India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. It would be impossible to cover here the vast literature on the Indian-Chinese cultural exchange. Some noteworthy examples include Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden: Brill, 1959); Kenneth Ch’en, The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973); Stephen Teiser, The Scripture of the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994); John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Victor Mair, Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988); Victor Mair, T’ang Transformation Texts (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989); Xu Dishan, “Fanju tili jiqi zai Hanjushang de diandian didi,” in Zhongguo xiju qiyuan, ed. Xia Xieshi et al. (Shanghai: Zhishi chubanshe, 1990), 86–118; Victor Mair and Tsu-lin Mei, “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Prosody,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, 2 (December 1991): 375–470; Richard Mather, “Chinese and Indian Perceptions of Each Other between the First and Seventh Centuries,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, 1 (1992): 1–8; Wang Bangwei, “Buddhist Nikāyas Through Ancient Chinese Eyes,” in Untersuchungen zur buddhistischen Literatur, Sanskrit-Wörterbuch der buddhistischen Texte aus den Turfan-Funden, Beiheft 5 (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 166–203; and Victor Mair, “Xie He’s ‘Six Laws’ of Painting and Their Indian Parallels,” in Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties, ed. Zong-qi Cai (Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press, 2004), 81–122. 2. The first military conflict between India and China took place in 648, when, according to Chinese sources, a Chinese embassy led by Wang Xuance was attacked by the Indian king Aruṇāśa. Wang survived the attack and retreated to Tibet, where he recruited twelve hundred mercenaries and seven hundred Nepali cavalry. These troops returned and conquered Aruṇāśa and his men. The circumstances of this conflict are obscure and are not attested in Indian sources. Significantly for the argument below, even according to Chinese sources Chinese troops did not play a major role in the attack; as in the case of trade and religious exchange, this first Chinese-Indian military encounter took place between 218 Notes to Pages 2–4 surrogates. See Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of SinoIndian Relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 22–25. 3. On Indian-Chinese trade, see Xinru Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchange AD 1–600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Sen, Buddhism , Diplomacy, and Trade. 4. For evidence of Indian merchants in China, see Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 162–64. 5. See Li Rongxi’s translation of Xuanzang’s travelogue, The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, BDK English Tripitaka 79 (Berkeley, Calif.: Numata Center , 1996); and Junjiro Takakusu’s translation of Yijing (I-Tsing), A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practiced in India and the Malay Archipelago (A.D. 671–695) (Oxford: Clarendon , 1896). See also Timothy H. Barrett, “Did I-Ching Go to India? Problems in Using I-Ching as a Source on South Asian Buddhism,” Buddhist Studies Review 15, 2 (1998): 142–56; Wang Bangwei, Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan jiaozhu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000); Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 17–19; and Max Deeg, Das GaosengFaxian -Zhuan als religionsgeschichtliche Quelle: Der älteste Bericht eines chinesischen buddhistischen Pilgermönchs über seine Reise nach Indien mit Übersetzung des Textes (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005). 6. As Robert Sharf puts it: “The Chinese ‘encounter’or ‘dialogue’with Buddhism took place almost exclusively among the Chinese themselves, on Chinese soil, in the Chinese language.” See his Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press, 2002), 2. The Chinese translation of Sanskrit and Prakrit Buddhist scriptures is a discipline unto itself; see among recent studies Jan Nattier, A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations (Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology , Soka University, 2008); Daniel Boucher, “Gāndhārī and the Early Chinese Buddhist Translations Reconsidered: The Case of the Saddharmapuņḑarīkasūtra,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 118, 4 (1998): 471–506; Stefano Zacchetti, In Praise of Light: A Critical Synoptic Edition with an Annotated Translation of Chapters 1–3 Dharmarak ṣa’s Guang zan jing (Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2005...