Notes
Notes Chapter 2. Ayurvedic Acupuncture-Transnational Nationalism: Ambivalence About the Origin and Authenticity ofMedical Knowledge 1. The response of King Udayana of the Upper Indus after questioning HuiSeng and Sung Yun about "The Land of the Sunrise" and listening to them speak of the philosophy of Confucius and Lao Tzu as well as the medical science of Hua Tho and the magical power of Tso Tzhu. English translation of E. Chavannes 's "Le Voyage de Song [Sung] Yun dans l'Udayana et Ie Gandhara" (1903). Quoted in Needham (1965: 209). 2. Tibetan Buddhism is by definition a Tantric tradition: this applies to the four major orders (the Nyingmapas, Kagyupas, Sakyapas, and Gelugpas), as well as to the Dzogchen and other syncretistic traditions. Much of the ritual of the medieval Chinese state was Tantric, and it was from China that nearly all the Buddhist Tantric traditions ofJapan were transmitted. In China Tantra has survived since the twelfth century C.E. in Daoist ritual practice, and it has been said that Daoism is the most enduring monument to Tantric Buddhism (Strickman 1996: 49). Elsewhere the Chinese Chan (a Sinicization of Sanskrit dhyana, "meditation ") school lives on in Japan as Zen Buddhism. In Burma, the Zwagyis, Theravada monk-alchemists, have for centuries combined elements of Theravada Buddhism, Daoism, and Tantric alchemy in their practice. Cambodian inscriptions indicate the presence of Hindu tantrikas (practitioners of tantra) there in the medieval period (White 2000: 8). 3. Evidence of trade between polities in South Asia and Chinese dynastic entities dates to the late second century B.C.E. This trade seems to have been well established by the fourth century C.E. and flourished between the third and eighth centuries, a period characterized by intensive philosophical and religious ferment. It seems clear that ideas that eventually came to take shape as what is now known as Buddhism were in circulation in what is now China as early as 50 C.E. By 450, an early Tantric text, the Ratna-Ketu-Dharani, which had been earlier translated into Tibetan, was further translated into Chinese. 4. As Needham points out, although most scholarship on contact between India and China is concerned with the history of religion, it is clear that many Buddhist monks-perhaps most importantly I-Ching-were concerned with questions of protoscience manifest in alchemy as well as in mathematics, geometry , physics, and astronomy along with medicine (Needham 1965: 209-14, in particular 212-13). 5. In Science and Civilization in Ancient China, Joseph Needham points out-in a manner that underscores the problem of thinking about medicine in nationalistic terms-that the communication between "China" and "India" was notjust bidirectional but circular (a pattern that probably also characterized the 152 Notes to Pages 21-26 exchange of ideas between the northern Mediterranean region and the area from Baghdad south and west). Third-century ideas about embryonic breathing found their way into Mahayana texts in South Asia and were "refined" into "erotic-yogic" techniques by Natha yogis in the ninth and tenth centuries, but were earlier-probably in the fourth or fifth century-reintegrated into Taoist practices. As White points out, following Needham: "when Indian tantrism was first introduced into China in the eighth century by the Buddhist monks Subhakarasimha , Vajrabodhi, and Amoghavajra, a certain number of its techniques were merely "returning" to their country of origin, from which they had been exported but a few centuries earlier (1996: 63). As Buddhism began to decline in southern Asia, it became formalized and increasingly institutionalized in what is now Tibet. Many early Sanskrit texts-on yoga and tantra-are known primarily through their translation into Tibetan by Marpa in the eleventh century, his disciple Milarepa's translations and original work in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as well as through the Tibetan historian Buston's fourteenth-century scholarship. 6. Do~a, which is translated into English as humor, defect, or fault-which reflects a similar imprecision-was translated into Chinese as tu, meaning poison in English (Unschuld 1985: 142). 7. The Sanskrit term of this era for the area ofTibet and China is, not surprisingly , politically ambiguous. Mahacina means greater China, and one wonders where exactly-if they were concerned with exactness at all-travelers to the northwest of Kashmir and north of Assam drew the line. 8. It should be noted that the term "Islamic medicine" is an exception to the rule. The term Unani medicine is used in India to designate Islamic medicine, but etymologically...
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