The common Western understanding of Buddhism today envisions this major world religion as one of compassion and tolerance. But as Roger-Pol Droit reveals, this view bears little resemblance to one broadly held in the nineteenth-century European philosophical imagination that saw Buddhism as a religion of annihilation calling for the destruction of the self. Originally published in France in 1997, this book traces the history of the Western discovery of Buddhism. Droit shows that such major philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cousin, and Renan imagined Buddhism as a religion that was, as Nietzsche put it, a negation of the world. In fact, says Droit, such portrayals were more a reflection of what was happening in Europe at the time when the collapse of traditional European hierarchies and values, the specter of atheism, and the rise of racism and social revolts were shaking European societies Philosophy East & West Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, Roger-Pol Droit, Munshiram Publications, Hardcover, 263 pages, $30.00
Roger-Pol Droit was born in Paris in 1949 and is a philosopher, a researcher at the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique, and a columnist for the French daily newspaper Le Monde. He is the author of La Compagnie des Philosophes and Astonish Yourself.
| Acknowledgments
| xi |
| Introduction: The Meaning of a Mistake |
I |
| |
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| The Birth (1784-1831) |
25 |
| 1 The Faceless Idol |
27 |
| 2 Bouddou, Distinguished Philosopher |
37 |
| 3 A World Emerges |
45 |
| 4 The Nothingness of the Buddhists |
59 |
| |
|
| The Threat (1832-1863) |
73 |
| 5 French Terror |
75 |
| 6 Frackfurt and Tibet |
91 |
| 7 Black Classes and Lost Peoples |
104 |
| 8 The End of the Human Race |
119 |
| |
|
| The Decline (1864-1893) |
131 |
| 9 The Invention of Weakness |
133 |
| 10 The Time of Pessimism |
149 |
| 11 A Secret Laboratory |
161 |
| |
|
| Notes |
169 |
| Bibliography |
191 |
| Index of Authors |
261 |
| |
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