An Inglorious Columbus – Edward P. Vining's Classic Case for the Buddhist Discovery of America (English Ebook)

Digital Ebook (PDF) — The Complete 1885 Landmark Study: Evidence That Hwui Shan and a Party of Buddhist Monks from Afghanistan Discovered America in the Fifth Century, A.D.

Author / Date: Edward Payson Vining | D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1885

Key Features

An Inglorious Columbus is one of the most remarkable and ambitious works of nineteenth-century scholarship - a monumental, nearly 800-page investigation into the tantalizing possibility that America was discovered not by Christopher Columbus in 1492, but by a party of Buddhist monks who reached its shores more than a thousand years earlier, in the fifth century A.D. First published in New York in 1885 by D. Appleton and Company, Edward P. Vining's massive study remains the fullest and most famous treatment of the Fusang question ever assembled in English.

At the heart of the book lies an ancient Chinese record: the account of Hwui Shan (Hui Shen), a Buddhist monk who returned to China in 499 A.D. bearing a description of a distant eastern land he called "Fu-sang." Drawing on the preserved annals of the Liang Dynasty and generations of scholarly debate, Vining traces the controversy from its beginnings in 1761, when the French Orientalist Joseph de Guignes first proposed that this Fu-sang was in fact America, through its championing by Alexander von Humboldt, its fierce rejection by the skeptic Julius Klaproth, and its revival by the American folklorist Charles G. Leland — whose ringing words grace the book's title page: that if Buddhist priests were truly the first to cross from the Old World to the New, "it will sooner or later be proved."

Vining marshals an extraordinary breadth of evidence in support of the theory. He examines the feasibility of the voyage itself — the "Gulf-Stream of the Pacific," the well-documented shipwrecks that carried mariners along the Kurile and Aleutian island chains to the American coast — and he assembles a wealth of cultural parallels between Asia and the Americas: resemblances in religion and imagery, the enigmatic "elephant" carvings of the New World, striking correspondences at Palenque and Uxmal, the Aztec traditions of Quetzalcoatl, and the identification of the mysterious "fu-sang tree" with the Mexican maguey or century-plant. The volume is richly illustrated with a frontispiece map of Hwui Shan's route and dozens of comparative engravings of Buddhist and Mesoamerican art and architecture.

Whether read as a serious contribution to the history of trans-Pacific contact, as a fascinating chapter in the history of ideas, or as a magnificent example of Victorian intellectual adventure, An Inglorious Columbus is an essential and endlessly absorbing work — a book that invites every reader to reconsider the very meaning of the "discovery" of America.

Ebook Details

• Format: PDF (digital download)
• Language: English
• Author: Edward Payson Vining
• Original Publication: D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1885
• Content: The complete text of the classic 1885 edition, including the frontispiece route map and the full set of comparative illustrations, faithfully reproduced
• Ideal For: Readers of alternative and pre-Columbian history, students of Buddhism and its spread, enthusiasts of the Fusang and trans-Pacific contact debates, lovers of nineteenth-century scholarship, and the intellectually curious

Why You'll Love It

A monumental classic in a single download — Edward P. Vining's complete 1885 study making the fascinating case that Buddhist monks reached America a thousand years before Columbus, packed with historical detective work, comparative art, and the frontispiece map of Hwui Shan's legendary voyage across the Pacific.

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