History & The Arts
What did Voltaire think about Buddhism?
...thinks immediately of David Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu (1835), Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien (1844), and Hermann Oldenberg’s Buddha: Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (1881). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the European portrayal of Buddhism underwent a profound metamorphosis: from a form of idolatry practiced by...