Academic Study of Buddhism in The Netherlands
The scientific study of Buddhism began in the Netherlands with the appointment of Hendrik Kern as the first professor for the chair for Sanskrit at Leiden University. He published two histories and a manual of Buddhism. Kern, like Émile Senart, portrayed the Buddha as a legendary being or a hero representing the sun. Kern was succeeded by Jacob Speyer (1849–1913), who translated several Mahayana texts and the Jatakamala for the series ‘The Sacred Books of the Buddhists’. The subsequent chair, Jean Philippe Vogel (1871–1958), became famous as an archaeologist by proving that Kasia in India must have been Kusinara, the place of the Parinirvana of the Buddha. He also conducted investigations on the Borobudur, the great Buddhist monument on the Isle of Java.
Read more about this topic: Buddhism In The Netherlands
Famous quotes containing the words academic, study, buddhism and/or netherlands:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“Parents who want a fresh point of view on their furniture are advised to drop down on all fours and accompany the nine or ten month old on his rounds. It is probably many years since you last studied the underside of a dining room chair. The ten month old will study this marvel with as much concentration and reverence as a tourist in the Cathedral of Chartres.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)