十六至十七世紀耶穌會士的東亞佛教觀

The Jesuit Image of East Asian Buddhism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

When Catholic missionaries first encountered Buddhism, they faced a great difficulty in understanding it: though religious rituals were quite similar, the Buddhist teachings seemed to reject any truth. In order to understand those two aspects of Buddhism, Jesuits in Japan established the theory of the double-teaching in Buddhism. According to the situations in China and Japan, Jesuits continued to adapt and develop the theory.