have proved this in a paper read at the Academy. The Chinese characters are nothing more than monograms formed by Egyptian and Phoenician letters, and the first emperors of China are the ancient Kings of Thebes. This I intend to show in a separate work. (de Guignes 1758:4.518)

How could an author who had just finished his 4-volume magnum opus, erected on the reliability of Chinese annals, rip out its foundation on the last page? It was by no means only a problem of "the first two or three pages," as de Guignes suggested. If the Chinese were a "rather modern colony of the Egyptians," then central pillars of de Guignes's argument like "the Huns were not less ancient than the Chinese who knew them even before the Hia Dynasty, which began its reign in 2207 before Jesus Christ" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.16) or "the establishment of the empire of the Huns must be dated to the year 1230 before Jesus Christ" (p. 21), crumbled to dust. What in the world had happened?

De Guignes's Egyptian Enlightenment

Two major events had triggered this spectacular change of opinion. The first is not obvious unless one carefully reads de Guignes's response to a review of his first volumes in the Memoires de Trevoux. De Guignes printed this letter to the editors just before the index at the end of the fourth volume of his History of the Huns, but it was written in 1757, that is, before de Guignes's "Egyptian enlightenment" of 1758. In this letter he criticizes "modern writers" who believe in the "authenticity of Chinese Annals and the Chinese Chronology" in order to attack that of the Bible (1758:4.347). De Guignes's main target is obvious since his name appears twice: Voltaire. Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs first appeared in the year 1756, the very year that also saw publication of the first volumes of de Guignes's Histoire des Huns. The view of origins in these two works is indeed diametrically opposed. For de Guignes, everything has its roots in the plain where Noah's ark landed, whereas Voltaire began his work by making fun of such "oriental fables" and "vain ideas" that are "an insult to reason" and "suffocate what little we know about antiquity under a mass of forced conjectures" (Voltaire 1756:4-7). Arguing that the Jesuits themselves had confirmed by calculation of solar eclipses that the Chinese Annals were both old and reliable, Voltaire had begun his universal history with a chapter on China that stated that twenty-five centuries before Christ the Chinese already had a well-established empire (p. 11). De Guignes sharply criticized such enthusiasm that makes the Chinese empire "begin well before the deluge and possibly even before the epoch of creation" (de Guignes 1758:4.348). Insisting that "nothing is as uncertain as this kind of chronology" (p. 349), de Guignes went on to dismiss the historical value of the very sources on which his early history of the Huns and of the Chinese was based. He now held that Chinese annals delivered neither detailed nor reliable information and were mostly late works that are "barely more ancient that Herodotus ... who flourished around 480 B.C.E." (p. 351):

The Chou-king, which is the most ancient, contains only some haphazard events without chronology. The Tsou-chou, whose authority is contested by the Chinese themselves and that was composed around 300 B.C.E. is, as it were, no mote than a chronological table. The Chuntchieou of Confucius is only a very dry short chronology; and the Chipen is very short. That's all there is of Chinese sources. (p. 351)

As we have seen in Chapter 1, Voltaire was at this point still unsure whether he should assign the role of cradle of human civilization to China or to India. But his sarcastic dismissal of biblical history and his initial chapters on China and India -- which relegated the Mediterranean cultural region and Israel to the also-rans -- ruffled many feathers. Furthermore, Voltaire's argument that the constant inundations of the Nile must have prevented early settlement in Egypt (Voltaire 1756:30) was a provocation to the majority of the encyclopedists and the egyptophile antiquarians of the time. As the author of an entire volume of chronological tables (vol. 1) and a history that took Chinese chronology and annals very seriously, de Guignes had good reason to fear being instrumentalized by Bible-averse critics like Voltaire. While his letter at the end of the fourth volume was a brave attempt at preventing such misuse, it also risked throwing the baby out with the bath water.

But there was another, far more decisive event that led to de Guignes's radical change of mind. After reading the abstract of an April 1758 report by Abbe Jean-Jacques Barthelemy on the Phoenician alphabet, de Guignes decided "to work on the manner in which alphabetical letters could have formed" (de Guignes 1760:36). Having before him a table with Phoenician letters, de Guignes happened to glance at a Chinese dictionary with old forms of characters. The similarity of ancient Chinese character elements and Phoenician letters struck him so forcefully that he was soon convinced that not only the Chinese characters "but also the laws, form of government, the sovereign, the ministers governing under him, and the entire Empire were Egyptian; and that the entire ancient history of China was nothing other than the history of Egypt inserted before that of China proper" (p. 37). Utterly convinced of having made an epoch-making discovery, de Guignes on November 14, 1758, read a report to the public assembly of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Literature in Paris. In the following year he published an abstract of this report together with some older opinions about Egypto-Chinese connections along with part of Abbe Barthelemy's paper on Phoenician letters in form of a booklet with the title "Report in which one proves that the Chinese are an Egyptian colony" (de Guignes 1760). De Guignes argued, to the astonishment of missionaries and academics alike that the Chinese had constructed their characters using a toolset of Phoenician letters. Unaware that these letters represent sounds, he explained, the Chinese interpreted them as elements of meaning or keys -- that is, character radicals in Fourmont-style -- and in this manner constructed myriads of characters with a hidden story they themselves could not grasp. It is here that, in Indiana Jones style, Professor de Guignes bursts upon the scene and discovers the hidden code.9 If the first Chinese radical (according to Fourmont) "signifies unity among the Chinese," aleph has the same meaning for the people of the Middle East; and "for both groups it also signifies preeminence and the action of steering" (de Guignes 1760:61). Soon enough, de Guignes drew up a kind of Ur-alphabet that was "perhaps very analogous to the primitive alphabet of all nations" (pp. 61-62). This would of course be the kind of writing system used in the plains of Shinar before peoples and languages multiplied. "New combinations gave me new letters, and I saw my alphabet develop imperceptibly to my eyes" (p. 63).

But if the Chinese had adopted alphabetic letters as hieroglyphic elements of meaning, men there had to be a proof of the pudding: it had to be possible to disassemble Chinese characters and get Egyptian or Phoenician words.

I began with the character by which the Chinese designate the word famer [x]; and disregarding the sound which they give to this character, I found it composed of an I and of a D, and I read Jad or Jod. Now in the Coptic language which has preserved numerous Egyptian words, Jod meant father. (p. 64)

While de Guignes cobbled together Phoenician letters infused with some meaning, disassembled Chinese characters into radicals whose meaning was just as contrived, and used his linguistic skills and Fourmont-schooled acumen to connect the dots and lines, he marveled at the enormous consequences of his discovery: "a strange phenomenon for Chinese literature, for the history of ancient peoples a new order of things, and systems new and more conform to truth" (p. 67). Thus, an entirely new vista opened before the eyes of the historian:

A people for a long sequence of centuries in possession of a language that it does not know; this language wrapped in traits that disfigure it and loaded with sounds that are foreign to it; an alphabetical script converted into hieroglyphic signs; Egypt and Phoenicia linked by the most palpable connections; the letters, the languages, the annals of the most ancient nations linked in a sequence and all concurring in general harmony. (pp. 67-68)

Details such as when this supposed Egyptian colonization of China had taken place were only cursorily addressed, but de Guignes proposed the year 1122 B.C.E. as the date "when the Egyptian colony appears to have come to China" (pp. 76-77). It is clear that the defense of the biblical scenario and its chronology against the likes of Voltaire was a major motive of de Guignes's Orientalist tour de force:

What will become of the Chinese and the immense duration that they attribute to their empire, all those divisions in historical and uncertain mythical times, all those works aiming to establish their chronology, and all those fashioned to destroy it? And of all those proofs that one draws from them against the books of Moses, and all those systems produced to defend the testimony of this legislator? And of that precocious wisdom, that superiority in all things attributed to the Chinese? ... All this disappears, and only a simple fact remains, namely, that the ancient savages of China, exactly like those of Greece, were cultivated by the Egyptians -- but much later than them because China is much further away than Greece. (p. 79)

As De Guignes refined his argument and replaced the Phoenician alphabetical radicals by Egyptian hieroglyphic ones it became increasingly clear that his theories were intimately linked to the defense of Europe's Bible-based view of history. He was convinced that an antediluvial unitary language of humankind and a writing system to represent that language had once existed. In a paper read on Easter 1766 at the Royal Academy about "the method to arrive at reading and understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs," he explained in some detail his concept of the 214 "primitive ideas" that the Chinese use as radicals and his view of hieroglyphic and alphabetic elements (which had also considerably evolved since 1758):

These 214 keys are either used alone as a character to express a meaning or combined in various ways and then considered parts of a character of group. Each of these parts is the representation of a simple idea which united with two or three others, produces a word or another idea resulting from these simple ideas; that is to say, they form together a kind of phrase which is like the definition of a more complex idea. One could thus regard the 214 keys as the representation of the 214 simple and primitive ideas of which the first humans made use and which they combined in various ways to express other novel ideas as the need arose (de Guignes 1770:13).

The first humans, de Guignes thus proposed, wrapped little Fourmont-style stories in their hieroglyphs: the character for night, [x], for example, "is composed of three such keys that signify 'obscurity,' the 'action of covering,' and 'man' "; literally rendered, "this means the obscurity covering men, a phrase that perfectly expresses the idea of night" (p. 13). This kind of implicit poetry, de Guignes suggested, is the ultimate source of the "oriental style" (which at that time was en vogue as a research topic in Bible studies) and accounts for the striking "poetic" similarities between various Asian languages.

According to de Guignes, this system of "hieroglyphic" writing was "that of the first men and by consequence common to all those who remained in the region where the Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Phoenician, and Egyptian languages were in use" (p. 26). The Egyptians had a special status since they had "cultivated the sciences earlier than other people, transmitted them to other peoples, and instructed Moses in all their sciences" (pp. 26-27). "More than any other people, the Egyptians had safeguarded the simplicity of this ancient language which must have been that of the first humans" (p. 41). They also passed on their "keys," which is why oriental languages, as seen in Figure 8. "have preserved the roots of Egyptian words" (p. 29).

Other oriental languages inherited the characteristics of primeval speech and writing via Egypt. De Guignes concluded:

I believe having sufficiently proved: 1. That the oriental languages, which must be regarded only as dialects, are related to that of the Egyptians, and that they all seem to have been formed from a mother language -- which apparently was that of the first humans -- that the Egyptians had preserved with the most care. 2. That the Chinese characters are the same as the Egyptian ones, and by consequence, that one can succeed in reading and understanding these latter [Egyptian] ones. (pp. 46-47)

Figure 8. De Guignes's hieroglyphs and Chinese characters (1770:50)

De Guignes was aware that the verification and documentation of his discovery would necessitate decades of hard labor. The volumes furnishing the promised proofs never came to completion, but by and by, de Guignes addressed some of the major issues in separate papers. His 1759 bombshell had been severely taken to task, especially by his codisciple under Fourmont, Deshauterayes, most of whose twenty-three objections -- published in the same year under the title of "Doubts about the dissertation of Mr. de Guignes about the Chinese" -- de Guignes was incapable of invalidating. They included the observation that the depiction of objects and hieroglyphic writing must be older than alphabetic systems (Deshauterayes 1759:12-15);10 that in spite of the Egyptian priests who supposedly carried the hieroglyph system to China, there is no trace of early Egyptian religion in China (pp. 16-18); and that the doctrine of metempsychosis was introduced to China from India in the year 65 C.E. and not from Egypt at some much earlier time (pp. 81-85).

The question of the relationship of Chinese religion to its supposed Egyptian origins was a central one. In 1775 de Guignes finally addressed it in a report, while admitting that this issue of religion was "the most difficult, the most important, and the least likely to furnish the kind of proofs I was looking for" (de Guignes 1781d:305). In spite of Jesuit speculation about ancient Chinese monotheism, little was known about ancient Chinese religion, and the exoteric/esoteric division in Chinese religion was not specific enough to allow a clear identification of Egyptian origins. Since the religion of Fo was excluded from discussion because of its non-Egyptian origin (see below), de Guignes had to fall back on the supposedly oldest Chinese book, the Yijing. Here he found himself once more in possession of an excellent analysis by de Visdelou (1770). But the similarities he came up with were less than impressive: Osiris and Yang, Isis and Yin, eight elements and trigrams, the conceptions of world soul and emanation, and an elaborate number system. He compared this with what is known about the doctrines of Pythagoras and quickly concluded that it was "borrowed from Egyptianisme, the source of Pythagorisme" (de Guignes 1781d:314). Similarities between the Yijing and Pythagorean numeric philosophy were seen as due to their common Egyptian source, and this short circuit allowed de Guignes to jump to the conclusion that it was "proven that one of the two nations borrowed its system from the other" (p. 314) and that "the Chinese -- who hitherto were portrayed as an isolated people that drew nothing from other nations and who some even wanted to make into the cradle of sciences and arts -- have borrowed everything from Egypt" (p. 345).

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Part 3 of 4

De Guignes's "Indian Religion"

It is interesting that in such discussions de Guignes did not mention one word about another focus of his interest, the religion of Fo. We have seen in previous chapters that Athanasius Kircher, Mathurin Veyssiere de La Croze, and Engelbert Kaempfer all regarded its origin as Egyptian and that in the case of Kaempfer, whose writings de Guignes studied with much attention, the founder was even identified as an Egyptian priest from Memphis. It also would have been easy to expand La Croze's list of similarities between Egyptian religion and that of the Samaneens who followed Fo/Buddha. However, though inspired by La Croze's synthesis, de Guignes held a different view of this pan-Asian religion. This view will be explored in the remainder of this chapter based on the following pertinent publications by de Guignes:

1. The Recherche sur les philosophes appeles Samaneens ("Researches about the philosophers called Samaneens"). De Guignes read this paper to the Royal Academy in July 1753 and published it six years later (de Guignes 1759:770-804).

2. A section of the second volume of the History of the Huns containing de Guignes's pioneering translation of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra (de Guignes 1756:1B.223-37).

3. Three reports read in the course of 1776 to the Royal Academy under the title of Sur la Religion Indienne, & sur les Livres fondamentaux de cette religion, qui ont ete traduits de l'Indien en Chinois ("On Indian religion and the basic texts of that religion that were translated from the Indian [idiom] into Chinese"). These were first published in 1781 (de Guignes 1781a, b, c).

What distinguishes de Guignes's research on the Samaneens from that of his predecessors is his use of Asian sources. We recall that La Croze's synthesis only mentioned a poetry lexicon, an ancient language book, and (with a question mark) the Civavakkiyam as "books of the Samaneens" (La Croze 1724:494-95). None of these texts is currently associated with Buddhism. By contrast, de Guignes from the outset based his view on two specific texts. He devoted the entire second part of his 1753 paper to their analysis and included partial translations from the Arabic and Chinese (de Guignes 1759:791-804). The first of these texts, the so-called Anbertkend (sometimes also spelled Ambertkend), is today known as the Amrtakunda (Pool of Nectar), a Hatha Yoga text of Indian origin that has nothing to do with Buddhism. Carl W. Ernst called it "one of the most unusual examples of cross-cultural encounter in the annals of the study of religion" on account of its complex synthesis of Indian, Islamic, gnostic, and Neoplatonic influences and the fact that no other literary source on yoga was so widely disseminated among Sufis (Ernst 1996:9-11). The use of this text by de Guignes is a hitherto unexplored facet of this interesting cross-cultural encounter. For him the Anbertkend was an important text of the so-called "Indian religion" that "contains the principles admitted by the Yogis, particularly those related to magic" (p. 791)." The second text discussed by de Guignes is presented as "the work of Fo himself that includes all the moral teachings he bequeathed to his disciples" (p. 791). While this second text is well known under the title Forty-Two Sections Sutra and is extant in Chinese, the Anbertkend or Amrtakunda is not exactly a household word. De Guignes described it as an Indian book that was "translated into the Persian language by the Imam Rokneddin Mohammed of Samarkand who had received it from a Brahmin called Behergit of the sect of the Yogis" and was subsequently translated into Arabic by Mohieddin-ben-al-arabi.12 [Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165–1240)] D'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale features the following information under the heading "Anbertkend" (1697:114):

-- "The Islamization of Yoga in the Amrtakunda Translations", by Carl W. Ernst

-- The Amrtakunda (The Vessel Containing The Nectar) And Sufic Practices [Chinese]

-- The death of smoker Schmel: The sleepy story, by Gustav Meyrink

Book of the Brachmans or Bramens which contains the religion and philosophy of the Indians; this word signifies the cistern where one draws the water of life. It is divided into fifty Beths or Treatises of which each has ten chapters. A Yogi or Indian dervish called Anbahoumatah, who converted to Islam, translated it from the Indian into Arabic under the title Merat al maani, The Mirror of Intelligence; but though it was translated, this book cannot be understood without the help of a Bramen or Indian Doctor.

Four decades after d'Herbelot, Abbe Antoine BANIER (1673-1741) widely disseminated the idea that the four Vedas contain "all the sciences and all religious ceremonies" whereas the Anbertkend "contains the doctrines of the Indians" (Banier 1738:1.128-29). De Guignes also thought that "this book is not at all the Vedam of the Indians" but regarded it as "a work of the contemplative philosophers who, far from accepting the Vedam, reject it as useless based on the great perfection they believe to have attained" (de Guignes 1759:791-92). This description very much resembles the one given by Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg and La Croze of the Gnanigol [Ganiguels] and their (Tamil Siddha) literature including the Civaviikkiyam. According to de Guignes, the Anbertkend is a "summary of the contemplatives of India" (p. 796) that advocates that "to become happy one must annihilate all one's passions, not let oneself be seduced by the senses, and be in the kind of universal apathy that is so much recommended in the book of Fo" (p. 793). Apart from this, the only apparent connection to Fo or Buddha is a mantra connected with the contemplation of the planet "Boudah or Mercury" (p. 800). The questions that thus need to be first addressed are why de Guignes regarded this Yogic text (of which he translated sample sections) as a scripture belonging to the tradition of the "philosophers called Samaneens;" what he meant by this term; and how he situated these "philosophers" within the religious universe of India and Asia as a whole.

Relying on several authors of European antiquity whose view of Indian religions La Croze had popularized, de Guignes accepted that in ancient India there were two main factions: the "ancient Brakhmanes," and the "Germanes, Sarmanes, or Samaneens" (p. 770). Supplementing the sparse information from Greek and Roman authors, de Guignes proposed to "make use of clarifications from Chinese and Arab authors in order to provide a more exact idea about the sect of the Samaneens by examining who their founder is, in which country it originated, and what doctrine he left to his disciples at his death" (p. 770). The information from ancient European authors led him to a view that fundamentally differs from that of La Croze. We recall that, based on information furnished by Ziegenbalg, La Croze saw Brahmanism and the religion of the Samaneens as rival religions that came into such conflict that the Samaneens or followers of Buddha were eventually driven from India to other countries of Asia. But de Guignes had a very different starting point:

What I have reported based on the Greek and Latin writers compels me to believe that there is little difference between the Samaneens and the Brachmanes, or rather, that they are two sects of the same religion. In effect, one still finds in the Indies a crowd of Brachmanes who appear to have the same doctrine and live in the same manner [as the Samaneens described by Greek and Latin writers]; but those who resemble the ancient Samaneens most perfectly are the Talapoins of Siam: like them, they live retired in rich cloisters, have no personal possessions, and enjoy great reputation at court [!!!]; but more austere ones exclusively live in woods and forests, and there are also women under the direction of these Talapoins. (p. 773)

De Guignes explains that in India there are still Brahmins who "hold a doctrine that is more or less similar to that of the Samaneens" (p. 775):

If the name of Samaneen seems no more extant in this [southern] part of India [described by La Croze], one still finds the Yogis, the Vanaprastas, the Sanjassis, and the Avadoutas which all go under the common denomination of Brahmins, and like the Samaneens they do not admit any difference between castes or tribes and still follow the precepts of Budda, the founder of the Samaneens. (p. 776)

But what is this religion of which the Brachmanes and the Samaneens supposedly constitute two separate sects? De Guignes simply calls it "the Indian religion" (la religion Indienne; p. 779). It is likely that de Guignes was also inspired by Johann Jacob Brucker's treatise on Asian philosophy (Brucker 1744:4B.804-26)13 and by Nicolas FRERET (1688-1749), who had studied Chinese even before Fourmont and had read a paper in 1744 that advanced exactly this opinion (see the beginning of Chapter 7). Freret asserted that "La religion indienne" is extremely widespread in Asia; reigning in India as "la religion des Brahmes," "Indian religion" has also conquered Tibet, Bhutan, China since the year 64 C.E., Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Siam, Burma, and so on (Freret 1753:36). But while Freret sought the doctrine of this religion in Diogo do Couto's description of the Vedas and combined it with some Buddhist elements, de Guignes decided to take the Buddhist track and identified the founder of his "religion Indienne" as Buddha who is venerated under various names in different countries of Asia.

