Kapstein on App and Lopez

BOOK REVIEWS

The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Inventionof Oriental Philosophy. By URS APP. Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2012. Pp. 295.

From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha. By DONALD S. LOPEZ JR. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. ix289.

Urs App and Donald Lopez are among the outstanding interpreters in recent years

of the early modernWestern encounter with Asian thought and religion, above all with

Buddhism.1 The two books reviewed here extend their individual trajectories, but at

the same time complement one another, for Apps subject is the role of Buddhist

thought in the European construction of Oriental Philosophy, while Lopezs is the

Wests discovery (or, as Lopez might have it, invention) of the idea of the Buddha

himself. The two works, however, despite a number of overlaps between them, resist

direct comparison. App offers us a tightly woven study in the history of ideas, while

Lopez guides us through a more impressionistic and personal florilegium of docu-

ments bearing on his topic.

Apps title echoes that of Roger-Pol Droits Le culte de neant.2 But whereas Droitbegan his account with the state-of-play during the eighteenth century, and then was

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1See, above all, Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2010), Richard Wagner and Buddhism (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2011), SchopenhauersKompass (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2011), and the authors English translation, SchopenhauersCompass (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2014); Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism andthe West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Buddhism and Science: A Guide for thePerplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Eugene Burnouf, Introduction tothe History of Indian Buddhism, trans. Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Katia Buffetrille (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2010).

2Roger-Pol Droit, Le culte du neant: Les philosophes et le Bouddha (Paris: Seuil, 1997), and

The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, trans. David Streight and Pamela

This content downloaded from 92.251.85.137 on Tue, 21 Apr 2015 10:46:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

primarily concerned with developments during the nineteenth, this is long after the

1702 publication of the second edition of Pierre BaylesDictionnaire historique et cri-tique, with which App ends his tale. The point of departure for App is the Jesuit mis-sion in sixteenth-century Japan, whose characterizations of Buddhist and other East

Asian religious traditions, he argues compellingly, cast a long shadow over the Euro-

pean engagement with Asian thought during the centuries that followed. This story

has been largely overlooked within both Buddhist Studies and European intellectual

history; Droits otherwise excellent bibliography of early modern European contribu-

tions to our knowledge of Buddhism, for instance, neglects this material completely.3

App interprets many of the sources he examines in the light of what he terms the

Arlecchino effect (11), referring to the Italian buffoon character who inspires hilarity

by mistakenly taking all that he encounters to be part of his own extended family. The

running gag begins, in this case, near the start of the story, when the famous missionary

Francis Xavier (150652) decides that the Japanese word for God, conforming to his

Christian conception of the Supreme Being, is Dainichi, in fact the Japanese name

for the cosmic Buddha Vairocana. Preaching the message, Dainichi wo ogami are!

(Pray to Vairocana!), he is understood by the Japanese, with their approval, to be a

Western (i.e., Indian) votary of Shingon Buddhism (14).

Within a few years, however, the Jesuits begin to comprehend the joke for which

they themselves are responsible. They decide to eliminate all use of possibly trouble-

some native terms from their tracts (Dainichi, for instance, is replaced by Dios [17,47]), so that their Japanese writings are increasingly composed in a sort of creole, in

which Japanese verbs and connectives are used to link Portuguese and Latin nouns. At

the same time, they begin to conduct far-reaching research into the religions of Japan

and its neighbors, research that would inform both their creation of Japanese cate-

chisms critical of Buddhism and Latin works destined for European readers. In the

process, some of the missionaries gain deep familiarity with the Japanese language

and sometimes classical Chinese as well (a notable and influential example is Joao

Rodrigues [15611633], chap. 8), and they benefit additionally from the collaboration

of several learned Japanese converts, for instance, the educated Tendai monk Paulo

Chozen (d. 1557; 3435), or the father-son team of doctors, Paulo and Vicente Toin(5359).

