On Tuesday 17 May 2005 16:11, Bhante Sujato wrote:

> > 1) For how long has the modern world known that Buddhism
> > originated in India?  Or did we always know?  Was there ever
> > a period of discovery?
>
> Yes, there was a period of discovery.

The scholars accompanying Alexander's army in India in 326 BCE
encountered Hindus, Jains (including the sky-clad
gymnosophists), and Buddhists, and reported back to Greece.
There were Greek ambassadors to the Bactrian Greek Buddhist
kingdom (the one that created the giant Buddha statues at
Bhamiyan that were ultimately destroyed by the Taliban) and to
Indian monarchs, so some information continued to flow until the
Parthian conquest.

"Megasthenes (c. 350 BCE-290 BCE) was a Greek traveller and
geographer. He was born in Asia Minor and became an ambassador
sent by Seleucus I of Syria to the court of Sandrocottus of
India.

"His observations were recorded in Indica, a work that served as
an important source to many later writers such as Strabo. He
describes such features as the Himalayas and the island of Sri
Lanka. He also described India's caste system."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megasthenes

This Sandrocottus is Chandragupta Maurya, who ruled from 322 to
298 BC. Megasthenes has some information on sramanas (Sarmanoi),
apparently Buddhists, but not a lot, and gets some of it
completely wrong.

These connections were cut by the Parthian Empire, kept closed by
later Persian and Muslim conquerors, and not effectively resumed
for more than a millennium. The first Buddhist missionary to
China and translator of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, An
Shikao, was Parthian.

Marco Polo reported in a vague way about Chinese and Central
Asian Buddhism in the 13th century.

The Portuguese and Spanish explorers and traders in the 15th
century were the first Europeans to have significant extended
contact with Buddhism in South Asia, China and Japan, followed
by Jesuit missionaries, who were the first to report back to
Europe in any systematic way on what they were learning. This
process began very slowly, however.

> The early colonial
> explorers took some time to piece together the various schools
> of Buddhism and figure out they originally came from India.
> This was agreed upon, i believe, by the end of the 18th
> century or therabouts.

I don't know why it would take so long. The Jesuit monks in China
in the 16th century must have heard that Buddhism arrived there
in the Han dynasty...Hmm, well, I looked it up, and now I know a
bit of what went wrong. Francis Xavier was informed in Japan
that the land of the Buddha was west of China, "beyond Tartary"
in Central Asia, and it took a while before any Catholics
learned Chinese and encountered the histories. Western study of
Pali started much later.

> Of course, anyone reasonably learned in any school of Buddhism
> would know that their religion hailed from India.

Francis Xavier's early informants were extremely unlearned. Note
that the route from China to India starts out northwest, then
turns southerly, then southeast and east. It is not surprising
that people got confused.

I know that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhists are very
clear on this point. There is a prayer beginning, "The Lord
Buddha was born in Kabira (Kapilavastu), enlightened in Magada,
taught in Harana (Benares, Varanasi), died in Kuchira
(Kusinagara)..."

There are two well-known accounts written by Chinese Buddhist
monks of their trips to India to collect sutras, the Record of
Buddhist Kingdoms (5th century), and the Journey to the West
(7th century). Journey to the West was the basis for a Chinese
novel of the same name in the 16th century (translated in part
by Arthur Waley under the title "Monkey"), leading to several
movies, TV series (including the Dragon Ball anime series) and
so on.
--
Edward Cherlin
Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more
"A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
--Alice in Wonderland
http://cherlin.blogspot.com