Several Arab authors who knew this personage name him Boudasp or Boudasf. Beidawi, the celebrated Persian historian, calls him Schekmouniberkan, or simply Schekmouni; the Chinese Tche-kia or Chekia-meouni, which is the same name as the Sehek-mouni of Beidawi; they give him also the name of Foteo or Foto, which is an alteration of phutta or butta. But the name under which he is best known in all Chinese works is that of Fo, the diminutive of Foto. The Siamese name him Prah-poudi-tchaou, that is to say, the Saint of high origin, Sammana-khutama, the man without passion, and phutta. Mr. Hyde derives this name from the Persian word butt, idol; and Mr. Leibniz believed that this legislator was identical with the Wodin of the Northern peoples. In the language of the Indians Butta or Budda signifies Mercury. (De Guignes 1759:776)

De Guignes furnished much detail about the life of this founder from Arabic and especially Chinese sources (pp. 785-87) and thought that a birth of around 1027 B.C.E (p. 778) appears more likely than an earlier date that might be due to a confusion of Buddha with Zoroaster (pp. 780, 785). He also included a short version of the Buddha's deathbed confession story but added a particular twist:

When dying he said to those of his disciples who were most attached to him that until then he had only made use of parables and that he had hidden the truth under figurative and metaphorical expressions; his true opinion being that there is no other principle than emptiness and nothingness [le vuide & le neant], and that everything came out of nothing and would return to it. So, according to all missionaries, atheism seems to be the favorite principle of this philosopher; but a more attentive examination of the conduct of those who follow his doctrine and of the book which he has left to us does not allow our wholesale adoption of this opinion. (pp. 786-77)

De Guignes's subsequent explanations about the two sects produced by the last words of Fo -- "la doctrine exterieure consisting in the cult of idols" and "la doctrine interieure that adopted this emptiness and nothingness of which Fo had spoken at his death" (p. 787) -- are key for understanding his "Indian teligion."'4 This religion, founded by Buddha around 1000 B.C.E. in India (p. 778), has as its fundamental principle the "system of metempsychosis" (p. 779). This explains the fact that even founders of other religions came to be incorporated as apparitions of the Buddha. De Guignes had read in Chinese sources that there were many "Fo"; in Ma Duanlin's Wenxian tongkao, for example, he found a reference to "seven Fo" (p. 779). He mistakenly thought that these were "authors of different religions that had successively been destroyed" but correctly inferred that the name Fo is not necessarily referring to one person but can be used as a generic term. In India this founder was "said to be identical with the god Vishnu who, according to the fabled traditions of India, appeared ten times in the world, and whose tenth apparition was in the shape of the Buddha" (p. 786).

De Guignes located representatives of the two "sects" of this "Indian religion" founded by Buddha throughout Asia. In his view the particular doctrines and practices of "Indian religion" gradually changed as they adapted themselves to local circumstances and customs; and this accounts for the great variety of forms in diverse countries. In the History of the Huns de Guignes explained:

One notices that the further the Samaneens were from their place of origin, the more they veered from the principles of their founder. The customs of the peoples to whom they taught their religion brought about great changes, and these Samaneens attached themselves more particularly to certain dogmas and certain religious practices that they judged to be more suitable to the peoples among which they lived. (de Guignes 1756:IB.235)

The two basic forms of his "Indian religion" are well characterized by the "exoteric" and "esoteric" labels.

The adherents of the exterior doctrine are those whom we know more commonly under the name of Brahmes, of Bonzes, of Lamas, and of Talapoins who, always prostrated at the feet of their gods, think their happiness consists in holding the tail of a cow, worshipping Brahma, Vishnu, Eswara [Shiva] and 330 million inferior divinities, constructing temples in their honor, having a singular reverence for the water of the Ganges, and believing that after death their soul will receive punishment for its crimes in Hell or recompense of its virtues in Paradise. From there the soul continues, as a form of recompense or punishment, to animate the bodies of humans, animals and even plants, until it has reached the highest degree of purification and perfection to which the different transmigrations imperceptibly lead. It is only after having transmigrated through the bodies of several beings that it finally takes shelter in that of a Samaneen. (de Guignes I759:787)

De Guignes's "Indian religion" has metempsychosis as its central tenet, and the Samaneens represent the ultimate stage of the purification process of souls. Like La Croze's Gnanigols, de Guignes's Samaneens are no longer bound to the rituals, superstitious practices, and divinities of ordinary people and their clergy. In the manner of mystics, these adherents of the Buddha's esoteric teaching live in poverty and seclusion while devoting themselves entirely to the task of "contemplating God" and "becoming one" with him:

They regard the rest of men as so many unfortunates who cannot reach the state of Samaneen unless they pass through all the degrees of metempsychosis. Thus, the true Samaneen or adherent of the interior doctrine, on account of having been born into the most perfect state, is no longer obliged to expiate the sins which have been washed away by previous transmigrations. He has no more need to go prostrate himself in a temple nor to direct his prayers to the gods worshipped by the people -- gods who are but ministers to the great God of the Universe. Freed from all passions and exempt from all crime, the Samaneen only dies to rejoin this unique Divinity of which his soul was a detached part. They think that all souls together form the supreme being, that they exist in him in all eternity, that they emanate from him; yet that they can only be reunited with him after having purified themselves to the level they were at when they were first separated. (pp. 787-88)

This view of the Samaneens explains why de Guignes associated the Anbertkend with the Samaneens and why Herder, as mentioned at the end of Chapter 3, began the India section of his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity with the phrase "Even though the teaching of the Brahmans is nothing but a branch of the widespread religion that, from Tibet to Japan, has formed sects or governments" (Herder 2002, 3/1:411). The Brahmans -- joined by the Tibetan Lamas, Chinese and Japanese Bonzes, Siamese Talapoins, and possibly even the Siberian shamans -- are seen as part of the exoteric clergy of the "Indian religion" of Buddha whose local variants with their multiform idolatry, polytheism, superstition, and ritualism stand in sharp contrast to the pure mysticism and resolute esoteric monotheism of the Samaneens.

Unlike La Croze who had theorized that the Samaneens of India turned into atheists and were mainly for this reason driven from India to surrounding countries, de Guignes depicted them as most ardent monotheists:

According to their principles, this Supreme Being, the Being of all Beings, is from all eternity; he has no form whatsoever, is invisible, incomprehensible, and the origin of everything; he is the power, the wisdom, the knowledge, holiness, and truth itself; he is infinitely good, just, and merciful; he has created all beings and preserves everything; because he himself is beyond any adoration, he cannot be represented by idols; yet his attributes -- to which he allows a cult to be rendered -- may be depicted. (de Guignes 1759:788)

We have already encountered similar monotheistic hymns in earlier chapters, and the amalgamation of much of Asia under the banner of a single religion made it as easy to find statements of "esoteric" monotheism as of "exoteric" polytheism. Similar to Francois Bernier's Sufis and Ziegenbalg's Gnanigols, the Samaneens of de Guignes are portrayed as fervent monotheists of a mystic tendency who occupy themselves exclusively with meditation on the Supreme Being.

For this reason the Samaneen is always busy contemplating him in his meditations and has no sign of an exterior cult; but he is not at the same time atheist, as the missionaries pretend, because he has the exclusive aim to snuff out in himself all passions in order to be ready to rejoin his God. Thus the emptiness and nothingness, the principles of the Samaneens, do not signify at all the destruction of the soul. Rather, they mean that we must annihilate all our senses, annihilate ourselves, in order to lose ourselves, as it were, in the bosom of the Divinity who has drawn all things out of nothing and who himself is not matter. (p. 788)

De Guignes's Samaneen mystics -- like Ziegenbalg's Gnanigols -- regard gods like Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva as vulgar representations of the attributes of the one and only creator God; but unfortunately, "the rest of the Indian religion, which is no more that of the Samaneens, is less susceptible to the grand ideas and profound meditations that form the entire cult of the disciples of Budda" (p. 789).

Though the boundaries of de Guignes's "Indian religion" are larger than those of the "Buddhism" that we know today, there are many fundamental correspondences. They include the name and biography of its founder; the religion's Indian origin; its expansion to various surrounding countries in Southeast, Central, and East Asia from the beginning of the common era; its existence in such places as Tibet, Mongolia, Siam, Cambodia, Burma, Ceylon, Vietnam, China, and Japan; the presence of marked local variations; its distinctive monastic culture; some its rituals; the appellations of its clergy in these countries; the existence of a sacred literature linked to the founder; and so forth. With regard to the doctrines of this religion, the fable of the Buddha's deathbed confession had created a fuzzy mold with enough space to accommodate various phenomena.

On the esoteric side of de Guignes's "Indian religion," the Zen monks of Japan were joined by such colorful company as Abraham Roger's Vanaprasthas, Bernier's Sufis and Yogis, and Ziegenbalg's Gnanigols. On the exoteric side, the Bonzes of Japan and China were in the company of a motley crowd of Indian Brahmins, Tibetan Lamas, and Siamese Talapoins. In the doctrinal sphere not much solid information had been gained since the days of the sixteenth-century Japan mission when the elements of the Buddha's "deathbed confession" made their first appearance. Though the Jesuits in Japan and China had studied some Buddhist texts such as the Lotus Sutra, biographies of the Buddha, and collections of Zen sayings -- and though Simon de la Loubere had published some excerpts that someone had translated from Buddhist texts in the Pali language -- the purportedly very large literature of this "Indian religion" remained an enigma. Kircher's inclusion of Indian Brahmins and de Visdelou/Le Gobien's view of the polomen as adherents of Fo further blurred the picture. If Indian Yogis, Gnanigols, and Tamil Siddhas were associated with the esoteric followers of Buddha, could it not be that the fabled Indian Vedas, too, formed part of the literature of the Samaneens?

This kind of haze lent itself to rampant speculation. For example, in a letter by Deshauterayes (de Guignes's co-disciple under Fourmont) to Anquetil-Duperron, the professor speculated that "this Budha or Phta could be the same as the founder of the Egyptian monarchy, the first to introduce among men the system of the transmigration of souls into animal bodies."15 But Deshauterayes was acutely aware that only the study of Asian languages and the ability to read its sacred literature could bring change to the state of ignorance enveloping even the natives themselves: "It is in their books that one must find what one wants to know" (NAF 8872:71V). He thus urged his young disciple to study the Pali language, "which is the only language of the Indies that, apart from the Tibetan, I advise you strongly to learn because these are the languages of the learned through which you will make an abundant harvest" (p. 70v).

Barely one year after this letter, the first Buddhist sutra appeared in the French translation of de Guignes. In fact he had already included a rendering of the short preface of this Chinese text in the second part of his 1753 Samaneens paper (de Guignes 1759:802-3). His portrayal of the central doctrines of the Samaneens was primarily based on his reading of this text that, according to de Guignes, Fo had "left to us" (p. 787) and that supposedly laid out the essence of the doctrine of the Samaneens. It appears that de Guignes was the first European who by himself translated a Buddhist text from an Asian language and published it. This can be seen as another waystation toward the "new Orientalism" that Thomas Trautmann too narrowly associated with early students of Indian languages (1997:32-33) and Raymond Schwab with Anquetil-Duperron and the Zend Avesta (1950:25). The particular text that de Guignes translated from Chinese into French was held in high esteem throughout East Asia as the (reputedly) earliest of all Buddhist texts and as the first sacred scripture to be brought from India to China in the year 65 C.E. We have seen that thanks to this text this date stood like a fixed centerpiece among the ever shifting shards in the European kaleidoscope of Asian religions. What kind of text is this "Book of Fo"? Which version did de Guignes use for his pioneer translation? And how did he arrive at his monotheistic interpretation of its fundamental doctrine?

The Forty-Two Sections Sutra

De Guignes had a kind of Bible for all things Chinese. Whether he was writing about Chinese history or religion, on virtually every page he either refers to or quotes from the Wenxian tongkao (Comprehensive examination of literature) compiled by MA Duanlin (1245-1322). Published after twenty years of work in 1321, this masterpiece of Chinese historiography soon became indispensable because it provided thematically arranged extracts from a very wide range of other Chinese works. Students preparing for China's civil service examinations sometimes memorized Ma's chapter introductions, and missionaries and early Western Sinologists appreciated the giant work because it furnished so much (and so judiciously selected) textual material from original sources.

One can say that this excellent work is by itself equivalent to an entire library and that even if Chinese literature would only consist of this work it would be worth the trouble to learn Chinese just to read this. It is not only about China that one would learn much but also a large part of Asia, and regarding everything that is most important and noteworthy about its religions, legislation, rural economics and politics, commerce, agriculture, natural history, history, physical geography, and ethnography. One only has to choose the subject which one wants to study and then to translate what Ma Duanlin has to say about it. All the facts are reported and classified, all sources indicated, and all authorities cited and discussed. (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.170)

This was the work that men like de Visdelou and de Guignes always seemed to have at hand; and some China missionaries only appeared to be so well read because they failed to mention that Ma Duanlin was the source of their quotations from so many Chinese works (p. 171). It was in the Wenxian tongkao that de Guignes found much of the material for his History of the Huns, and the influence of this collection was so great that Abel-Remusat stated in 1829 that Ma Duanlin alone was at the origin "of the large part of positive knowledge that one has so far acquired in Europe about Chinese antiquity" (p. 171-72). While this may be a bit exaggerated in view of the translations of Chinese classics and histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is no doubt that for de Guignes this collection was of supreme importance. For example, fascicles 226 and 227 of Ma Duanlin's work, which deal with Buddhism and its literature, are the source of much of the solid information (as opposed to speculation) that de Guignes conveyed about this topic to his pan-European readership.

In the introduction to his Buddhism sections, Ma Duanlin recounts the traditional story about the dream of Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty (re. 58-75 CE.) and the introduction of Buddhism to China. The emperor saw a spirit flying in his palace courtyard, was told that this had to do with an Indian sage called Buddha, and sent an embassy to India. Accompanied by two Indian monks, this embassy brought the Forty-Two Sections Sutra and a statue of the Buddha on a white horse back to China in 65 CE. The famous White Horse Monastery (Baimasi) was built near the capital Chang'an (today's Xian) in order to store this precious text and China's first Buddha statue.

This is the story de Guignes was familiar with. But the more modern Sinologists led by Maspero (1910) learned about it, the more this Story turned out to be a classic foundation myth. Today we know that there is no evidence that such an embassy ever took place; that the oldest extant Story of Emperor Ming's dream had a man as leader of the ambassadors who had lived two hundred years earlier; that Buddhism was introduced to China before the first century of the common era; that the first references to a White Horse Monastery date from the third century CE.;16 and of course, as is the rule with such myths, that striking details -- such as the first Buddha image and the two Indian monks accompanying the white horse -- enter the game suspiciously late (here in the fifth century).

While this tale of the introduction of Buddhism to China is today regarded as a legend without any historical basis, the Forty-Two Sections Sutra itself has a reasonable claim to antiquity. It is an exaggeration to say that "most scholars believe that the original Scripture of Forty-Two Sections, whatever its origins, was indeed in circulation during the earliest period of Buddhism in China" (Sharf 2002:418). One can only state with confidence that some of its maxims and sayings are documented from the second century onward and that some of the vocabulary of the text indicates (or wants to indicate) an origin in the first centuries CE. The scholarly consensus in Japan holds that the text as we know it stems not from the first or second century but is a Chinese compilation dating from the fifth century CE. that combined passages and sayings from a number of different Buddhist texts (Okabe 1967).

Twentieth-century research has also revealed that there are three major versions of this text (Okabe 1967). The first, included in the Korean Buddhist canon, appears to more or less closely reproduce the original fifth-century compilation and is here called "standard version." The version used by de Guignes, by contrast, first emerged around 800 CE. and contains some sections that are strikingly different from the standard version. Figure 9 shows the genealogy of editions of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra.


Figure 9. Stemma of major Forty-Two Sections Sutra editions (Urs App)

Since exactly these modified sections (Yanagida 1955) are of central importance for de Guignes's interpretation of "Indian religion," a bit more information is needed here. The book entitled Baolin zhuan ("Treasure Forest Biographies") of 801 -- which was the first text to include the modified Forty-Two Sections Sutra -- is known as a scripture of the Chan or Zen tradition of Chinese Buddhism. Rather than a separate "sect" in the ordinary sense, this was a typical reform movement involving Buddhist monks of a variety of different affiliations who had a particular interest in meditation17 and wanted to link their reform to the founder's "original teaching." For this purpose, lineages of transmission were created out of whole cloth, and soon enough the founder Buddha was linked to his eighth-century Chinese "successors" by a direct line of Indian patriarchs at whose end stood Bodhidharma, the legendary figure who fulfills the role of transmitter and bridge between India and China. Needless to say, all this was a pious invention to legitimize and anchor the reform movement in the founder's "original" teaching that supposedly was transmitted "mind to mind" by an unbroken succession of enlightened teachers reaching back to the Buddha. According to this very creative Story line, the Buddha once showed a flower to his assembly and only one member, his disciple Mahakashyapa, smiled. He thus became the first Indian "Zen" patriarch who had received the Buddha's formless transmission. Such transmission lineages had much evolved since their modest beginnings in genealogies of Buddhist masters of Kashmir and in Tiantai Buddhist lore. In the eighth century, Zen sympathizers tested a number of variants until, in the year 801, a model emerged that carried the day (Yampolsky 1967:47-50). This was the model of the Baolin zhuan featuring twenty-seven Indian patriarchs and the twenty-eighth patriarch Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen whom Engelbert Kaempfer had depicted crossing the sea to China on a reed (see Figure 10 below).

The partially extant first chapter of this "Treasure Forest" text presented the biography of the founder, Shakyamuni Buddha, and this chapter contained the modified text of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. The setting is, of course, significant: the sutra is uttered just after the Buddha's enlightenment and thus constitutes the founder's crucial first teaching. This alone was quite a daring innovation that turned a collection of maxims, anecdotes, and rules into a founder's oration. But the ninth-century editor of the Baolin zhuan went one significant step further. Not content faithfully to quote the conventional text of the sutra, he changed various sections and added passages that clearly reflected his own reformist "Zen" agenda. This method of putting words into the founder's mouth was and is, of course, popular in many religions; but in this case it was a particularly effective ploy. Not only did the Buddha now utter things that furthered the editor's sectarian agenda-and turned the text into a "sutra" -- but he said these things in his very first speech after enlightenment! And this speech formed a text that was not just any text but the reputedly first and oldest text of Buddhism and for good measure also the first one to make its way to China and to be translated into Chinese! What better pedigree and vehicle for reformist teachings could one wish for?

The Zen movement as a whole was crowned with brilliant success, as Ma Duanlin's list of Buddhist literature in fascicle 227 of his work shows: more than one-third of the eighty-three listed texts are products of the Zen tradition (for example, the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Blue Cliff Record, and Records of Linji). The "Zen-ified" text of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, too, was a smashing success. It became by far the most popular version of this sutra, was printed and reprinted with various commentaries, and in the Song period was even included as the first of the "three classics" (Ch. sanjing) of Buddhism.18 A copy of it found its way into the Royal Library in Paris, and this is the text de Guignes set out to translate in the early 1750S.19 It is worthy of note that it was exactly the most "Zen-ified" version of this text that served to introduce Europe to Buddhist sutras, that is, sermons purportedly uttered by the Buddha.20

The difference between the three major versions of the Forty- Two Sections Sutra is of great interest as it exhibits the motives of their respective editors. For example, the end of section nine of the standard version reads as follows:

Feeding one billion saints is not as good as feeding one solitary buddha (pratyekabudda). Feeding ten billion solitary buddhas is not as good as liberating one's parents in this life by means of the teaching of the three honored ones. To teach one hundred billion parents is not as good as feeding one buddha, studying with the desire to attain buddhahood, and aspiring to liberate all beings. But the merit of feeding a good man is [still] very great. It is better for a common man to be filial to his parents than for him to serve the spirits of Heaven and Earth, for one's parents are the supreme spirits. (Sharf 2002:424)

Whether one regards the portions of the text that are here emphasized by bold type as interpolations or not, their emphasis on filial piety clearly exhibits the Chinese character of this text and fits into the political climate of fifth-century China. The Imperial Zhenzong edition (Zen version A), which adopted a number of the "Zen" changes from the Baolin zhuan, leaves out part of the first phrase but also praises filial piety:

Feeding one billion saints is not as good as feeding one solitary buddha (pratyekabudda). Feeding ten billion solitary buddhas is not as good as feeding one buddha, studying with the desire to attain buddhahood, and aspiring to liberate all beings. But the merit of feeding a good man is [still] very great. It is better for a common man to be filial to his parents than for him to serve the spirits of Heaven and Earth, for one's parents are closest.

For a religion whose clergy must "leave home" (ch. chujia) and effectively abandon parents and relatives in order to join the family of the monastic sangha, this call for filial piety may seem a little odd; but this kind of passage certainly helped fend off Confucian criticism about Buddhism's lack of filial piety. Compared to the standard edition, the "imperial" edition (Zen version A) effectively sidelined the issue and made it clear that "feeding one buddha, studying with the desire to attain buddhahood, and aspiring to liberate all beings" is the highest goal. The Shousui text (Zen version B), by contrast, mentions not one word about filial piety and advocates a rather different ideal:

Feeding one billion saints is not as good as feeding one solitary buddha (pratyekabudda). Feeding ten billion solitary buddhas is not as good as feeding one of the buddhas of the three time periods. And feeding one hundred billion buddhas of the three time periods is not as good as feeding someone who is without thought and without attachment, and has nothing to attain or prove.

