The present article responds to Roger-Pol Droit’s contributions to the study of the European confrontation with Indian and Buddhist philosophy, above all in his L’oubli de l’Inde and Le Culte du Néant, by interrogating the peculiar reception history, in Germany and in France, of the masterpiece of nineteenth-century Russian scholarship in this area, Vasily P. Vasilyev’s Buddhism, Its Dogmatics, History and Literature (St. Petersburg 1857). In particular, we seek to clarify the unusual political background of the opposing and contested French and German translations.