298 CHAPTER 1WELVEin its list of saints. The saints Barlaam and Josaphat (a corruption of the word
bodhisattva) derive from the Buddha legend, which had become increasingly
garbled as it traveled west from India through Georgia and, in the tenth or
eleventh century, began spreading throughout Europe.
Beginning in the thirteenth century as a result of the Crusades, Europeans
gradually began to travel overland to Asian Buddhist countries, primarily in
the role of occasional ministers to the Khan or-like Marco Polo-as adven-
turous merchants. When Vasco de Gama discovered oceangoing routes in
1497, he opened Asia to European religious and commercial interests, the pri-
mary religious interest being to convert Asians to Christianity. The zeal for
this mission led Jesuits to travel to India, Japan, and China in the sixteenth
century, and Tibet in the seventeenth. These missionaries made detailed stud-
ies-sometimes quite accurate-of the religions they were trying to supplant,
although their reports languished, unread, in the Vatican until the twentieth
century. Early European colonizers, especially those from the Catholic coun-
tries, viewed it as their God-given duty to convert the natives to Christianity
and stamp out heathenism. One result of this attitude was the campaign of
atrocities the Portuguese committed against Sri Lankan Buddhists during their
control of the island during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Sec-
tion 7.4.1).
Merchants from the Protestant European countries, perhaps because of
their own recent experience with religious intolerance from the Catholic
church, tended to be more lenient toward Asian customs and religions. Many
of them wrote glowing accounts of the highly civilized, rationally organized
societies they encountered in Asia. These accounts had a telling effect in Eu-
rope, as they opened the European mind to the possibility that Europe was
not the only truly civilized society on Earth. Cultural relativism-the view
that cultural values and institutions were not absolutes, but were relative to ge-
ographical, historical, and other factors-thus came to be more widely ac-
cepted in European intellectual circles. This set the stage for the revolution
that was to reshape Western culture at the same time it was to shape all serious
Western encounters with Buddhism up to the present day. That revolution
was the European and American Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
12.2 The Awakening Meets the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was essentially an effort made by a loosely organized con-
federation of intellectuals-including Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Diderot, Franklin,
and Montesquieu-to liberate Western society from what they considered the
intellectual and political tyranny of the past. Tyranny in the intellectual sphere,
for most of them, meant the control that the Jesuits and other Catholic clerics
had over Western thought, although some of them went so far as to equate