BOOK REVIEWS

The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention
of Oriental Philosophy. By URS APP. Kyoto: University Media, 2012. Pp. 295.
From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha. By DONALD S. LOPEZ JR. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. ix289.
Urs App and Donald Lopez are among the outstanding interpreters in recent years
of the early modern Western encounter with Asian thought and religion, above all with
Buddhism.1 The two books reviewed here extend their individual trajectories, but at
the same time complement one another, for Apps subject is the role of Buddhist
thought in the European construction of Oriental Philosophy, while Lopezs is the
Wests discovery (or, as Lopez might have it, invention) of the idea of the Buddha
himself. The two works, however, despite a number of overlaps between them, resist
direct comparison. App offers us a tightly woven study in the history of ideas, while
Lopez guides us through a more impressionistic and personal florilegium of documents bearing on his topic.
Apps title echoes that of Roger-Pol Droits Le culte de n

eant.2 But whereas Droit
began his account with the state-of-play during the eighteenth century, and then was

1
See, above all, Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010), Richard Wagner and Buddhism (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2011), Schopenhauers
Kompass (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2011), and the authors English translation, Schopenhauers
Compass (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2014); Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and
the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the
Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Eugene Burnouf, Introduction to
the History of Indian Buddhism, trans. Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Katia Buffetrille (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
2
Roger-Pol Droit, Le culte du n

eant: Les philosophes et le Bouddha (Paris: Seuil, 1997), and
The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, trans. David Streight and Pamela

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460

Book Reviews

primarily concerned with developments during the nineteenth, this is long after the
1702 publication of the second edition of Pierre Bayles Dictionnaire historique et critique, with which App ends his tale. The point of departure for App is the Jesuit mission in sixteenth-century Japan, whose characterizations of Buddhist and other East
Asian religious traditions, he argues compellingly, cast a long shadow over the European engagement with Asian thought during the centuries that followed. This story
has been largely overlooked within both Buddhist Studies and European intellectual
history; Droits otherwise excellent bibliography of early modern European contributions to our knowledge of Buddhism, for instance, neglects this material completely.3
App interprets many of the sources he examines in the light of what he terms the
Arlecchino effect (11), referring to the Italian buffoon character who inspires hilarity
by mistakenly taking all that he encounters to be part of his own extended family. The
running gag begins, in this case, near the start of the story, when the famous missionary
Francis Xavier (150652) decides that the Japanese word for God, conforming to his
Christian conception of the Supreme Being, is Dainichi, in fact the Japanese name
for the cosmic Buddha Vairocana. Preaching the message, Dainichi wo ogami are!
(Pray to Vairocana!), he is understood by the Japanese, with their approval, to be a
Western (i.e., Indian) votary of Shingon Buddhism (14).
Within a few years, however, the Jesuits begin to comprehend the joke for which
they themselves are responsible. They decide to eliminate all use of possibly troublesome native terms from their tracts (Dainichi, for instance, is replaced by Dios [17,
47]), so that their Japanese writings are increasingly composed in a sort of creole, in
which Japanese verbs and connectives are used to link Portuguese and Latin nouns. At
the same time, they begin to conduct far-reaching research into the religions of Japan
and its neighbors, research that would inform both their creation of Japanese catechisms critical of Buddhism and Latin works destined for European readers. In the
process, some of the missionaries gain deep familiarity with the Japanese language
and sometimes classical Chinese as well (a notable and influential example is Joao
Rodrigues [15611633], chap. 8), and they benefit additionally from the collaboration
of several learned Japanese converts, for instance, the educated Tendai monk Paulo
Chozen (d. 1557; 3435), or the father-son team of doctors, Paulo and Vicente T
oin
(5359).
To understand the flow of ideas, however, it is essential to decipher the often
obscure correspondences among Japanese sources, concepts, and terms, and the European, mostly Latin, writings in which these are represented. For this, App finds his
rosetta stone (1820) in a number of interrelated documents of the late sixteenth
century (chaps. 57). Among them, there is the Latin Catechismus christianae fidei by
the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, published in Lisbon in 1586. To work out just how
its discussions of Buddhism are related to Japanese materials, App turns to an intriguing discovery of the early twentieth century, the Evora screen (1820, 6067, 7379,
etc.), a Japanese folding screen that had been brought to Portugal toward the end of the
sixteenth century and was found to be stuffed with Japanese writings as filler. Some of
Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). References herein will be to
the English edition.
3
Droit, Cult of Nothingness, 191258.

