Most of the historical work on the West’s encounter with Buddhism has focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is generally assumed that there was not a great deal of information in Europe about Buddhism before this. It is true that Buddhist texts in Sanskrit and Pāli were not widely studied in the West until the nineteenth century (de Jong, 20), and there was little popular knowledge of Buddhism there until the end of that century (Almond), but Buddhism was known before 1800.

Urs App has done a lot of research on the period prior to the nineteenth century and argues that some thinkers were indeed impacted by the knowledge about South and East Asia that was filtering back to Europe from the sixteenth century onward, mostly via Jesuit writings. A scholar of Zen Buddhism himself, App even argues that the Jesuits’ first systematic study of the texts of a non-Abrahamic religion was their study of Japanese Zen Buddhism (App, 9-10). The fact that the Jesuits served as the mediators in early European encounters with Asian religions naturally introduced some biases as their writings often focused on the religious arguments they were having with Buddhists and Confucians in China (Lee), and Brahmins in India. Nevertheless, App argues that their reports did allow some Enlightenment thinkers to learn about traditions such as Buddhism. Here are two of his examples:

1. Voltaire helped popularize Jesuit writings on Asian religion. Although he was generally more interested in the Indian Vedas, he shared a general approval of the artistic and particularly humanistic traditions of China (App, 41). He also drew from Jesuit writings on Buddhists and Hindus to support his arguments for universal human history and a universal human religion that was Deistic in nature (App, 33-35).
2. Diderot accepted the notion, which was becoming common among French intellectuals, that Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufi Islam were simply facets of a single Asian religious system, and that this system was fundamentally atheistic (App, 151-153). As with Voltaire, the existence of an ancient and supposedly atheistic tradition helped Diderot make his case.

Thus, Enlightenment thinkers tended to treat Buddhism as part of a larger, ancient pan-Asian religion that was atheistic or Deistic in nature, but which had become corrupted by priests who kept these esoteric teachings to themselves while teaching an exoteric doctrine that was ritualistic and superstitious. Of course, this attitude appears to be much influenced by the Enlightenment thinkers’ own philosophical commitments, but App argues that influence was a two-way street, and missionary writings about Asian religions actually contributed to the formation of these commitments.

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Works Cited

Almond, Philip. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

App, Urs. The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

de Jong, J. W. A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in America and Europe. Tokyo: Kōsei Publishing, 1997.

Lee, Thomas H. C. China and Europe: Images and Influences in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991.