This goal reflects the agenda of the Zen sympathizer who edited the Forty-Two Sections Sutra around the turn of the ninth century and decided to put this novel teaching straight into the mouth of the newly enlightened Buddha. De Guignes, who used a "Zen version B" text, translated the part emphasized by bold type quite differently from my rendering above:

One billion O-lo-han are inferior to someone who is in the degree of Pie-tchi-fo, and ten billion Pietchi-fo inferior to someone who has reached the degree of San-chi-tchu-fo. Finally, one hundred billion Sanchi- tchu-fo are not comparable to one who no more thinks, who does nothing, and who is in a complete insensibility of all things. (de Guignes 1759:1.2.229)

This last passage played a crucial role in de Guignes's definition of the Samaneens and their ideal. He interpreted the different stages of perfection as stages of rebirth and purification. This conception lies at the heart of his view that the ideal Samaneens, who in the Zen version B text are credited with exactly such absence of discriminating thought and attachment, represent the ultimate stage of transmigration before union with the Supreme Being. Theirs is the "religion of annihilation" (la religion de l'aneantissemen) de Guignes found at the very beginning of the Sutra text where the Buddha says, "He who abandons his father, his mother, and all his relatives in order to occupy himself with the knowledge of himself and to embrace the religion of annihilation is called Samaneen" (de Guignes 1759:1B.227) The corresponding standard text defines the Samaneens as follows: "The Buddha said: Those who leave their families and their homes to practice the way are called sramanas." The Zen text version A and also version B used by de Guignes, by contrast, have: "The Buddha said: A home-leaver or sramana cuts off all desire and frees himself from attachment, understands the source of his own mind, attains the Buddha's profound principle, and awakens to the doctrine of wu-wei." This "doctrine of wu-wei" (literally, "nonaction") was interpreted by de Guignes as "religion of annihilation."21 It was thus exactly the eight-character-phrase [x] ("know the mind / reach the source / understand the doctrine of wu-wei") that the Zen editor had slipped into the opening passage that inspired de Guignes to define the religion of the 5amaneens as a "religion of annihilation." He found this ideal confirmed in other passages of his Forty-Two Sections Sutra. The second section, which is also exclusive to the Zen versions, is shown in Table 7.

TABLE 7. SECTION OF DE GUiGNES'S FORTY-TWO SECTIONS SUTRA TRANSLATION

"Zen" version B (Shousui text) / English translation based on de Guignes (1756:I.2.228) / English translation based on the Chinese text (App)

[x] / A Samaneen, after having abandoned everything and smothered his passions, must always occupy himself with contemplating the sublime doctrine of Fo; / A "home-leaver" or sramana cuts off all desire and frees himself from attachment, understands the source of his own heart-mind, attains the Buddha's profound principle, and awakens to the doctrine of wu-wei.

[x] / then there is nothing to desire any more, his heart is no more bound, nothing touches him, and he thinks of nothing. / He has nothing to attain inside and nothing to search for outside; his heart-mind is not bound to the Way nor is he tied to karma. Free of thought and action, he has nothing to cultivate and nothing to prove.

De Guignes's translation in places reads more like a paraphrase; some phrases are left untranslated, and there is a very understandable ignorance of technical terminology. For example, de Guignes translates the text's "nor is he tied to karma" as "nothing touches him." The lack of specialized dictionaries and a tenuous grasp of classical Chinese grammar must have made translation not just a tedious but also a hazardous enterprise. So much more astonishing is the degree of confidence that de Guignes seemed to have in his skill as a translator and interpreter of Chinese texts.

The God of the Samaneens

An anonymous British reviewer once described de Guignes as a man who is "almost always wading through the clouds of philology, to snuff up conjectures."22 He must have been thinking of de Guignes's theories about the Egyptian origin of the Chinese people or his conviction, built on a flimsy legend in Ma Duanlin's work, that Chinese Buddhist missionaries had discovered America in the fifth century C.E. (de Guignes 1761). But de Guignes's tendency to take some ambiguous drop of information and to wring earth-shattering torrents of conclusions from it is already in evidence in his very first translation from the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. His interpretation of the first word of the sutra's preface, as it happens, was just such a "cloud of philology," and the house of cards de Guignes built on this one-legged stool was of a truly astonishing scale. This was de Guignes's first attempt to come to terms with the content and history of the creed that he called "Indian religion" and to introduce the central and oldest text by this religion's founder, so it is no surprise that many readers and other authors were inspired.23 De Guignes's mistranslation and misinterpretation of the first word of this preface thus not only set his own interpretation of Buddhism on the wrong footing but misled a generation of readers unable to read Chinese who naturally relied on de Guignes's "expertise."

Zen version B's short preface appears to have been authored by the editor of the Baolin zhuan around the turn of the ninth century. Since that editor wanted to portray the Forty-Two Sections Sutra -- which he had so cleverly used as a host for his reformist "Zen" agenda -- as the first sermon of the Buddha after his enlightenment, his "Zen Version B" text, of course, situated the action at the Deer Park in Saranath where the Buddha first taught (turned the dharma wheel of the Four Noble Truths); see Table 8.

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Part 4 of 4

TABLE 8. BEGINNING OF DE GUIGNES'S FORTY-TWO SECTIONS SUTRA PREFACE

Zen version B text / English tramslation based on de Guignes (1759:802-3) / English translation based on the Chinese text (App)

[x] / The veritable law of the adoration of Chi only consists in meditations, in the removal of one's passions, and in perfect apathy. The one who has reached the greatest perfection in this law, / When [Buddha] the World-honored One had attained the Way [buddhahood] he had the following thought: "To free oneself of desire and be calm is most excellent."

[x] / after having lost himself in profound contemplations, can submit the spirits, go in the middle of deserts, / Absorbed in a great state of meditation [samadhi], he subdued all demonic ways, and while in the Deer Park

[x] / traverse the revolutions of the four Ti, meditate on the five famous philosophers and particularly on Kiao-chin-ju, / he revolved the Dharma wheel of the Four [Noble] Truths. He converted Kaudinya, etc., the five companions.

[x] / and finally pass through the different degrees of sanctity that one acquires by practicing the law. / and had them attain the fruit of the Way.

De Guignes's translation of this preface makes one doubt his grasp of classical Chinese and confirms that he would hardly have been in a position to produce the translations in his History of the Huns without the constant help of de Visdelou's manuscripts. But translating such texts in mid-eighteenth-century Paris was an extremely difficult undertaking. Some reading of Buddhist texts would have quickly showed that "the world-honored one" is a very common epithet of the Buddha. But there were few such texts at hand, and the Chinese character dictionaries of the Royal Library (Leung 2002:196-97) as a rule did not list compounds. Still, the "subject-verb-past particle" structure should have suggested something like "XX having attained the Way ... " rather than de Guignes's wayward "the veritable law of the adoration of Chi only consists in ... " For de Guignes everything turned around this "adoration of Chi." In his view this "veritable law" consisted in "meditations, removal of one's passions, and in perfect apathy." Furthermore, de Guignes thought that this preface outlined a process through which those who practice this law "pass through the different degrees of sanctity" before reaching the greatest perfection, and used this as textual support for his conception of the Samaneens as the ultimate stage of the transmigration process. But ultimately de Guignes's interpretation hinged on the meaning of the first two characters that he translated as "adoration of Chi." The first character chi (which today is romanized as shi) usually means "century" or "world." But here it forms part of the compound shizun, which in Chinese Buddhist texts is one of the most common appellations of the Buddha. It literally means "the world-honored one" and is as common in Buddhist texts as in Christian texts the phrase "our savior" that, as everyone knows, refers to Jesus. Probably due to lack of exposure to Buddhist texts, de Guignes did not realize this and explained the meaning of the first character chi or shi as follows:

Chi, in the Chinese language, means century and corresponds to the Arabic word Alam, which the translator of the Anbertkend employed in the same sense; it is thus the adoration of the century that is prescribed in both works. What Masoudi reports of the Hazarouan-el-alam, a duration of 36,000 years (or according to others 60,000 years) was adopted by the Brahmins and is the same as this Chi of the Chinese. This Hazarouan possessed the power over things and governed them all. In the Indian system, the Chi or Hazarouan corresponds perfectly to this Eon of the Valentinians who pretend that the perfect Eon resides in eternity in the highest heaven that can neither be seen nor named. They called it the first principle, the first father. (de Guignes 1759:803)

In support of this view, de Guignes here referred to the famous two-volume Critical History of Mani and Manichaeism (1734/1739) by Isaac de BEAUSOBRE (1659-1738). Citing St. Irenaeus, Beausobre had characterized this Eon of the Valentinians as "invisible, incomprehensible, eternal, and alone existing through itself" and as "God the Father" who is also called "First Father, First Principle, and Profundity" (Beausobre 1984:578). Following Beausobre, de Guignes stated that these Christian heretics "admitted a perfect Eon, the Eon of Eons," and concluded without further ado that exactly this Eon of Eons "is the Chi of the Samaneens" (de Guignes 1759:804). For de Guignes and his readers this appeared to be solid textual evidence in support of a monotheistic interpretation of esoteric Buddhism, an interpretation that some had already encountered in Brucker (1742-44:48.821-22) or Freret (1753; see Chapter 7).

De Guignes's 1753 paper on the Samaneens thus ended with a monotheistic bang. Three years later, in the History of the Huns, he spelled out some of the implications. After having once more laid out his view of the exoteric and esoteric followers of Fo and described the Samaneen as a person who "is free of all these passions, exempt of all impurity, and dies only to rejoin the unique divinity of which his soul was a detached part" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.225), de Guignes explains the Samaneen vision of God in a manner that echoes Brucker:

This supreme Being is the principle of all things, he is from all eternity, invisible incomprehensible, almighty, sovereignly wise, good, just, merciful, and self-originated. He cannot be represented by any image; one cannot worship him because he is beyond any adoration, but one can depict his attributes and worship them. This is the beginning of the idolatric cult of the peoples of India. The Samaneen who is ever occupied with meditation on this great God, only seeks to annihilate himself in order to rejoin and lose himself in the bosom of the Divinity who has pulled all things out of nothing and is itself different from matter. This is the meaning that they give to emptiness and nothingness. (de Guignes 1756:1.2.226)

For de Guignes this sovereign Being, this "great God," is the one who in the "doctrine of the Samaneens or Philosophers has the Chinese name of Chi" (p. 226). This fact forms the core of de Guignes's conception of the real (monotheist) religion of Buddha. He even read a creator God into the last section of his 1756 translation of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. That section contains a passage that compares the Buddha's "method of skilful means" (Ch. fangbianmen) to a magician's trick ([x]). Like a magician in his own right, de Guignes pulled nothing less than the creatio ex nihilo out of this simple phrase. He translated it by "the creation of the universe that has been pulled from nothingness [I regard as] just the simple transformation of one thing into another" (p. 233).

After his translation of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, de Guignes summarized his view of it as follows:

I thought I had to report here the major part of this work that forms the basis of the entire religion of the Samaneens. Those who glance at it will only find a Christianity of the kind that the Christian heresiarchs of the first century taught after having mixed ideas from Pythagoras on metempsychosis with some other principles drawn from India. This book could be one of those false gospels that were current at the time. With the exception of a few particular ideas, all the precepts that Fo conveys seem to be drawn from the gospel. (pp. 233-34)

De Guignes's misunderstanding and mistranslation not only confirmed his fixed idea of the monotheism of the Samaneens but also led to an entirely original assessment of the history of their religion. Without making any attempt to help his confused readers, de Guignes suggested that the purportedly oldest book of this religion was an apocryphal Christian gospel of gnostic tendency from the early first century C.E. In a paper read in the fall of 1753 he also argued -- possibly inspired by de Visdelou's annotated translation of the Nestorian stele that repeatedly made the same point -- that the Chinese had mixed up Nestorian Christians with Buddhists.24 Not content with this narrow argument based on the text of the stele, he grew convinced that the Chinese mixup of Christianity with Foism happened on such a scale that they even "gave Jesus Christ the name of Fo!' (de Guignes 1764:810). In a sense, his theory about the Forty-Two Sections Sutra was a counterpart to the story line advanced by Ruggieri (Rule 1986:10) and Ricci that proposed that Emperor Ming's dream about a saint from the West had been about Jesus Christ and that the imperial embassy had mistakenly brought back the idolatry of Fo instead of the truth of Christianity. According to de Guignes, however, the Chinese ambassadors had imported a heretical kind of Christianity and fallen victim to the delusion that it was the religion of Fo.

But what about the origin of the religion of Fo around 1000 B.C.E. that de Guignes had found documented in so many Chinese and Arabic sources? Did he now believe that its exoteric and esoteric teachings were all from the common era? Where did Pythagoras learn about metempsychosis? What were those "other principles" from (presumably pre-Christian-era) India that were supposedly mixed in? Do the Vedas belong to this religion or are they older? In the 1750s de Guignes left these and many other questions unanswered; and when he revisited the theme two decades later, the Christian heresiarchs and the view of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra as an apocryphal gospel had vanished like a magician's doves and rabbits.

The History of Buddhism

In the two decades since the publication of his History of the Huns, de Guignes had continued to study Ma Duanlin's Wenxian tongkao. Much of the accurate information conveyed by the Frenchman in his three 1776 papers stemmed from its 226th and 227th fascicles. These papers contained an extraordinary amount of solid information about the history of Buddhism that may have been lost on those who were only interested in origins and the most ancient events. De Guignes hoped that many such people, especially indomaniacs, would study his findings, accept his view of the Vedas as relatively young texts (not much older than 1100 B.C.E.) and regain or fortify their faith in the accuracy of the biblical account.

With regard to the history of de Guignes's "Indian religion," which, as we now know, consisted mostly of Buddhism, comparatively little solid information had hitherto been available in Europe. Much of it concentrated on tales about the founder's biography, and few missionaries had actually studied Buddhist texts. It was all very confusing. But from the 1750s, many decades before Pali and Sanskrit sources came into play, the ability of a few Europeans to read Chinese opened up a new and abundant source of data, and for a while Fourmont's two disciples, Deshauterayes and de Guignes, were the sole pioneers in Europe able to exploit this treasure trove. As we will see in Chapter 7, Deshauterayes was confused by some ideas that de Visdelou had sent from Pondicherry to Fourmont. Deshauterayes eventually produced some translations from the Chinese that were posthumously published in 1825 and 1826 and influenced Arthur Schopenhauer (App 1998b), but in the eighteenth century he had very little impact and was sidelined by de Guignes.

For information on Buddhism and its history (which for him, of course, formed part of "Indian religion"), de Guignes profited mainly from Ma Duanlin's sections on Buddhism and from the famous travelogue by the Chinese monk Faxian (337-422), who had made a long pilgrimage via Central Asia to India. Such data transmitted by de Guignes had no equal in Europe until the appearance of studies by Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat and Eugene Burnouf half a century later. However, the accurate data contained in de Guignes's writings tended to be overshadowed by his spectacular (and spectacularly wrong) conclusions. Yet long sections of his three papers lay out, based on Ma Duanlin, how China had become familiar with Buddhism in the first centuries when Indian and Central Asian monks brought their sacred literature to China and helped translate it into Chinese.

Soon afterward, Chinese monks began to travel to Central Asia and then to India itself in search of Buddhist texts and relics. Some of these monks wrote travelogues that even today are considered precious sources of information about ancient India and Buddhism. Ma Duanlin described many important figures, events, and texts of Buddhism and provided an excellent survey of the history of Chinese Buddhism up to the thirteenth century. De Guignes's European readership thus could learn much about the Indian origin of the religion of Buddha; the life of its founder; the religion's early presence in Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Central Asia; its introduction into China; its famous missionaries, masters, and translators; its abundant sacred literature; some of its doctrines; its two main branches; its spread to Ceylon, Tibet, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and Japan; and much else.

Almost sixty years before Abel-Remusat's posthumous Foe Koue Ki (1836) and seventy years before Burnouf's justly famous Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme Indien (1844), the first shot at a presentation of the history of Buddhism was de Guignes's. Apart from details about famous Chinese India travelers such as Faxian and Xuanzang, many Indian or Central Asian monks who had sojourned in China were mentioned by de Guignes (Bodhiruci, Gunabhadra, Kumarajiva, etc.). For some of them even important translations into Chinese are listed; for example, the titles of no less than twenty-three texts translated by Kumarajiva are specified (de Guignes 1781b:40-41). The history of Buddhism in China was laid out in several phases: from the introduction of Buddhism in the first century to 419 (pp. 1-81); from 419 to 543 CE. (pp. 82-111); from 544 to 698 CE. (de Guignes 1781C:112-32); from 698 to 965 CE. (pp. 132-63); and finally from 965 to 1648 CE. (pp. 163-200). Accurate historical information mostly stems from Ma Duanlin and is sometimes reproduced in detail; for example, de Guignes reports that the important Biographies of Eminent Monks (Ch. Gaoseng zhuan) and its supplement contain information about 257 persons between the years 67 and 519 CE (1781b:109-10). But apart from a few texts including the Forty-two Sections Sutra, de Guignes enjoyed no access to Buddhist literature in Chinese and could thus not study the content of the texts that were listed with so much detail. The readers of these three papers, however, must have been very impressed by the wealth of Buddhism's sacred literature whose history in China went back to the first century of the common era.

The Battle Against Indomania

De Guignes's discoveries were invariably of a kind that stunned the public and seemed to provide answers to important questions. His Visdelou-inspired identification of the Xiongnu and the Huns (1751,1756) established a hitherto unknown connection between Chinese, Mongol, Turkic, Persian, Arab, and European history and seemed to have solved the mystery of the Huns. His analysis of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra (1753-56) claimed to have uncovered a connection between early Christian heretics and the "Indian religion" that dominates large parts of Asia by portraying one of Asia's most famous religious texts as an apocryphal gospel. His sensational discovery of the Egyptian origin of the Chinese (1758) not only proposed to rewrite the history of much of Asia and to show ancient Chinese historical sources in a new light but also to furnish a comprehensive solution to the riddle of China's "hieroglyphic" writing system. His theory about a fifth-century voyage of Chinese Buddhist monks (1761) to a country named Fusang, built on a Chinese legend mentioned by Ma Duanlin, supposedly dethroned Columbus by a thousand years as discoverer of the Americas. If the public thought that five major discoveries in ten years were plenty and that the time had come to furnish solid evidence, it underestimated de Guignes's creative powers. He had one more ace up his sleeve, and once more it was Ma Duanlin who furnished much of the raw material on which the French professor built an impressive tower of speculation.

During the 1760s Europe's interest in India had grown exponentially through Voltaire's propaganda, Abbe Mignot's papers on the ancient philosophers of India,25 and the supposedly very ancient texts of "Indian" origin that had made their way to Europe: Voltaire's [??? The Jesuits'] Ezour-vedam, Holwell's Chartah Bhade Shastah, and Dow's Shastabad. By the early 1770s the major threat to biblical authority and chronology was no more China but India, so it comes as no surprise that de Guignes's last great endeavor was the debunking of India as cradle of all human culture. The title of three lectures held in 1776 at the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Literature ("On the Indian religion and the fundamental texts of this religion that were translated from the Indian [idiom] into Chinese") indicates the direction of his effort. De Guignes explained:

My principal aim in these researches is to demonstrate that the Chinese have not been cultivated by the Indians, to whom one pretends to attribute great antiquity, and that this sentiment [of great Indian antiquity] is only based on pure conjecture. They are a means that has for some time now been abused with too much impudence in order to establish a bunch of paradoxes because one does not consult the veritable sources and abandons oneself too much to one's own imagination. (de Guignes 1781a:77.349-50).

De Guignes does not mention any names but we can infer that he mainly thought of Voltaire, Raynal, and Bailly:

The Ancients chastized the poets for having altered and corrupted history: we could address the same criticism to several writers who in recent times have set themselves up as Historiens Philosophes. Abandoning themselves to their imagination, they dare to invent and assume facts because they are ignorant of the sources. Overall, they are little versed in the study of antiquity and even less familiar with the art of criticism; they do not weigh the authorities; and they adopt without examination everything that seems to agree with their system. After having shaped the earth to their liking, they place on it the diverse tribes and arrange the cradle of science where they see fit. According to some, the sciences were born in India; according to others in Siberia near Selinginskoi and Lake Baikal, a region where nature seems numb and where the inhabitants were anciently plunged in the greatest barbarity. Such are the aberrations which the spirit of systematization [esprit de systeme] produces! ... But all these hazardous assertions vanish when one examines history. (pp. 354-55)

Of course such assertions were only "hazardous" for someone attached to biblical chronology and the orthodox Christian ideology of history that held Europe in its grip for so many centuries. In the second half of the eighteenth century dissenters were no longer dragged before the inquisition and tortured by its henchmen until they confessed. But resistance to alternative views was still extremely strong and de Guignes, like many fellow pioneers of orientalism, was eager to build academic barricades in its defense. It is amazing how much orientalism as a discipline owes to religious motivations. In this case, the will to defend Europe's orthodox view of history resulted not only in a series of mind-boggling theories but also in Europe's first detailed (and, thanks to Ma Duanlin, largely accurate) description of large chunks of Buddhist history.

In his first 1776 presentation, de Guignes proposed to establish some basic facts about Indian history and religion, and in the second and third lectures he planned to trace "the history of this religion in China" and discuss "various Indian texts that were translated into Chinese" (p. 350). The most important first step consisted in proving that Indian religion was not as old as the indomaniacs claimed. This was not too difficult given that for de Guignes both "sects" of Indian religion came from the same founder, namely, Buddha. Though the dates of this figure vary in different sources (de Guignes mentions 688, 1027, and 1122 B.C.E.; p. 361), they are not of overly great antiquity. Since "these Brahmins as well as the Samaneens follow the same doctrine of Fo" (p. 360), de Guignes found that their religion cannot be older than 1122 B.CE. According to Ziegenbalg and La Croze, the Samaneens had first brought culture to India, and de Guignes read a confirmation of this in a Chinese author who wrote, "Boudha, after having examined the character of the Indians and adapting and rectifying it, succeeded in instructing and civilizing these people" (p. 372). All this led to de Guignes's conclusion that around 1100 BCE the Indians were still "nothing but barbarians and brigands" (p. 372) and that any notion of India as cradle of human civilization was pure fantasy.