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History of Religions

461

these documents, it emerges, may be identified as lecture notes recording the lessons
on Japanese religion delivered by the Catholic convert Vicente T
oin, notes that in
some instances correspond closely enough to the contents of Valignanos catechism to
enable App to identify precisely the Japanese Buddhist ideas in question, and sometimes their textual sources as well. A luminous first principle named in the Latin text
Ixin turns out to be the One Mind (Jap. Isshin) encountered in many East Asian Buddhist traditions, but, in view of the details of its description here, almost certainly to be
identified with the teachings elaborated by the Chinese Chan master Zongmi (780
841) in his Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity and subsequently developed in the
lineage of his disciple Huangbo. Elsewhere, we find Jesuit discussions of the teaching
of this mystery to aspirants through problems posed by their superiors (48), certainly
the earliest Western references to ko
an practice in the Rinzai Zen sect.
The One Mind, identified with emptiness, Buddha-nature, and the final destiny of
all who attain enlightenment, was understood by the Jesuits to represent an essentially
amoral inner teaching of Buddhism, contrasted with the vulgar teaching that exerted
moral control through its promises and threats of rebirth in heaven or hell. What is crucial here is that the Jesuit discovery of the One Mind as first principle required that
they assimilate it, together with other Buddhist ideas, to the scholastic philosophy in
which they themselves had been educated. One Mind became the insentient prime
matter of the early Greek cosmologists, while the vulgar teachings notion of rebirth
was of course linked to Pythagoras. The Arlecchino effect reasserted itself in full
force, and throughout the seventeenth century European speculations became increasingly extravagant. Thanks to Rodriguess discoveries concerning the original religions of Asia, it became clear to many that Noahs evil son Ham, who was thought to
be none other than Zoroaster (1013), was responsible for the whole mass of Asian
idolatry, together with its roots in the infernal conception of empty prime matter.
Ham/Zoroaster, heir to the perverse doctrines stemming from Adams son Cain, was
the direct source of the poison that later came to be promulgated throughout Asia by
the Buddha. One of the most eccentric geniuses of the time, Athanasius Kircher
(160180), even extended this reasoning to the Americas, so that Christianity faced
not numerous paganisms, but in fact and in essence just one throughout the entire
world (11921). Thanks to the interventions, which soon followed, of the great French
explorer of the Mughal empire, Francois Bernier (162588), it was possible to assimilate all of this to the teaching of the Upaniads and Indo-Persian Sufism as well (chaps.
1213). The Oriental Philosophy (singular) that would exercise a continuing fascination through to the nineteenth century and beyond was thus born.
The story told here is wonderfully engaging, enlivened by Apps dogged antiquarian researches, which take him to his authors original manuscripts and annotated copies in order to uncover the precise genealogies of the ideas in play. The Cult of Emptiness is a model of scholarly detective work. That some of the thinkers App discusses
were so bold as they were in their condemnation of the Buddhas lies, given their
own capacity for breathtakingly audacious confabulations, may seem almost laughable to us today, but we must recall, too, that this was but one facet of the voluntarism
with which early modern Europe asserted its authority over the entire planet.
Just as App echoes Roger-Pol Droits title, so Lopez mirrors in some respects his
point of departure, namely, the initial European response to the Buddha as an idol

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Book Reviews

(cf. Droits The Cult of Nothingness [2003], chap. 1, The Faceless Idol). True to a
device that he has effectively deployed in earlier work, Lopez organizes each of his
key chapters around a theme encapsulated in a single term: The Idol, The Myth,
The Man, The Text. Of course, the history is by no means so neat as Lopezs linear progression might suggest; idol and myth came into European consciousness
almost together, and occasionally glimpses of the man as well.4 Although strict historical progression, though by no means ignored, is not really Lopezs principle of organization, his approach permits him the liberty to weave and sometimes digress in relation to his chosen themes, so as to introduce general background or anecdotes of
interest, and to keep the readers pleasure always in the foreground. The first chapter,
for instance, on The Idol, offers Lopez the occasion for forays into the history of
idolatry and iconoclasm in Western religions (2634), the art historical thesis that
Buddhism was initially aniconic (3738), and the rituals used by contemporary Buddhists for the consecration of their sacred images (4345). Likewise, chapter 2, The
Myth, introduces the figure of the Buddhas apostate cousin Devadatta, his impalement in hell, and the probability that early Catholic missionaries in Southeast Asia,
with their tortured savior hanging from their necks, were presumed by local Buddhists
to be his devotees (8187).
Despite the many excellences of Lopezs workthe considerable learning it represents, its elegant structure and entertaining styleall of which merit much praise, I
nevertheless found its overall thrust to be in some respects tendentious. Although
Lopez cites and discusses an impressive number of the relevant early modern texts,
From Stone to Flesh should by no means be taken as comprehensive in its coverage.
The early seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuits in Tibet, for instance, are altogether
missing. Although they add further confusions to those already documented by Lopez
in this period, they also betray an unusual sympathy for the Tibetan Buddhists they
sought to understand, and one of their number, Est
evao Cacela, even began to appreci
akyamuni was indeed a man, not merely a mythological being. While Lopez
ate that S
affirms that his book ends where other histories of the European encounter with Buddhism generally begin (4), many aspects of the story have been long available in
scholarship on the writings of European travelers and missionaries.5 Lopezs book has
the merit of providing a generous collection of pertinent passages culled from the
works concerned, presenting them with his own commentaries. It offers a rich selection, but it does so, well, selectively.
In effect, Lopez omits elements of the larger background that put the story he tells
into a somewhat different light. Beginning with the chaos of late medieval and early
4

Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1988), chap. 3, The Buddhafrom Myth to History, is suggestive of Lopezs passage
from myth to man, but Almond is interested in mid-nineteenth-century developments in British orientalism, a later phase of the history than that with which Lopez is concerned.
5
It strikes me as unfortunate that the late Donald F. Lachs opus magnum, Asia in the Making
of Europe, 9 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 196593), is nowhere referenced.
Although Lach does not treat all of the many discussions of the Buddha and Buddhism found in
his sources in a fully detailed and sustained manner, most of the sources drawn upon by Lopez,
and others besides, are discussed there in the larger context of Europes growing awareness of
Asia during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

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History of Religions

463

modern European impressions of oriental idols and culminating, almost teleologically,

with Eugene Burnoufs characterization of the Buddha as a historical individual who
taught a rational and humane philosophy (20611), Lopezs tale gains in conviction
by ignoring crucial aspects of Asias Buddhist past. Thus, when at the very end of the
work Lopez reintroduces the thirteenth-century Venetian traveler Marco Polo, he suggests that it is somehow odd that Marco knew already that Singhalese and Chinese recognized the same object of faith: He understood, it seems, that the idol worshipped in
China was the same as the idol worshipped in Ceylon (229). But this appears exceptional only if, as occurs here, the story is largely removed from the history of Buddhism in Asia. For throughout much of the first millennium CE and the first centuries
of the second, a rich network of religious, political, and commercial relations linked
Buddhists from many parts of Asia, who at the time clearly recognized that they were
in some sense co-religionists despite differences of local custom and practice. Thus,
we find Kashmiri scholars in the court of the Xixia kingdom and Bengalis in Nanzhao,
paintings of Chinas sacred Wutai mountains in Pala palm-leaf manuscripts, and an
Indian whose teacher was Indonesian voyaging to preach in Tibet, besides many other
examples.6 Between this period and the European Age of Exploration, when Lopezs
story takes off, dramatic changes rent the fabric of this richly intercommunicative
Buddhist world: Buddhism vanished in India, and Central Asia and maritime Southeast Asia became increasingly the domains of Islam. The comedic misunderstandings
of Buddhist commonalities as seen by European travelers and missionaries were in
part reflections of this fragmentation, but Marco Polo arrived early enough to catch the
last glimmers of the pan-Asian Buddhist networks that extended by stages from Ferghana to Japan. And among Buddhists, indeed, these were never altogether forgotten;
the Tibetan historian Taranatha (15751634), for instance, still knew that his religion,
besides being of Indian origin and still present in lands neighboring TibetNepal,
China, and Mongoliahad spread throughout Southeast Asia, including the kingdoms
of Burma, Sumatra, Java, Cambodia, and Champa, in what is today Vietnam.
Moreover, in the conceptual worlds of these Asian Buddhists, it is not at all clear that
the distinctions upon which Lopez rests his casethose among idol, myth, and man
had the force he wishes to impart to them. For reading traditional Asian accounts of the
Buddha, such as those of the Ming-dynasty monk Baocheng or his near-contemporary
in Tibet, Nanam Tsunpa, we find that, although myth and miracle are not wanting, a
human Buddha teaching human disciples is everywhere in view. The fact that traditional Buddhists accepted the marvelous by no means warrants the inference that they
ignored the homely and common. And it was in virtue of the humanity present in the
Buddhist sources themselves that Burnouf could find the human Buddha he did.
Lopezs admiration of Burnouf, for his pioneering and prescient reading of these
sources, is in my view fully justified, but his insistence that, thanks to Burnouf, a new
Buddha will emerge, one who had not existed before, one born in Europe, different
from the Buddha of Asia (4) strikes me as overdrawn.

