Buddhism in the West: A Brief History
Stephen Batchelor
Buddhism is a world religion with two and a half thousand years of history and millions of adherents throughout Asia, which remained almost entirely unknown in the West until the first decades of the 19th century. European missionaries and travellers since the middle ages had periodically reported the religious beliefs and practices of peoples they encountered in Mongolia, China, Japan, Siam and elsewhere but assumed these were just different regional cults. It wasn’t until 1740 that a Jesuit called Father Pons in India recognized that these beliefs and practices were part of the same religious tradition that he tentatively called Bauddhamatham (from Sanskrit), to which later scholars would give the name “Buddhism.”
The process of understanding this “Buddhism” began with the collecting, cataloguing and translating of Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts, the first of which began to arrive in European universities from India and Nepal in the early 19th century. The first scholar to provide a comprehensive and informed account of this heretofore unknown religion was Eugène Burnouf of the Collège de France in Paris, who in 1844 published his 600 page L’introduction à l’histoire du buddhisme indien. Burnouf realized that the Sanskrit texts sent to him from Nepal were the originals of works later translated into Chinese and Tibetan. Since he had already co-written a study of Pali in 1826, Burnouf was able to reconstruct the basic outlines of Buddhist history and show how some of the different schools and doctrines were related to one another. After his L’introduction, he then proceeded to translate the Lotus Sutra, which appeared in 1852.
From this point on, the study of Buddhism in Europe proceeded in earnest for the rest of the 19th century, attracting a number of brilliant linguists and scholars to the field. In 1881, T.W. Rhys Davids founded the Pali Text Society in London, which began the task of editing and translating the entire canonical works of Theravada Buddhism, an endeavour that continues to this day. On the continent, a generation of French, German and Russian academics immersed themselves in compiling, analysing, translating and interpreting Buddhist scriptures in languages as diverse as Sanskrit, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan.
In an age of rapid and disturbing scientific discovery, this new religion suddenly appeared as though out of nowhere. In 1853, the French writer Felix Nève described Buddhism as “the only moral adversary that Western civilisation will find in the Orient.” Yet while Arthur Schopenhauer found in Buddhism confirmation of his own philosophical ideas, Richard Wagner planned (but never completed) a Buddhist opera called Die Sieger (The Victors), and Sir Edwin Arnold glorified the Buddha in his poem The Light of Asia, others were deeply troubled by what they perceived as a Godless and nihilistic religion. The scholar Jules Barthèlemy-Sainte-Hilaire, for example, in his popular Le Bouddha et sa religion (1866) sought not to extol Buddhism but to expose “this hideous system, this narrow materialism, worthy of disdain more than study.”
But none of the enthusiastic advocates of Buddhism in the 19th century seriously considered becoming Buddhists themselves. Although Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott, the founders of the fashionable Theosophical Society, took lay Buddhist precepts in Ceylon in 1880, Buddhism remained an element within their theosophical worldview rather than a religious commitment in its own right. An existential engagement with Buddhism on its own terms was not to begin until the dawn of the 20th century, when Westerners travelled to Asia to receive ordination as Buddhist monks.
The first European to take this step was an Englishman, Allan Bennett, who took monastic vows in Burma in 1901, receiving the name Ananda Metteya. Three years later a German, Anton Gueth, was also ordained in Burma. As Bhikkhu Nyanatiloka, he went to Ceylon, where, in 1911, he founded the Island Hermitage, thus establishing the first monastic community for non-Asian Buddhists. Over the following decades, a small trickle of Westerners followed their example, either by ordaining in Asia or forming lay Buddhist societies in Europe – predominantly in Germany and Britain. Alexandra David-Neel and later Ernst Hoffman (known as Lama Govinda) travelled to the Himalayas and Tibet, becoming the first Western Europeans to embrace the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. And through the writings of the Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki, the first reliable accounts of Mahayana and Zen Buddhism in English began to appear.
In the 1960’s, this marginal interest in the Dharma among small groups of dedicated monks and laypeople suddenly exploded into a cultural and spiritual movement involving thousands, which prepared the ground for the practice of Buddhism as we find it in the West today. A number of factors were responsible for this. Starting in the mid 1960’s, a generation of leisured, idealistic and alienated young men and women travelled to India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South East Asia, Japan and Korea. While staying in these countries many of them enthusiastically embraced Buddhism. This exodus also coincided with the tragic exile of the Dalai Lama and around 100,000 Tibetans from Tibet in 1959, most of whom settled in refugee camps in India. The widespread and fertile encounter between Westerners and Buddhist traditions soon led to Theravada monks, Zen masters and Tibetan lamas being invited by their followers to establish centres in their home countries in the West.
Since the early 1970’s, throughout Europe, America and Australasia, the presence of Buddhism as a living tradition among non-Asian converts has been steadily growing. When I left England for India in 1972, there were no more than a handful of Buddhist centres in Europe: now it is nearly impossible to keep count of them. This rapid growth has been accompanied by the availability of a bewildering number of books, journals, magazines, media documentaries as well as, in recent years, an active virtual Buddhist community on the internet. “Buddhist Unions” have been established in most European countries, which serve as umbrella organizations for the diverse Buddhist communities in those lands, as well as channels through which Buddhists can interact as a body with state institutions.
It is no longer necessary to travel to Asia to practise Buddhism. In many Western countries, one can ordain as a Buddhist monk or priest, receive an education in Buddhist doctrine, and undertake extensive meditation retreats under the guidance of qualified teachers. Moreover, for the first time in the history of Buddhism, people now have access to a wide range of Buddhist schools in a single country. Not only is the West encountering Buddhism, but Buddhists are coming face-to-face with Buddhists from other traditions. At the same time, Buddhism finds itself in dialogue with Christianity and other faiths, as well as non-confessional philosophical traditions and secular disciplines such as psychotherapy.
While some Buddhists in the West are justifiably wary of adapting their religious views to accord with the norms of science and modernity, others are concerned that too strict an insistence on preserving traditional Asian forms will deter people who would otherwise benefit from the Dharma. Similar concerns are also being voiced among Buddhists in Asia. Lay movements have distanced themselves from the monastic orthodoxy of mainstream Buddhism and focused on addressing the needs of people leading active lives in modern, urban societies. At the same time, Buddhist ideas, practices and imagery are constantly filtering into different areas of contemporary life: you may now be taught mindfulness meditation in a public healthcare programme, inspired to buy a laptop computer because it is endorsed by the Dalai Lama, or encouraged to “restez Zen” when showing signs of stress.
One cannot predict where all this interest will lead. To some extent, the West’s fascination with Buddhism is part of the same cultural phenomenon of globalisation that has led to the current enthusiasm for Yoga, Tai-chi and acupuncture. For many, the teachings of the Buddha offer a pragmatic way to find spiritual meaning in secular societies where the authority of the Christian churches has largely collapsed. From where we stand at present, it is not possible to say whether the appearance of Buddhism in the West is just a transient spiritual fashion or whether it marks the beginning of entirely new developments in Buddhist thought and practice. The only certainty is that should Buddhism succeed in establishing roots in Europe and America, it will also be transformed in the process.