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Translating Christianity and Buddhism: Catholic Missionaries in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Burma
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2017
Abstract
Catholic mission in Burma during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides evidence for the importance of translation as an element of both Christian evangelism and apologetic. In Burma missionaries were faced by a varied linguistic environment, which became more complex over time. An effective mission required Burmese and the two Karen dialects. Additionally, missionaries were pastors to existing Portuguese Christian communities. British expansion during the nineteenth century added English and Tamil to these pastoral languages. English also became a language of education, Christian debate and mediation. Those wishing to understand Buddhism through its canonical texts had to acquire, or borrow from Buddhist monks, expertise in Pali. This translation and interpretation of Buddhist texts became a tool for both evangelization and Christian defence. In this latter role, the manner in which Buddhist terms were translated or employed became significant within wider European debates concerning the relationship of Christianity to Buddhism.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017
Footnotes
The assistance of the Scouloudi Foundation in providing a Historical Award to undertake the initial research for this article is gratefully acknowledged.
References
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34 ‘Paul Bigandet (1813–1894)’.
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50 Ibid. 265; Bigandet, Life, 53 n. 49, 182.
51 Ibid. 2 n.1, 9 n. 12, 63 n. 55, 101, 227. But in his article, he used Phra as equivalent to Buddha and Phralaong to represent the bodhisatta state: Bigandet, ‘Principaux points’, 89.
52 Bigandet, Life, 2 n. 1, 286–7.
53 Hallisey, ‘Roads Taken’, 40.
54 Bigandet, Life, vii, 285. Max Müller names Bigandet when discussing the habit among missionaries of emphasizing the ‘elevated, pure and humanizing character’ of Buddhism, only then to bring it low: Stone, Essential, 81–2.
55 Bigandet, Life, 2 n. 1, 176 n. 93, 285–6, 312. Sangermano similarly relied on the classical texts rather than ‘the tales and reports of the common people’: History, xxxix.
56 Harris, British Encounter, 28, 51, 104–5. Protestant writers often had their own particular model in mind, in which comparisons of Buddhism to Protestant and Catholic Christianity were ‘from the perspective of a protestant representation of Catholicism as a degenerate form of Christianity’: Hallisey, ‘Roads Taken’, 46. The American Baptist James Knowles described Buddhism as a religion in which ‘[t]he sacred books are sealed from the eyes of all but the learned and the priesthood, by the secrecy of a learned language; and little is known of the established religion, except in popular fables, and external rites’: Knowles, Memoir, 316. The description could equally be of Catholicism.
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