Swans to Lake #1

[Guest guest]

Thanks to those who expressed an interest in some history, here is the first

installment. Glo

 

Excerpts based on "How the Swans Came to the Lake" a narrative history of

Buddhism in America, by Rick Fields.

 

(An extremely condensed background from the first 3 chapters.)

 

 

While the main focus of this book is a history of how Buddhism came to be

known in America, the first 2400 years since Buddha's enlightenment resulted

in no real exchange between the Western mind and Buddhism. Scattered

accounts and references by traders and early Christian missionaries to the

East were predominantly negative, typical of the exploitive era of European

Colonialism in the Americas and Africa. The Asian culture fared somewhat

better as the Rationalists of the 18th century saw China and Japan as

orderly and civilized. The translations of Confucius, furnished by Jesuits,

confirmed this view among Europeans.

 

The founder and principal force behind the first systematic study of Indian

literature was William Jones, a lawyer and linguist, whose appointment to

India was held up by George III, due to Jones support of the American

colonists during the Revolutionary War. While still at Oxford, he had

learned Persian and he was the first to translate Hafiz and Rumi into

English. Within a few months of his arrival in India, he invited 30 English

administrators to form the basis for The Asiatick Society, whose weekly

papers were soon published in their Journal. The men enlisted by Jones were

all amateurs, otherwise busy with their respective professions. Thanks to

the encouragement of Warren Hastings, then governor-general, there was

enthusiastic support within the society for Indian religion and literature,

but these men were the exception of their times. Charles Wilkins translated

the Bhagavad-Geeta, the first directly Sanskrit to English work published.

Many Persian translations from the Sanskrit texts were made available in

English.

 

When Wilkins left India, Jones labored to learn Sanskrit with no dictionary

even available to him. His early works were the hymns to to Hindu gods like

Kama, Narayana, Indra and Sarasvati, which Jones turned into English poems

based on classical verse forms used by Pope, Gray, and Milton. (These

"Hymns" were widely reprinted later in American magazines and made a deep

impression on the young Emerson when he read them in 1820.) His next major

effort was the "Gitagovinda," a tale of the loves of Crishna and Radha, or

the attraction between the divine goodness and the human soul. As a judge,

Jones primary task was the translation of the Ordinances of Manu, for Jones

had the novel idea that the British might actually govern by Indian laws in

so far as they did not conflict. He soon learned that Manu was the "Hindu

Adam," the first man, and the laws he had received governed the cosmos was

well as society and these formed the basis of the Hindu world view. His

dedication to this lengthy work made such a favorable impression, that a

friendly Brahmin shared with him the natakas. Of these plays, the best of

these was said to be "Shakuntala" by Kalidasa, and upon reading it Jones was

convinced it was one of the great masterpieces of world literature. When the

translation reached Europe in 1789 it created a sensation. Incredibly, most

Indians had not heard of it either, and its re-discovery sparked a national

renaissance.

 

As Jones's knowledge of Sanskrit increased, he began to see the

correspondences between it and many of the 28 languages he had learned. He

was the first to propose that a common Indo-European family of languages had

emerged from some ancestral source which no longer existed. Just as the Manu

translation was completed, Jones died at age 48, in 1794. He had only been

in India 12 years, but the mine of Sanskrit had been opened to the West.

Jones himself compared this to the importance of the re-discovery of Greek

literature and predicted an Oriental renaissance, infused by the vitality of

this ancient wisdom. Jones had begun to understand Hinduism, but the world's

most learned Orientalist was not aware that India had once been the home of

a great Buddhist civilization as well. Buddhism had long since disappeared

from India by the time the English rulers replaced the Moslems, though the

Journals did carry some fairly reliable reports from Ceylon and Tibet.

 

The issues of the Journal "Asiatick Researches" were a primary source of

information and interest in Eastern culture, comparative religion and

literature. Translations of them into other European languages were made,

contributing to German Romanticism. The spark for an American interest

subsequently to become known as The Transcendentalists ( Emerson and

Thoreau) grew from reading the works in translations inspired by Jones and

his Royal Asiatick Society.

[Guest guest]

This is a great summary, energetically and well written !! Thanks very much!

 

--Greg

[Guest guest]

Thanks, Glo! Please do continue.