To understand the flow of ideas, however, it is essential to decipher the often

obscure correspondences among Japanese sources, concepts, and terms, and the Euro-

pean, mostly Latin, writings in which these are represented. For this, App finds his

rosetta stone (1820) in a number of interrelated documents of the late sixteenth

century (chaps. 57). Among them, there is the LatinCatechismus christianae fidei bythe Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, published in Lisbon in 1586. To work out just how

its discussions of Buddhism are related to Japanese materials, App turns to an intrigu-

ing discovery of the early twentieth century, the Evora screen (1820, 6067, 7379,

etc.), a Japanese folding screen that had been brought to Portugal toward the end of the

sixteenth century and was found to be stuffed with Japanese writings as filler. Some of

Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). References herein will be tothe English edition.

3Droit,Cult of Nothingness, 191258.

460 Book Reviews


these documents, it emerges, may be identified as lecture notes recording the lessons

on Japanese religion delivered by the Catholic convert Vicente Toin, notes that insome instances correspond closely enough to the contents of Valignanos catechism to

enable App to identify precisely the Japanese Buddhist ideas in question, and some-

times their textual sources as well. A luminous first principle named in the Latin text

Ixin turns out to be the One Mind (Jap. Isshin) encountered in many East Asian Bud-dhist traditions, but, in view of the details of its description here, almost certainly to be

identified with the teachings elaborated by the Chinese Chan master Zongmi (780

841) in his Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity and subsequently developed in the

lineage of his disciple Huangbo. Elsewhere, we find Jesuit discussions of the teaching

of this mystery to aspirants through problems posed by their superiors (48), certainly

the earliest Western references to koan practice in the Rinzai Zen sect.The One Mind, identified with emptiness, Buddha-nature, and the final destiny of

all who attain enlightenment, was understood by the Jesuits to represent an essentially

amoral inner teaching of Buddhism, contrasted with the vulgar teaching that exerted

moral control through its promises and threats of rebirth in heaven or hell. What is cru-

cial here is that the Jesuit discovery of the One Mind as first principle required that

they assimilate it, together with other Buddhist ideas, to the scholastic philosophy in

which they themselves had been educated. One Mind became the insentient prime

matter of the early Greek cosmologists, while the vulgar teachings notion of rebirth

was of course linked to Pythagoras. The Arlecchino effect reasserted itself in full

force, and throughout the seventeenth century European speculations became increas-

ingly extravagant. Thanks to Rodriguess discoveries concerning the original reli-

gions of Asia, it became clear to many that Noahs evil son Ham, who was thought to

be none other than Zoroaster (1013), was responsible for the whole mass of Asian

idolatry, together with its roots in the infernal conception of empty prime matter.

Ham/Zoroaster, heir to the perverse doctrines stemming from Adams son Cain, was

the direct source of the poison that later came to be promulgated throughout Asia by

the Buddha. One of the most eccentric geniuses of the time, Athanasius Kircher

(160180), even extended this reasoning to the Americas, so that Christianity faced

not numerous paganisms, but in fact and in essence just one throughout the entire

world (11921). Thanks to the interventions, which soon followed, of the great French

explorer of the Mughal empire, Francois Bernier (162588), it was possible to assimi-

late all of this to the teaching of the Upaniads and Indo-Persian Sufism as well (chaps.1213). The Oriental Philosophy (singular) that would exercise a continuing fasci-

nation through to the nineteenth century and beyondwas thus born.

The story told here is wonderfully engaging, enlivened by Apps dogged antiquar-

ian researches, which take him to his authors original manuscripts and annotated cop-

ies in order to uncover the precise genealogies of the ideas in play. The Cult of Empti-ness is a model of scholarly detective work. That some of the thinkers App discusseswere so bold as they were in their condemnation of the Buddhas lies, given their

own capacity for breathtakingly audacious confabulations, may seem almost laugh-

able to us today, but we must recall, too, that this was but one facet of the voluntarism

with which early modern Europe asserted its authority over the entire planet.

