Jesuit Orientalism; - Ines G. Županov

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corruptions were usually attributed to the work of the Devil and to the “perfidy” of the
Brahmans. This kind of approach, based on a neo-scholastic Aristotelian grid, led to a
permanent mistrust of indigenous texts. Even those Jesuits who were Orientalist in the
primary meaning of the word, that is, those who were proficient in Asian languages used more
often their erudition and analysis to refute concepts and meanings rather than to explain them.
The wealth of accumulated knowledge, however, enabled the Jesuit writers to compare
and collate data, even when they were dismissed as unreliable. Queiros‟s wobbly description
of Sri Lankan heathenism is full of fictitious renditions of myths and events, and yet, at least
in fragments, we can identify religious practices attested by anthropologists and contemporary
students of Sri Lankan culture. Queiros‟s most important “ethnographic” achievement is his
effort at piecing together the origin, the diffusion and the founding myths of what he calls the
“sect of Buddum”. Just because Buddhism was propelled, after Orientalist scholars
watermarked its “authentic” textual sources in the 19 th century, into the category of a “world”
religion, it is quite erroneous to say that “Buddhism had only recently [early 19 th c.] been
recognized as „the same‟ tradition existing in diverse regions of South, Southeast, East and
Central Asia”. 46 Queiros knew well that Buddhism was a transnational “sect”, extending over
most of the known Asian countries. 47
“And it has been observed that the Ganêzes of Ceylon, the Talpoys of Arracan, Pegu, Siam
and other neighboring Realms, as well as the Lamazes of Tartry agree with the Bonzes of
China and Japan in the essentials of their sect and profession, it is easy to understand that the
Buddum of Ceylon, the Fô of Kina, the Xaka of Japan is the same as the Xekia of India, for
the word Buddum is only an adapted name, and in the Ceylon it means Saint by
antonomasia.” 48
Buddhism was, in fact, quite early identified as a particular sect with relatively well defined
founder that seemed to have migrated from the west into China and then to Japan. This is the
story told by Anjiro, Francis Xavier‟s first Japanese convert whose summary description of
Buddhism made it into Nicolò Lancilotto‟s report, used widely by Guillome Postel in Des
46 Tomako, Masuzawa,The Invention of World Religions, Chicago and London: Chicago
University Press, 2005, p. 122.
47 Queiros, pp. 89-90.
48 Queiros, p. 110.