ABSTRACT

Some of the first scholars of Buddhism were nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury British scholars who brought to the study of Buddhism a range of concerns typical of Buddhist modernism in its formative years. As Philip Almond, David McMahan and others have shown, mastery over texts was crucial to the formulation of disciplinary standards for early Buddhist studies in the West. T. W. Rhys Davids (1843-1922), who founded the Pāli Text Society, C. A. F. Rhys Davids (1857-1942), B. C. Law (1862-1969), I. B. Horner (1896-1981), and other early Western scholars of Buddhism were textual scholars who gave pride of place to the primary sources that they collected and mastered. The Buddhism thus constituted as an object of study was almost entirely textual, and based on a select corpus of texts at that. Cosmological texts that assume the reality of various spirit beings, deities, and demons, and ritual texts that provide means of controlled interaction with such beings, did not garner the same attention as texts dedicated to ethical matters and the cultivation of inner states of mind in meditation. As Charles Hallisey points out with regard to T. W. Rhys Davids, this imbalance in the kinds of texts prioritized can be traced in some cases to indigenous priorities and to the kinds of texts that Theravāda Buddhist collaborators shared with Western Buddhist scholars (Hallisey 1995: 47). In any case, the prioritizing of certain texts along with the nineteenth-century mystique of origins made it possible for many early scholars of Buddhism to idealize the Buddha as a figure whose teachings emphasized instrumental rationality, individualism, gender egalitarianism, and other Western Enlightenment values.