Just as App echoes Roger-Pol Droits title, so Lopez mirrors in some respects his

point of departure, namely, the initial European response to the Buddha as an idol

461History of Religions


(cf. Droits The Cult of Nothingness [2003], chap. 1, The Faceless Idol). True to adevice that he has effectively deployed in earlier work, Lopez organizes each of his

key chapters around a theme encapsulated in a single term: The Idol, The Myth,

The Man, The Text. Of course, the history is by no means so neat as Lopezs lin-

ear progression might suggest; idol and myth came into European consciousness

almost together, and occasionally glimpses of the man as well.4 Although strict histori-

cal progression, though by nomeans ignored, is not really Lopezs principle of organi-

zation, his approach permits him the liberty to weave and sometimes digress in rela-

tion to his chosen themes, so as to introduce general background or anecdotes of

interest, and to keep the readers pleasure always in the foreground. The first chapter,

for instance, on The Idol, offers Lopez the occasion for forays into the history of

idolatry and iconoclasm in Western religions (2634), the art historical thesis that

Buddhism was initially aniconic (3738), and the rituals used by contemporary Bud-

dhists for the consecration of their sacred images (4345). Likewise, chapter 2, The

Myth, introduces the figure of the Buddhas apostate cousin Devadatta, his impale-

ment in hell, and the probability that early Catholic missionaries in Southeast Asia,

with their tortured savior hanging from their necks, were presumed by local Buddhists

to be his devotees (8187).

Despite the many excellences of Lopezs workthe considerable learning it repre-

sents, its elegant structure and entertaining styleall of which merit much praise, I

nevertheless found its overall thrust to be in some respects tendentious. Although

Lopez cites and discusses an impressive number of the relevant early modern texts,

From Stone to Flesh should by no means be taken as comprehensive in its coverage.The early seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuits in Tibet, for instance, are altogether

missing. Although they add further confusions to those already documented by Lopez

in this period, they also betray an unusual sympathy for the Tibetan Buddhists they

sought to understand, and one of their number, Estevao Cacela, even began to appreci-ate that Sakyamuni was indeed a man, not merely a mythological being. While Lopezaffirms that his book ends where other histories of the European encounter with Bud-

dhism generally begin (4), many aspects of the story have been long available in

scholarship on the writings of European travelers and missionaries.5 Lopezs book has

the merit of providing a generous collection of pertinent passages culled from the

works concerned, presenting them with his own commentaries. It offers a rich selec-

tion, but it does so, well, selectively.

In effect, Lopez omits elements of the larger background that put the story he tells

into a somewhat different light. Beginning with the chaos of late medieval and early

4Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1988), chap. 3, The Buddhafrom Myth to History, is suggestive of Lopezs passagefrom myth to man, but Almond is interested inmid-nineteenth-century developments in Brit-ish orientalism, a later phase of the history than that with which Lopez is concerned.

5It strikes me as unfortunate that the late Donald F. Lachs opus magnum, Asia in the Making

of Europe, 9 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 196593), is nowhere referenced.Although Lach does not treat all of the many discussions of the Buddha and Buddhism found inhis sources in a fully detailed and sustained manner, most of the sources drawn upon by Lopez,and others besides, are discussed there in the larger context of Europes growing awareness ofAsia during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

462 Book Reviews


modern European impressions of oriental idols and culminating, almost teleologically,

with Eugene Burnoufs characterization of the Buddha as a historical individual whotaught a rational and humane philosophy (20611), Lopezs tale gains in conviction

by ignoring crucial aspects of Asias Buddhist past. Thus, when at the very end of the

work Lopez reintroduces the thirteenth-century Venetian traveler Marco Polo, he sug-

gests that it is somehow odd thatMarco knew already that Singhalese and Chinese rec-

ognized the same object of faith: He understood, it seems, that the idol worshipped in

