The Early Modern Origins of Chinese Indology

Thanks to the activities of over a thousand years of Buddhist translation, China inherited a massive amount of South Asian materials, entirely eclipsing pre-modern translations into the languages of Europe. But as we shall see, even in the early seventeenth century the priority seems to have been to restate the message of these materials in Chinese terms rather than examine them as evidence for another cultural tradition. This changed in the early nineteenth century, shortly before the outbre..