BURNOUF Eugène (EN)

Biographical article

Born on 8 April 1801 in Paris, Eugène Burnouf was the son of the philologist and specialist in ancient languages, Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775–1844)—who came from Urville in Normandy, and who at the time of his birth was a clerk and dealer, and was subsequently professor of Latin eloquence in the Collège de France from 1817 to 1826—and Marie Chavarin (1776–1841), who came from Maffliers and was the daughter of Joseph, a pit-sawyer (AD 75, 5Mil 114). He was taught Latin and Greek grammar at an early age by his father (Wailly, N. de, 1852, p. 327), who had studied in the Collège Royal de Louis-le-Grand. A resident student in the archives section of the Archives du Royaume at the École Royale des Chartes, in 1822, then at the École de Droit in Paris (Burnouf-Delisle, L., 1891, p. 477), he defended a thesis in Roman law (Burnouf, E., De Re judicata et de rei judiciariae apud Romanos disciplina exercitationem, 1824) under the supervision of Hyacinthe Blondeau (1784–1854) on 6 August 1824. Working as a lawyer at the Cour Royale de Paris, and residing at 13, Place de l’École-de-Médecine, he married Angélique Poiret (1804–1886) on 25 September 1826, the daughter of Nicolas, a farmer (AD 95, p. 143). They had four daughters: Louise (1828–1905), who, in 1857, married the historian Léopold Delisle (1826–1910), who came from Valognes, and Amélie (1831–1907), Pauline (1834–1902), and Claire (1842–1894) (AD 75, V3E/N361). His fragile health, like that of his paternal grandfather, prevented him from ever travelling to India, and he gradually exhausted himself though his intense and continuous studies in the field of Indo-Iranian languages (Wailly, N. de, 1852, p. 326). Hence, despite thermal cures in Vichy, the lithiasis that caused him terrible suffering in the 1830s (Burnouf-Delisle, L., 1891, p. 281 and 302) eventually weakened his health. He died on 28 May 1852 at 21, Rue de l’Odéon in Paris and was buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery (59^th division), alongside his father.

As a consequence of his training in comparative grammar that he had learned from his father in his youth (Wailly, N. de, 1852, p. 327; Naudet, J., 1854, p. 39), the palaeographic lectures at the École Royale des Chartes, the Sanskrit lessons taught by Antoine-Léonard Chézy (1776–1832) (Naudet, J., 1854, p. 43), which he attended as of 1822, and the scientific influence of the linguist and Arabic specialist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) (Wailly, N. de, 1852, p. 326), Eugène Burnouf gradually shifted away from the Barreau de Paris to focus on the grammatical science of Oriental languages; the manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque Royale (Ducœur, G., 2021), some of which had been placed there in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, were excellent sources. This was also made possible thanks, in particular, to the preliminary work of Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824), a member of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, who, upon his return from the East Indies and stopping over in Paris, taught Sanskrit in the city and published the Catalogue des manuscrits Sanskrits de la Bibliothèque impériale in 1807.

Present during the foundation of the Société Asiatique de Paris in 1822, Eugène Burnouf very soon became one of the European pioneers in several fields of research: deciphering pre-Islamic Iranian languages and the Buddhist Pāli language, which enabled progress to be made in Indo-European comparative grammar; and the study of Veda and post-Vedic Sanskrit literature, as well as the reconstitution of the history of Indian Buddhism based on the reading of Nepalese Sanskrit manuscripts (Barthélémy Saint-Hilaire, J., 1852). Assistant secretary in 1826, then secretary, in 1829, of the Société Asiatique de Paris, Professor of Grammar at the École Normale de Paris from 1830 to 1833 (Mohl, J., 1852), and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres in 1832 (Gazette des écoles, 1832, p. 4), he became professor of the ‘Sanskrit language and literature’ at the Collège de France in 1833. Inspector of Oriental typography at the Imprimerie Royale after S. de Sacy, in 1838 (Mohl, J., 1852), he was appointed, several days before his death, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Letters (Naudet, J., 1854, pp. 39–61). Throughout his career, he bought, from his own funds, a large number of copies of Parsi and Indian manuscripts that came from Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, and copied out certain Avestan and Sanskrit texts during a stay in Oxford and London from April to August 1835 (Burnouf-Delisle, L., 1891, pp. 190–274).