China was the same as the idol worshipped in Ceylon (229). But this appears excep-

tional only if, as occurs here, the story is largely removed from the history of Bud-

dhism in Asia. For throughout much of the first millennium CE and the first centuries

of the second, a rich network of religious, political, and commercial relations linked

Buddhists from many parts of Asia, who at the time clearly recognized that they were

in some sense co-religionists despite differences of local custom and practice. Thus,

we find Kashmiri scholars in the court of the Xixia kingdom and Bengalis in Nanzhao,

paintings of Chinas sacred Wutai mountains in Pala palm-leaf manuscripts, and an

Indian whose teacher was Indonesian voyaging to preach in Tibet, besides many other

examples.6 Between this period and the European Age of Exploration, when Lopezs

story takes off, dramatic changes rent the fabric of this richly intercommunicative

Buddhist world: Buddhism vanished in India, and Central Asia and maritime South-

east Asia became increasingly the domains of Islam. The comedic misunderstandings

of Buddhist commonalities as seen by European travelers and missionaries were in

part reflections of this fragmentation, but Marco Polo arrived early enough to catch the

last glimmers of the pan-Asian Buddhist networks that extended by stages from Fer-

ghana to Japan. And among Buddhists, indeed, these were never altogether forgotten;

the Tibetan historian Taranatha (15751634), for instance, still knew that his religion,besides being of Indian origin and still present in lands neighboring TibetNepal,

China, andMongoliahad spread throughout Southeast Asia, including the kingdoms

of Burma, Sumatra, Java, Cambodia, and Champa, in what is today Vietnam.

Moreover, in the conceptual worlds of these Asian Buddhists, it is not at all clear that

the distinctions upon which Lopez rests his casethose among idol, myth, and man

had the force he wishes to impart to them. For reading traditional Asian accounts of the

Buddha, such as those of the Ming-dynasty monk Baocheng or his near-contemporary

in Tibet, Nanam Tsunpa, we find that, although myth and miracle are not wanting, ahuman Buddha teaching human disciples is everywhere in view. The fact that tradi-

tional Buddhists accepted the marvelous by no means warrants the inference that they

ignored the homely and common. And it was in virtue of the humanity present in the

Buddhist sources themselves that Burnouf could find the human Buddha he did.

Lopezs admiration of Burnouf, for his pioneering and prescient reading of these

sources, is in my view fully justified, but his insistence that, thanks to Burnouf, a new

Buddha will emerge, one who had not existed before, one born in Europe, different

from the Buddha of Asia (4) strikes me as overdrawn.

6Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations,

6001400 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), offers a valuable contribution to ourunderstanding of Buddhist international networks during the period concerned.



Part of what troubles me in Lopezs account is the determination with which he

inscribes Burnouf as the unique hero of the story (albeit with nods to Hodgson, Csoma,

and some others); mimicking Newton, Burnouf arrives and there is light. But, without

diminishing Burnouf, I am inclined to see him less as a brilliant lone star than as a par-

ticularly bright member of the mid-nineteenth-century constellation of scholars who

collectively gave birth to the modern academic study of Buddhism. Burnoufs col-

league Stanislas Julien and student Edouard Foucaux both merit more than the one-

liners they receive here. Nor does it seem to me that Alexander Csoma de Koros andI. J. Schmidt, both publishing during the 1830s, quite receive their due in Lopezs tell-

ing, though admittedly their indications concerning the Buddha are inconveniently

scattered throughout their works on grammar and other topics. (Both were clearly

aware, however, that buddha has a general cosmological reference and yet also speci-fically denotes Sakyamuni, a historical person of Indian antiquity; and both clearly useBuddhism to refer to a single religion distributed throughout much of Central, East,

and Southeast Asia.) Nor do we find any mention of the mid-nineteenth-century spe-

cialists of Buddhism working in the Russian Empireabove all Vasily Vasilyev and

Anton Schiefnerwho, in the decade or so following Burnoufs Histoire, began touse Tibetan sources to reenvision the history of Indian Buddhism in ways that Burnouf

himself could not, given the materials at his disposal.

