Strangers at their approach fall prostrate with their heads to the ground, and kiss him with incredible Veneration, which is no other than that which is performed upon the Pope of Rome; so that hence the fraud and deceit of the Devil may easily and plainly appear, who by his innate malignity and hatred, in way of abuse hath transferred, as he hath done all the other Mysteries of the Christian Religion, the Veneration which is due unto the Pope of Rome, the only Vicar of Christ on Earth, unto the superstitious Worship of barbarous people.
Whence as the Christians call the Roman High-Priest Father of Fathers, so these Barbarians term their false Deity the Great Lama, that is, the Great High-Priest, and the Lama of Lamas, that is, the High-Priest of High-Priests, because that from him, as from a certain Fountain, floweth the whole form and mode of their Religion, or rather mad and brain-sick idolatry, whence also they call him the Eternal Father.33
This is an extreme form of the theory of demonic plagiarism articulated by Justin Martyr and other church fathers during the second and third centuries, in which any similarity between ritual elements of the Church and those of rival cults is attributed to the work of the devil. In many cases, components of the Christian rituals were derived from these very same rival cults, such that the doctrine of demonic plagiarism served as a means of appropriating the purity of the origin, consigning the other to the corrupt state of the derivative.34
Why must this appearance be demonic? The answer derives in part from the Christian Church’s claim to historical and ontological particularity. It is the task of the missionary to transmit the word of that particularity to those realms where it has not yet spread, to diffuse it from its unique point of origin. To carry its accoutrements from Rome in a time and to a place they could not possibly have been taken before, and to find them already there, suggests the workings of a power beyond history, which could only be seen as demonic. But what is described in this passage is a visual image: the dress and the liturgy were derived from their authentic source; they are a copy. It is as if the priest arrived in distant China only to see himself reflected in a mirror, with the inversion of the image so typically ascribed to the demonic. He sees the very aim of his long journey, what he hopes will have been when the last domain of the globe has been brought to the true faith—namely, that as a result of his ministry the bodies of the once idolatrous Orientals will have worn the vestments of the Christian father and will have performed the liturgy of the holy church. But to the priest, the image of the Buddhist monk at the first encounter appears to already be what it can only become later. This distant goal, a mirage of the maturation of his power, has already been achieved. The monk stands before the priest, as if he were looking in a mirror.
Unlike the infant in the “mirror stage” who regards the integrated vision of his body in the mirror with jubilation, for the priest it is a moment of dread; he recognizes the reflected image, as the child does not, as a trap and a decoy. What is monstrous is not the presence of the Buddhist monk, but the priest’s identification with the monk’s image, “with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.”35 The priest sees identity where it is absent: the dress and liturgies of Buddhism, whether Chinese or Tibetan, are not the same as those of a Roman Catholic priest. But for such a perception to occur, the fragmented body of the church must imagine itself complete, already present before its arrival, in the regalia of the Lamaist priest. The original has arrived too late, after its image, and this late arrival has as its consequence both self-constitution and alienation. The Catholic priest simultaneously identifies with the image of his foreign counterpart and armors himself against it by condemning it as demonic. It is as if the image of the Buddhist, the counterpart, throws the priest forward in time, out of the “natural” dissemination of the word, projecting him out of the process of conversion. The missionary’s confrontation with his Tibetan counterpart is then, like the mirror stage, “high tragedy: a brief moment of doomed glory, a paradise lost.”36
Even at the Qing court, a Portuguese missionary to China was quoted as saying of Tibetan rituals, “There is not a piece of dress, not a sacerdotal function, not a ceremony of the court of Rome, which the Devil has not copied in this country.”37 Thus this Roman Catholic genealogy of Tibetan Buddhism was not merely a case of pre-Enlightenment demonology, it persisted into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.38