6
Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations,
6001400 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), offers a valuable contribution to our
understanding of Buddhist international networks during the period concerned.

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Book Reviews

Part of what troubles me in Lopezs account is the determination with which he

inscribes Burnouf as the unique hero of the story (albeit with nods to Hodgson, Csoma,
and some others); mimicking Newton, Burnouf arrives and there is light. But, without
diminishing Burnouf, I am inclined to see him less as a brilliant lone star than as a particularly bright member of the mid-nineteenth-century constellation of scholars who
collectively gave birth to the modern academic study of Buddhism. Burnoufs colleague Stanislas Julien and student Edouard Foucaux both merit more than the oneliners they receive here. Nor does it seem to me that Alexander Csoma de Kor
os and
I. J. Schmidt, both publishing during the 1830s, quite receive their due in Lopezs telling, though admittedly their indications concerning the Buddha are inconveniently
scattered throughout their works on grammar and other topics. (Both were clearly
aware, however, that buddha has a general cosmological reference and yet also speci
akyamuni, a historical person of Indian antiquity; and both clearly use
fically denotes S
Buddhism to refer to a single religion distributed throughout much of Central, East,
and Southeast Asia.) Nor do we find any mention of the mid-nineteenth-century specialists of Buddhism working in the Russian Empireabove all Vasily Vasilyev and
Anton Schiefnerwho, in the decade or so following Burnoufs Histoire, began to
use Tibetan sources to reenvision the history of Indian Buddhism in ways that Burnouf
himself could not, given the materials at his disposal.
At the same time, we must recognize that Europeans, even after Burnouf, were by
no means immune to the magic and mystery that Lopez regards Burnouf as having dispelled, and I am not speaking just of those on the occult fringe, or of the emerging circle of Western Buddhist enthusiasts. Tolstoy, writing in 1891, listed the wonder-filled
Lalitavistara, in Foucauxs translation, as one of the 50 books that influenced him
most (enormous).7 And works such as novelist Claude Avelines La merveilleuse
l

egende de Siddh^
artha C
a^kya-mouni Bouddha (Paris, 1928) demonstrate that, among
artists at least, some preferred what we might term the John Ford School of Historiography: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
In his concluding chapter, Lopez writes that we make vain attempts to bring [the
Buddha] back to life by imagining that he understood quantum mechanics, imagining
that he taught mindfulness of the breath in order to reduce our blood pressure (229
30). In this, he once more echoes Droit, who says, Buddhism is first and foremost, for
us, a kind of therapy.8 And Lopez adds that, in discovering that underlying Asias
diverse myths and idols there was but a single Buddha, the human Buddha described
by Burnouf, we have lost something, the rich tapestry that was represented by the local
diversity of fo (Buddha in Chinese), hotoke (Japanese), sanggy

e (Tibetan), samana
Gotam (Thai), and more. But at this point I am inclined to respond, What do you
mean we, kemosabe? For Buddhist studies as I know it today is very much interested
in the local and the particular, examining Inner Mongolian revivals, the dream-worlds
of a medieval Japanese monk, womens rituals in Ladakh, the specificities of a bodhisattva cult in Sri Lanka, and much more. And Buddhists today, as Lopez himself suggests (230), are also concerned with sustaining faith in their respective traditions,

7
8

Tolstoy Was Impressed, New York Times Book Review, April 2, 1978, 4.
Droit, Cult of Nothingness, 14.

