Gentile Religion in South India, China, and Tibet: Studies by Three Jesuit Missionaries

Before about 1775, the European scholars who directly studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and other Asian religions in Asia itself were almost all Catholic missionaries, many of them Jesuits.¹ After this date, secular scholarly administrators stationed in Asian countries, especially those associated with the colonial projects of the British and French, began to undertake their own studies of Asian religions and cultures. Particularly in India, these administrator scholars were called orientalists. The name stuck and is now used loosely for almost any pre-twentieth-century European scholar of Asian cultures, including Christian missionary scholars. Largely because these new administrator orientalists were much better financed than the missionaries had been, they were much more successful in getting the results of their researches published and then distributed in Europe. Scholarly works by earlier missionaries had mostly remained in manuscript and sometimes did not reach Europe even in this form. Another advantage of the administrator orientalists was that they were usually influenced by the more open and secular intellectual spirit associated with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment.

The new flood of works on Asian religions produced in Asia by the administrator orientalists—and the eventual arrival in Europe of manuscripts of the classical texts of Asian religions written in the original Asian languages—fostered an explosion of studies on Asian religions by armchair scholars who lived and worked in Europe. Many of these scholars had a deep personal commitment to Christianity. During the nineteenth century, these European (and American) studies of Asian religions were gradually transmuted into a discourse on what became know as "world religions," a historical process that has been extremely well analyzed by Tomoko Masuzawa in her recent book The Invention of World Religions.²

Over the past fifteen or twenty years other academic scholars have interpreted the explosion of European studies on Asian religions in such a way that they claim that the nineteenth-century European authors of these studies in fact were the first to "invent," "imagine," or "manufacture" these Asian religions. In this view, these religions simply did not exist as conceptual entities before these European scholars invented them. All that existed were chaotic, undifferentiated collections of religious beliefs and practices that had no real unity and were not conceptualized as having any real unity by the people who held these beliefs and followed these practices. I am thinking particularly of recent studies by Heinrich von Stietencron and others on Hinduism, by Philip C. Almond on Buddhism, by Lionel M. Jensen on Confucianism, and by scholars such as Richard King on the topic of orientalism and religion in general.³

In the case of the invention of Hinduism, I have elsewhere argued against the view that this religion was in any significant sense invented by nineteenth-century European scholars and for the view that the Hindus themselves had become quite conscious of their Hindu identity by at least 1400 and probably several hundred years earlier.⁴ The present essay extends and modifies these arguments, using as examples texts by three Italian Jesuit missionaries who worked in different areas of Asia well before 1775. These missionaries are Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who spent most of his adult life in China; Roberto Nobili (1577–1656), who lived in south India from 1605 until his death; and Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), who was in Tibet from 1715 to 1721. Until the professionalization of secular academic studies of Asia in European universities in the second half of the nineteenth century, these three were probably the best European scholars of the Asian religions dominant in these cultural areas.

In this essay I examine how these three missionaries categorized the Asian sects and religions they encountered and offer a discussion of why their categories are organized in the ways that they are. My basic claim is that the missionaries organized their religious categories principally on the basis of categories already elaborated by the Asians themselves and that these native categories were constructed by emphasizing, in a relatively arbitrary way, specific doctrinal and ritual differences. The argument about the use of such arbitrary differences...