Thread by @vakibs

In this thread, I will discuss the colonial invention of the religion called "Buddhism". I will summarize some arguments from S.N. Balagangadhara's book "Do all roads lead to Jerusalem?"

I will quote some old colonial literature in parallel.

Most people don't know that the understanding that Buddhism is a *different religion* from the paganism of Asia (also called as "Hindooism") was a very late one. The early colonial literature doesn't mention it. "Buddhism" as a separate religion was invented in early 1800s.

So the discovery of "Buddhism" as a religion is tied up to the formulation of "Hindooism" as a religion. Balagangadhara argues that both of these efforts are inherently trapped into a intellectual prism, of how Christianity sees itself as a religion, in a peculiar self image.

One of the earliest European visitors to India, the French traveler (and possibly, spy) Jean Baptiste Tavernier wrote a very famous account of his travels in the middle east, India, Siam etc. in the period 1630-1655. He doesn't mention "Buddhism" at all.
google.de/books/edition/…

Tavernier's travelogues were widely translated in many European languages. The above book is a relatively modern reproduction in English. Tavernier discusses Hindu religion at length, mentions even names of the deities "Peremel", "Vvistnou".. even tells the story of "Rama".

Tavernier also discusses "Mahometanism" at length. He contrasts this strongly with the idolatrous customs of Hindoos. But it is remarkable that he doesn't mention Buddhism: its mythology or philosophical peculiarities. It doesn't cross his mind that it is a different religion.

Tavernier was likely following up the practice of investigative reporting by travelogues, that the Christians conducted on the Moors after Spain was liberated (and perhaps also during the Crusades). So he has a peculiar anthropological curiosity, but doesn't detect "Buddhism".

Fast forward to the 18th century. The British got a foothold in Bengal, and there was an English civil servant named George Foster. He wrote a long travelogue with "sketches on the mythology and customs of the Hindoos". Again, "Buddhism" is not mentioned.
google.de/books/edition/…

When we compare Tavernier's and Foster's accounts, one thing stands out. Foster's narrative about Hindooism is more sympathetic. Already in the 17th century, Tavernier had composed an all-time hits of the evils of Hindooism: Suttee, Juggernauth etc. Foster is more inquisitive.

Foster not only talks about the names of the Hindoo deities and the ritual practices, but also discusses the Hindoo value system and code of ethics. By this time, Indian texts are slowly being read and reviewed in Europe. So a softer more nuanced image has appeared.

By Foster's time, a transformation is also happening within Hindu communities in Bengal due to this intellectual exchange. Raja Rammohan Roy would be creating a Hindoo Universalist Church in the next decades "Brahmo Samaj".

We must ask, why is "Buddhism" not discussed till then?

In 1793, Thomas Maurice publishes "Indian antiquities or dissertations: geography, theology, civil laws, government, profound literature.." compared with Persia, Egypt and Greece.

Hindoos start to be seen as not just any idolators, but an ancient people.
google.de/books/edition/…

This is when Europeans were spurred into a serious cross-civilizational investigation. The relationship of the languages of Europe with Sanskrit is also now known. The race is on to investigate the exchanges of ancient India with Egypt and Greece, and with the Biblical people.

Christian Europe was forced to examine the Hindoos with respect to its own identity. This is something they didn't do in Africa or the Americas. Those races were simply condemned as inferior ( as also in India e.g, Portuguese rule in Goa), but now Hindoos are seen differently.

It is at this cross-roads of history that "Buddhism" was discovered (or "invented") as a "religion". This moment is tied with the confusion in European's minds about how Indians, an ancient people related to them and who started with a noble cause, lost their "true religion".

There is a fantastic book "The Theogony of the Hindoos: their systems of philosophy and cosmogony" by a Swedish Count, Magnus Frederik Björnstjerna that explains this process beautifully.

In this, Björnstjerna compares Hindoos with his own Norse people.
google.de/books/edition/…

The son of a Swedish diplomat stationed in Saxony, Björnstjerna had access to the best of the German scholarship in its literary renaissance. He never stepped in India, but produced an extraordinarily deep study of its culture. His book also discusses "Buddhism" at some length.

Björnstjerna's book was published in 1843. Even at this late date, "Buddhism" was not understood clearly. Björnstjerna says there were many Buddhas (which is actually correct, according to Bauddha Sampradāya) but that 3 were prominent: Sakia, Godama and Fo (Fud'h Budd'h).

