On Buddhist Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Abstract

This essay argues that the study of Buddhism in Germany forms a very particular, iconoclastic, room in the mansion of 'orientalism.' German linguists were little inclined to study living religions, and especially those little connected to the classical and biblical lands. The first scholars to pay significant attention to Buddhism were Romantics seeking Indoeuropean connections, but by the mid-1830s, Wilhelm von Humboldt and others had begun to make deeper inquiries into the linguistic and cultural varieties of Buddhism across South Asia. The Young Hegelian Carl Koeppen's Die Religion des Buddha (1857, 1859) championed the Buddha's social message while pouring vitriol on Buddhism as a tangle of absurd beliefs and rituals; Carl Josias von Bunsen and Arthur Schopenhauer found in early Indian Buddhism an iconoclastic form of Aryan eastern wisdom which Schopenhauer gleefully contrasted to the horrors of Christianity. At the fin de siècle, responding in part to Schopenhauer and in part to the revival of Buddhism in South Asia, debates about the Indian origins of Christian ideas raged, shocking Wilhelmine Christians. In the end, while German studies of Buddhism before the Great War all reflect local cultural interests and debates, in this case, 'orientalism' tended to undermine rather than ratify faith in Europe's civilizing mission and mainstream values.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Studies on East Asian Religions

First Page

253

Last Page

283

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