Inside Müller's workshop: Max Müller's collaboration with Nunjō Bun'yū and Kasahara Kenju on the translation of Buddhist Texts From Japan

Keating, David (2016) Inside Müller's workshop: Max Müller's collaboration with Nunjō Bun'yū and Kasahara Kenju on the translation of Buddhist Texts From Japan. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the forgotten collaboration that occurred between Max Müller, founder of the Science of Religion, and Nanjō Bun’yū, a Japanese priest of the Shin Buddhist sect, as they worked on the first English translations of sutras that would become Buddhist Texts from Japan. Building on Tomoko Masuzawa’s extensive scholarship on Müller and through the lens of Charles Hallisey’s theory of intercultural mimesis and Anne Blackburn’s related method of locative pluralism, Müller’s legacy as a Edward Said-styled Orientalist is reconsidered in light of the evidence of this crosscultural exchange. Aligned with the work of Hallisey, Blackburn and others, including Richard King, this thesis is part of an emerging movement to revisit assumptions about Victorian scholarship founded in Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism and recover the voices of Buddhist practitioners who collaborated on, contributed to and, in some cases, were the primary influencers of Western scholarship’s first ideas about Buddhism.

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