The Birth of Orientalism

Notes

N o t e s preface 1. Urs App, ‘‘William Jones’s Ancient Theology,’’ Sino-Platonic Papers 191 (July 2009). 2. Needless to say, these translations are limited to materials connected to the included case studies. Translations from a substantially broader range of sources will appear separately in a Reader of source materials pertaining to the European discovery of Asian religions. introduction 1. Most prominent among them were the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, who in the early seventeenth century applied Ricci’s ideas to Indian religion, and the Dutchman Abraham Roger, who relied on Brahmin informers and wrote an influential manuscript on South Indian religion that was posthumously published in 1651 in edited and amplified form. chapter 1. voltaire’s veda 1. In Orientalism, Edward Said mentions only briefly that Voltaire was interested in the Orient because he wanted to make the Bible more unbelievable (1994:76), and Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing discards the theme after a brief discussion of Voltaire’s contradictory treatment of Islam’s prophet (2006:117). 2. This story is told in detail in App 1997a, b, 1998a. 3. See the original text, transcription, and commentary along with the Latin, Portuguese , and English translations of the entire document in App 1997a:232–39. 4. The complete Portuguese manuscript is in the Biblioteca Nazionale Roma, Fondo Gesuitico 1482, no. 33; transcribed in Ruiz-de-Medina 1990:655–67. An Italian version that is slightly shorter has the number 1384, no. 7, in the same Fondo Gesuitico. For other versions and translations, see Ruiz-de-Medina 1990:654. 5. A detailed history of this misconception is in preparation. Roger-Pol Droit’s The 484 notes to pages 19–25 Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha (2003) ignores its Japanese origin and interesting history but illustrates its remarkable staying power and great influence even in the nineteenth century—another proof, if any were needed, of the survival of certain fixed ideas from the missionary era in the age of modern Orientalism. 6. See also the ‘‘Exoterica and Esoterica’’ section at the beginning of Chapter 3. 7. Ruggieri was a very good friend of Possevino, the republisher of Valignano’s catechism ; see Ricci 1942:136. 8. See the Chinese text in table IX, Ricci 1942:195. Pasquale d’Elia’s ‘‘sanitized’’ Italian translation is found on p. 194 of the same edition. 9. Jesuit archives, Rome, Jap-Sin, 9, ff. 263–64; table XII in Ricci 1942:201. The Pure Land of East Asian Buddhism is traditionally located in the West. The text of both inscriptions is by Wang Pan, the local Chinese prefect. 10. The original document is preserved in Rome (Archivio Romano della Compagnia di Gesù, Jap-Sin., 9, ff. 263–64) and is reproduced in Ricci 1942:1.200. The handwriting is here transcribed and slightly rearranged. The Chinese characters of the original appear to stem from the hand of a native (possibly Wang Pan, the prefect of Shaoqing who donated the plates). 11. D’Elia (Ricci 1942:199) supplemented Ruggieri’s howler by proposing the equally misleading ‘‘gente venuta dalla santa terra del ponente’’ (people who have come from the Holy Land in the West), which effectively transforms the Buddhist Pure Land into Palestine! 12. For the West, Rodrigues used Sebastião Barradas’s Commentaria in concordiam et historiam evangelicam (Coimbra, 1599–1611) and Benito Pereira’s Commentariorum et disputationum in genesim (Rome, 1591–99). See Doi 1955:853. 13. Paper inscribed with Japanese notes of such lectures on Japanese religions (which went into great detail about Buddhist doctrine) was used for the lining of a folding screen that was sent to Europe in the late sixteenth century. The texts of this so-called Evora screen (Port. Biombo de Evora; Jap. Ebora byōbu) provide a fascinating glimpse into the sixteenth-century study of Buddhism. See Ebisawa 1963 and Itō 2000. 14. This appraisal stands in marked contrast to the caricature of Rodrigues by Paul A. Rule (1986:74–77), who failed to grasp the influence of forty years of Jesuit mission in Japan on the fledgling China mission and on the perception of Asian religions including Confucianism. In Rule’s opinion Rodrigues, who spent thirty-three years in Japan and twenty-three years in China, suffered from a ‘‘lack of discrimination between the cultures of East Asia’’ (p. 75)! 15. Martini made extensive use of Rodrigues’s materials. For example, the beginning of Martini’s...