At the same time, we must recognize that Europeans, even after Burnouf, were by

nomeans immune to the magic andmystery that Lopez regards Burnouf as having dis-

pelled, and I am not speaking just of those on the occult fringe, or of the emerging cir-

cle of Western Buddhist enthusiasts. Tolstoy, writing in 1891, listed the wonder-filled

Lalitavistara, in Foucauxs translation, as one of the 50 books that influenced himmost (enormous).7 And works such as novelist Claude Avelines La merveilleuselegende de Siddha^rtha Ca^kya-mouni Bouddha (Paris, 1928) demonstrate that, amongartists at least, some preferredwhat wemight term the John Ford School of Historiog-

raphy: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

In his concluding chapter, Lopez writes that we make vain attempts to bring [the

Buddha] back to life by imagining that he understood quantum mechanics, imagining

that he taught mindfulness of the breath in order to reduce our blood pressure (229

30). In this, he once more echoes Droit, who says, Buddhism is first and foremost, for

us, a kind of therapy.8 And Lopez adds that, in discovering that underlying Asias

diverse myths and idols there was but a single Buddha, the human Buddha described

by Burnouf, we have lost something, the rich tapestry that was represented by the local

diversity of fo (Buddha in Chinese), hotoke (Japanese), sanggye (Tibetan), samanaGotam (Thai), and more. But at this point I am inclined to respond, What do youmean we, kemosabe? For Buddhist studies as I know it today is very much interestedin the local and the particular, examining Inner Mongolian revivals, the dream-worlds

of a medieval Japanese monk, womens rituals in Ladakh, the specificities of a bodhi-

sattva cult in Sri Lanka, and much more. And Buddhists today, as Lopez himself sug-

gests (230), are also concerned with sustaining faith in their respective traditions,

7TolstoyWas Impressed,New York Times Book Review, April 2, 1978, 4.

8Droit,Cult of Nothingness, 14.

464 Book Reviews


whether those of the Pure Land sects of Japan, or of the Newar Tantric lineages of

Nepal, or of the Theravadamonastic centers of Thailand. No doubt, there are neverthe-

less many contemporary readers whose pre-understandings of Buddhism correspond

with those of Lopezs weparticularly if they have been influenced by the Mind

and Life Institutebut in many cases, I suspect, he is preaching to the converted (who

will be pleased by his tale nonetheless).

Both of the books reviewed here are almost free from error, though a fewminor cor-

rections may nevertheless be proposed. In The Cult of Emptiness, the bibliographylists Sydney Pollock (251) where Sheldon is the correct given name. (Perhaps this

is an example of the Arlecchino effect, considering that the director of They Shoot

Horses, Dont They? may have been what App had in mind.) A number of works

cited in the book are not entered into the bibliography: Shabistari 1880, which is given

under Mahmud (248); and Mahfuz-ul-Haq 1990, which is not given at all (no doubt

the intended reference is: M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq, trans. Majma-ul-Barain or the Min-gling of the Two Oceans by Prince Muammad Dara Shikuh [Calcutta: Asiatic Soci-ety of Bengal, 1929; repr. 1990]). And chapter 16 begins incomprehensibly: Battles

between exclusivists who believed that the Judeo-Christian tradition has a monopoly

of truth and exclusivists who rejected this notion dot Church history from the early

centuries and pertained to evaluations both of religions and philosophies (209).

