BURNOUF, EUGÈNE

BURNOUF, EUGÈNE (1801–1852), French Sanskritist, Buddhologist, and Indologist. Son of the classicist Jean-Louis Burnouf, Eugène Burnouf was born in Paris on April 8, 1801. After distinguishing himself at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École de Chartes, Eugène began the study of Sanskrit with his father and Leonard de Chézy in 1824, only one year after de Chézy's appointment to Europe's first Sanskrit chair. Just two years later, Burnouf, together with Christian Lassen, published Essai sur le Pali (1826), which identified and analyzed the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and mainland Southeast Asia.

If a single person can be credited with inaugurating the West's serious study of Buddhism according to primary sources, he is Eugène Burnouf. In less than three decades prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, Burnouf succeeded in establishing European Buddhist studies on solid footing through his own research and preparation of young scholars, and also in contributing significantly to the foundation of studies in the Veda and the Purāṇas, and to Avestan studies as well.

In 1833, a year that also saw publication of Commentaire sur le Yaçna, a landmark in modern Avestan studies, Eugène succeeded de Chézy as professor of Sanskrit at the Collège de France. About the same time, he began work on the Buddhist texts sent by Brian H. Hodgson, an East India Company resident in Katmandu, to the French Asiatic Society in Paris. By 1837, Burnouf had resolved to translate the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra (Lotus Sūtra of the True Dharma), a text that he felt was most representative of the materials sent by Hodgson.

About 1840, Burnouf decided that the annotations needed to make a translation of the Lotus Sūtra intelligible to European audiences threatened to overwhelm the text. He thus set as a preliminary task the writing of an "introduction to Buddhism" that would provide the necessary context. His Introduction à l'histoire du bouddhisme indien was published in 1844. His Lotus de la bonne loi, the translation of the Lotus Sūtra, appeared posthumously in 1852.

Although Burnouf is deservedly celebrated for his own pathbreaking scholarship on Buddhism and the Avestan tradition, his importance to the history of religions does not end there. Among his students in Paris in the 1840s was the young Sanskritist F. Max Müller. "Went to Burnouf, [who is] spiritual, amiable, thoroughly French," Müller wrote in his journal in 1845, and continued,

He received me in the most friendly way, talked a great deal, and all that he said was valuable, not on ordinary topics but on special [ones]. 'I am a Brahman, a Buddhist, a Zoroastrian; I hate the Jesuits' – that is the sort of man [he is]. His lectures were on the Rigveda, and they opened a new world to me. He explained to us his own research, he showed us new manuscripts that he had received from India, in fact he did all he could to make us his fellow-workers.

It was at Burnouf's urging that Müller undertook his own critical edition of the Ṛgveda Saṃhita (1849–1873).

In addition to Burnouf's teaching and his continuing research in Buddhist, Sanskrit, and Tibetan sources, he also worked on materials directly significant for the study of Hinduism, seeing a translation of the first nine books (in three volumes) of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (1840–1847) into print before his death.

To his pioneering Buddhist studies Burnouf brought a calm and imperturbable attitude generally unruffled by the new and often puzzling ideas his research disclosed. Patient and thorough, this scholar, whose genius effectively introduced in Europe the scientific study of Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhist traditions, remained open throughout his lamentably brief career to information from all Buddhist sources. He set standards for Buddhist studies that few of his successors would match.

Bibliography

Although by no means of merely antiquarian interest, Eugène Burnouf's scholarly writings have remained untranslated into English. L'Introduction à l'histoire du bouddhisme indien (Paris, 1844) and the translations Le Lotus de la bonne loi (Paris, 1852) and Le Bhagavata Purāṇa, 5 vols. (Paris, 1840–1898) are still important and provide the reader of French with eloquent testimony to the spirit and grace of Burnouf's judicious scholarship.

Appreciations of Burnouf's life and work are numerous. Among the more helpful are Sylvain Lévi's preface to the 1925 edition of Le Lotus ; Raymond Schwab's La renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950), esp. pp. 309–316; and Ernst Windisch's Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und indischen Altertumskunde, 2 vols. (Strasbourg, 1917–1920), pp. 123–140.

G. R. Welbon (1987 and 2005)