[nukkad] Indian Influence : 9

[Zaveri Rohit <>]

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Tip of the day:  Many times quality trumps quantity
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Hi all,                                                                 The
message of the Buddha was little known before the middle of the nineteenth
century. Brian Hodgson, the British representative in Nepal, had indeed
collected Buddhist manuscripts there in the early of the century, and James
Prinsep, another servant of the East India Company, had deciphered
inscriptions of the Buddhist emperor, Asoka. But these were known only to a
very small number of Europeans until Eugene Burnouf published his immensely
influential Introduction a l'Histoire de Bouddhism Indien in 1844. R.
Spence Hardy's Manual of Buddhism appeared in 1853, and five years later a
popular life of the Buddha by Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire was published in
France.                       The discovery of the Buddhist scriptures went
on, and their influence can be traced in the works of such disparate
personalities as Richard Wagner and Tolstoy, as well as, in the paintings
of Odilon Redon(1840-1916) and others. Perhaps the most superb example of
Buddhist influence can be found in the works of Herman Hesse, particularly
his mystical novel Siddartha (1926). In the case of Wagner, both Buddhist
and Hindu ideas had a tremendous appeal. His knowledge of Buddhism was
acquired almost entirely from Burnouf. Wagner absorbed Indian ideas and
transformed them to suit his aesthetic purpose. They appear in the libretti
of such operas as Parsifal (1882), in which he used an episode from the
great epic of the Ramayana (c.400 BC). In a sense, he succeeded in
producing a synthesis of East and West, and from it derived the materials
of a universal drama. In this, he was in a direct line from the early
German romantics.                                                   The
influence of Indian thought on the founders of Theosophical Society w2ill
be narrated in the next mail.


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