As early as the mid-eighteenth century Protestants were comparing Tibetan Buddhism with Roman Catholicism, but for a different reason. Their intent was not to account for the possibility of similarity between idolaters and Roman Catholics, as Catholic authors had sought to do, but to claim the necessity of such similarities, because Roman Catholics were, in effect, idolaters as well. Thus the English Protestant Thomas Astley’s A New Collection of Voyages and Travels Consisting of The most Esteemed Relations which have been hitherto published in any Language Comprehending Everything Remarkable in its Kind in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, published between 1745 and 1747, is in many ways similar to the French Catholic Picart’s The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, which was published during the same decade. Yet Astley draws conclusions different from Picart’s in his discussion of the Tartar court in China:
From the above Accounts of the Religion of Fo [Buddha], however imperfect, or disguised, the Reader may perceive a most surprizing Conformity between it, and that of Rome: We shall not say of Christians in general, although it is circumstanced with an incarnate God, a Saviour, a Holy Spirit, a Ternary, which some of the Missioners consider as an Emblem of the Trinity, and others a Trinity in Effect. However that may be, we find, in this Religion, every individual article, great and small, of which the Romish system is composed: Such as the Worship of Images, praying to Saints, and for the Dead; Purgatory, Pardons, Indulgences, Confession, Absolution, Penance; Exorcism, the Treasure of the Church, Merits and Works of Supererogation; the Pretence to work Miracles; a Hierarchy, or different Order of Priests, with a Pope at their Head; Monks and begging Friars, Nuns; in short, every Thing in Speculation and Practice down to Holy-Water and the Beads. They have not, indeed, a Wafer-God, which they first adore, and then devour; but they have a living Divinity in human Form [the Dalai Lama] transubstantiated, or transformed, as they believe, from Time to Time; who dwells among them personally, and is therefore, we think, a much more rational Object of Worship.
The Missioners, confounded at this exact Conformity of the Romish Faith, with a Religion which is confessedly idolatrous, and one continued Scene of Priestcraft, use several Arts to conceal the Resemblance; some mentioning one Part of its Doctrines, others different Parts, none the Whole; and those who are most copious on the Occasion, recite them in a loose, scattered Way, without any Method, or Order. After all these Disguisements, the Resemblance appears so glaring, that many, to account-for it, have made a hardy Step, and pretend, that it is a Corruption of Christianity, meaning the Romanish Religion. Some affirm, that the Nestorians converted the People of Tibet and Tartary about the seventh and eighth Centuries: Others will have it, that the Faith was preached there in the Time of the Apostles. We call this a hardy Step, because they know, that according to the Chinese History, Fo’s Religion sprung-up above a thousand years before Christ.39
Astley thus catalogs the similarities, which he claims the Catholics try to hide, finding the religion of the Buddha and the Romish faith identical in every way, except for that most preposterous article of faith, the Eucharist, which is unique to Catholics. He dismisses the possibility of historical influence, noting that Buddhism antedates Christianity (although Buddhism was introduced in Tibet only in the seventh century). For Astley, it is the very resemblance of the two that accounts for the failure of the Roman Catholic missions in China and Tibet: the Buddhists would gain nothing by converting:
But the greatest Security the Bonzas [Buddhist monks] can have against the Progress of Popery among them, is the great Conformity between the two Rel
igions: For, by the Change, their Followers see they will be just in the same Condition they were before; there being nothing of Novelty to induce them, excepting what arises from the Difference of a few Forms. Besides, they must naturally have a greater Respect for the Saints, Images, and Ceremonies of their own, than those of a foreign Manufacture.40