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History of Religions

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whether those of the Pure Land sects of Japan, or of the Newar Tantric lineages of
Nepal, or of the Theravada monastic centers of Thailand. No doubt, there are nevertheless many contemporary readers whose pre-understandings of Buddhism correspond
with those of Lopezs weparticularly if they have been influenced by the Mind
and Life Institutebut in many cases, I suspect, he is preaching to the converted (who
will be pleased by his tale nonetheless).
Both of the books reviewed here are almost free from error, though a few minor corrections may nevertheless be proposed. In The Cult of Emptiness, the bibliography
lists Sydney Pollock (251) where Sheldon is the correct given name. (Perhaps this
is an example of the Arlecchino effect, considering that the director of They Shoot
Horses, Dont They? may have been what App had in mind.) A number of works
cited in the book are not entered into the bibliography: Shabistari 1880, which is given
under Mahmud (248); and Mahfuz-ul-Haq 1990, which is not given at all (no doubt
the intended reference is: M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq, trans. Majma-ul-Barain or the Mingling of the Two Oceans by Prince Muammad Dara Shik
uh [Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1929; repr. 1990]). And chapter 16 begins incomprehensibly: Battles
between exclusivists who believed that the Judeo-Christian tradition has a monopoly
of truth and exclusivists who rejected this notion dot Church history from the early
centuries and pertained to evaluations both of religions and philosophies (209).
In From Stone to Flesh, I note the following points: The most famous Buddha
image in Tibet . . . was said to have been carved when the Buddha, or Buddha-to-be,
was twelve years of age (40). Tibetan sources, by contrast, state that it was a portrait
statue of the Buddha, divinely manufactured after his enlightenment, but proportioned
according to his size at twelve years as known through the testimony of his aunt
Prajapati. The famous monastery of Vikrama
sla was razed so effectively that its precise location has yet to be determined (57). In fact, it has been known for several
decades that the ruins of a major Buddhist vih
ara found in Antichak, Bhagalpur district, Bihar, are those of Vikrama
sla, and the Bihar state government as well as the
Archaeological Survey of India are currently investing considerably in its revival as a
pilgrimage and tourist destination. (The archeological work that established the identity of the site is treated in B. S. Verma, Antichak Excavations2 (19711981), Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India 102 [Archaeological Survey of India,
2011]).
While Lopez has made use of some of the surviving Tibetan texts authored by the
Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (10516) and conserved in the Jesuit Archive (ARSI)
in Rome, he nowhere mentions the thorough studies of these writings, including facsimiles of the original manuscripts, by Giuseppe Toscano.9 In citing one of Desideris
quotations from the Tibetan master Tsongkhapa (116 n. 54), Lopez refers to page 7
recto in the manuscript Goa 74 (ARSI), but in Toscanos edition (vol. 3, p. 72 for the
Tibetan and pp. 16869 for Toscanos Italian translation), the passage clearly appears
on page 11 recto.

Giuseppe Toscano, S.X., Opere Tibetane di Ippolito Desideri, 4 vols. (Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 198189).

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Book Reviews

466

Such small points aside, From Stone to Flesh is in all events a delight to read, and I
can recommend no better place to begin to explore the Wests struggle to come to
terms with the Buddha. Apps The Cult of Emptiness will claim a more specialized
readership. For all who have a serious interest in the intellectual history of the Western
engagement with Asian religions, however, it should be considered an essential text.

MATTHEW T. KAPSTEIN
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris
and University of Chicago

The One by Whom Scandal Comes. By RENE GIRARD. Translated by M. B. DEBEVOISE.

East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Pp. xii139. $19.95 (paper).
In the preface to this volume, Ren
e Girard assures us that the title The One by Whom
Scandal Comes does not refer to him. But we may be excused for wondering, since
even Girard felt compelled to clarify this point with Maria Stella Barberi, who suggested the title. It refers instead to Matthew 18:7, a verse Girard sees as one of the
clearest statements of the Gospels demythologizing project. As the New Revised
Standard Version has it (translating skandalon as stumbling block/s): Woe to the
world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but
woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!
The reception history of Girards writing in the English-speaking world is worth
mention here. Although he spent nearly his entire teaching career in American universities, his books have almost always appeared first in French. As a result, his books
have appeared out of order in America, with the English translations being published
in a different sequence from the original works. As a result, it is often difficult to trace
the development of Girards thought from his published works. To add to the confusion, many current Girardian scholars were former students who learned mimetic theory through contact with the man himself and not through his writing. In a way this situation reflects the messy crash landing in America of French literary theory as a
whole, which Girard helped facilitate by organizing the infamous Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium held at Johns Hopkins in 1966, which
introduced Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and of course Jacques Derrida to a wide
English-speaking audience.
Regardless, Girards ideas have found enthusiastic reception in unexpected and
often incongruous audiences: he is revered in the circles of Latin and African American liberation theologians on one hand and of LAcad
emie francaise and the Modern
Language Association on the other; he has influenced thinkers as disparate as the hardnosed libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Italian polymath and publisher
Roberto Calasso. But in the discipline of history of religions, which more or less corresponds to what he calls anthropology in his books, Girards work is largely relegated
to preliminary remarks (in which it is quickly dismissed) that may precede a serious
discussion of sacrifice or myth. Girard has little to say about his admirers, but he positively relishes his position as an outsider to what he regards as the mainstream study of

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