Ma Duanlin and the Chinese travelogues also permitted de Guignes to trace the dissemination of this "Indian religion" founded by Buddha into various regions of Asia. Much of this information was new for European readers. De Guignes traced the religion's spread southward to Ceylon (p. 393), northward to Tibet and Tartary (p. 406), south-eastward to the whole region of Southeast Asia including some islands (p. 429), and eastward to China and Japan (p. 447). But fact and fiction were hard to disentangle. For example, de Guignes also claimed that in the year 966 CE. India was still full of Samaneens and that only the name of their religion had disappeared from India, not its doctrine (p. 385). As confusing as the mass of data was, readers like Herder and Sainte-Croix had no trouble understanding de Guignes's overall notion of a huge pan-Asian religion of Indian origin that consisted of "interior" and "exterior" branches. In this vision the Samaneens represent the interior doctrine -- a doctrine that, according to de Guignes, had survived not only in India but also in other countries.

The Chinese Vedas

In the 1750s de Guignes had only mentioned the Yogic Anbertkend and the Forty-Two Sections Sutra as representatives of the interior teaching and failed to mention the Vedas. But in the age of growing indomania, he could not avoid this discussion, and he prepared himself by reading everything in his reach about these elusive texts. In the 1760s the purported age of Indian texts had become the centerpiece of arguments by proponents of India as humanity's cradle of civilization. The Chinese annals, Voltaire's exaggerations about the age of the Ezour-vedam, and the even greater antiquity claimed by Holwell and Dow for their Indian texts were becoming serious challenges to biblical chronology and Mosaic authority. At the end of the decade, another supposedly very ancient Indian text turned up in Paris: the manuscript of the Bhagavata purana ("Bagavadam") translated by the South Indian Maridas Poulle. In 1772 de Guignes rode a first attack against the antiquity of Indian texts. Debunking all claims of antiquity of the Bagavadam, he showed that this supposedly extremely ancient text is at best 1,000 years old (de Guignes 1777:320). But de Guignes had bigger fish to fry. For the better part of his century, the reputation of the Vedas as the oldest texts of humankind had been slowly growing (see Chapters 5 and 6), and at the beginning of the 1770s, the interest in these texts had reached a first peak that prepared the ground for the claim in 1790 by Louis-Mathieu Langles that the Old Testament's Pentateuch was a late imitation of the five Indian Vedas.26 In the mid-1770s de Guignes felt exactly the same danger as Father Gaston Laurent Coeurdoux in Pondicherry (see Chapter 7); but instead of using Coeurdoux's method of linking India's famous seven penitents (rishis) to some descendant of Noah, de Guignes employed a secular historical approach involving no reliance on the Bible: he linked India's sacred literature to the Buddha. Drawing his data mainly from Jean-Francois Pons (letter of 1740; Pons 1781), and to some degree also from Abraham Roger (1651) and some additional authors who had discussed the Vedas, de Guignes projected his exoteric/esoteric divide on the sacred literature of India and divided it in two categories (see Table 9).

TABLE 9. INNER AND OUTER DOCTRINES ACCORDING TO DE GUIGNES

Inner (esoteric) Doctrine Religion of the Brachmanes/Samaneens / Outer (exoteric) Doctrine Religion of the people

Main scriptures: the four Vedas. Rig- and Yajurveda mainly used in South India, Sama- and Atharvanaveda mainly used in North India / Main scripture: Dharma shastram; by different authors

does not contain ceremonies of popular religion but explain meditation, ascetic practices / contains ceremonies, sacred rites of vulgar religion

inner doctrines and practices of philosophers / exterior practices of vulgar religion

strictly monotheistic / polytheistic; attributes of God are personified

Though Father Calmette had sent the Vedas in the 1730s to Paris in Telugu script (see Chapter 7), nobody could read them. But had not the Brahmins or polomen brought their religion to China, and could the Vedas not have formed part of their baggage of sacred scriptures? Scouring through Ma Duanlin's account of the introduction of Buddhism to China, de Guignes kept encountering the terms "small vehicle" and "great vehicle." At the time it was, of course, not yet known that these "vehicles" designate the Hinayana (Ch. xiaosheng) and Mahayana (Ch. dasheng) branches of Buddhism. For de Guignes these two terms signified the religion's exoteric and esoteric branches: "From the earliest times of the establishment of this religion, the opinions of the Buddha engendered two great sects. One was called Ta-tching and the other Siao-tching" (p. 370). He also learned from Ma Duanlin that the sacred scriptures of this religion did not stem from the Buddha himself:

Buddha has written nothing; but after his death five hundred of his disciples, of which the principals were Ta-ka-ye or the great Kia ye and Onan, collected everything that he had taught, transcribed it, and formed a body of scriptures of it that they divided into twelve Pou or classes. The Japanese call these personages Kasja-sonsja & Annan-sonsja;27 this last word seems to correspond to the Indian Sanjassi. (p. 370)

As long as de Guignes stuck to the data that he found neatly arranged and summarized in Ma Duanlin, he conveyed more or less what the Chinese tradition held to be true. Of course, this can be quite different from what scholars today believe; we now know that for several centuries after the Buddha's death there was no written tradition and that the Mahayana reform movement arose about half a millennium after the founder's death. But de Guignes was not content simply to translate Ma Duanlin and present the result as the view of an extremely well-read Chinese intellectual of the early fourteenth century. Instead he presented very interesting (and for Europe, absolutely new) information about the history and texts of Buddhism in a framework of speculation that gave it a sensational touch. The first mistake was, as we have seen, de Guignes's rejection of La Croze's view that Buddhism and Brahmanism were different religions; he preferred Kircher's "Brahmin" missionaries of Buddhism and Le Gobien's polomen who venerate the Buddha, the dharma, and Brahmanic scriptures. The second mistake was his uncritical acceptance of the Buddha's supposed "deathbed confession" (of which the Chinese sources known to him contained no trace) and the identification of Buddhism's smaller and larger vehicle with the exoteric and exoteric branch of de Guignes's "Indian religion." But the third mistake was perhaps even more spectacular: on the basis of a slight similarity of epithet, de Guignes concluded that Shakyamuni Buddha was identical with the purported redactor of the Vedas, Vyasa.

This Che-kia or Schaka was the elder son of Tcing fan, King of the country called Kia-goei-goei; his mother was called Yeou-hie, and one recounts many fables about his birth. The name Che kia is, according to the Chinese, an Indian word that signifies very good, or very compassionate (Meng-gin); this is the same person whom Mr. Dow called Beass-mouni or Beas the inspired and whom the Indians, as he reports, regard as a prophet and philosopher who composed or rather collected the Vedas. (p. 363)

De Guignes's overall view of Indian sacred literature was mainly responsible for this mistake. It seduced him into identifying the "interior" doctrine and the Vedas with Mahayana doctrine and its texts. Starting with this idea, de Guignes soon detected evidence in support of his idea that the Vedas are scriptures of the Samaneens and thus of the followers of Buddha's "inner" or esoteric teaching. Once he had his stool standing on these seemingly solid feet, he piled more conjectures on it. In the absence of translations from the Vedas, he used the Ezour-vedam (see Chapter 7) as proof that the teaching of the Vedas and of the Samaneens are identical (p. 368): "The most perfect state taught by the Vedas, following the Ezour-vedam, is the same as that prescribed in the books of the Samaneens, which has me believe that these books are the same as the Vedas; it is a constant ... that the doctrine is identical" (p. 369). The Ezour-vedam's "total absence of passion in order to occupy oneself exclusively with the knowledge of God and the truth" is thus seen as matching the core teaching of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. This suggested a link between the Vedas and the esoteric Buddhist scriptures that the polomen had brought to China and translated into Chinese. As mentioned above, de Guignes's main source about the Vedas was the famous letter by Father Pons of 1740 to which de Guignes refers time and again:

-- Letter From Father Pons, Missionary of the Company of Jesus, to Father Du Halde, of the same Company. At Careical, on the coast of Tanjaour; in the East Indies, November 23, 1740. From "Lettres Edifiantes Et Curieuses, Ecrites Des Missions Etrangeres", by Charles Le Gobien

It is obvious, according to these missionaries, that the four Vedas did not form a single unified textual corpus because they are not generally adopted [in both the north and south]. Still, they could not contain the ceremonies of the people because it is prohibited to communicate them; besides, they belong to the secret doctrine that does not admit any such ceremonies. In India there are two doctrines, an exterior one which is the religion of the people and an interior one which is that of the philosophers. There is also a rather general consensus that the Adharvana-vedam -- to which Father Pons still gives the name of Brahma vedam -- is lost. It was followed in the North of India whence this religion passed to China. (pp. 380-81)

The Atharva-veda -- which was usually listed as the fourth veda and sometimes considered lost -- was thus among the texts that the polomen had conceivably brought from India to China. De Guignes was impressed by the number of Indian books that, according to Ma Duanlin's Wenxian tongkao, had been imported in China and translated into Chinese. Ma Duanlin, of course, regarded these texts as Buddhist; but as we have seen, this religion had a rather different scope for de Guignes who identified the Buddha with Vyasa:

Among the great number of Indian books that were translated into Chinese, there is one that is regarded as the basis of this Indian religion, and it carries the title of Book of Brahma. In China it is the most important book of this religion, and several translations and innumerable commentaries of it have been made. This book seems to me to be the Brahmavedam that is lost in India; but I am tempted to believe, for reasons that I will develop below, that it must be different from the Adharvanavedam. Consequently one can suspect that all the Vedas can be found in China. (de Guignes 178Ia:77.381)

This stunning conjecture of de Guignes seemed confirmed by a story that he read in his second major source on Buddhism, a polyglot glossary of Buddhist terms that he cites as Ou yin yun-tong (de Guignes 178Ib:78.25-28). The story is about Zhu Shixing, the first Chinese monk to leave his country in quest of Buddhist scriptures (Zurcher 1959:1.61). In the year 260 C.E., Reverend Zhu and his group went to Khotan in Central Asia where they found the Sanskrit text of the Prajnaparamita scripture in 25,000 verses.

These Samaneens stayed in Khotan until 282. When they prepared for departure, the inhabitants of Khotan who followed the doctrine of the small Tching [vehicle] were opposed to their departure and said to the King: The Samaneeens of China want to have the books of the Brahmins. (de Guignes 1781b:78.27).

De Guignes found this information noteworthy because it indicated that to communicate the Prajnaparamita scripture to the Chinese would signify "altering the true doctrine":

You are the king of this land, they said, if you do not prevent them from taking along these books, the great Law will be destroyed because the Chinese are a deaf and blind people, and it will be your fault. (p. 27)

This is a legend of interest for the history of Buddhism since it indicates tensions between adherents of traditional (Hinayana) and reformist (Mahayana) branches of Buddhism.[???] But for de Guignes, fixated as he was on his conception of "Indian religion," this seemed to be a conflict between adherents of the Buddha's "inner" and "outer" doctrines.[???] Making the connection to the Indian Brahmins and the Vedas, de Guignes grew convinced that the Vedas contain the Buddha's secret doctrine and that this doctrine was well known in China through the Mahayana texts that had been translated into Chinese. He explained:

The Indians have even today the same principles about their Vedas that they do not want to communicate to anybody. Not even all of them may read them since this privilege is reserved to the Brahmins, and those who do may not be involved in commerce. Also, they are not allowed to teach it to everybody without distinction. The people may not speak of it nor listen to others talk about it. So these books of the Indian religion must be guarded as a secret among a few elect ones. As to the text in question here, whose communication proved to be so difficult, could it be one of the Vedas? One would have [to have] the Vedas before one's eyes to decide this question; but the text is portrayed as the basis and foundation of the entire secret doctrine. It seems likely that those in China who followed the Indian religion had to know finally the most hidden books of this religion and to possess them in China where a great number of Indians resided. (pp. 27-28)

In de Guignes's mind, an interesting story about tensions between Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhists [???] in third-century Central Asia thus became a tale about the transmission of the scriptures of the esoteric branch of his "Indian religion," and the Prajnaparamita literature of early Mahayana Buddhism seemed to be the Vedas translated into Chinese. Scouring through Ma Duanlin's Wenxian tongkao, de Guignes found additional evidence to support this view. DHARMARAKSA (c. 230-308), an important translator of Indian Buddhist texts, was said to have translated the same text (p. 30). Moreover, Ma Duanlin's list of twenty-three texts translated by the great Kuchean monk KUMARAJIVVA (344-413) featured several texts containing "puon-jo" (Ch. banruo, Skt. prajna; wisdom) in their title. In second place of this list, there was a text whose title attracted de Guignes's particular attention: the Diamond Prajnaparamita Sutra. Prajna paramita (literally, perfection of wisdom) is one of the perfections of the Bodhisattva, and in East Asia the word parami or paramita was often interpreted as "[means of] reaching the other shore." But for de Guignes the word parami (from Skt. parama, the highest), which the Chinese read "boluomi" (in de Guignes's transcription "Polomi"), had a very different meaning, namely, "Brahma"! This mistranslation (p. 46) confirmed de Guignes's idea that certain Mahayana texts are Chinese translations of the Vedas:

Father Pons speaks of a Veda that he names Adharvana vedam or Brahma vedam whose doctrine was followed in the North of India. Since the Chinese book under discussion is called the book of Brahma, is one of the principal books of this religion, and was adopted in the north, it could be this Brahma vedam or the Vedam of Brahma that the missionary talks about. (pp. 46-47)

As he scanned the pages of Ma Duanlin for text titles that somehow resembled the names of Vedas -- in particular, those of the Sama- and Atharvana-veda used in India's north where frequent communication with China was amply documented -- de Guignes struck gold and wrote:

Before the year 479 ... an Indian called Kieou na po-to-lo or Kieou-na poutra [Gunabhadra, 394-468] translated a work called Leng-kia-king [the Lankavatara Sutra] in four books. It is said that Leng-kia is the name of a mountain where Fo [Buddha] meditated on the Law. Leng-kia is pronounced Lang-ka in the Tibetan dictionary; it is the name that the Indians give to the island of Ceylon, which is famous in Indian mythology .... In the Tang period seven other books [of this sutra] were translated, and it was called Leng-kia O-po-to-lo pao king [Lengqie abatuoluo baojing], that is, the precious book called O-po-to-lo of Leng-kia. This name of O-po-to-lo resembles very much the word Obatar, which is the name of a Veda. (pp. 97-98)

The word "O-po-to-lo," whose Sanskrit equivalent avatara is well known to millions of garners and moviegoers today, made de Guignes think of the Veda that is traditionally listed as the fourth and youngest, the Atharvana Veda. De Guignes must have been excited about this additional confirmation. Now not only the Diamond Sutra and the great Prajna-paramita Sutra were Vedic texts in disguise, but the supposedly lost fourth Veda -- the very Veda, incidentally, as whose teacher Roberto de Nobili presented himself (see Chapter 7) -- was also extant in China, where it was called Lankavatara Sutra!

Thus, de Guignes became convinced that the "religion established in China is still absolutely the same as that of India" (p. 57) and that the Chinese had translated and were using the Indian Vedas including the fourth Veda. They contain the inner doctrine of Buddha, and the practice of both its Chinese followers and all sects of Indian philosophers "begins with the meditation and contemplation of the Supreme Being and ends with a kind of identity where there is no more feeling not will" -- a perfection that can only be reached after many transmigrations (p. 50). This was a repetition of the idea that he had already gained from his very particular reading, to put it charitably, of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra in the early 1750s.

Why Did Bodhidharma Go from India to China?

Between the 1750s and the 1770s, de Guignes thus sought to find additional textual evidence for his pan-Asian religion of Indian origin with esoteric and exoteric branches. This search constituted, as we will also see in the next chapters, a powerful force that propelled traditional orientalism toward an ever more secularized modern form -- a form able to dispassionately and competently investigate ancient sacred texts and monuments.[???] The literature of the esoteric branch seemed increasingly voluminous to de Guignes who quoted various texts, from the Anbertkend (de Guignes 1781b:60) and a text excerpted by Dow, the Neadirsen (p. 63), to the so-called Bequeathed Teachings of Buddha (p. 61). The latter is an apocryphal Buddhist text grouped by a Zen monk of the Song dynasty with the "zen-ified" Forty-Two Sections Sutra and a text of his own Guishan lineage to form the so-called Fozu sanjing, the Three Sutras of Buddha and Patriarch (Ch. Fozu sanjing). These three were among the few Buddhist texts studied by de Guignes. Given his idea of the doctrine of the esoteric branch of "Indian religion," he paid much attention to the word Chan (Jap. Zen, literally, contemplation or meditation). Since the main informer Ma Duanlin was writing in the golden age of Chinese Zen, the word popped up everywhere in his Buddhism section and was contained in many titles of scriptures. De Guignes was intrigued by these "particular treatises related to contemplation" and remarked:

As we have seen, this doctrine is very much in fashion with the Indians. These contemplatives are penitents who live in greatest austerity, observe the most extraordinary practices, and maintain the most ridiculous body positions. Although I do not have these treatises and do not find them mentioned in the Chinese books [other than Ma Duanlin] that I can consult, I feel obliged to discuss this subject for a moment and explain what other works have to say about this. (pp. 64-65)

In his discussion, de Guignes throws all kinds of data from India and Tibet (from Giorgi's Alphabetum Tibetanum; p. 65) into the mix and quotes La Croze on the Gnanigols and the Anbertkend as well as Dow on Yogic practices (pp. 69-70). Everything seemed to support his idea that these practitioners were trying hard to achieve total concentration on God (p. 70).

But this seemingly pure religion was not immune to change. Already in the 1750s, de Guignes had read about Fo's "three doctrines;" but at the time he believed them to be three religions of the seven Fo [Buddhas] of the past whom he saw as "foreign legislators":

Among the different religions that these Fo have established, there are three principal ones: 1. Tchim-kiao, the simple and natural religion; 2. Siam-kiao, the religion of idols; and 3. Mo-kiao, the posterior religion. (de Guignes 1759:779)

As his ability to read Chinese improved, de Guignes realized that Ma Duanlin had not written about three religions by foreign legislators but rather about three phases or epochs of the religion of Fo:

One distinguishes in this religion of Fo three different epochs. In the first it was called Tching-fa, i.e., the first Law. According to a book which treats of these first times, this epoch began with the death of Fo or Boudha and lasted five hundred years. The second is called Siang-fa, the Law of Figures or Images. It lasted for 1000 years. The third is named Mo-fa, or the last Law, and it must last for 3000 years. As Boudha was born in 1027 or 1122 and lived 79 years, he died in 969 or 1043 B.C.E. That's when the first Law that lasted for 500 years began, and it must have ended in 469 or 543 B.C.E. (de Guignes 1781a:77.373)

De Guignes's reliance on Ma Duanlin had many benefits; In this instance he had more or less accurately grasped the Chinese conception of three periods of the dharma: (1) the period of the genuine dharma, Ch. zhengfa; (2) the period of the semblance dharma, Ch. xiangfa; and (3) that of the end of the dharma or law, Ch. mofa. But not surprisingly, he misinterpreted the first period as the pure monotheism of remote antiquity and the second period as the age of idolatry (p. 376). In this second period something happened that, unbeknownst to de Guignes, strangely resembles the fate of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra:

It is likely that in the second [epoch, i.e., Xiangfa], which began around 470 or 544 B.C.E., people abandoned themselves increasingly to the cult of images. In that period they would compose books to explain the most ancient texts in conformity with the new cult; and it is not rare in such circumstances that the partisans of the new religion compose such [purportedly ancient] texts and attribute them to the first legislator. Later on, further books by unknown authors could have been attributed to him. The Indians, by the way, ate quite used to attribute their religious texts to the Divinity. (pp. 376-77)

De Guignes saw this scheme of the Fo religion's three epochs as proof that "the Indian Religion has not always remained the same since its origin and is not as ancient as people pretend" (p. 374). The degeneration of relatively pure esoteric monotheism into idolatric cults was bad enough; but who was the culprit responsible for the further degradation that rang the bell for the final period of the Dharma?

Here we enter the treacherous territory of Indian religion's axis of evil. If the Vedas were seen as embodiments of the interior doctrine and of monotheism professed by philosophers who kept such teachings among themselves, de Guignes identified the Dharma shastra as their exoteric, vulgar counterpart:

After the Vedas, the Dharma-chastram was composed, which contains the practices of the different sects, the rites of all kinds, the ceremonies and the laws for the administration of justice: there you have vulgar religion, in which all the attributes of the divinity were personified and the most absurd fables admitted. The people believe them and the philosophers teach them to the people even though they believe nothing of it and admit only a single God, the soul of the universe present everywhere. (p. 383)

Here the reader will hear a distinct echo of the Buddha's "deathbed confession" story that was endlessly repeated in Western sources. If the four Vedas with the inner doctrine of Indian religion had made their way to China disguised as the Diamond Sutra and other texts that we today associate with the Prajna paramita literature of Mahayana Buddhism, then the vulgar Dharma shastra had conceivably also been transmitted to China. After all, the panorama of Chinese religion -- riddled as it was with superstitious practices -- did not look all that rosy. According to the three-stage scheme, the last period of the true doctrine was said to have begun in the sixth century C.E. As de Guignes read the names of the major Buddhist figures of that century in Ma Duanlin's book, he came across a "Bodhidharma," an Indian "contemplative philosopher" (p. 106) who "had come to China with many books of contemplation" and had retired to a small temple where he "devoted himself entirely to contemplation with his face turned to a wall that he did not cease to stare at for nine years" (p. 107). If his name already suggested an association of this man with the Dharma shastra, his purported pivotal role in both India and in China was an additional hint. Was he the person who had perverted the "Indian religion" of China and launched the era of "Mo-ja, that is, the end o/the Law which is to last for 3,000 years" (p. 112)?

