Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism

"Much of what we understand Buddhism to be today is a direct result of how Buddhism was portrayed in Europe in the 19th century. By the time that the Portuguese arrived in India in the late 15th century – eventually followed by the Dutch, the French, and the British – Buddhism had effectively disappeared from the subcontinent. There are a number of reasons. We know from the reports of Chinese pilgrims that Buddhism had been in decline for some time, its fortunes waxing and waning based on royal patronage. It also seems that Hindu priests, more than Buddhist monks, were performing important life cycle rituals for much of the Indian population. In addition, in the 11th century, Muslim armies carried out a series of incursions into northern India during which a number of Buddhist monasteries were looted. Perhaps the greatest of the monasteries, Nalanda, was sacked in 1193: the Muslim troops apparently mistook it for a fortress. As a result of these various factors, when Europeans arrived in India, the birthplace of Buddhism, it was active all around India , in places like Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, China and Tibet, but it was dead in India. What Europeans found were the remnants of Buddhism – texts, monuments, statues, inscriptions – and from these they built Indian Buddhism as we understand it. ‘Influence’ may be too strong: it might be more accurate to say that the academic study of Buddhism in the West, often by scholars who never travelled to Asia, played a key role in defining what we understand Buddhism to be. In the case of Burnouf, in 1837, 24 Sanskrit manuscripts arrived in Paris, sent from Kathmandu by Brian Houghton Hodgson, an officer of the East India Company serving in Kathmandu. They were Buddhist scriptures, long lost in India but preserved in Nepal. The Société Asiatique instructed two scholars to examine these texts. One of them was a young Sanskrit scholar named Eugène Burnouf. He found the second text that he looked at to be captivating. It was The Lotus Sutra . He knew nothing of its huge importance in the history of Buddhism, but he liked the way it read. He soon translated the entire text, but he felt it would be incomprehensible without an introduction. He thus wrote a long book, the first of as many as five planned volumes of introduction. Due to his untimely death, he was only able to complete the first volume, published in Paris in 1844 with the modest title Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme indien . It would become the most influential work in the history of the European study of Buddhism, setting the stage for more than a century of subsequent scholarship. For example, it provides the portrait of the Buddha as we know him today. My colleague Katia Buffetrille and I translated the entire text, so we have an intimate knowledge of all 647 pages."