Mahayana in Europe: Japanese Buddhists and Their Contribution to Academic Knowledge about Buddhism in Nineteenth-Century Europe

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What part did Japanese Buddhists play in the production of knowledge about Buddhism and religion in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century? The current project aims at answering this question, thereby contributing to research on the reception of Buddhism in Europe. Although important aspects of this reception (such as Indological research, Buddhism in European philosophy, or more recently Theosophy) have been the subject of research, the contribution made by Japanese Buddhists is missing completely from the picture. Yet the direct transfer of knowledge about Mahayana Buddhism through Japanese who were in contact with European orientalists since the 1870s has influenced European views of Buddhism more than has been acknowledged so far.In three subprojects I plan to investigate 1) how a modern view of Buddhism emerged in Japan from the 1870s onwards, 2) how this view was spread in Europe by Japanese Buddhists, and 3) how this knowledge about Mahayana Buddhism changed not only the European image of Buddhism, but eventually conceptions of religion in the European academy overall. To elaborate, it was only through the inner reform of Japanese Buddhism under the conditions of modernity that the impulse to reach out to Europe emerged (subproject 1). The actual mediators, i.e. Japanese Buddhist priests, went to Europe as pupils of orientalist scholars there. At the same time, however, they were regarded as authentic experts of their lived religion and they were also scholars of their indigenous traditions of knowledge in their own right (subproject 2). Although some sources of Mahayana Buddhism had been translated into European languages even before the middle of the nineteenth century, there was little consciousness of the differing subtraditions of Buddhism in Europe before the 1860s. The Japanese mediators were a crucial actor in the emergence of a clear-cut concept of "Mahayana Buddhism" (subproject 3).The central hypothesis of the overall project is that knowledge about Buddhism was created in the initial phase of the new discipline of religious studies, but that this process was not just due to European textual studies. Buddhism was important in this initial phase because it was crucial in forming conceptions of "world religions". And we see here a dynamic picture of the production of academic knowledge between Asia and Europe with active mediators also on the Asian side, a picture that throws serious doubt on established notions of European orientalism.