I believe I can here conjecture that this [Bodhi-]Darma of whom I spoke is the author of this revolution [the beginning of the final phase of the Law]. In India there exists a book with the title Darma Schastram or Dirm Schastram, i.e., Explication of Darma; and the doctrine contained in this book is adopted by a great number of Indians. This Darma seems to have played a great role in India, and this authorizes me to regard him as the author of the change in religion. For the rest, this is only a conjecture that I propose, a conjecture that Indian history can confirm or destroy. (p. 113)

De Guignes was aware that he was stepping on slippery ground here; but the reputation of Bodhidharma as symbol of transmission was already firmly established. In fact he is a splendid example of a "person of memory" (Assmann 1998:9) who probably never existed in the flesh yet has had a large impact in history. Students of religion know all too well that invented personages and traditions can become so real that they can not only save many souls but also pack in enormous amounts of baggage.

By the Song dynasty, when Ma Duanlin wrote, the Zen tradition of Chinese Buddhism and its model of Ur-tradition had become so dominant that other schools of Buddhism and later even Daoist movements began to imitate its lineage trick. But it was not easy to invent such a colorful transmitter figure as Bodhidharma, who not only was credited with having brought the Buddha's original teaching from India to China floating on a reed and having sat for nine years facing a wall but even with having, as Kaempfer excitedly reported, cut off his eyelids to avoid falling asleep (see Figure 10). He threw them away -- and behold, the next day two tea shrubs had grown at the exact spot where they had hit the ground. Thus Bodhidharma became the inventor and patron saint of tea ... (Kaempfer 1906:218-19). In the Song period the "successors of Bodhidharma" began to use koans in their training, and an entire literature grew around these poignant "Zen presentations offered as a Zen challenge" (DeMartino 1983). One of the most famous koans features a simple question: "Why did the patriarch [Bodhidharma] go from India to China?" Twenty years ago, during a pleasant research group party, an aggressive Japanese university professor suddenly shouted this question in a shrill voice at Professor Seizan Yanagida. He calmly replied: "Watakushi no tame" ("Because of me").


Figure 10. Bodhidharma crossing the sea on a reed (Kaempfer 1906:221).

Now we also know de Guignes's answer, as I interpret it: Because Bodhidharma wanted to destroy genuine Indian religion in China and launch the final age of the dharma by carrying the entire Dharma shastra, packed with the exterior practices of vulgar religion, in his bulky robe as he crossed the sea on that slender reed!

If the idea of a pan-Asian religion gradually took hold in European minds during the first half of the eighteenth century, the second half turned into a race to substantiate this idea and supply textual evidence for it. This was a task only orientalists could hope to tackle, and the chapters of this book present various facets of this endeavor that is so intimately connected with the birth of modern orientalism. Starting with de Guignes's translation of the Forty-two Sections Sutra in the early 1750s, texts that seemed to answer this need successively appeared, and most of them pointed to an Indian cradle. In 1761 it was Voltaire's Ezour-vedam, in 1767 Holwell's Shastah, in 1768 Dow's Bedang Shaster and Neadirzin, in 1771 Anquetil-Duperron's Zend- Avesta, in 1785 Wilkins's Bhagvat-Geeta, and so on until de Guignes's death in 1800. Despite an almost superhuman effort during half a century of orientalist research, de Guignes was unable to furnish conclusive textual evidence for his "Indian religion." But the search was launched, and passionate orientalists such as Anquetil-Duperron were ready to risk their lives to gain the prize that had eluded de Guignes.

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Part 1 of 3

Chapter 5: Ramsay's Ur-Tradition

When D. P. Walker wrote about "ancient theology" [The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London, Duckworth, 1972), by Daniel Pickering Walker (1914-1985)] or prisca theologia, he firmly linked it to Christianity and Platonism (Walker 1972). On the first page of his book, Walker defined the term as follows:

By the term "Ancient Theology" I mean a certain tradition of Christian apologetic theology which rests on misdated texts. Many of the early Fathers, in particular Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius, in their apologetic works directed against pagan philosophers, made use of supposedly very ancient texts: Hermetica, Orphica, Sibylline Prophecies, Pythagorean Carmina Aurea, etc., most of which in fact date from the first four centuries of our era. [100-400 A.D.] These texts, written by the Ancient Theologians Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, were shown to contain vestiges of the true religion: monotheism, the Trinity, the creation of the world out of nothing through the Word, and so forth. It was from these that Plato [428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC)] took the religious truths to be found in his writings. [???!!!] (Walker 1972:1)

By the term "Ancient Theology"1 [i.e. prisca theologica, a term which I regret having launched, since no one, including myself, is quite sure how to pronounce it. The main recent works on this subject are: F.A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London, 1964; J. Dagens, 'Hermetisme et Cabale en France, de Lefevre d'Etaples a Bossuet', in Revue de litterature comparee, annee 35, Paris, 1961, pp. 5-16; Charles B. Schmitt, 'Perennial Philosophy: from Agostino Steuco to Leibniz', in Journal of the History of Ideas, xxvii, 1966, pp. 505-32.] I mean a certain tradition of Christian apologetic theology which rests on misdated texts. Many of the early Fathers, in particular Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius, in their apologetic works directed against pagan philosophers, made use of supposedly very ancient texts: Hermetica, Orphica2 [v. infra, pp. 14 seq.], Sibylline Prophecies,3 [Oracula Sybyllina, ed. J. Geffcken, Leipzig, 1902; cf. F.A. Yates, Bruno, p. 8, n. 4.] Pythagorean Carmina Aurea,4 [Les Vers d'or pythagoriciens, ed. P.C. Van der Horst, Leiden, 1932; The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period, ed. H. Thesleff, Abo, 1965; Hieroclis in Aureum Pythagoreorum Carmen Commentarius, ed. F.G. A. Mullachius, Hildesheim, 1971; M.T. Cardini, Pitagorici Testimonianze e Frammenti, Firenze, 1958, 3 vols.] etc., most of which in fact date from the first four centuries of our era. [100-400 A.D.] These texts, written by the Ancient Theologians Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, were shown to contain vestiges of the true religion: monotheism, the Trinity, the creation of the world out of nothing through the Word, and so forth. It was from these that Plato [428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC)] took the religious truths to be found in his writings.

-- The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, by D.P. Walker, 1972:1)

Walker described a revival of such "ancient theology" in the Renaissance and in "platonizing theologians from Ficino to Cudworth" who wanted to "integrate Platonism and Neoplatonism into Christianity, so that their own religious and philosophical beliefs might coincide" [!!!](p. 2). After the debunking of the genuineness and antiquity of the texts favored by these ancient theologians, the movement ought to have died; but Walker detected "a few isolated survivals" such as Athanasius Kircher, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and the Jesuit figurists of the French China mission (p. 194). For Walker the last Mohican of this movement, so to say, is Chevalier Andrew Michael RAMSAY (1686-1743), whose views are described in the final chapter of The Ancient Theology. But seen through the lens of our concerns here, one could easily extend this line to various figures in this book, for example, Jean Calmette, John Zephaniah Holwell, Abbe Vincent Mignot, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Guillaume Sainte-Croix, and also to William Jones (App 2009).

Ur-Traditions

To better understand such phenomena we have to go beyond the narrow confines of the Christian God and Platonism. There are many movements that link themselves to some kind of "original," "pure," "genuine" teaching, claim its authority, use it to criticize "degenerate" accretions, and attempt to legitimize their "reform" on its basis. Such links can take a variety of forms. In Chapter 4 we saw how in the eighth and ninth centuries the Buddhist reform movement known as Zen cooked up a lineage of "mind to mind" transmission with the aim of connecting the teaching of the religion's Indian founder figure, Buddha, with their own views. The tuned-up and misdated Forty-Two Sections Sutra that ended up impressing so many people, including its first European translator de Guignes, was one (of course unanticipated) outcome of this strategy. Such "Ur-tradition" movements, as I propose to call them, invariably create a "transmission" scenario of their "original" teaching or revelation; in the case of Zen this consisted in an elaborate invented genealogy with colorful transmission figures like Bodhidharma and "patriarchs" consisting mostly of pious legends. Such invented genealogies and transmissions are embodied in symbols and legends emphasizing the link between the "original" teaching and the movement's doctrine. "Genuine," "oldest" texts are naturally of central importance for such movements, since they tend to regard the purity of teaching as directly proportional to its closeness to origins.

A common characteristic of such "Ur-tradition" movements is a tripartite scheme of "golden age," "degeneration," and "regeneration." The raison d'etre of such movements is the revival of a purportedly most ancient, genuine, "original" teaching after a long period of degeneration. Hence their need to define an "original" teaching, establish a line of its transmission, identify stages and kinds of degeneration, and present themselves as the agent of "regeneration" of the original "ancient" teaching. Such need often arises in a milieu of doctrinal rivalry or in a crisis, for example, when "new" religions or reform movements want to establish and legitimize themselves or when an established religion is threatened by powerful alternatives.

When young Christianity evolved from a Jewish reform movement and was accused of being a "new religion" and an invention, ancient connections were needed to provide legitimacy and add historical weight to the religion. The adoption of the Hebrew Bible as "Old Testament," grimly opposed by some early Christians, linked the young religion and its "New Testament" effectively to the very creation of the world, to paradise, and to the Ur-religion of the first humans in the golden age. Legends, texts, and symbols were created to illustrate this "Old-to-New" link. For example, the savior's cross on Golgotha had to get a pedigree connecting it to the Hebrew Bible's paradise tree; and the original sinner Adam's skull had to be brought via Noah's ark to Palestine in order to get buried on the very hill near Jerusalem where Adam's original sin eventually got expunged by the New Testament's "second Adam" on the cross (Figure 11). Theologians use the word "typology" for such attempts to discover Christian teachings or forebodings thereof in the Old Testament.

Similar links to an "oldest," "purest," and "original" teaching are abundant not only in the history of religions but also, for example, in freemasonry and various "esoteric" movements. They also tend to invent links to an original "founder," "ancient" teachings and texts, lineages, symbols of the original doctrine and its transmission, eminent transmitter figures ("patriarchs"), and so on; and they usually criticize the degeneration of exactly those original and pure teachings that they claim to resuscitate. In such schemes the most ancient texts, symbols, and objects naturally play important roles, particularly if they seem mysterious: pyramids, hieroglyphs, runic letters, ancient texts buried in caves, and divine revelations stored on golden tablets in heaven or in some American prophet's backyard ...


Figure 11. Adam's skull underneath the cross. Collection of Drs. Valerio and Adriana Pozza, Padova, Italy.

In premodern Europe such "original" teachings were usually associated with Old Testament heroes who had the function of transmitters. A typical example that shows how various ancient religions were integrated in a genealogy linking them to primeval religion as well as its fulfillment in Christianity is Jacques Boulduc's De Ecclesia ante legem ("On the Church before the [Mosaic] Law") of 1626. Boulduc shows in a table how the extremely long lifespans of the patriarchs facilitated transmission: for example, Adam lived for 930 years and could instruct his descendants in person until his sixth-generation Ur-nephew Lamech, Noah's father, was fifty-six years old. Adam's son Seth was 120 years old when the first priestly functions were instituted; 266 years old when his son Enos first offered prayers in a dedicated house; and 800 years old when he took over the supreme pontificate of the "church before the law" at Adam's untimely death (1630:148-49). In the second book, Boulduc shows that "all philosophers, both of Greece and of other regions, have their origin in the descendants of the prophet Noah" (p. 271) and includes in this transmission lineage even the "wise rather than malefic Persian magi [Magos Persas non maleficos, sed sapientes]," Egyptian prophets, Gallic druids, the "naked sages of India [Indis Gymnosophistae]," etc. (p. 273). Boulduc took special care to document through numerous quotations from ancient sources that the wise men who were variously called Semai, Semni, Semanai, Semnothei, and Samanaeil "all have their name from Noah's son Shem" and are therefore direct descendants of Noachic pure Ur-religion (p. 275). The same is true for the Brachmanes of India who were so closely associated with these Samanaei by St. Jerome (p. 277). Even "our Druids" worshipped "the only true God," believed "in the immortality of the soul" as well as "the resurrection of our bodies," and adored almost all the very God who "at some point in the future will become man through incarnation from a virgin" (pp. 278-79). The correct doctrinal linage of such descendants of Shem is guaranteed by the fact that "after the deluge, Shem brought the original religion of Enos's descendants to renewed blossom [reflorescere fecit]" (p. 280). Boulduc also paid special attention to Enoch, the sixth-generation descendant of Adam who could boast of having lived no less than 308 years in Adam's presence (pp. 148-49). This excellent patriarch, who at age 365 was prematurely removed from the eyes of the living and has been watching events ever since from his perch in the terrestrial or celestial paradise, had left behind "writings, that is, the book of Enoch, which contains nothing false or absurd" (p. 131). Noah had taken special care to "diligently preserve these writings of Enoch, placing them at the time of the deluge on the ark with no less solicitousness than the bones of Father Adam and some other patriarchs" (p. 138). Boulduc did not know where this famous Book of Enoch ended up, but some well-known passages in scripture specified that it conveyed important information about the activities of angels.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, textual criticism began to undermine the very foundation of such tales, namely, the text of the Old Testament and particularly of its first five books (the Pentateuch). These books had always been attributed to Moses and regarded as the world's oldest extant scripture. But in 1651 Thomas HOBBES (1588-1679) wrote in the third part of his Leviathan that the identity of "the original writers of the several Books of Holy Scripture" was not "made evident by any sufficient testimony of other history, which is the only proof of matter of fact" (Hobbes 1651:368). However, Hobbes did not deny that Moses had contributed some writings: "But though Moses did not compile those books entirely, and in the form we have them; yet he wrote all that which he is there said to have written" (p. 369).

A limited hangout is a form of deception, misdirection, or coverup often associated with intelligence agencies involving a release or "mea culpa" type of confession of only part of a set of previously hidden sensitive information, that establishes credibility for the one releasing the information who by the very act of confession appears to be "coming clean" and acting with integrity; but in actuality by withholding key facts is protecting a deeper crime and those who could be exposed if the whole truth came out. In effect, if an array of offenses or misdeeds is suspected, this confession admits to a lesser offense while covering up the greater ones.

A limited hangout typically is a response to lower the pressure felt from inquisitive investigators pursuing clues that threaten to expose everything, and the disclosure is often combined with red herrings or propaganda elements that lead to false trails, distractions, or ideological disinformation; thus allowing covert or criminal elements to continue in their improper activities.

-- Limited Hangout, by Wikipedia

By contrast, Isaac LAPEYRERE (1596-1676) -- who wrote earlier than Hobbes and influenced him though his book on the pre-Adamites appeared later -- was far more radical in questioning whether Moses had in fact written any of the first five books of the Old Testament:

I know not by what author it is found out, that the Pentateuch is Moses his own copy. It is so reported, but not believed by all. These Reasons make one believe, that those Five Books are not the Originals, but copied out by another. Because Moses is there read to have died. For how could Moses write after his death? (La Peyrere 1656:204-5).

La Peyrere's conclusion was shocking:

I need not trouble the reader much further, to prove a thing in itself sufficiently evident, that the five first Books of the Bible were not written by Moses, as is thought. Nor need anyone wonder after this, when he reads many things confus'd and out of order, obscure, deficient, many things omitted and misplaced, when they shall consider with themselves that they are a heap of Copie confusedly taken. (p. 208)

Such textual criticism2 initiated "a chain of analyses that would end up transforming the evaluation of Scripture from a holy to a profane work" (Popkin 1987:73). Until La Peyrere, the Bible had always been regarded as a repository of divine revelation communicated by God (the "founder" figure) to a "transmitter" figure (in this case Moses). Unable to reconcile biblical chronology and events with newly discovered facts such as American "Indians" and Chinese historical records, La Peyrere came to the conclusion that the Bible contained not the history of all humankind but only that of a tiny group (namely, the Jews). His rejection of Moses' authorship, of course, also entailed doubts about the Bible's revelation status: if it was indeed revealed by God, then to whom? To a whole group of people whose notes were cut and pasted together to form a rather incoherent creation Story with "many things confus'd and out of order"? At the end of the chain of events described by Popkin, the Bible was no longer "looked upon as Revelation from God, but as tales and beliefs of the primitive Hebrews, to be compared with the tales and beliefs of other Near Eastern groups" (p. 73), leading Thomas Paine to declare: "Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities or downright lies" (Paine 1795:4).

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian tales, without the merit of being entertaining; and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous immortality of the giants of the Mythology.

Besides, the character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation, of which I will state only one instance.

When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows: Numbers, chap. xxxi., ver. 13:

"And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the council of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters.

-- The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine

But such loss of biblical authority was a gradual and painful process that frequently elicited the kind of apologetic intervention evoked by Walker in The Ancient Theology. I doubt that Walker would have gone as far as including the Bible among his pseudepigraphic and misdated texts. Yet if one views phenomena like the Reformation from the perspective of Ur-traditions, the biblical text appears as a (misdated) record of "original teaching" used by reformers like Calvin and Luther in their effort to discard "Romish" degenerations and to restore what they took to be the "genuine," "original" religion revealed by the "founder" God to "transmitters" from Adam and the antediluvian "patriarchs" to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and ultimately the authors of the New Testament. But this kind of Reformation was soon denounced as degenerate in its own right, for example, by the radical English deists who regarded "genuine" Christianity not as revealed to any particular Middle Eastern tribe but as engraved in every human heart. From this perspective, Christianity was -- as Matthew TINDAL (1657-1733) in 1730 succinctly put it in the title of his famous bible of the Deists -- exactly "as Old as Creation," and the holy Gospel was no more than "a Republication of the Religion of Nature" (Tindal 1995). While biblical answers became suspect and alternative creation narratives began to be culled from apparently far more ancient sacred texts, the search for humankind's origins, its "original" religion, and its oldest sacred scriptures had to begin again. In this "crisis of European consciousness," a number of men sought to anchor Europe's drifting worldview anew in the bedrock of remotest antiquity via a solid Ur-tradition chain. Among them was an Englishman who defended the Middle Eastern and biblical framework while dreaming of restoring Noah's pure religion (Isaac Newton); a Scotsman who determined that China offered better vestiges of the Ur-religion and wanted to reinterpret the Bible accordingly (Andrew Ramsay); and the Irish protagonist of the next chapter, John Zephaniah Holwell, who presented Europe with an Indian Old Testament that -- he alleged -- was so much older and better than Moses's patchwork that it could form the basis for the ultimate reformation of Christianity.

Newton's Noachide Religion

Isaac NEWTON (1642-1727) is, of course, known as one of the greatest scientists of all time, but his theological and chronological writings have become the focus of increasing attention. They amount to more than half a million words and are in great part still unpublished; but their study4 points to a central "Ur-tradition" pattern in Newton's worldview. For example, modern specialists point out that "it can be shown how Newton regarded his natural philosophy as an integral part of a radical and comprehensive recovery of the true ancient religion, which had been revealed directly to man by God" (Gouk 1988:120); that Newton tried to prove "that his scientific work in the Principia was a rediscovery of the mystical philosophy which had passed to the Egyptians and the Greeks from the Jews" (Rattansi 1988:198); and that the great scientist "believed that alchemical writings preserved a secret knowledge which had been revealed by God" (Golinski 1988:158). Newton apparently saw himself as a regenerator of an Ur-wisdom that had been encoded in symbols and transmitted through dark and degenerate ages by a line of eminent men (patriarchs). The italicized words in this sentence are all elements of what I call Ur-traditions.

Newton developed such views over many decades but dared to discuss them only with a few close friends. But the last sentences of his famous Opticks let the reader catch a glimpse:

If natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature. And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal Virtues; and instead of teaching the Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have taught us to worship our true Author and Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the Government of Noah and his Sons before they corrupted themselves. (Newton 1730:381-82).

This closing passage suggests that for Newton the religion of the "golden age" or Ur-religion was preserved by Noah and his sons who were thoroughly monotheistic. Far from being only the religion of the Hebrews, this Ur-religion reigned for a long time everywhere, even in Egypt (Westfall 1982:27). But these "blinded heathen" who had initially shared Noah's Ur-religion could barely remember the cardinal virtues because their religion at some point degenerated into the worship of false gods, objects of nature, and dead heroes and into the teaching of the transmigration of souls.

