Contexts of reception: The Lotus Sutra in nineteenth-Century Europe and what they overlooked

Abstract

Buddhism arrived in the west as a topic of scholarly investigation, colonial occupation, missionary conquest, and popular fascination in nineteenth-century Europe. The Lotus Sutra, now as then the most widely read and recited sutra in Southeast Asian Buddhism, was unheard of in the west until translated into French by Eugene Burnouf in 1837-1841.