Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol

Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol is an anthology of early European writers on the Buddha. Donald Lopez presents us with first-hand accounts of the ways in which the Buddha entered the Western imagination, taken from a wide variety of authors: everyone from shipwrecked sailors and missionaries to diamond merchants and scholars. These diachronic selections range from one paragraph in length up to eighteen pages. They begin in 215 CE with St. Clement of Alexandria and end in 1844 with Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien. Lopez’s reason to end with Burnouf is that the “human and humane” Buddha we are all familiar with was born from Burnouf’s writings (8). Before the nineteenth century, “Europeans regarded the Buddha with profound suspicion. He was an idol worshipped by heathens.... [and one] known by many names” (2). Lopez introduces each selection with a headnote, signaling “the traditional referent for a garbled or fanciful episode in the Buddha’s life” (5). Through the headnotes of each narrative, we learn about the production and circulation of knowledge on the Buddha—or however he was known then—in early Europe.

Art · Art history · Buddhism · Gautama Buddha · Literature · Narrative · Paragraph · Theology · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law · Philosophy