"Sakia was born to the east of the Ganges, on the confines of Nepaul, in a town called Kapita-Vastu; Godama was born in Siam; Fo was born to the west of India, but the place is unknown."

He adds there were 2 Sakia Buddhas. The one above was Sakia-Muni, the other was Sakia-Sinha.

Björnstjerna quotes a book by Coleman "Mythologie of the Hindoos" published in 1832, a book which has beautiful illustrations (linked below). There, we see the mention of "Buddhas and Jainas" as sects of Hindus, who got driven out by a "religious war".

archive.org/details/in.ern…

Coleman uses the new orthography "Hindus", but he calls the followers of Buddha as "Buddhas" (e.g, Buddhas of Nepal). In earlier texts, they were not explicitly identified as a "religion" but just used as a word for Sanyāsis/monks (like Tavernier mentions of "Bonzes" in Siam).

Anyway, Björnstjerna armed with this beautiful anthropological book by Coleman, quotes from it that "the Buddhists of Ceylon say, that the number of Buddhas is now twenty-two, and that several others are expected on earth."

Björnstjerna still uses the older spelling "Hindoos".

Björnstjerna says that the "eldest Buddha" was a reformer of the "Brahmin division of caste" as given in "Menu's Codex".

This is the central pivot around which the "religion" of Buddhism is invented. So in order to understand "Buddhism", we must see "Menu's Codex" (Manusmṛti).

In the years after the mid 19th century, European scholarship on Buddhism got better. The "Cyclopaedia of India, and of Eastern and Southern Asia" (another great book) by Edward Balfour, published in 1871, the mysteries of the many Buddhas are explained.

play.google.com/books/reader?i…

Balfour says "Sakya-Sinha" was the name of a prince. "Sakya-Muni" was his name when he became the "atoner". He was also called "Gotama" from the name of his clan or "Got".

He says, the Chinese having no B- or D- and their language being monosyllabic, softened his name to "Fo".

By the 1870s, it was estimated that "Buddhism" was the second largest religion on Earth after Christianity, with around 222 million people (of which 170 million in China). Balfour lists various scholars who studied Buddha's doctrine, and who called it the closest to Christianity.

By the mid 1800s, the theory arose of a religious war between Hindoos and the Buddhists, which resulted in the Buddhists being driven away from India, Björnstjerna quotes one scholar Bogle, that Dalay Lama of Thibet requested the British to erect Buddha temples on the Ganges.

Many European scholars explicitly called Buddha the "reformer" of the Hindoo religion, comparable to Martin Luther for Christianity, who tried to remove the corruptions of the Hindoos. So we must understand why they thought Hindooism was corrupted, and why it needed a reformer.

In Balagangadhara’s book, he quotes the 1988 work of Philip Almond “The British discovery of Buddhism”, that this entire process of inventing Buddhism as a “reform” from the older Hindoo religion was all done in a mere 30 years of the Victorian period, from 1830s to the 1860s.

By 1860s, Buddhism as a “religion” existed not in the praxis of people around the world, but in British libraries, amongst books that codify the doctrine. Balagangadhara says that what took a few hundred years for “Hinduism” as “religion” was compressed for Buddhism in 3 decades!

I tried to quote various books from this period, with all the errors in orthography as well as ontology (conceptual organization) to show how *bonkers* thisprocess is. But importantly, we are *still* living through the same bonkers errors in our self image as Hindus or Buddhists!

Now, let us understand Balagangadhara’s thesis of how the meaning of “religion” came to be: as a belief system or “faith” that can be condensed into a book (or a set of books) of doctrines.

This is not an academic definition, but how e.g, Indian Judiciary understands “religion”.

The origin of “religion” as an ontological framework that can be defined in a book comes entirely from Christianity (not Islam, not Judaism, but exclusively Christian understanding). This meaning is due to its history, as a struggle against Roman “Religio” and “Traditio”.

Broadly speaking, “Traditio” is what can be translated as “Sampradāya” in Indic view. It is the cumulative sum of customs handed down from generations of ancestors.

“Religio” is the ideals and aspirations of man, represented by the gods and the union/communion with these gods.

In the Roman Empire, they insisted that people abide by the “traditio”, if not for anything, for the basic continuation of ages-old civic life. Respecting the “religio” (gods for any city, season, occasion etc.) goes hand in hand with it.

This came into conflict with the Jews.

But the Jews argued that their own “Traditio”, from Moses etc, required them to *not* pay obeisance to the “religio” of Rome. The Romans were perplexed, but later accepted that oddity, as their own “traditio”.

