Eugène Burnouf

• 1. Introduction

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  Eugène Burnouf died on the 28th of May 1852, the same year his translation of the Lotus Sutra finally appeared in print. He had spent his final years working on a text central to Buddhist tradition, and the book arrived just as he did not. Burnouf was born in Paris on the 8th of April 1801, the son of Professor Jean-Louis Burnouf, a classical scholar whose six-volume translation of Tacitus was regarded as excellent. The father shaped the son, but Eugène would reach far beyond classical antiquity. He would decipher dead scripts, lay the groundwork for European scholarship on Buddhism, and help unlock the Persian inscriptions at Persepolis. He did all of this before he turned fifty-one. How does a single scholar span Sanskrit texts, Zoroastrian liturgy, and Persian cuneiform? What drove Burnouf to keep opening new doors when most experts spent careers behind a single one?

• 2. The Avestan Breakthrough

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  In 1826, Burnouf published his Essai sur le Pali in collaboration with Christian Lassen, tackling one of Asia's ancient literary languages. That was only his opening move. The larger challenge came from a collection of manuscripts brought to France by Anquetil-Duperron: the Avesta texts of the Zoroastrian tradition. Before Burnouf engaged with them, the Avestan language had no real foothold in European scholarship. His work changed that. He arranged for the Vendidad Sade to be lithographed with great care from the manuscript held in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and the project was issued in folio parts from 1829 through 1843. Between 1833 and 1835, he published his Commentaire sur le Yacna, a detailed study of one of the liturgical books of the Parses. These were not light undertakings. Lithographing a manuscript with precision demanded both philological rigor and institutional resources. Burnouf had access to both, and the result was that European readers could study Zoroastrian scripture for the first time on a sound scholarly basis.

• 3. Cracking Persian Cuneiform

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  Copies of cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis had been circulating since Carsten Niebuhr published them in 1778. Georg Friedrich Grotefend had already drawn some preliminary inferences from those inscriptions, but the puzzle remained largely unsolved. In 1836, Burnouf made a decisive move: he identified that the first of the inscriptions contained a list of the satrapies of Darius. That single recognition gave him a foothold. Working from it, he was able to construct and publish an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which he correctly identified. The priority question was immediately disputed. A month before Burnouf's publication, his friend and longtime correspondent Christian Lassen of Bonn had published his own work on the Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions of Persepolis. The two men had been in regular contact, and Burnouf's claim to have independently detected the satrapy names was fiercely challenged. The scholar Sayce later acknowledged that Lassen's contributions to the decipherment were both numerous and important, whatever the nature of the two men's intellectual debt to each other. A year later, in 1837, Henry Rawlinson made a copy of the Behistun inscriptions in Persia, which bore identical texts in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite, carved during the reign of King Darius, who ruled from 522 to 486 BC. When Rawlinson sent an early translation to the Royal Asiatic Society, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him before his paper was published, prompting revisions and a delay. The first part of Rawlinson's Memoir appeared in 1847, the second in 1849, and by that point the decipherment of Persian cuneiform was effectively complete.

• 4. Sanskrit and the Bhagavata Purana

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  Brian Houghton Hodgson, the Indologist and anthropologist, sent Burnouf a substantial collection of Sanskrit texts that would shape the next phase of his career. From that material, Burnouf produced a French translation of the Bhagavata Purana, the Hindu text devoted to the story of Krishna. It appeared in three folio volumes between 1840 and 1847 under the title Bhagavata Purana ou histoire poetique de Krichna. The scale and care of the project reflected a pattern Burnouf had established with the Avestan work: he was not interested in brief summaries or partial renderings. He held a professorship in Sanskrit at the College de France and had been a member of the Academie des Inscriptions for twenty years by the time the final volume appeared. Those institutional ties gave his publications a weight and reach that independent scholars could not easily match. His work on Sanskrit literature fed directly into his final and most influential project.

• 5. The Founding of Buddhist Studies

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  Jonathan Silk has described Burnouf as the founding father of modern Buddhist scientific studies, a phrase that carries genuine historical precision. His Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme indien, published in 1844, was recognized as an introduction to Buddhist metaphysics, and it reached an audience well beyond academic specialists. French occultists in the nineteenth century found in it a doorway to Indian thought, and Sanskrit texts became a source of inspiration in those circles partly because of Burnouf's work. A second edition of the Introduction appeared in 1876, prefaced by a notice of Burnouf's works written by Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire. The Lotus Sutra translation, Le Lotus de la bonne loi, was published in Paris by the Imprimerie Nationale in 1852, the year of Burnouf's death. It was reprinted in 1973. A list of his contributions to the Journal asiatique and of his manuscript writings was later compiled in the appendix to the Choix de lettres d'Eugene Burnouf, published in 1891. His cousin Emile-Louis Burnouf, born in 1821 and living until 1907, carried on his work on the Sanskrit language into the following generation.