Draft only. Please do not quote. Gentile Religion in South India, China and Tibet: Studies by Three Jesuit Missionaries. 1 David N. Lorenzen El Colegio de México Before about 1775, the European scholars who directly studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and other Asian religions in Asia itself were almost all Catholic missionaries, many of them Jesuits. 2 After this date, secular scholarly administrators stationed in Asian countries, especially those associated with the colonial projects of the British and French, began to undertake their own studies of Asian religions and cultures. Particularly in India, these administrator scholars were called Orientalists. This name stuck and is now used loosely for almost any pre-twentieth-century European scholar of Asian cultures, including Christian missionary scholars. Largely because the new administrator Orientalists were much better financed than the missionaries had been, they were much more successful in getting the results of their researches published and then distributed in Europe. Scholarly works by the earlier missionaries had mostly remained in manuscript and sometimes did not reach Europe even in this form. Another advantage of the administrator Orientalists was that they were usually influenced by the more open and secular intellectual spirit associated with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. The new flood of works on Asian religions produced in Asia by the administrator Orientalists—and the eventual arrival in Europe of manuscripts of the classical texts of Asian religions written in the original Asian languages—fostered an explosion of studies on 1 This essay grew out of a presentation for the Buddhism and Orientalism conference held in the University of Toronto on 11 March 2006. I thank Professor Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, the conference organizer, and the other scholars attending the conference for their comments on my presentation. I also thank Elisabetta Corsi for her comments on a draft of the present essay. 2 I have discussed the issues raised in this paragraph in three recent essays (Lorenzen 1999, 2003 and 2006). The scholarly literature on the history of the Jesuits is, of course, enormous. Useful general surveys include O’Malley 1993 and 2000; Pavone 2004; and Wright 2004. 1