À propos des Fondements du bouddhisme d’Elena Roerich

The paper is a commentary, from the contemporary Buddhological point of view, on Helena Roerich’s book Fundamentals of Buddhism, first published anonymously in 1927 in Urga (Ulan Bator), and reprinted in 1940, in Riga, under the pseudonym of Natalia Rokotova. The author of the paper, a Russian academic scholar and buddhologist, identifies two layers in Helena Roerich’s text: an adequate presentation of the Buddha’s teachings based on original texts, mainly from the Pali Tipitaka canon, and a vulgarly sociologizing interpretation in the spirit of the Bolsheviks’ socialist ideas, as well as Helena Roerich’s theosophical teachings of “Agni Yoga”. The author of the paper argues that these two layers enter into contradiction with each other, creating a kind of cognitive dissonance in the mind of the reader of this book. The paper shows that the attempts of Helena Roerich to present the Buddha as a social reformer and a fighter for the rights of working class people do not correspond to the most important tenets of the early Buddhism; among them: the status of the Buddha as the spiritual liberator of living beings who deliberately refused the role of a world’s ruler (chakravartin); the Buddha’s views on the role of property and non-attachment to it, clearly expressed in the texts; the soteriological advantages of monastic way of life in comparison with life in the world, the Buddha’s detachment from society and social problems of his time.