Learning from the West, Learning from the East

The essays collected in this volume for the first time foreground the fundamental role Asian actors played in the formation of scholarly knowledge on Buddhism and the emergence of Buddhist studies as an academic discipline in Europe and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The contributions focus on different aspects of the interchange between Japanese Buddhists and their European interlocutors ranging from the halls of Oxford to the temples of Nara. They break the mould of previous scholarship and redress the imbalances inherent in Eurocentric accounts of the construction of Buddhism as an object of professorial interest.