The first major work he published, in collaboration with the Norwegian India specialist Christian Lassen (1800–1876), was the Essai sur le pali ou langue sacrée de la presqu’île au-delà du Gange (‘Essay on Pāli, or the Sacred Language of the Peninsula beyond the Ganges’) in 1826 (Burnouf, E., Lassen, C., 1826). Based on several very succinct studies by his predecessors, and on the reading of five Pāli, Siamese, and Burmese manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque Royale de Paris, he managed to decipher the various scripts and compared the Pāli language to Sanskrit in order to understand its meaning and thereby highlight the grammatical particularities of the ancient Buddhist language.

The second research field in which he distinguished himself was the publication of the Vendidád Sádé, from 1829 to 1843, based on a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Royale and, above all, the semantic analysis of the Avestan language in his Commentaire sur le Yaçna (‘Commentary on the Yaçna’), based on four manuscripts held in the library and a Sanskrit version published in 1833. In 1836, Burnouf regularly corresponded with the Parsi businessman Manockjee Cursetjee (1808–1887), whom he asked to copy and send to him at his own expense a large number of Mazdean texts accompanied by a Sanskrit translation (Feer, L., 1899, p. 128).

Aside from his courses at the Collège de France on the Ṛig-Veda and several translations of extracts from the Hitopadeśa (1823), the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa (1824), and the Padma Purāṇa (1825), Burnouf undertook the translation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP I-IX, 1840–1847), based on three manuscripts from the Bibliothèque Royale and Duvaucel’s manuscript from the Société Asiatique de Paris (Burnouf, E., 1840, p. CLIX-CLXI), a translation he never finished, but which was eventually completed by his pupils (BhP X-XII, 1881). Lastly, thanks to his knowledge of Pāli sources and the arrival, in 1836, of copies of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts from Nepal (Filliozat, J., 1941, p. X), sent by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801–1894), Burnouf attempted to reconstitute the history of Indian Buddhism (Introduction à l’histoire du buddhisme indien, 1844) and translated the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Le Lotus de la bonne loi (‘The Lotus of the True Law’)), accompanied by commentaries; this work, which went to press at the time, was printed only five months after his death, under the watchful eye of his colleague and friend, the Iran specialist Jules Mohl (1800–1876).

As the continuer of the work of Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) on the deciphering of Mazdean texts, Eugène Burnouf’s philological rigour and historical-critical approach provided science with some of the greatest progress in the field of the history of religions during the first half of the nineteenth century; today, he may be considered in Europe as the founder of Buddhology and the pioneer of the comparative history of religions, and his pupil, Max Müller (1823–1900), who continued his work on the Ṛig-Veda upon his request, became the founder of this comparative approach (Ducœur, G., 2013).

The collection

After the death of Eugène Burnouf, the collection of manuscripts that he had bought or been given was acquired by the Bibliothèque Impériale and formed the ‘Fonds Burnouf’ in 1854 (Filliozat, J., 1941, p. XII). Hence, this collection is still held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Nevertheless, during its history, the reference numbers have been modified during successive inventories, as attested in the various catalogues in the Département des Manuscrits Orientaux (Blochet, E., 1900; Cabaton, A., 1907 and 1908; and Filliozat, J., 1941 and 1970).

The difficulties encountered by Burnouf when he started work on the Indian manuscripts some of which had been held in the Bibliothèque Royale since the first half of the eighteenth century, often in Southern Indian writing, where the Christian missionaries worked, led him to quickly acquire new copies in Devanāgarī script, both for the Société Asiatique de Paris and himself (Ducoeur, G., 2021). Upon his death, his personal collection included more than two hundred manuscripts, most of which were on Indian paper and dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, either from South Asia or from the collections of European Orientalists. It comprised texts written in Avestan and Pahlavi (7), Sanskrit (123), and Pāli (22) as well as in Indian dialects (42), and even in Burmese (3), Siamese (3) and Sinhalese (10). These were mainly religious texts—Mazdean, Vedic, and Buddhist—, their commentaries, and several treatises of grammar, astronomy, and medicine. This suggests that epic literature (Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa) was completely absent and that the only entire Puranic manuscript was that of the Bhāgavata, with Śrīdhara Svāmin’s commentary (BnF, Sanskrit 463-475). This 3,139-page copy, made on Indian paper in Benares between 1839 and 1840, was given to him by Saint-Hubert Theroulde upon his return from the Indies. Beautifully made, Burnouf took it into consideration for his translation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, based on Book IV (Burnouf, E., 1844^b, p. II-III). Hence, the entire collection reflects the fields of study Burnouf excelled in, that is the Avestan studies based on the comparison with the Veda and, above all, the history of Indian Buddhism, both the ancient schools (Sthaviravāda (Elders) and Mahāsāṃghika (Majority)) and the Mahāyāṇa. This major personal collection dating from the first half of the nineteenth century was inventoried in its entirety in several catalogues (Anonymous, 1854; Blochet, E., 1900; Cabaton, A., 1907 and 1908; and Filliozat, J., 1941 and 1970).

