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Eugène Burnouf was the son of Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775-1844), professor of Latin eloquence at the Collège de France. After studying at the École royale des Chartes (Royal School of Charters) (1822), then at the Paris School of Law where he defended a thesis on Roman law (1824), he abandoned his position as a lawyer at the Royal Court of Paris in order to continue his study of Eastern languages, especially Sanskrit, first with his father who introduced him to the German Indianist Franz Bopp (1791-1867), then by attending the courses taught by Antoine-Léonard Chézy (1776-1832). He was present at the founding of the Asiatic Society of Paris in 1822, and was able to spend time with Orientalists such as the Arabist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) and the Sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat (1788-1832) who were his academic role models. As Deputy Secretary of said Society, in 1826, then Secretary, in 1829, Eugène Burnouf was appointed professor of grammar at the École Normale de Paris from 1830 to 1833 and elected member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1832. Professor of Sanskrit language and literature at the Collège de France in 1833, he was also inspector of oriental typography at the Imprimerie Royale in 1838, and, a few days before his death, was elected permanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
From the 1820s onwards, Burnouf concentrated on two main areas of research, one on Buddhist texts, the other on Mazdean texts, in line with the work already done by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), but whose terminology he clarified by referring to the archaic language of Ṛgiveda. He also translated the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (books I-IX, 1840-1847), from three manuscripts of the Royal Library – including a copy (BnF, sanscrit 463- 475) containing the commentary of Śrīdhara Svāmin (1378-1414), published in Benares (1839-1840), which was offered to him by his student, Saint-Hubert Théroulde, on his return from India – and from the manuscript of Duvaucel of the Asian Society of Paris. This translation, which he could not complete, was done by his students (books X-XII, 1881).
Seeking work that would not only set him apart from Chézy and his pupil Alexandre Langlois (1788-1854), but would also allow him to reconstruct the history of the origins of Sanskrit and Prakrit, Burnouf, with the help of his Norwegian friend Christian Lassen (1800-1876), embarked on the study of the Buddhist language Pāli by collating five Siamese and Burmese manuscripts held in the Royal Library of Paris. In their joint work, 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), published in 1826, he was therefore able to present the grammatical characteristics of this ancient Buddhist language. He continued this work on the textual sources of so-called Southern Buddhism in order to reconstruct its history, by acquiring, at his own expense, Pāli palm-leaf manuscripts, as, in 1833, the Dīghanikāya (BnF, pali 46) from the London-based bookseller William Straker whom he met in 1835, or the Pātimokkha (BnF, pali 9) as well as chronicles such as Commentaire du Mahāvaṃsa (Commentary on the Mahāvaṃsa) or Mahāvaṃsaṭīkā (BnF, pali 367) and the Thūpavaṃsa (BnF, pali 368) on the history of Bhuddist stupas. Beginning in 1836, E. Burnouf began compiling the history of so-called Northern Buddhism (ntroduction à l’histoire du buddhisme indien [Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism], 1844) through the study of Sanskrit manuscripts from Nepal sent to him by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801-1894), including the Lalitavistara (BnF, sanscrit 97-98, G. Ducœur (éd.) 2022), the Kāraṇḍavyūha (BnF, sanscrit 22 et sanscrit 23, G. Ducœur (éd.) 2022), the Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā (BnF, sanscrit 11-12, G. Ducœur (éd.) 2022), the Mahāvastu (BnF, sanscrit 87-89), and two manuscripts of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (BnF, sanscrit 138-139 et sanscrit 140-141) from which he produced his annotated translation Le Lotus de la bonne loi (The Lotus of the True Law) (1852).
Wishing to better define the linguistic and geographical boundaries of the Sanskrit language, E. Burnouf also turned very early on to Avestan, which the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron had partly made known through his publication of the Zend-Avesta (1771). To do this, he created a lithographed edition of Vendidad Sadé (1829-1843), from a manuscript of the Royal Library (BnF, supplément persan 27) and established a semantic analysis of the Avestan language in his Commentaire sur le Yaçna (1833), from four manuscripts kept in said library and a Sanskrit version. The difficulties he encountered, in particular the fact that Anquetil-Duperron's edition was in no way a literal translation of the Avestan text, led him to correspond with the Parsi jurist Manockjee Cursetjee (1808-1887) as early as 1836 and to order from him several manuscripts, including that of the Yašt. It was during this vast undertaking of philological study that Burnouf became aware of the linguistic kinship between the language of Avesta and that of Rigveda. That is why, after the death of his friend, Friedrich Rosen (1805-1837), Burnouf continued the study of the Rigveda, by acquiring manuscripts in Nāgarī writing (BnF, sanscrit 199-206), as well as the commentary of Sāyaṇa (BnF, sanscrit 216-218), through John Stevenson (1798-1858) and James Prinsep (1799-1840) – thus abandoning the difficult reading of the manuscript in incised Telinga script that had been deposited in the Royal Library in 1731 (BnF, sanscrit 214) –, and by presenting during his lectures at the Collège de France, from 1839 to 1845, his advances in understanding the hymns of the Rіgveda.
Published in july 2024