Newton had closely studied Thomas Burnet's Archaeologiae philosophicae of 1692 (see Chapter 3), and though the outlines of his historico-theological system were already developed in 1692, Burnet's influence is unmistakable:

Like Burnet, Newton regarded Noah, rather than Abraham or Moses, as the original source of the true religion and learning; consequently, he, too, argued that vestiges of truth could be found among the ancient Gentile peoples as well as that of the Jews since all were descendants of Noah and his sons. Both also shared the belief that modern philosophy was contributing to the recovery of ancient truths which had been distorted after Noah's death. (Gascoigne 1991:185)

Newton clearly thought that an initial divine revelation was the ultimate source of all religion, that this Ur-religion was once shared by all ancient peoples. Nevertheless, he sought to root his views firmly in the Old Testament narrative. Monogenesis and the universality of the great flood, for example, were nonnegotiable. Thus, all postdiluvial humans, gentiles and Hebrews alike, originally shared the religion transmitted by Noah and his sons, and vestiges of this religion could be found in all ancient cultures. Newton explained:

From all of which it is manifest that a certain general tradition was conserved for a very long time among the Peoples about those things which were passed down most distinctly from Noah and the first men to Abraham and from Abraham to Moses. And hence we can also hope that a history of the times which followed immediately after the flood can be deduced with some degree of truth from the traditions of Peoples. (Yahuda Ms. 16.2, f. 48; Westfall 1982:22-23)

But Newton did not go as far as taking Chinese chronology into account. He owned and studied Philippe Coupler's 1687 work that was discussed in the previous chapter yet grew convinced that the famous burning of books by Emperor Shih Huangdi in the third century B.C.E had reduced all ancient Chinese history to legend. In the New College Manuscript (I, fol. 80v) Newton wrote,

And there are now no histories in China but what were written above 72 years of this conflagration. And therefore the Story that Huan ti founded the monarchy of China 2697 years before Christ is a fable invented to make that Monarchy look ancient. The way of writing used by the Chinese was not fully invented before the days of Confucius the Chinese philosopher & he was born but 551 years before Christ & flourished only in one of the six old kingdoms into which China was then divided. (Manuel 1963:270)

Newton instead studied Middle Eastern chronologies and used them to defend the Bible as the most reliable source for remote antiquity. Moses had in his opinion originally written a history of creation, a book of the generations of Adam, and the book of the law. Though these oldest books "have long since been lost except what has been transcribed out of them in the Pentateuch now extant" and though the existing text of the Pentateuch was in his opinion redacted by Samuel rather than Moses (Manuel 1963:61), Newton remained firmly convinced that the first books of the Old Testament "are by far the oldest records now extant," that the Bible is the most authentic history of the world, and that the Kingdom of Israel was the first large-scale political society with all the attributes of civilization (p. 89).5 Manetho of Heliopolis, Berosus the Chaldaean, and others had, like the Persian and Chinese historians, created extravagant chronologies that were infinitely less reliable and old. In a chapter of his Chronology dedicated to the Persian Empire, Newton wrote,

We need not then wonder, that the Egyptians have made the kings in the first dynasty of their monarchy, that which was seated at Thebes in the days of David, Solomon, and Rehoboam, so very ancient and so long-lived; since the Persians have done the like to their kings Adar and Hazael, who reigned an hundred years after the death of Solomon, "worshipping them as gods, and boasting of their antiquity, and not knowing," saith Josephus, "that they were but modern." (Newton 1785:5.263)

Newton employed such chronologies that "magnified their antiquities so exceedingly" (p. 263) in a manner that much resembled that of William Jones a century later, namely, to confirm the biblical account and vindicate biblical authority; but Jones was to use the even more hyperbolical Indian chronologies. Newton's final system appeared, as Frank Manuel put it, "as a eulogy of Israel" and is evidence "for his central proposition that the Hebrews were the most ancient civilized people" (Manuel 1963:97). Though the Bible bestows greater antiquity on the Egyptian and Assyrian royal institutions than on the tribes of Israel, Newton "was able to cling to his idee fixe throughout the revision of the history of antiquity, both in the fragments and in the final Chronology" (p. 99).

Newton's "ancient theology" was thus -- unlike that of Ramsay and Holwell -- still exclusively rooted in the Middle East and the Bible. Since events before the biblical deluge remained hazy due to the fragmentary character of the Pentateuch and the lack of reliable ancient pagan sources, Newton's history of religions really starts with Noah and his sons. His true religion "most closely resembled that which prevailed at the time of Noah, immediately after the Deluge, before the idolatry -- which to Newton was the root of all evil not only in religion but also in politics and even philosophy -- began to corrupt it" (Gascoigne 1991:185). The symbol of this pure original religion is the Temple of Solomon (Figure 12), which not only features the eternal flame on a sacrificial altar at the center but also a geometrically precise representation of the heliocentric solar system.

Newton's "prytanea," sacred cultic places around a perpetual fire, symbolize God's original revelation and are at the source of the transmission line.6 Cults with prytanea were for Newton the most ancient of all cults. According to him this religion with the sacred fire "seems to have been as well the most universal as ye most ancient of all religions & to have spread into all nations before other religions took place. There are many instances of nations receiving other religions after this but none (that I know) of any nation's receiving this after any other. Nor did ever any other religion which sprang up later become so general as this" (Westfall 1982:24).

This religion around the prytanea was professed by Noah and his sons.


Figure 12. Newton's map of Solomon's temple (Newton 1785:5.244).

They spread "the true religion till ye nations corrupted it" (p. 25). This first corruption consisted in forgetting that the symbols in the prytanea (for example, lamps symbolizing heavenly bodies around the central "solar" flame) are symbols, leading men to engage in sidereal worship. It is of interest to note that Newton's history of religion -- and, I might add, Ur-traditions in general -- are intimately linked to the encoding and decoding of symbols. Here the degeneration process begins with a misunderstanding of symbols [!!!]; and this misunderstanding eventually leads to the worship of dead men and statues, the belief in the transmigration of souls, polytheism, the worship of animals, and other "Egyptian" inventions. In parallel with such religious degeneration, the false geocentric system took hold thanks to a late Egyptian, Ptolemy (pp. 25-26).

The first major postdiluvial regeneration was due to Moses who, according to Newton, "restored for a time the original true religion that was the common heritage of all mankind" (p. 26). But soon enough the degeneration process began anew, punctuated by calls of prophets for renewal, until Jesus came not to bring a new religion but rather to "restore the original true one" not solely for the Jews but for all mankind (p. 27). Soon enough, another round of degeneration set in with the Egyptian Athanasius, the doctrine of the Trinity, and Roman Catholic idolatry, which got worse and worse until the Reformation cleaned up some of the mess. But Protestantism and Anglicanism were not immune from corruption either, which is why Newton (who was adamantly opposed to the Trinity) felt the need to call -- in a very muted voice and in heaps of unpublished notes and manuscripts -- for one more restoration of true, pure, Noachic religion and wisdom.

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Part 2 of 3

Ramsay's Quest

In 1727, the very year of Newton's death and one year before his Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended was published, a bestseller by Andrew Michael RAMSAY (1686-1743) appeared on the market both in French and English: the Travels of Cyrus (Les voyages de Cyrus). It saw over thirty editions in English and French and was translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek (Henderson 1952:109). The two volumes that Ramsay called his "Great work," however, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion Unfolded in a Geometrical Order, only appeared posthumously in 1748 and 1749.

Ramsay grew up in modest circumstances in Ayr (Scotland), and after studying philosophy and theology at Glasgow and Edinburgh, he went to London in 1707 or 1708 to study mathematics with Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers (Walker 1972:234), a Swiss refugee who was perhaps Newton's most intimate friend and was well informed about Newton's unorthodox religious views. Newton's preference for the prophet Daniel is reflected in Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus. In the preface to the revised edition, Ramsay gave his readers the following key to his bestselling book:

The Magi in Cyrus's time were fallen into a kind of atheism, like that of Spinoza; Zoroaster, Hermes and Pythagoras adored one sole Deity, but they were deists; Eleazar resembled the Socinians, who were for subjecting religion to philosophy; Daniel represents a perfect Christian, and the hero of this book a young prince, who began to be corrupted by the maxims of irreligion. In order to set him right, the different philosophers with whom he converses successively unfold to him new truths mixt with errors. Zoroaster confutes the mistakes of the Magi; Pythagoras those of Zoroaster; Eleazar those of Pythagoras; Daniel rejects those of all the others, and his doctrine is the only one which the author adopts. (Ramsay r814:xvii)

Ramsay's goal was "to prove against the Atheists the existence of a Supreme Deity, who produced the world by his power and governs it by his wisdom," and he wanted to show "that the earliest opinions of the most knowing and civilized nations come nearer the truth than those of latter ages" (p. xiv). According to Ramsay, the "theology of the Orientals" was far purer than that of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (pp. xiv-xv). If the most important point of The Travels of Cyrus was the demonstration that the primitive system of the world was monotheistic, Ramsay's second major objective was described as follows:

The second point is to shew, in opposition to the Deists, that the principal doctrines of revealed religion, concerning the states of innocence, corruption and renovation, are as ancient as the world; that they were foundations of Noah's religion; that he transmitted them to his children; that these traditions were spread throughout all nations; that the Pagans disfigured, degraded, and obscured them by their absurd fictions; and lastly, that these primitive truths have been no where preserved in their purity, except in the true religion. (pp. xv-xvi)

This passage presents in a nutshell some of the main elements of what I have called "Ur-tradition": an Ur-teaching from a founder (here God and his original revelation); an overall scheme of golden age/degeneration/regeneration; a transmission lineage of the Ur-teaching; pivotal transmission figures; and the linking of this Ur-doctrine to the religion of the proponent that purportedly regenerates the true original creed. For Ramsay as for Newton, Noah's religion seems to form a crucial juncture since he was the sole heir of antediluvial pure monotheism; and for both men the protagonist of the Hebrew Bible's Book of Daniel is another crucial "transmitter" figure. In his treatise on the prophecies of Daniel, Newton pointed out that already Ezekiel had joined "Daniel with Noah and Job, as most high in the favour of God" and that "Daniel was in the greatest credit amongst the Jews, till the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian: and to reject his prophecies, is to reject the Christian religion" (Newton 1785:5-311).

If some protagonists of the Old Testament are so highly valued as transmitters of Ur-religion, the question of the text's reliability inevitably arises. Indeed, Newton's treatise "Upon the Prophecies of Daniel" begins with a chapter "Concerning the compilers of the books of the Old Testament" (pp. 297-305). In the second volume of his "Great work," Ramsay summarizes Newton's argument as follows:

1. Several great men, both of the Greek and Latin Church, of the Roman and Protestant communion, think as the famous Sir Isaac Newton, That we have lost some books wrote by the patriarchs, both before and after the deluge, concerning the creation, first origin and primitive history of the world; and that the book of Genesis preserved was rather a short extract, than an exact copy of these original patriarchal records. It is certain, as Sir Isaac remarks, that Scripture mentions, in different places, several books lost, such as "the book of the generations of Adam; the book of the wars of God; The books of Enoch" (see Sir Isaac Newton's observations upon Daniel, page 4 & 5). (Ramsay 1749:215)

Ramsay claims that he is not in a position "to decide such an important question" and has decided to "leave it to the decision of the learned," but his second point immediately shows that he accepted Newton's view:

2. If there be any truth in this conjecture, we must not be surprized, if the transitions from one subject to another be more rapid in the extracts preserved, than in the originals that are lost, and if many particular circumstances be omitted, that would have been very useful to illustrate several curious enquiries concerning the primitive creation and fall of angels and men, tho' they were not absolutely necessary to regulate our faith. (p. 216)

If the Old Testament contains only "extracts" of the whole story and its originals are "lost," are there any other, possibly more complete and reliable sources? The presentation of such sources was exactly the objective of the second volume of Ramsay's "Great work":

In the second part we shall show "That vestiges of all principal doctrines of the Christian religion are to be found in the monuments, writings, or mythologies of all nations, ages and religions; and that these vestiges are emanations of the primitive, antient, universal religion of mankind, transmitted from the beginning of the world by the Antidiluvians (sic) to the Postdiluvian patriarchs, and by them to their posterity that peopled the face of the earth." (Ramsay 1748.iv-v)

Ramsay's great quest was to collect all vestiges of the "original traditions of the patriarchal religion" from the writings of "the antient Hebrews, Chinese, Indians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans," and he was convinced that even "among the ancient Gauls, Germans, Britons, and all other nations," one would "find vestiges of the same truths" if we would possess any "records left of their doctrines" because "all flowed from the same source" (Ramsay 1749:iv). but if the records of the "antient Hebrews" were only fragmentary, those of the Egyptians indecipherable, those of the Indians and Persians still largely unknown, and those of the Greeks and Romans too young, where could such vestiges of Ur-religion be found?

Before he enters this discussion, Ramsay clarifies the origin of his Ur-tradition and firmly links Adam's "perfect knowledge" to its regeneration through the Messiah:

According to the Mosaic accounts of the origin and propagation of mankind, the protoplast had a perfect knowledge of all the great principles of Natural and Revealed Religion. Adam created in a state of innocence, before sin and passion had darkened his understanding, who conversed with the Logos in paradise under a human form, must have had a perfect knowledge of the Deity, and of the love we owed to him. Adam, after the fall, could not but know the miserable state, into which he had plunged himself, with all his posterity. Scripture assures us, and all divines agree, that God, after having banished him from paradise, revealed to him the sacrifice, sufferings, and triumphs of the Messiah. Thus Adam must have had a perfect knowledge of all the great principles both of Natural and Revealed Religion. (p. 8)

This quoted passage also sets the stage for Ramsay's "three states scheme (initial perfection, degeneration or fall, and regeneration). Next comes the problem of a line of transmission of Adam's initial wisdom:

Yea, he [Adam] must not only have instructed his children then existent in these sublime truths, but have given them orders to transmit the same notions to their posterity. All the holy patriarchs must have done the same, from generation to generation, till the deluge; when Noah, possessed with the same spirit, had, no doubt, the same care to hand down, to succeeding ages, those essential truths. Now, since the holy patriarchs, before and after the deluge, could and should have acted thus, it is sure they did so. (p. 9)

But such direct transmission was risky, which is why even Ur-tradition movements that emphasize "mind-to-mind" transmission tend to place their trust in ancient texts:

It is no ways probable, that such a wise man as Noah, who was instructed by, and conversed with the Logos, would have trusted to oral tradition alone, for the preservation and transmission of these divine lights, and sublime mysteries of faith to his posterity, and all the nations who were to cover the face of the earth. He, no doubt, took care to have them wrote in such characters as were then in use. All grant that the first way of writing was by hieroglyphics. (p. 9)

Ramsay mentions the famous pillars of stone and clay that were, according to Flavius Josephus and numerous Old Testament pseudepigraphs, designed to withstand both water and fire, but he rejects the view that they contained astronomical knowledge (p. 10). Rather, the symbolical characters on these pillars had the aim "to preserve and transmit to posterity some idea of the mysteries of religion" (p. II). Here we have one more element of Ur-traditions: a code for the transmission of original doctrine. Ramsay thought that the inscriptions on the pillars were "Enochian or Noevian symbols" designed "to preserve the memory of these sacred truths" (p. 13). In this manner sacred texts were transmitted to all nations, thus forming a global written Ur-tradition:

Thus the symbolical characters, images and representations of divine intellectual truths, were much the same in all nations. Of this we have uncontestable proofs, since the symbols of the Chinese are very oft the same with those wrote upon the Egyptian obelisks yet preserved: for all the Chinese characters are hieroglyphics. We find also, that the Gauls, Germans and Britains long before they were conquered by Julius Caesar, had much the same symbolical representations of their sacred mysteries and Deities, as the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. (pp. 13-14)

Though these "Enochian or Noevian symbols" were "at first invented not to render religion mysterious, and cover it with an impenetrable veil, but, on the contrary, to render its sublime, intellectual, spiritual ideas sensible, visible and familiar to the vulgar," their true original sense was soon forgotten; "men attach'd themselves to the letter, and the signs, without understanding the spirit and the thing signified," and soon "the Pagans fell by degrees into gross idolatry and wild superstition" (pp. 14-15). Ramsay's Story about the degeneration of the original religion continues very much like Newton's. Desire for power, greed, and priestcraft were some of the reasons why "the sacred, ancient and primitive symbols were degraded, obscured, misinterpreted, dismember'd, mangled and disfigured. The sacred became profane; the divine, human; and the most sublime truths were turn'd into wild fictions" (p. 16). Thus "the original sense was intirely perverted, the sign became the thing signified, and the reality was look'd upon as a symbol"[!!!] (p. 19). Such degeneration took place not only in pagan nations but also with the Jews, and their claims of exclusive transmission form part of it:

We must not however think, that the Pagans alone were guilty of these degradations, alterations and false explications of the sacred symbols and ancient traditions. As men are much the same in all nations, ages and religions, and that human nature is an inexhaustible source of ignorance, self-love and cupidity, the members of the visible church both Jewish and Christian fell into far greater tho' very different abuses, and misinterpretations of ancient tradition, than the Pagans. Tho' the Jews had a law written not in a hieroglyphical style, but in vulgar language, yet they explain'd all the metaphorical descriptions of the divine nature and attributes in a literal sense, and form'd to themselves the idea of a partial, fantastic, furious, wrathful God who loved one nation only and hared all the rest. Because they were chosen to be the depositaries of the sacred oracles, and had the external means of salvation, they fancied that the God of the Israelites was not the God of the Gentiles; that he abandon'd all other nations to a total ignorance of his essence, and to inevitable damnation. (pp. 19-20)

Ramsay also included the Christians and declared at the beginning of his "Great work" that not only the Pagan mythologists who "adulterated by degrees the original traditions of the partriarchal religion" needed to be ser straight but also the "Jewish rabbins, and then the Christian schoolmen" who "disfigured revealed religion, by many absurd opinions, popular errors, and wild fictions, which being neither founded in scripture, nor authorized by the consent of the universal church, ought not to pass for doctrines of faith" (Ramsay 1748:v). Ramsay obviously had a reformist agenda. but what did the "original" doctrine consist in? How could one hope to get some idea of Adam's "perfect knowledge" without access to (and understanding of) "Enochian or Noevian symbols"?

Noah's Chinese Heirs

When Ramsay wrote his books in the first half of the eighteenth century, a new avenue to humanity's past had opened up through the study of Chinese. Long before students of Sanskrit began to throw light on Indian antiquities, a number of pioneer Sinologists studied the Chinese "hieroglyphs" and tried to make sense of China's ancient texts. Though earlier books such as Juan Mendoza's Historia ... del gran reyno de la China (1596), Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault's De Christiana Expeditione (1615), and Alvaro Semedo's Imperio de La China (1642) had provided some enticing information about Chinese history, language, and religion, it was from the mid-seventeenth century that information about China's antiquity really began to sink in. In 1662, when Bishop Edward Stillingfleet wrote his Origines sacrae (Sacred Origins), he sensed that the defense of biblical authority entered a new phase. "The disesteem of the Scriptures," he wrote, "is the decay of religion" (Stillingfleet 1817:I.viii), and he mentioned threats from three main sides:

The most popular pretences of the Atheists of our age, have been the irreconcileableness of the account of times in Scripture with that of the learned and ancient Heathen nations; the inconsistency of the belief of the Scriptures with the principles of reason; and the account which may be given of the origin of things, from principles of philosophy, without the Scriptures. These three therefore I have particularly set myself against, and directed against each of them several books. In the first, I have manifested that there is no ground of credibility in the account of ancient times, given by any Heathen nations, different from the Scriptures, which I have with so much care and diligence inquired into. (p. xiv)

The bishop's book shows that his scope was still limited to Egypt, Phoenicia, Chaldaea, and Greece; and after less than one hundred pages, he declared his proof complete that "there is no credibility in any of those Heathen histories" (p. 94). One thing that bothered Stillingfleet about these "Heathen histories" and other new discoveries was that the defense of Scripture became increasingly costly. He hoped that his book would silence men like Isaac La Peyrere who claimed to defend the Bible but ended up undermining it, and he prayed "that from thence we may hope to hear no more of men before Adam to salve the authority of the Scriptures by" (p. xiv).

But while the bishop wrote these words, a new and much less easily discounted threat had already ominously raised its head in two publications by a Jesuit: Martino MARTINI'S Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655) and his Sinicae historiae decas prima (1658).7 The potential of this threat may have dawned on some early readers when Gabriel DE MAGALHAES(1610-77) declared in 16688 that Chinese characters predated Egyptian hieroglyphs; but it was a noted English architect and amateur antiquarian who was among the first to have a sense of its implications. John WEBB (1611-72), the close collaborator of Inigo Jones and coaurhor (1655) as well as author (1665) of two works on Stonehenge, published a book in 1669 that attempted to prove that Chinese is the sole remnant of antediluvial human language and that the Chinese still use the antediluvial writing system. Writing many decades before Ramsay, Webb also mentions the engravings made by Seth or Enoch on the two pillars of brick and stone and thinks that they must have been written in humankind's original language. Based mainly on the Bible, Flavius Josephus, Walter Raleigh (1614), and Peter Heylin's Cosmographie (1652), Webb concludes "that Noah carried the Primitive Language into the Ark with him, and that it continued pure and uncorrupted amongst his succeeding generations until the Confusion of Tongues at Babel' (Webb 1678:17). Until the great flood the whole earth was therefore "of one Language and one Lip" (p. 17).

