The History of Buddhist Thought c28.2

c28.2

The changes that have taken place in the conception of Buddhism as a religion and a philosophy are largely due to the piecemeal way in which the original documents have been brought to light. When Burnouf in 1844 issued his *Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien*, he mentioned as his chief predecessors Abel Rémusat,¹ the Chinese scholar, and the Moravian missionary Isaac Jacob Schmidt² as having thrown more light on the origin of Indian Buddhism than all those who up to that time had undertaken the study of the subject. Yet Rémusat's investigations were limited to Chinese works, and Schmidt, a scholar whose great merits have never been fully recognized, drew all his information from Mongolian and Tibetan translations. Burnouf was the first to investigate some of the Sanskrit originals, and his task was made possible through the enterprise of B. H. Hodgson, who was British Resident in Nepal from 1833 to 1843. During this time Hodgson sent from Nepal a large number of copies of Sanskrit manuscripts to various libraries in Europe, and it was chiefly on the basis of those sent to the Société Asiatique of Paris and to himself that Burnouf wrote his *Introduction*. But these documents were mainly representative of Mahāyāna, and their relation to the earlier Pāli and Sanskrit works was quite unknown.