Voltaire and the Buddha: How the French Enlightenment thinker prefigured an approach now familiar in the West

An excerpt from the essay:

Well into the nineteenth century, Europeans divided the population of the world into four nations, based on their religion: Christians, Jews, Muslims (often called Mahometans), and Idolaters. For centuries, Buddhists fell into this last category. The process of their elevation to having an “ism” of their own is too long to tell here. However, one chapter in that story would be about those Jesuits, the intrepid travelers who set out from Europe to spread the Gospel across Asia. St Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, first imagining a kinship with Buddhists; later he would condemn them. In China, Matteo Ricci first dressed as a Buddhist monk before adopting the guise of a Confucian scholar, writing works in Chinese condemning the “religion of Fo” (fo is the Chinese word for Buddha). Early reports on the Buddhism of Thailand came from delegations sent to the court of Siam by Louis XIV, delegations that included Jesuit priests.

This short essay on the portrayal of Buddha and the evolution of his portrayal in European sources raises an interesting topic of discussion - namely, how we try to separate the image of the leader of a religion or a movement from the parts of religion that we find unsavoury or downright appalling. Unfortunately, ~ doesn't have a ~philosophy topic yet, but seeing how this article is about Voltaire and the Jesuit writings, I have decided to post it here.