The arguments of Jan Gorp (Goropius Becanus; 1569:473) and Walter Raleigh (1614:144) convinced Webb that Noah's ark landed "in the confines of Tartaria, Persia, and India," and he deemed it "very probable" that Noah "first inhabited India" before sending Nimrod and his followers to the Middle East (Webb 1678:20-21). He seconded Raleigh's opinion "that India was the first Planted and Peopled Countrey after the Flood" (p. 25). Instead of going to Shinar in Mesopotamia, Noah and his followers "sent out Colonies to the more remote parts of Asia, till at length they setled (sic) in the remotest CHINA" (p. 26). Webb held it "for a matter undeniable, that the Plantation of India preceded that of Babel' and inclined to believe "that all the Eastern parts of Persia, with CHINA, and both the Indias, were peopled by such of the Sons of Sem, as went not with the rest to the Valley of Shinaar" (p. 27).

Webb's scenario squarely contradicted the traditional narrative of the ark's landing on Mt. Ararat and the Mesopotamian epicenter of dispersion. Webb did not question the universality of the great flood, but his speculation about Noah's whereabouts after the flood (which the biblical account leaves unclear) led him to the conclusion that India and China were populated by the descendants of Noah and Shem and did not suffer from the disastrous confusion of tongues that befell the colonies that Noah had sent from India to the Middle East.

Rejecting Kircher's scenario of the Egyptian origins of Indian and Chinese religion, Webb maintained, based on Raleigh's calculation, that Noah's son Cham had founded his kingdom in Egypt 191 years after the flood (p. 30) and that the Egyptians did not flourish until the times of Moses (p. 31). By contrast, China was "in all probability ... after the Flood first planted either by Noah himself, or some of the sons of Sem, before the remove Shinaar"; thus, the "Principles of Theology, amongst the Chinois, ... could not proceed from the wicked and idolatrous race of accursed Cham, but from those ones that were, de civitate Dei, of the City of God" (p. 32). The Indians and Chinese "retained the PRIMITIVE Tongue, as having received it from Noah, and likewise carry the same with them to their several Plantations, in what part of the East soever they setled themselves" (p. 32).

Whereas other writers such as La Peyrere began to doubt the universality of the flood, Webb transformed the confusion of tongues into a local Mesopotamian event that could not have affected India and "its Plantations in the East" where the "Language of Noah" reigned without any change (pp. 33- 34). Webb's intensive study of Martino Martini's Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655) and the Sinicae historiae decas prima (1658) convinced him, in the absence of evidence from India, that "the Language of the Empire of CHINA, is, the PRIMITIVE Tongue, which was common to the whole World before the Flood' (p. 44). Even the famous Isaac Vossius, so Webb claims, confirms that the Chinese "preserve a continued History compiled from their monuments, and annual exploits of four thousand five hundred yeares" and have "Writers ... more antient than even Moses himself" (p. 48). Unlike the Indians and all other nations, the Chinese "have never been corrupted by intercourse with strangers" and have, "unknown indeed to other Nations," continued "enjoying to themselves their own felicity at pleasure" (p. 48). The great antiquity of this isolated people could not be doubted in view of the evidence furnished by secular as well as Jesuit experts:

Whereby appears, that according to the vulgar Aera, which Martinius follows, and which makes from the Creation to the Flood of Noah one thousand six hundred fifty six years; and from thence to the coming of CHRIST into the World two thousand two hundred ninety four years; the Historical time of the Chinois begins several Ages, to wit, five hundred fifty three years before the Universal Deluge, computing to the year one thousand six hundred fifty eight: as Vossius doth. (p. 52)

Again relying on Martini, Webb argues that the only possible explanation of China's ancient and uninterrupted historical records is that "this extreme part of Asia, whereof we treat, was for certain inhabited before the flood" and that the family of Noah, which alone could know of antediluvian events, had indeed settled there and saved ancient records on the ark (p. 55). He even speculated that Noah had built his ark in China since "no Countrey in the habitable Earth could better furnish Noah, with all manner of conveniences,  and every sort of materials proper for the building of such a Machine than China" (p. 71).

Apart from humankind's Ur-language, the Chinese had, of course, also safeguarded antediluvian Ur-religion: "But that of old, saith Martinius, the Chinois professed the true God from the Doctrine delivered them by Noah, there is no doubt to be made" (p. 88). The proof of this lies in the Chinese books where "this Theology of the Chinois, not by tradition, and a perpetual same" is found "successively written from Age to Age, ever since the universal Deluge, above seven hundred years before Moses was born" (p. 92). According to Webb's Jesuit sources, idolatry was unknown to the Chinese "till after the birth of CHRIST, when for many Ages preceding, the whole World had followed Idols"; but when idolatry was imported to China "in the sixty fifth year after CHRIST, infected by an Indian Philosopher that crept into China," it was of the very worst kind (p. 94).

Webb's conclusion from all this was that, absent any ancient information from India, "China is the most antient, and in all probability, was, the first planted Countrey of the World after the flood" and that there is "no doubt to be made" that the Chinese knowledge "in Divine matters, of the true God especially, was taught them by Noah" (p. n6). With regard to the antediluvian writing system that survived in China equally unscathed by events in the rest of the world, Webb was convinced that antediluvian books had survived the flood; some parts of the books of Enoch were reportedly "found after the flood in Arabia Felix ... of which Tertullian affirmeth, that he had seen and read some whole pages" (p. 147). Regarding the Chinese "hieroglyphics," Webb found that their inventor "was Fohius their first Emperour, who according to the time that is given to the beginning of his reign might be contemporary with Enos" (p. 152).9 But the language extant in China is even older-in face, it must be "as antient, as the World itself and Mankind" (p. 162). All Chinese books are written in this "true ORIGINAL Language," whose characters "ever have been one and the same throughout their whole Empire" (p. 180). The characteristics of this language -- picked up by Webb from Semedo, Martini, and Kircher -- seemed to prove that Chinese is the language of paradise, which "perdures in its Antient purity without any change or alteration,"

And I must not omit, that several books yet live amongst them, written in their first and original Hieroglyphicks, which still remaining in their Libraries, are understood by all their Literati, though they are no longer used, except in some Inscriptions, and Seals instead of Coats of Arms. Among these sort of Books is extant one called Yeking of great Antiquity, as taking beginning with Fohius, and of as great esteem for the Arcana it contains. This Book seems much to confirm the opinion of those that would have the Inscription of Persepolis more antient than the flood. For, as This in Persia consists only in Triangles several wayes transversed: So That in China consists only of streight lines several wayes interrupted. It treats especially of Judicial Astrology, Politique Government; and occult Philosophy. (p. 190)

Such information and conclusions could not but interest Europe's "antiquarians," who were intrigued by the age, origin, and meaning of Mesopotamian cuneiform inscriptions, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the hexagrams of the Yijing, and the runic inscriptions of northern Europe. Were they all some kind of code from the dawn of time -- a kind of Ur-shorthand -- the key to which was exclusively preserved in that most mysterious and secluded of all ancient countries of the world, China?

The Search for the World's Oldest Text

Martino Martini began his Sinicae historiae decas prima of 1658 -- the first genuine history of China to appear in a European language10 -- with the reign of Fuxi (Fu Hsi; Webb's Fohius) from 2952 to 2838 B.C.E. According to the widely accepted chronology of Archbishop James USSHER (1581-1656), the creation of Adam had taken place in 4004 B.C.E and the great flood in 2349 B.C.E. The reign of Martini's Fuxi thus took place about six centuries before Noah's flood. The Jesuits in China had long been aware of this discrepancy and had in 1637 received permission to use a Septuagint-based alternative chronology whose flood occurred in 2957 B.C.E., five years before Fuxi began his reign (Mungello 1989:127). Martini was convinced that East Asia was inhabited before the time of Noah's flood, yet unlike John Webb, he "was willing to leave the problem unresolved" (p. 127) and thus stimulated a heated debate among chronologists and so-called antiquarians that continued well into the eighteenth century. Martini accepted the Chinese view that Fuxi had invented the trigrams and was fascinated by the sixty-four hexagrams that he associated with ancient mathematical knowledge and "a mystical philosophy similar to Pythagoras, but many centuries older" (Martini 1658:6).

Though the Chinese "use it today mainly for divination and sortilege and either ignore or neglect its genuine meaning" (p. 6), Martini regarded this system as a repository of ancient wisdom transmitted from patriarch to patriarch since the time of Noah. He thought that the Yijing was China's most ancient book and was convinced that Fuxi had invented the Chinese writing system that reminded him so much of the Egyptian hieroglyphs (p. 12) he had seen in the 1630s in Rome while studying under Athanasius Kircher.

Manini published his China atlas and history while traveling through Europe to drum up support for the accommodationist approach in the Jesuit mission, and during his stay in Rome (fall 1654 to January 1656), he gave his teacher much of the China-related information that ended up in Kircher's famous China Illustrata (1667).11 But their view of Fuxi was completely at odds, and this difference is very significant. For Martini, Fuxi was a transmitter of "genuine meaning" and a great astronomer who had come to China some time before the confusion of tongues (Martini 1658:11). He was thus a member of the "good" transmission. Kircher, by contrast, followed Martini's informer Joao Rodrigues (who had first identified Fuxi with Zoroaster) in asserting that Fuxi was a descendant of Ham and therefore a member of the "evil" transmission (Kircher 1987:214).

The difference between Webb and Martini on one hand and Rodrigues and Kircher on the other does not just concern the burning question of Egyptian or Chinese anteriority (which evoked passionate discussions well into the nineteenth century). It also lies at the heart of the protracted dispute about the Jesuit "accommodation" policy and formed the crux of the famous controversy about Chinese Rites in Paris when the Sorbonne in 1700 condemned the following propositions:

I. China had knowledge of the true God more than two thousand years before Jesus Christ.

2. China had the honor of sacrificing to God in the most ancient temple in the world.

3. China has honored God in a manner that can serve as an example even to Christians.

4. China has practiced a morality as pure as its religion.

5. China had the faith, humility, the interior and exterior cult, the priesthood, the sacrifices, the saintliness, the miracles, the spirit of God, and the purest charity, which is the characteristic and the perfection of the genuine religion.

6. Of all the nations of the world, China has been the most constantly favored by the graces of God. 12

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Part 3 of 3

The controversy reached enormous proportions because it did not just involve China but also India (where the toleration of "Malabarian Rites" by Roberto de Nobili and his successors was based on a similar notion of pure ancient monotheism) and ultimately even Europe's ancient religion and its druids. The two opposing views of China's first emperor were emblematic of two completely different views of the past. I have earlier called them "inclusive" and "exclusive," but even the "inclusive" view was in a sense exclusive since it also hijacked other people's histories and religions and embedded them in a fundamentally biblical scenario. For example, Webb's journey of Noah to China left the entire basic framework of the Old Testament narrative with its creator God, paradise, the Fall, the patriarchs, the deluge, and other biblical events intact and turned the Chinese into descendants of Noah. A metaphor from the commercial realm may be more to the point. What Webb, Martini, the China figurists, and Ramsay attempted can be called a "friendly takeover" [???!!!] whereas the approach of Rodrigues, Kircher, and the victors of the Rites controversy would constitute a "hostile takeover." The "hostile takeover" group usually made the Chinese descend from Noah's problem child Ham -- the one who had mocked his drunken father -- and regarded China's ancient religion not as noachic monotheism but as an evil concoction reeking of polytheism, idolatry, and superstition of Egyptian or Chaldean ancestry. The Sorbonne accusers of Louis Daniel Le Comte's and Charles Le Gobien's writings were of this persuasion, and so were the exclusivists in Rome, China, and India who adamantly opposed the approach of Ricci, de Nobili, and Ur-traditionalists of all colors. This "hostile takeover" group won in the rites controversy, and its victory not only led to the prohibition of publications by "friendly takeover" promoters but also became a factor in the expulsion of missionaries from China and the eventual dissolution of the Jesuit order (see Chapter 7). Moreover, as is documented in this book, it exerted a profound influence on the growth of Orientalism. But so did the opposing faction.

The proponents of a "friendly takeover" put the Chinese and their first emperor into the transmission line tethered to Noah and his good son Shem and believed that they were soundly monotheistic and fundamentally good. The hazards of this sort of friendly takeover are shown in the tragic fate of Li Zubo, a Chinese Christian who was executed in 1665 for having asserted in a treatise that biblical teachings were carried to China by early descendants of Adam and Eve, that China's founding father Fuxi was one of them, that biblical teachings had for many ages reigned in China, and that the old Chinese classics showed vestigial evidence of such teachings (Mungello 1989:93). Li wrote,

The first Chinese really descended from the men of Judea who had come to the East from the West, and the Teaching of Heaven is therefore what they recalled. When they produced and reared their children and grandchildren, they taught their households the traditions of the family, and this is the time when this teaching came to China. (trans. Rule 1986:99)

While Li's treatise pleased the "accommodationist" faction and his Jesuit mentors, who possibly had a hand in its redaction, it enraged seal-carrying shareholders of the Chinese empire like the official Yang Guangxian, who launched a formal accusation and succeeded in having the unfortunate Li Zubo executed. It seems that Chinese officials regarded this not exactly as a "friendly" takeover of their past.

A friendly takeover is an acquisition which is approved by the management of the target company. Before a bidder makes an offer for another company, it usually first informs the company's board of directors. In an ideal world, if the board feels that accepting the offer serves the shareholders better than rejecting it, it recommends the offer be accepted by the shareholders.

-- Takeover, by Wikipedia

Yet some decades later some of the most extremist proponents of this view were studying the Yijing with the emperor's consent right under the officials' noses in the precincts of Beijing's imperial palace. They were the Jesuit missionaries who are now commonly called "figurists," a label that alludes to both their interest in "figures" or symbols and their central typological enterprise, which consisted in finding the New (their Christianity) prefigured in the Old (the Yijing and the Chinese classics). In a letter to Etienne Fourmont, Father Premare expressed the aim of this group and of his own work as follows:

The ultimate and last goal to which I dedicate this Notice and all my other writings is to bring about, if I can, that the whole world realizes that the Christian religion is as old as the world, and that the God-Man was very certainly known to the man or men who invented the Chinese hieroglyphs and composed the Jing. (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.266)13

The fact that Premare included his Notitia Linguae Sinicae, the first comprehensive textbook of the Chinese language and of Chinese literature (Lundbaek 1991:64), in this dedication is significant: research of ancient Asian texts necessitated a thorough knowledge of language and literature, and it is certainly not by chance that the best Sinologists of the early eighteenth century were all deeply involved in the search for humankind's earliest religion, whether they promoted figurism (Bouvet, de Premare, Foucquet) or eventually rejected it on the basis of intensive study (de Visdelou). Although the "hostile takeover" policy of the Catholic Church and the Jesuit order prevented them from publishing (and even openly discussing) the results of their research, the effort to identify, date, and understand ancient texts while making use of available native commentaries, dictionaries, reference works, and literari advice was a very important event in the history of Orientalism and opened many doors. It influenced, among many others, pioneer anthropologists like Lafirau, historians like Olof Dalin and Paul Henri Mallet, and of course also via Ramsay a number of eighteenth-century Orientalists such as Holwell (Chapter 6); Mignot, Anquetil-Duperron, and Sainte-Croix (Chapter 7); and William Jones (App 2009).

A new phase in the study of ancient Asian materials began in earnest at the end of the seventeenth century, around the time when Jean-Paul BIGNON (1662-1743) became president of the Academie des Sciences (1692), began his reform of the Academy of Sciences (1699), became director of the Journal des Savants, gave it its lasting form (1701), and reorganized Europe's largest library (the Royal Library in Paris that evolved into the Bibliotheque Nationale de France). It was Bignon who stacked the College Royal with instructors like Fourmont (Leung 2002:130); it was Bignon whom Father Bouvet wanted to get on board for his grand project of an academy in China (Collani 1989); it was Bignon who employed Huang, Freret, and Fourmont to catalog Chinese books at the library and to produce Chinese grammars and dictionaries; it was Bignon who ordered CalmeIte and Pons to find and send the Vedas and other ancient Indian texts to Paris (see Chapter 6); and it was Bignon who supported Fourmont's expensive project of carving over 100,000 Chinese characters in Paris (Leung 2002). The conversion of major libraries into state institutions open to the public, which Bignon oversaw, was a development with an immense impact on the production and dissemination of knowledge, including knowledge about the Orient. So was the promotion of scholarly journals like the Journal des Scavans (later renamed Journal des Savants) that featured reviews of books from all over Europe and fulfilled a central function in the pan-European "Republique des lettres".

Joachim BOUVET(1656-1730) first explained his figurist system in a letter to Bignon (dated September 15, 1705) that was originally intended for Leibniz (Collani 1989:26). Seeing features of Christianity prefigured in ancient (or seemingly ancient) sources was quite common throughout the history of Christianity, but Bouvet brought an amazing text into play:

One will be forced to admit that the canonical books of China are the most ancient works of natural law that can today be found among the heathens and even among the believers, not even excepting the Pentateuch of Moses; that is true at least for the book ye kim [Yijing] which can with assurance be regarded as the most ancient work known in the world. (p. 39)

The "veritable author" of this book is, according to Bouvet, the "holy Patriarch Enoch whose works, according to Tertullian, were rejected by the Jews because they talked too clearly of the Messiah and the incarnation of a God who would himself come to expiate the world" (p. 39). While the Chinese people thought that Fuxi was the Yijings author and inventor of its hieroglyphs and ancient "mystical science" (p. 39), Bouvet was convinced that the Chinese had -- like many other peoples -- unknowingly adopted the antediluvian biblical patriarch Enoch as a founder figure:

But we add and dare to affirm that this alleged founder of the Chinese monarchy is none other than he whom most ancient nations have recognized ... as the founder not only of their laws and customs but also of their religion, sciences, ancient books, writing systems, and languages. Consequently the Fo-hi [Fuxi] of the Chinese, the Hermes or Mercury Trismegist of the Egyptians and Gteeks, the Thot of the Alexandrians, the Idris or Adris of the Arabs, and the Enoch of the Hebrews are one and the same person who is revered by diverse nations under different names. (p. 42)

In this manner Bouvet attempted a friendly takeover of the remote antiquity of the world's ancient nations, and the two reputedly oldest ones -- Egypt and China -- both got a biblical pedigree. This was more elegant than Huet's attempt to hijack entire dynasties of gentile divinities by identifying them all as disguised members of Moses's family, but it was nevertheless a takeover of global proportions. Whoever authored the Yijing, it was the oldest extant book of the world and therefore of the greatest interest:

In effect, in spite of its small volume and very simple figures, this work contains in a kind of natural, methodical, clear, and abbreviated algebra, as it were, the principles of all sciences and forms, and a system of nature and religion. Following the very simple principles on which it is wholly based, one discovers in it all the mysteries of the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the entire economy of symbolic science of this ancient nation, invented by Enoch, the true Mercury. Who could, in the face of such a perfect affinity between China and Egypt in such an extraordinary type of doctrine ... deny that this must have come to them from a common origin and that their first master must necessarily have been identical? (p. 46)

But who had brought this oldest book, the Yijing, to China? Since Bouvet was in the "friendly takeover" camp this task fell to Noah's good son Shem:

Indeed, Shem -- who because of his rare piety and his seniority doubtlessly succeeded to his father's sovereign dignity of priesthood and kingship -- inherited the treasure trove of sacred hieroglyphic books that Noah had saved from the waters of the deluge after having received them from Methusalem, the nephew of Enoch with whom he had spent several centuries. This holy patriarch [Shem] preserved through his wise and religious policy almost the entire lineage of Noah in the cult of God and in the faithful observance of the natural law until about the end of the fifth century after the deluge when the numerous descendants were divided by divine order into several colonies in order to populate the earth. (p. 47)

The tribe that populated China was, in Bouvet's scenario, "probably the most considerable of the colonies issued by Shem's family," and it was "only natural" that it received as heritage "from the very hands of Shem" some precious treasures: antique "vases, sacred texts, and most genuine hieroglyphic sources that certainly included the Yijing and the other ancient books of China" (p. 47). Thus, the ancient treasures of Enoch came to be transmitted "via the hands of Noah and Shem to China" (p. 48). Since both the transmission and its content were so pure, it is hardly surprising that China was "since the beginning of her foundation in possession of his [Enoch's] sciences, his laws, and his religion in the highest degree of purity and perfection" and has ever since safeguarded its canonical books "with the same attachment and the same respect as the Hebrews show for the sacred books of the Old Testament" (p. 48).

So far we have here an Ur-religion and Ur-science revealed by the founder (God) to a line of patriarchs, plus a secure transmission in the form of texts and symbols in canonical books that are substantially older than the Old Testament but go back to the same source. While the Chinese were thus living in purity and perfection, the Egyptians -- instructed by Cham "who was as abhorred by men for his impiety as his elder brother [Shem] was admired" -- learned "the detestable and conjectural [suppose] meaning of the hieroglyphs, the diabolical secrets of magic, and the sacrilegious rites of idolatry" that Cham had smuggled onto the ark of his father (p. 48). but unfortunately, the Chinese had in the course of time forgotten the true significance of the "hieroglyphs" of their Enochian science as preserved in the Yijing, and of true Noevian Ur-religion. It is here that Bouver and his disciples had to step in as regenerators of Ur-religion with the ability to introduce the Chinese, starting with their emperor, to the "genuine" meaning of their canonical books, their ancient religion, and that oldest book of the world, which contained all this. For those who could read it, the Yijing proves -- as Premare put it -- that "the Christian religion is as old as this world" and that the oldest Chinese texts contain "vestiges of the dogmas of Chrisrianity" (Premare 1878:9, 51).