Please note: such a conflict wouldn’t even have occurred in India.

The situation got trickier with the Christians, who derived from Judaism, but had no “traditio” (ancestral customs). This spurred the Christian Fathers to argue on a philosophical point: that their religion is based on a (perfect) doctrinal purity: of the oldest “traditio” ever!

The sequence of this argument is important, and it is encoded in church dogma after they won over Rome. Christianity claims to be “God’s plan for man” (the oldest traditio since the first man: Adam). Jesus was the redeemer who corrected ignorant practices that inevitably accrued.

Now I will summarize Christianity’s conflict with other cultures and “traditio”s. Balagangadhara gives a range of examples from European pagans to Indian tribes; there is a peculiar sequence of strategies that Christianity applies to cope with various stages of this conflict.

Firstly, Christianity understands no other form of “religio” but pristine doctrinal purity. The doctrines should be in a book, or at least representable in a book. If a culture didn’t even achieve this codification, it is primitive, dumb & ignorant. Hence “pagan” (villager/fool).

Stage-1 “Jahillia”: I coined this name from Islam’s view of pre-Islamic past, as that of ignorance. The exactly same view is held in Christianity. So how to deal with such people? Beat them to submission. Plunder, pillage, anything is fine, for they are people of sin.

We can see plenty of examples in the history of colonialism for how this strategy is applied. This is naturally, the default strategy with which the Europeans first saw Indians. Examples include Portuguese colonization of Goa, British atrocities on forest-dwellers etc.

At every stage of conflict, please note, that Christianity’s understanding of other traditions is bound to be limited and erroneous. But the greatest ignorance is at the first stage: the most lurid moral corruptions are attributed to the other (cruelty, sexual deviance etc).

Stage-2 “Conceit”: This is when they discover that the other race is civilized, has some moral character and ethical philosophy. But then why do they not agree to the logic of the “true religion”? Because they are conceited, and are exploiting others through their conceit.

Stage-2 “Conceit” is where Hindooism is stuck at for the most part of the globe. Its image through “caste” is essential for driving this view. Jews were also seen in this prism for long, for why would they not accept Jesus? Brahmins are thus construed as agents of exploitation.

When Europeans discovered Roman philosophers during the Renaissance, they couldn’t understand them except through this prism of conceit. They found them to be very intelligent, but they were still following their ancestral rituals and sacrifices. So they called them conceited.

The Christian perspective on Hindoo philosophers (or of the Darśanas) was greatly influenced by their prior assessment of the Greco-Roman philosophers. This charge of conceit was especially placed on the Brahmin caste, when they were found to be the hardest barrier to conversion.

From Balagangadhara’s book, I see the attribution of conceit applied at two levels. First, they call the people as conceited. Then, they attribute the conceit to their holy texts. As a “religion” is a doctrine (dogma) represented in a book, the conceit should also be found there.

The analysis of Indian literature happened after William Jones and Colebrooke translated some Sanskrit texts. The “Menu’s Codex” (Manusmriti) became a focal point of this attributed conceit. (In my opinion, by sheer chance). But that text is still pilloried by ignorant people so.

Stage-3 “Innocence”: This is when Christians discover not only mere ethical values or moral character in that other culture, but “beauty”. Sometimes, they found words so sublimely beautiful that they couldn’t but call them divine in inspiration. This happened with the Upanishads.

This stage of awe and respect for the Hindoos also occurred with some Muslims in India. One famous case was the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh who translated the “Upanikhet” into Persian. Both Shikoh and Europeans wondered if that was the original “traditio” - the religion of Adam.

The discovery of Indian literature kicked off a major movement in European cultural history: Romanticism. The timing was also brilliant. The pressures of the industrial revolution were also showing. A timeless India was then invented as a solace, forever bound in its innocence.

Apart from the rich literary tradition, Europeans were shocked by the antiquity of the Indians, who remembered many millennia of history. The books I referred to quote Greek authors who opined that the Egyptians got their religion from Indians. India was thus the original cradle.

It is in this context that we must see the Hindoo Reform movements, first by Rammohan Roy and later by others. They all were trying to carve a honorable space for India, that agreed with the prejudices of Colonial Europe. The Theosophy movement was born likewise.

Björnstjerna gives an elaborate set of similarities between the extinct Egyptian religion and the Hindoo religion, the worship of Ammon with Śiva, and ultimately concludes that even Egypt derived its religion and accompanied sciences from India.

