Jesuit Orientalism; - Ines G. Županov

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time approached, the holy mother Maya went with her companions to the Lang-pi-ni parc,
very auspicious place. She walked slowly, reflecting on all things. There was a big and
beautiful p‟ouo-lou-tch‟a (sala) with flowering branching. At the moment in which she lifted
her right hand to catch one of the branches, her son was born, so luminous that the beams
coming out of his body illuminated the heavens”. 112
Pereira must have known that the canonical place from which the child and the future
Buddha came out miraculously was his mother‟s side. He was conceived when he entered the
same way on the white elephant while Queen Maya was asleep. Pereira‟s description of these
events is consistent with the one in the Wieger‟s version. However, by substituting “armpit”
for a “side” he added a derisive spin to the event. The elliptic language of the Chinese text and
the particular style of the illustration may have helped Pereira‟s disbelieving and sneering
imagination.
In a paradoxical sense, at least for some, the problem with Jesuit Orientalism in the
texts of Queiros, Pereira and Wieger is unwillingness to refrain from “refutation” and irony,
as discreet as it can be. The two late-seventeenth century Jesuits and the modern and
accredited Sinologist such as Wieger defined their objects of study as fables (patranhas) and
fiction. 113 The texts they chose to represent and unravel contained by definition a deceit, a
disguise, briefly, a falsehood their audience is exhorted not to believe in. 114 Since the Jesuits
always start from an authorized reality, they are tied and blinded by the preordained frames
that shore up that particular construction. By chasing the false, as de Certeau remarked, one
makes the assumption that its opposite is real. “Thus, for example, in the past, arguments
against „false‟ gods were used to induce belief in a true God”. 115
By comparing notes on Asian Buddhism, Queiros and Pereira perform common
scientific operations such as accumulation, stratification, verification (of authenticity) of
knowledge. In this respect they do not differ much from the accredited Orientalists of the later
period. The problem is that by the end of the 18 th century, their institutional and heuristic
home base - the Catholic Church and the Catholic empires – had lost purchase in the period
112 Wieger, Les vies chinoises du Buddha , p. 23
113 Wieger, Les vies chinoises du Buddha , p. 13.
114 On the labour of “fictionalization” see Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 308-354.
115 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies; Discourse on the Other, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986 p. 201.