The apparent similarities between Lamaism and Roman Catholicism continued to fascinate Protestants into the twentieth century. In 1901 Dr. Susie C. Rijnhart, a Dutch missionary who had traveled in Tibet from 1895 to 1899, wrote, “No more interesting question offers itself to Christian scholarship than that concerning the resemblances between the ritual of the Gelupa [sic] sect and that still in vogue in the Roman Catholic and Anglican branches of Christendom.”41 But the question had already been considered in depth, especially in Britain during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Buddhism enjoyed great popularity then, as evidenced by the success of Edwin Arnold’s life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia. The Buddha was seen in such works as the greatest philosopher of India’s Aryan past, and his teachings were regarded as a complete philosophical and psychological system, one based on reason and restraint, and opposed to ritual, superstition, and sacerdotalism, demonstrating how the individual could live a moral life without the trappings of institutional religion. Standing in sharp contrast to the spiritual and sensuous exoticism of modern India, this Buddhism was also a fitting candidate for classical status because, like the civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and unlike Hinduism, the Buddhism of India was long dead.42
The leading British Orientalists of the late Victorian period saw in Buddhism a rationalist and humanist reaction against the priestcraft of sixth-century B.C.E. India, subsumed under yet another of the “isms” of the Western study of Asia, Brahmanism. “Being opposed to all sacerdotalism and ceremonial observances, it abolished, as far as possible, the sacrificial system of the Brāhmans, and rejected the terrible methods of self-torture, maintaining that a life of purity and morality was better than all the forms and ceremonies of the Vedic ritual.”43 Early Buddhism was thus consistently, and mistakenly, portrayed as lacking any element of ritual; ignored, for example, were the ordination ceremonies for monks and nuns; the communal confession of infractions of the monastic code, and the ceremonial conclusion of the retreat at the end of the rainy season, all said to have been sanctioned by the Buddha. As Monier-Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, described it in his 1888 Duff Lectures, “It had no hierarchy in the proper sense of that term—no church, no priests, no true form of prayer, no religious rites, no ceremonial observances.”44
Among the factors contributing to such a portrayal was the Victorian interpreters’ almost exclusive reliance on the texts selected and edited by the Pali Text Society (and then translated in Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series and the Pali Text Society’s Sacred Books of the Buddhists series), which were thought to constitute the canon of primitive Buddhism. This portrayal, moreover, supported the interpreters’ comparative model, in which the Buddha’s rejection of sacerdotalism could be interpreted as foreshadowing a similar rejection in the West during the Reformation. As Müller wrote, “The ancient history of Brahmanism leads on to Buddhism, with the same necessity with which mediaeval Romanism led to Protestantism.”45 The point was made more emphatically and extensively by James Freeman Clarke in his Ten Great Religions in the chapter “Buddhism, or the Protestantism of the East”:
Why call Buddhism the Protestantism of the East, when all its external features so much resemble those of the Roman Catholic Church?
We answer: Because deeper and more essential relations connect Brahmanism and the Romish Church, and the Buddhist system with Protestantism. The human mind in Asia went through the same course of experience, afterward repeated in Europe. It protested, in the interest of humanity, against the oppression of the priestly caste. . . .
Buddhism in Asia, like Protestantism in Europe, is a revolt of nature against spirit, of humanity against caste, of individual freedom against the despotism of an order, of salvation by faith against salvation by sacraments. . . . Finally, Brahmanism and the Roman Catholic Church are more religious; Buddhism and Protestant Christianity, more moral.46
The rise of interest in Buddhism in England during the last half of the nineteenth century coincided with the “No Popery” movement, which was marked by the Murphy riots of 1866 to 1871 and the wide popularity of works such as Richard Whately’s Essays on the Errors of Romanism (1856) and The Confessional Unmasked, distributed to each member of Parliament in 1865 by the Protestant Evangelical Mission and Electoral Union.47
It is against the background of original Buddhism and anti-Papism that the Protestant discourse on Lamaism must be placed: Lamaism, with its devious and corrupt priests and vapid sacerdotalism, would be condemned as the most degenerate form of Buddhism (if it was a form of Buddhism at all) in the decades just after Roman Catholicism was being scourged in England, in the decades before the turn of the century and the 1903 invasion of Tibet, when British troops under the command of Colonel Younghusband marched on Lhasa to demand trade privileges.