At the beginning of his vestiges, Premare lists the essential prefigured doctrines:

The Principal Dogmas of the Christian Religion Rediscovered in the Ancient Chinese Books

The following is the plan of this work:

1. I will first explain different points necessary for understanding the book.

2. I will speak of God as One and Trine.

3. I will treat of the question of the state of unspoiled and innocent Nature.

4. Then of the state of corrupted Nature, and separately of the rebellion of Angels and the fall of Adam.

5. Of restored Nature through Jesus Christ. This point, with God's help, will be treated at length because of the importance of the subject and the abundance of material. (p. 22)

Bouvet and his disciples had, in spite of a number of differences, the same basic vision of Ur-tradition and shared the dream to show the Chinese and also Western skeptics that the world's oldest books contain vestiges of a primitive revelation, form part of the antediluvian patriarchal transmission, and constitute an Oldest Testament containing the encoded prefiguration of central doctrines of Christianity.

As the idea of Asian antiquity and ancient wisdom slowly took hold among Europe's cultured class, it also played a role in one of the famous controversies of the time: the struggle between the "ancients" and the "moderns." In 1690 Sir William TEMPLE (1628-99) wrote in An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning that the Egyptians, who had the reputation of being the oldest civilization and the instructors of Moses, might themselves "have drawn much of their learning from the Indians" and explained:

To strengthen this conjecture, of much learning being derived from such remote and ancient fountains as the Indies, and perhaps China; it may be asserted with great evidence, that though we know little of the antiquities of India, beyond Alexander's time, yet those of China are the oldest that any where pretend to any fair records; for these are agreed, by the missionary Jesuits, to extend so far above four thousand years, and with such appearance of cleat and undeniable testimonies, that those religious men themselves, rather than question their truth, by finding them contrary to the vulgar chronology of the Scripture, are content to have recourse to that of the Septuagint, and thereby to salve the appearances in these records of the Chineses. (Temple 1814:3-455)

Sir William was aware that it "may look like a paradox, to deduce learning from regions accounted commonly so barbarous and rude" yet insisted that "whoever observes the account already given of the ancient Indian and Chinese learning and opinions, will easily find among them the seeds of all these Grecian productions and institutions": the transmigrations of souls, the four cardinal virtues, abstinence from all meats that had animal life, the eternity of matter with perpetual changes of form, the indolence of the body and tranquility of mind, the care of education from the birth of children, the austere temperance of diet, and so on (p. 457).

Ramsay and the Figurists

With the return to Europe of Foucquet in 1722 and his residence in Rome from 1723 until his death in 1741, the Chinese figurist message and the notion that there are extremely old Chinese scriptures got a somewhat broader exposure. Among Foucquet's interlocutors were Voltaire, 14 Saint-Simon, Montesquieu, Charles de Brosses, Etienne Fourmont, Joseph Spence, and Chevalier Ramsay (Witek 1982:3°8). Ramsay conversed with Foucquet in 1724, and Spence called him the "great friend of Foucquet" (pp. 310-14). During a lengthy talk, the former missionary confirmed that "the canonical Chinese books were truly more ancient than those of Moses" and that "their authors were unable to know these things except by the ancient tradition which should be recognized as having come from Adam through Seth and Enoch, who was the author of these books" (pp. 310-11). Foucquet must also have supplied Ramsay with some of his translations, as he certainly is the "gentleman of superior genius, who does not care to be mentioned" who allowed Ramsay to publish some "passages, which he translated himself out of some ancient Chinese books that have been brought into Europe" (Ramsay 1814:382-83). After citing some "ancient commentaries of the book Yking, i.e., the book of Changes" that "continually speak of a double heaven, a primitive and a posterior," Ramsay included two pages of quotations from these commentaries as well as Daoist classics in his Of the Mythology of the Pagans appended to the Travels of Cyrus. The texts supplied by Foucquet were chosen to prove that the Chinese knew a golden age of innocence ("former heaven"), an age of degradation ("latter heaven"), and also "an ancient tradition common to all nations that the middle god was not to expiate and put an end to crimes but by his own great sufferings" (pp. 383-85). It is very likely that Ramsay's basic scheme of a "primitive perfection of nature, its fall, and its restoration by a divine hero" -- the scheme that he detected "in the mythologies of the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Chinese" -- was inspired by, or even stemmed from, "the superior genius" of Foucquet.

Premare, who remained in China, read Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus in 1731 and expressed his elation of having found a kindred soul in a letter to Fourmont on August 27, 1731 (Lundbaek 1991:171). After this welcome discovery, Premare began to exchange letters with Ramsay and supplied him with the best of his writings. Ramsay used so much of them in his "Great work" that Lundbaek called him "Premare's editor" (p. 170).15 This material radically changed Ramsay's view of the Bible. In the Travels of Cyrus he had acknowledged that some ancient peoples cannot be accused of having plagiarized Moses because "the Jews and their books were too long concealed in a corner of the earth, to be reasonably thought the primitive light of the Gentiles" and suggested that one "must go farther back even to the deluge" in order to prove the essential correctness of the biblical account (Ramsay 1814:390-91). At the time Ramsay was still convinced that the truth of the three states (initial perfection, the fall, and salvation through a Messiah) "has been transmitted to us from age to age, from the time of the deluge till now, by an universal tradition; other nations have obscured and altered this tradition by their fables; it has been preserved in its purity no where but in the holy scriptures, the authority of which cannot be disputed with any shadow of reason" (p. 390).


Figure 13. Yijing trigram charts (former and Janel' heaven) by Premare (1878:79).
 
In his posthumously published "Great work," however, Ramsay accepted Newton's conjecture that the book of Genesis is only a short extract of older, lost sources (Ramsay 1749:215-16), and he supplied so much information missing in the Bible that the description of "the rapid Mosaical narration" as "rather an abridgment, than a full detail of that great legislator's original writings" seems adequate. In the chapter on "the three states of degraded angelical nature," Ramsay finally states without ambiguity:

As the book of Genesis is probably, but an extract and abridgment of the antidiluvian and Noevian traditions, concerning the creation, Moses, in his rapid narration, does not enter into any full description of the primitive state of the angelical world, nor so much as mention the fall of angels, which is only hinted at, by a transient word about the chaos. (p. 301)

Apart from mlssll1g information about the fall of angels, Ramsay was also concerned about the lack of Old Testament support for the Trinity, even though this must have been taught by the antediluvian patriarchs. Here, too, the Chinese transmission seemed more reliable:

If the Noevian patriarchs taught the great mystery of the Trinity to their children; if this sublime truth was transmitted to their posterity by the different heads of the families that peopled the various countries of the earth; if the most ancient of all nations the Chinese have such plain vestiges of this sacred truth in their original books, is it surprising, if we find some traces of the same doctrine among the Chaldeans and Persians, both descended from the same source? (p. 124)

In this last of his works, Ramsay keeps coming back to "the Chinese, the most ancient of all nations now existent under a regular form of government, uninterrupted almost, since the first times after the universal deluge" (pp. 124, 274) and to their closeness to the Ur-tradition:

As the Chinese are one of the most ancient people that inhabited the earth, and that were formed into a regular government soon after the deluge it is no wonder we find among them such venerable traces of the Noevian tradition. The nearer we approach to the origin of the world, the clearer is this tradition concerning a triplicity in the divine essence. We must not then be surprised, if we find some vestiges of the same truth in the following ages. The Chinese mythology, or rather theology, is a key to all the others less ancient, and more obscured by the succession of rime. (p. 121)

Premare's texts had convinced Ramsay that "the canonical books of China contain many scattered fragments of the ancient Noevian, yea, antidiluvian tradition concerning the sublimest mysteries of faith" (p. 181), and he was in awe of the new kind of Orientalist research performed by "some very learned and great men who have lived twenty, thirty and forty years in China, studied the language of the country, seen these original books, and read the ancient commentarys upon them" (p. 181). But how did Ramsay see their system? He boiled it down to seven points:

1. They pretend to demonstrate, that all the Chinese characters were originally hieroglyphics, as those wrote upon the Egyptian obelisks ... 2. These ancient monuments, characters, symbols and hieroglyphics were originally wrote upon pillars, or tables of stone and mettal, by some antidiluvian patriarch who foresaw the universal deluge, who knew the mysteries of religion, and who was desirous to preserve the memory of those sacred truths from shipwrack. 3. That tho' those hieroglyphical monuments may have been adulterated, interpolated and ill copied in succeeding ages, yet they still contain many vestiges of the most essential doctrines of our most holy faith, as of God and his three essential attributes; of the sacred Trinity; of the pre-existence, suffering and triumph of the Messiah, of the fall of angels and men; and of the true means of reunion to our great original. (p. 181)

The remaining four points deal with the Chinese's mistaken belief that they were the only people to possess this tradition because of their ignorance of Fuxi's identity with Enoch; the mixup of past and future because of the lack of conjugation; and their ignorance of the true meaning of the ancient hieroglyphs that constitutes, as with other peoples, the origin of mythologies:

The original hieroglyphics transported from nation to nation were by succession of time falsely translated, adulterated, or misunderstood, and the true sense of the ancient traditions, being at last forgot, every nation explained them differently according to their fancy, and applied them as fabulous facts that had already happened, or to fictitious heroes, that had once lived in their own country. Hence arose all the different mythologies of the Eastern and Western, of the Southern and Northern nations, where the ground and canvass is still the same, tho' the colourings and ornaments are different. (pp. 182-83)

These seven points that Ramsay attributes to the Chinese figurists had great repercussions in his work, since he consistently uses the translations of Father Premare to render his demonstrations incontestable:

If these seven principles can be demonstrated, or at least proved in such a manner, as to render them not only possible and probable; but even, as uncontestable as any matters of fact can be, then we see, how some hints and vestiges of the same divine truths may, and must be found in all learned and religious nations, since they are so clear in the ancient monuments of China. (p. 183)

For orthodox readers who had followed Ramsay's religious itinerary from Protestant theology studies in Scotland into the arms of the Catholic Church and from there toward Francois FENELON (1651-1715), the French mystic Madame GUYON (1648-1717), and finally the Jesuit figurists, Ramsay's conclusions from all this must have been hard to swallow:

The only objection that can be made, is, that if this system be true, then the five canonical books of China would contain clearer revelations concerning the mysteries of our holy religion, than the Pentateuch, or the five canonical books of Moses. (p. 183)

Ramsay lets this objection stand without further comment; and since he continues to adduce Chinese evidence for his arguments, the readers could not fail to understand his answer to this objection.

Thus, the Yijing and the other ancient "canonical" books of ancient China had their brief but poignant moment of fame. The study of Chinese sources and the Jesuit figurist obsession with Enoch's symbols left a permanent mark, as they directed Europe's attention to the study of the most ancient Oriental texts and played a crucial role in opening a new phase of Orientalist research. The French king opened the eighteenth century at Versailles with a display of Chinese fireworks, and half a century later Voltaire began his universal history with a chapter on China. But by then Voltaire was already guessing that India had an even older civilization than China. But let us now turn to some other Ur-teachings discovered by Ramsay: doctrines that influenced men like Holwell, the protagonist of the next chapter.

Angels, Souls, and the Origin of Evil

The problem of the origin of evil was basic both for the radical deists who refused to accept any divine revelation and for men like Ramsay and Holwell in whose systems vestiges of a divine revelation to our first forefathers were central. In the Discourse upon the Theology and Mythology of the Pagans, Ramsay points out that even without the help of revelation and "left to the light of their reason alone," men have always been shocked that evil could be "the work of a Being infinitely wise and powerful" and knew that "what is supremely good, could never produce any thing that was wicked or miserable" (Ramsay 1814:362).

From hence they concluded, that souls are not now what they were at first; that they are degraded, for some fault committed by them in a former state; that this life is a state of exile and expiation; and, in a word, that all beings are to be restored to their proper order. Tradition struck in with reason, and this tradition had spread over all nations certain opinions, which they held in common, with regard to the three states of the world, as I shall shew in this second part, which will be a sort of abridgment of the traditional doctrine of the ancients. (p. 362)[/quote]

This "tradition" refers to the divine revelation transmitted from the earliest patriarchs whose vestiges are found among all ancient nations. The fact that it "strikes in with reason" is the overall theme of Ramsay's Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, which argues that supernatural revelation is not opposed to reason, as the deists argued, but rather in perfect accord with it.

There are but two possible ways of coming to the knowledge of truth, by natural evidence, or by supernatural revelation. Both are emanations of that sovereign wisdom which alone has the right to command our assent, and both are employed in this essay. Tho' natural light is not always sufficient to discover supernatural truths, yet revelation never contradicts reason. The former serves to exalt and ennoble, but never to degrade and extinguish the latter. (Ramsay 1748:iii)

One instance where man's "natural light" is not sufficient for the discovery of "supernatural truths" is the question of the origin of evil. When young Cyrus in Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus interviews Pythagoras about this, Pythagoras -- who in Ramsay's portrait believes in an "infinite Being" that produced everything and is "only power, wisdom, and goodness"-ran through "all the different opinions of the philosophers," but the best of Greek philosophy could not satisfy Cyrus (Ramsay 1814:225, 230). Of all the opinions he had heard regarding the origin of evil, the only one that made sense was one proposed by some Hebrews (p. 230). This "solution" stemmed from the Kabbala and was explained to Prince Cyrus by an "allegorist" called Eleazar, "one of the great geniuses of his age," who was able to prove "that the religion of the Hebrews was not only the most ancient, but the most conformable to reason" (p. 290). This doctrine of "the Hebrew philosophers, concerning the three states of the world" is based on supernatural revelation that never contradicts reason, and since the Hebrew transmission of revelation is so ancient and pure, Eleazar knows details of Ur-tradition that do not necessarily appear in the vestiges of the heathens. According to him, God first "created divers orders of intelligences to make them happy," but two kinds of spirits "lost their happiness by their disloyalty" (pp. 290-91). The cherubim of superior order did so by pride, rebelled, and their sphere of the heavens "became a dark chaos" (p. 292). The less perfect ischim became too attached to material objects and sensual pleasures and were punished less severely because they sinned through weakness rather than through pride. They were forced to be "souls which actually inhabit mortal bodies," and when such a body dies they must occupy another (p. 292):

The organic moulds of all human bodies were shut up in that of Adam, and the order of generation was established; each soul awakens in such a body, and in such time, place and circumstances, as suit best with the decrees of eternal wisdom. The earth changed its form, it was no longer a garden of delights, but a place of banishment and misery, where the continual war of the elements subjected men to diseases and death. This is the hidden meaning of the great Hebrew lawgiver, when he speaks of the terrestrial paradise and of the fall of our first parents, Adam does not represent a single man, but all mankind. (p. 292)

One can discuss whether this solution ought to have satisfied Ramsay's Cyrus; but variations of it involving the preexistence of souls were well known in Ramsay's time; in fact, they stretch from the days of Origen to Henry MORE (1614-87) and to the Latter-day Saints knocking on our doors today. In his book on The Immortality of the Soul (1662), Henry More not only asserted that "the hypothesis of Praeexistence is more agreeable to Reason than any other Hypothesis" and "has the suffrage of all Philosophers in all Ages" but also that "the Gymnosophists of Aegypt, the Indian Brachmans, the Persian Magi, and all the learned of the Jews were of this Opinion" (More 1662:110). Preexistence of souls assumes that people's souls "did once subsist in some other state; where, in several manners and degrees, they forfeited the favour of their Creatour" and were punished for their apostasy (p. 112). The main benefits of the preexisting soul theory are that original sin is committed by all souls and not just Adam; that nobody is, therefore, unjustly punished; and that God is cleared of accusations of meanness. This also has implications for the end of times when such souls are to be restituted to their original state, and it can accommodate a measure of transmigration of souls among humans.

According to Ramsay, other peoples preserved vestiges of the same Ur-tradition. For example, Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato who "endeavored to re-establish the ancient theology of the Orientals" (Ramsay 1814:359) believed in the "very ancient doctrine, common to all the Asiatics," that "the souls of beasts are degraded spirits"; and their followers "thought the doctrine of transmigration less absurd" than believing that "the divine justice could inflict sufferings on intelligences that had never offended." These philosophers held that "none but the depraved souls were destined to such a transmigration, and that it would one day be at an end, when they were purified from their crimes" (pp. 364-65). Plato wrote that the souls "free themselves from the impurities of their terrestrial prison" and after death retire to "the first earth, where souls made their abode before their degradation." This means that our "second earth" was seen as a "low abyss" and a "prison" (pp. 366-67).

When souls no longer make their felicity consist in the knowledge of truth, and when lower pleasures turn them off from the love of the supreme Essence, they are thrown into some planet, there to undergo expiatory punishments, till they are cured by their sufferings. These planets are consequently, according to Plato's notion, like hospitals or places instituted for the cute of distempered intelligences. (p. 371)

This was, according to Ramsay, "the system adopted by the heathen philosophers, whenever they attempted to explain the origin of evil," and Pythagoras "had learned the same doctrine among the Egyptians" (p. 372). The core doctrine of the Egyptians was thus another vestige of primeval revelation. Their belief was

1. That the world was created without any physical or moral evil, by a Being infinitely good. 2. That several genii abusing their liberty, fell into crimes, and thereby into misery. 3. That these genii must suffer expiatory punishments, till they are purified and restored to their first state. 4. That the god Orus, the son of Isis and Osiris, and who fights with the evil principle, is a subordinate deity, like Jupiter the conductor the son of Saturn. (p. 378)

The Persian doctrine is less well known "because we have lost the ancient books of the first Persians" (p. 379); but Ramsay was convinced that "the doctrine of the Persian magi is a sequel of the doctrine of the Indian Brachmans" (p. 380), and he had consulted "what has been translated of the Vedam, which is the sacred book of the modern Bramins." Though "its antiquity be not perhaps so great as it is affirmed to be, yet there is no denying that it contains the ancient traditions of those people, and of their philosophers" (p. 381). The Vedam of the Indians states

that souls are eternal emanations from the divine Essence, or at least that they were produced long before the formation of the world; that they were originally in a state of purity, but having sinned, were thrown down into the bodies of men, or of beasts, according to their respective demerits; so that the body, where the soul resides, is a sort of dungeon or prison. (p. 382)

This quotation stems from Abraham Roger and will be discussed in the next chapter since it forms the core of Holwell's "Indian" text and of his conception of the world's oldest religion. This view of souls that existed before the formation of the world in a state of purity, sinned, and were imprisoned in the bodies of humans and animals was linked by the Indians with the concept of transmigration. Ramsay saw this confirmed by a quotation from Kircher's China lllustrata (1987:142-43): "Lastly, they hold that 'after a certain number of transmigrations, all souls shall be re-united to their origin, re-admitted into the company of the gods, and deified'" (Ramsay 1814:382). Ramsay expressed his surprise about finding such a clear formulation in the Indian Veda but saw this as a confirmation of Indian influence on Pythagoras:

I should hardly have thought those traditions authentic, or have brought myself to trust to the translators of the Vedam, if this doctrine had not been perfectly agreeable to that of Pythagoras, which I gave an account of a little before. This philosopher taught the Greeks nothing but what be had learned from the Gymnosophists. (p. 382)

While Ramsay insisted -- as a good Catholic should -- that he was not defending such opinions, he acknowledged their efficacy in confounding "such philosophers as refuse to believe" (p. 390):

In all these systems we see that the ancient philosophers, in order w refute the objections of the impious concerning the origin and duration of evil, adopted the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, and their final restoration. Several fathers of the church have maintained the first opinion, as the only philosophical way of explaining original sin; and Origen made use of the latter, to oppose the libertines of his time. (p. 390)

But by presenting such doctrines as vestiges of primeval revelation and linking them w "the foundation of our religion" (pp. 390-91) Ramsay gave them a tacit seal of approval. In his posthumously published "Great work," Ramsay's approval was open enough for David HUME (1711-76) to conclude in his Natural History of Religion (1757) that Ramsay, "having thus thrown himself out of all received sects of Christianity," was "obliged w advance a system of his own which is a kind of Origenism, and supposes the pre-existence of the souls both of men and beasts, and the eternal salvation and conversion of all men, beasts, and devils" (Hume 1976:86).

Hume was averse w Ramsay's basic view of initial perfection, gradual decline, and return to perfection. He saw monotheism not as the religion of Paradise but rather as the result of a long, hard slog from utter primitivity:

'Tis a matter of fact uncontestable, that about 1700 years ago all mankind were idolaters. The doubtful and sceptical principles of a few philosophers, or the theism, and that too not entirely pure, of one or two nations, form no objection worth regarding. Behold then the clear testimony of history. The farther we mount up into antiquity, the more do we find mankind plunged into idol atty. No marks, no symptoms of any more perfect religion. The most antient records of human race still present us with polytheism as the popular and established system. The north, the south, the east, the west, give their unanimous testimony to the same fact. What can be opposed w so full an evidence? (p. 26)

Ramsay's answer was, as Cudworth's before him: ancient textual evidence! But unlike Cudworth who had w dig for signs of Ur-monotheism in the Middle East and in Egypt, Ramsay had informants supplying him with ancient Chinese evidence. Nevertheless, Europe was gradually warming to the idea, promoted by Hume, of humankind's gradual rise from primitivity. This was diametrically opposed w Ramsay's notion of a decline from initial perfection. But both Ur-theologians of the Ramsay-type and believers in progress from primitivity of the Hume-type were interested in evidence -- particularly ancient texts from Asia, since this continent was (at least in Europe and Asia itself) universally considered to be the cradle of civilization. The hunt for such evidence was a task made for Orientalists, and the next chapters will present some of the men who tried to rise to this challenge.