Translating worlds: negotiating Christian western cosmography in early modern Jesuit missionary contexts in Japan and China

Abstract

This essay focuses on documented cases of epistemic translations at the time of the encounters among Jesuit missionaries, Buddhist monks and neo-Confucian scholars in the context of early modern Catholic missions in Japan. These encounters involved intense translational activities of various kinds: linguistic (for the purpose of teaching and learning Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Latin), cultural (i.e. mutual learning of and adaptation to local customs and behaviors for the reception and negotiation of Christian rituals) and, epistemic: particularly of Christian cosmology, for the purpose of evangelization, and Buddhist cosmology, for the purpose of its refutation by the missionaries. We will analyse the Jesuits’ epistemic translations of the Christian cosmology and cosmography and how they were challenged by equally complex and structured Buddhist and Neo-Confucian cosmologies on the part of their Japanese interlocutors.

KEYWORDS: Epistemic Translation; Early Modern Jesuit Mission in Japan; Western-Christian Cosmology; Buddhist Cosmology