Björnstjerna says that highlands of Central Asia (the Mēru mountain region by the Caspian sea) were remembered in multiple cultures to be the origin of their race, and that this is geographically close to India. So this antiquity of India was a very old imagination.

Even the Mappa Mundi of Hereford of the 1300s shows the mythical land of Eden (Paradise) close to India. This follows from the understanding of the ancients that India is very antique in civilization. So the Romantic period was not inventing anything new.

https://twitter.com/vakibs/status/879221441731977218?s=20

The Romantic understanding of India as timeless, also makes it without agency. Hegel argued that it has no creativity even. Björnstjerna phrases this viewpoint very unambiguously below. So "Hindoos" must beware of the appreciation of the Romantics.

The translation of the Vedas was done in this background. The Vedas became the pristine texts of humanity's ideals in its original innocence. This is why they are not seen as complex philosophical musings, but simple expressions of wonder and awe, even today by Indologists.

The 3 strategies to deal with the Hindoos are now seen in parallel. The ugly pagan idolatry is still seen present. The conceit of their living philsophers (Brahmins) is still seen present, as with their conceited texts (Manusmṛti etc). But there are also innocent pristine texts.

In this context, from Christian imagination, it is inevitable to pose the question of prophethood. Why would God forsake the Hindoo race? At some point, there must appear a reformer to revert the practices to their original purity. He may not be successful, but he must occur.

Stage-4 "Reform": This is the stage where certain doctrines were discovered, that argue against the corrupted practices and attempt to restore a religion to its pristine form. These must be "texts" since that is how Christians understood "religion" to be. Buddhism was thus born.

Again, I think it is sheer chance that "Buddhism" was made out to be reform movement, that Hinduism inevitably needed. It somehow fit the timeline of discovery of Buddhist texts by European scholars. In a rapid phase of 30 years, Buddhism was fully developed as a "religion".

What the European scholars first did with the Buddhists, they would repeat later with the Sikhs - again interpreting these scriptures and cultural practices as a "reform movement" of the Hindu religion. In later years, they will do this with Vaishnavaites, Lingayats and so on.

Stage-4 "Reform" is a perpetual process for uplifting Hindoos back to their "purity of innocence". It will never end. Hindoos can never be at ease with their own skin, their own modes of worship or ritual practice. Even the Indian state took it upon itself as its responsibility.

Björnstjerna takes this Buddhist reform process to its logical conclusion. That the Buddhas were numerous and spread around the world. The Fo-Hi of China was one such. He postulates that the Norse people followed another Buddha (Odin). "Asiatic Buddhism, strangely corrupted".

The Poetic Edda of the Norseland is imagined by Björnstjerna to be an equivalent of the Vedas. The Buddhist reform process helped restore the purity of the true religion (Monotheism)

Why this roundabout wish for the Norse people? To be seen somehow as equal to the Hebrews.

All of these stages of dealing with the Hindoos (or Buddhists) are ultimately corruptions. Is there Monotheism in there? Is there something else in there? It is just free flowing imagination. These traditions (Sampradāyas) were not studied seriously from the native viewpoint.

Stage-5 "Postmodernism": At this final stage, the Christian must give up the pretense of adjudicating "religion". He says everything is the same, "whatever floats the boat". It is a breather for the Hindoos, but it is also a form of escapism, an unwillingness to engage seriously.

We are now living through a mixture of all these strategies, which are encoded at different levels of detail in academic dogma or social/political institutions. If we take the Hindoo to be a frog, some strategies are like frying that frog in oil, some are like burying it in sand.

There is, of course, a native Indic method of philosophical engagement "Saṃvāda", where all the diverse viewpoints "Darśanas" get together, and ponder over the unknown (both the known and the unknown unknown).

We are being denied that, and are being boxed into blunt categories.

How long will we live through these lies of accepted colonial convention? An artifice that we are forced to don over our identities, so as to appear comprehensible and respectable in front of our colonial rulers? Isn't it absurd to do these dances even a century after?

So is "Buddhism" a religion? No. Is "Sikhism" a religion? No. Is "Hinduism" a religion? No. They are not "religions".

There are many many Sampradāyas (Traditio and Religio) which fit into the framework of Dharma (universal ethic). They deal with ideals like Yajñam and Ṛtam.

These Sampradāyas must be led to engage in their own respectful manner (Saṃvāda) and evolve over time. They must use their native tongues and idioms. Perhaps, even Christianity will also take a seat at that table if it ever grows to see itself as a "Dharma". (End of thread).