In From Stone to Flesh, I note the following points: The most famous Buddhaimage in Tibet . . . was said to have been carved when the Buddha, or Buddha-to-be,was twelve years of age (40). Tibetan sources, by contrast, state that it was a portrait

statue of the Buddha, divinely manufactured after his enlightenment, but proportioned

according to his size at twelve years as known through the testimony of his aunt

Prajapati. The famous monastery of Vikramasla was razed so effectively that its pre-cise location has yet to be determined (57). In fact, it has been known for several

decades that the ruins of a major Buddhist vihara found in Antichak, Bhagalpur dis-trict, Bihar, are those of Vikramasla, and the Bihar state government as well as theArchaeological Survey of India are currently investing considerably in its revival as a

pilgrimage and tourist destination. (The archeological work that established the iden-

tity of the site is treated in B. S. Verma, Antichak Excavations2 (19711981), Mem-oirs of the Archaeological Survey of India 102 [Archaeological Survey of India,

2011]).

While Lopez has made use of some of the surviving Tibetan texts authored by the

Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (10516) and conserved in the Jesuit Archive (ARSI)

in Rome, he nowhere mentions the thorough studies of these writings, including facsi-

miles of the original manuscripts, by Giuseppe Toscano.9 In citing one of Desideris

quotations from the Tibetan master Tsongkhapa (116 n. 54), Lopez refers to page 7

recto in the manuscript Goa 74 (ARSI), but in Toscanos edition (vol. 3, p. 72 for the

Tibetan and pp. 16869 for Toscanos Italian translation), the passage clearly appears

on page 11 recto.

9Giuseppe Toscano, S.X., Opere Tibetane di Ippolito Desideri, 4 vols. (Rome: Instituto Ita-

liano per ilMedio ed Estremo Oriente, 198189).



Such small points aside, From Stone to Flesh is in all events a delight to read, and Ican recommend no better place to begin to explore the Wests struggle to come to

terms with the Buddha. Apps The Cult of Emptiness will claim a more specializedreadership. For all who have a serious interest in the intellectual history of theWestern

engagement with Asian religions, however, it should be considered an essential text.

MATTHEW T. KAPSTEIN

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Parisand University of Chicago

The One by Whom Scandal Comes. By RENE GIRARD. Translated by M. B. DEBEVOISE.East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Pp. xii139. $19.95 (paper).

In the preface to this volume, Rene Girard assures us that the title The One byWhomScandal Comes does not refer to him. But we may be excused for wondering, sinceeven Girard felt compelled to clarify this point with Maria Stella Barberi, who sug-

gested the title. It refers instead to Matthew 18:7, a verse Girard sees as one of the

clearest statements of the Gospels demythologizing project. As the New Revised

Standard Version has it (translating skandalon as stumbling block/s): Woe to theworld because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but

woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!

The reception history of Girards writing in the English-speaking world is worth

mention here. Although he spent nearly his entire teaching career in American univer-

sities, his books have almost always appeared first in French. As a result, his books

have appeared out of order in America, with the English translations being published

in a different sequence from the original works. As a result, it is often difficult to trace

the development of Girards thought from his published works. To add to the confu-

sion, many current Girardian scholars were former students who learned mimetic the-

ory through contact with the man himself and not through his writing. In a way this sit-

uation reflects the messy crash landing in America of French literary theory as a

whole, which Girard helped facilitate by organizing the infamous Languages of Criti-

cism and the Sciences of Man symposium held at Johns Hopkins in 1966, which

introduced Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and of course Jacques Derrida to a wide

English-speaking audience.

Regardless, Girards ideas have found enthusiastic reception in unexpected and

often incongruous audiences: he is revered in the circles of Latin and African Ameri-

can liberation theologians on one hand and of LAcademie francaise and the ModernLanguage Association on the other; he has influenced thinkers as disparate as the hard-

nosed libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Italian polymath and publisher

Roberto Calasso. But in the discipline of history of religions, which more or less corre-

sponds to what he calls anthropology in his books, Girards work is largely relegated

to preliminary remarks (in which it is quickly dismissed) that may precede a serious

discussion of sacrifice or myth. Girard has little to say about his admirers, but he posi-

tively relishes his position as an outsider to what he regards as the mainstream study of

466 Book Reviews


Documents

Kapstein on App and Lopez