Paul Carus
An early supporter of Buddhism in America and the proponent of the "religion of science": a faith that claimed to be purified of all superstition and irrationality and that, in harmony with science, would bring about solutions to the world's problems. Carus was born in Ilsenberg in Harz, Germany. He immigrated to America in 1884, settling in LaSalle, Illinois, where he assumed the editorship of the Open Court Publishing Company. He attended the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and became friends with several of the Buddhist delegates, including Dharmapāla and Shaku Sōen, who were among the first to promote his writing.Later, Shaku Sōen's student, Daisetz Teitaro Susuki, woudld spend eleven years working with and for Carus in LaSalle. In 1894, Carus published The Gospel of Buddha according to Old Records, an anthology of passages from Buddhist texts drawn from contemporary translations in English, French, and German, making particular use of translations from the Pāli by Thomas W. Rhys Davids, as well as translations of the life of the Buddha from Chinese and Tibetan sources. Second only to Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia in intellectual influence at the time, The Gospel was arranged like the Bible, with numbered chapters and verses and a table at the end that listed parallel passages from the New Testament. The Gospel was intended to highlight the many agreements between Buddhism and Christianity, thereby bringing out "that nobler Christianity which aspires to the cosmic religion of universal truth." Carus was free in his manipulation of his sources, writing in the preface that he had rearranged, retranslated, and added emendations and elaborations in order to make them more accessible to a Western audience; for this reason, the translated sources are not always easy to trace back to the original literature. He also makes it clear in the preface that his ultimate goal is to lead his readers to the Religion of Science. He believed that both Buddhism and Christianity, when understood correctly, would point the way to the Religion of Science. Although remembered today for his Gospel, Carus wrote some seventy books and more than a thousand articles. His books include studies of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, and Chinese thought. (Source: The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 2014, 168)
Mentioned in
On the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna
An introduction to the Awakening of Faith
Gardner, Alex. "On the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna." Buddha-Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative, October 9, 2019. https://buddhanature.tsadra.org/index.php/Articles/On_the_Awakening_of_Faith_in_the_Mah%C4%81y%C4%81na
Outline of Western Scholarship on Buddha-Nature
Scholars of Buddhism writing in European languages have celebrated, derided, and frequently misinterpreted the doctrine of tathāgatagarbha for well over a hundred years. While some have seen it as a crucial theoretical step to explain how deluded, impure sentient beings can become buddhas, others have dismissed the entire idea as non-Buddhist. Following Chinese and Tibetan scholiasts, Western scholars have labeled tathāgatagarbha as either Yogācāra or Madhyamaka, although most now understand that the doctrine arose independently of either of these main Mahāyāna schools. The philosophical question of whether ultimate reality can or should be described in positive terms, and the ethical matters of faith and practice all come to the fore in discussions of tathāgatagarbha, and scholars have for the most part spent the last century explicating the scripture and commentary that have sought to make sense of it all. To the degree that academics have assumed the role of interpreting Buddhist doctrine to Western audiences, tathāgatagarbha—“buddha-nature” to the popular reader—seems now to be the foremost shared interest of the academic and the practitioner. This essay attempts to be exhaustive, referencing all books, articles, and chapters that take buddha-nature as the primary focus. It discusses only scholarship published in European languages.
Gardner, Alex. "Outline of Western Scholarship on Buddha-Nature." Buddha-Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative, July 16, 2019. https://buddhanature.tsadra.org/index.php/Articles/Outline_of_Western_Scholarship_on_Buddha-Nature.