After the publication of his Commentaire sur le Yaçna (‘Commentary on the Yaçna’) in 1833, based on manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Royale, Burnouf obtained through the intermediary of Manockjee Cursetjee (1808–1887) several manuscripts of Avestan texts (Feer, L., 1899, pp. 125–147). Nevertheless, to facilitate the reading of it, he asked him either for a transcription in Devanagari or a translation in Sanskrit, in particular for the Vidēvdāt. In 1838, Manockjee Cursetjee sent him a manuscript that contained the Yašt (Blochet, E., 1900, p. 57) in Avestan and Sanskrit and, in 1841, the Mīnōkhired (Blochet, E., 1900, p. 73) in Pahlavi, accompanied by its Sanskrit translation completed by Neryosongh (in the 15^th century). After identifying the linguistic link between the Avestan and Rgvedic languages, Burnouf realised that it was not possible to decipher the Avestan language without a comparison with the Vedic lexicon. This is why he also sought to obtain manuscripts of the Veda, in particular through the intermediary of John Stevenson (1798–1858) and James Prinsep (1799–1840) (Feer, L., 1899, p. 140 and 151; Burnouf-Delisle, L., 1891, pp. 312 and 316). Hence, he obtained, on the one hand, a version of the Ṛgveda in its Padapāṭha form in eight volumes, dating from 1794 (BnF Sanskrit 199–206), and, on the other hand, Sāyaṇa’s commentary (fourteenth century) or Ṛgvedabhāṣya, which was copied for him in Bombay in 1838 (BnF, Sanskrit 216–218). With the help of this material that was easier to read than Telinga script on talipot palm leaf (Burnouf, E., 1833, p. 161), he was able to pursue his Études sur la langue et les textes zends (‘A study of the Zend language and texts’) and prepare his lessons at the Collège de France about Vedic literature in the best conditions.

As for Buddhist manuscripts written in Pāli and Sanskrit, they were acquired by Burnouf after his work on deciphering Pāli with Christian Lassen. On 2 June 1833, for example, he bought a palm-leaf manuscript of the Dīghanikāya in William Straker’s London bookshop (BnF, Pali 46, verso of the last plank). Although he acquired the texts of the Vinayapiṭaka, such as the Pātimokkha (BnF, Pali 9), he was also interested in historical accounts, such as the Commentaire du Mahāvaṃsa (‘Commentary on the Mahāvaṃsa’) or Mahāvaṃsaṭīkā (BnF, Pali 367), a copy dating from 1837, and the history of the Buddhist stūpa (dome-shaped Buddhist shrine), the Thūpavaṃsa (BnF, Pali 368). But it was the links he forged with Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800–1894) in 1835 that enabled him to buy a magnificent collection of Buddhist manuscripts written in Sanskrit, sometimes including prākṛtisms, traced out in Nepalese characters (Feer, L., 1899, 147–179). Amongst the latter manuscripts, the reading of which enabled him to draft his Introduction à l’histoire du buddhisme indien (‘Introduction to the history of Indian Buddhism’), worthy of note is the Lalitavistara (BnF, Sanskrit 97–98), sent from Kathmandu by Hodgson in 1836; the Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāparamitā (‘Perfection of Wisdom’) (BnF, Sanskrit 11–12), in 1837; the Mahāvastu (‘The Great Story’) (BnF, Sanskrit 87-89) in 1841; and, above all, two manuscripts of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (BnF, Sanskrit 138–139 and 140–141), on the basis of which, collated with those of the Société Asiatique de Paris and the British Library, he started work on his annotated translation, Le Lotus de la bonne loi (‘The Lotus of the True Law’), which was published in 1852.