In 1877 Thomas W. Rhys Davids, the nineteenth century’s leading British scholar of Buddhism and the founder of the Pali Text Society, produced a popular manual on Buddhism. It was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge as part of its Non-Christian Religious Systems series. (Rhys Davids was the son of a Welsh Congregationalist minister.) Near the end of the book Rhys Davids considers “developments in doctrine” beyond those in the Pali canon, the locus of which was interchangeably termed “primitive Buddhism,” “true Buddhism,” or “original Buddhism.” He writes:
The development of Buddhist doctrine which has taken place in the Panjab, Nepal, and Tibet is exceedingly interesting, and very valuable from the similarity it bears to the development which has taken place in Christianity in the Roman Catholic countries. It has resulted at last in the complete establishment of Lāmāism, a religion not only in many points different from, but actually antagonistic to, the primitive system of Buddhism; and this is not only in its doctrine, but also in its church organization.48
Two comparisons are drawn here, one of similarity and one of contrast. The value of developments in Buddhist doctrine lies in their similarity to the changes undergone by Christianity in those countries that remain Roman Catholic. At the same time, Lamaism is contrasted with primitive Buddhism, such that Lamaism is seen as not merely different from but inimical to the doctrine and organization of primitive Buddhism, now long past. As Monier-Williams said, “In truth, Tibetan Buddhism is so different from every other Buddhistic system that it ought to be treated of separately in a separate volume.”49
Rhys Davids’s most sustained comparison of Roman Catholicism and Lamaism appears in his 1881 Hibbert Lectures, “Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Some Points in the History of Indian Buddhism.” There he provides a full page of parallels, all of which constitute “one of the most curious facts in the whole history of the world.” “[E]ach with its services in dead languages, with choirs and processions and creeds and incense, in which the laity are spectators only; each with its mystic rites and ceremonies performed by shaven priests in gorgeous robes; . . . each, even ruled over by a Pope, with a triple tiara on his head and the sceptre of temporal power in his hand, the representative on earth of an eternal Spirit in the heavens!”50
The litany of parallels is now familiar. Like Thomas Astley a century before, the late Victorian interpreters of Buddhism to the West, especially the British and the Americans, no longer held to the view that the apparent similarities between Lamaism and Romanism were due to direct historical contact between the two.51 Instead, Rhys Davids explains, in a vocabulary of violation, mixing begets mixing:
Each had its origin at a time when the new faith was adopted by the invading hordes of barbarian men bursting in upon an older, a more advanced civilization—when men in body, but children in i
ntellect, quick to feel emotion, and impregnated with Animistic fallacies, became at once the conquerors and the pupils of men who passed through a long training in religious feeling and in philosophical reasoning. Then do we find that strange mixture of speculative acuteness and emotional ignorance; of earnest devotion to edification, and the blindest confidence in erroneous methods; of real philanthropy, and a priestly love of power; of unhesitating self-sacrifice, and the most selfish struggles for personal pre-eminence, which characterize the early centuries of Roman Catholicism and Tibetan Lāmaism alike.52
Whether or not the genealogical view put forward by the Roman Catholic missionaries anticipated the anthropological theory of diffusionism, the Protestant interpreters held firmly to a variation of the theory that diffusionism briefly replaced: the “comparative method,” made famous by Sir James Frazer, in which it was postulated that all societies develop according to a similar pattern, and that each is distinguished by the stage it occupies in the continuum of development and the rate at which it progresses along it. The comparative method was so named because of its claim that societies at the same stage of development, regardless of their location in time and place, share the same characteristics, allowing knowledge of one to inform analysis of another. Such a theory cast primitive societies as contemporary reminders of the archaic stages through which Western civilization had passed, and from which the savages themselves, with the encouragement and support of the West, would eventually emerge. That Frazer’s comparative method made its mark on Buddhist Studies is evident from this 1896 statement by Rhys Davids:
For it is precisely in India that for us Westerns the evolution of religious beliefs is most instructive. It can be traced there with so much completeness and so much clearness; we can follow it there with so much independence of judgement and so great an impartiality; and it runs, in spite of the many differences, on general lines so similar to the history of religion in the West, that the lessons to be learnt there are of the highest value. . . . Yet nowhere else do we find a system at once so similar to our own in the stages and manner of its growth, and so interestingly and absolutely antagonistic to our own in the ultimate conclusions it has reached.53
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