04-19-2005, 01:49 PM
(where shall I put this?). Okay here, but please move it as necessary.
Here is an interesting article about the intellectutal links between China and India.
<b>The New York Review of Books: Passage to China</b>
Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004
<b>Passage to China
By Amartya Sen</b>
1.
The intellectual links between China and India, stretching over two
thousand years, have had far-reaching effects on the history of both
countries, yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice
they get tends to come from writers interested in religious history,
particularly the history of Buddhism, which began its spread from
India to China in the first century. In China Buddhism became a
powerful force until it was largely displaced by Confucianism and
Taoism approximately a thousand years later. But religion is only
one part of the much bigger story of Sino-Indian connections during
the first millennium. A broader understanding of these relations is
greatly needed, not only for us to appreciate more fully the history
of a third of the world's population, but also because the
connections between the two countries are important for political
and social issues today.
Certainly religion has been a major source of contact between China
and India, and Buddhism was central to the movement of people and
ideas between the two countries. But the wider influence of Buddhism
was not confined to religion. Its secular impact stretched into
science, mathematics, literature, linguistics, architecture,
medicine, and music. We know from the elaborate accounts left by a
number of Chinese visitors to India, such as Faxian in the fifth
century and Xuanzang and Yi Jing in the seventh,[1] that their
interest was by no means restricted to religious theory and
practices. Similarly, the Indian scholars who went to China,
especially in the seventh and eighth centuries, included not only
religious experts but also other professionals such as astronomers
and mathematicians. In the eighth century an Indian astronomer named
Gautama Siddhartha became the president of the Board of Astronomy in
China.
The richness and variety of early intellectual relations between
China and India have long been obscured. This neglect is now
reinforced by the contemporary tendency to classify the world's
population into distinct "civilizations" defined largely by religion
(for example Samuel Huntington's partitioning of the world into such
categories as "Western civilization," "Islamic civilization,"
and "Hindu civilization"). There is, as a result, a widespread
inclination to understand people mainly through their religious
beliefs, even if this misses much that is important about them. The
limitations of this perspective have already done significant harm
to our understanding of other aspects of the global history of
ideas. Many are now predisposed to see the history of Muslims as
quintessentially Islamic history, ignoring the flowering of science,
mathematics, and literature that was made possible by Muslim
intellectuals, particularly between the eighth and the thirteenth
centuries. One result of such a narrow emphasis on religion is that
a disaffected Arab activist today is encouraged to take pride only
in the purity of Islam, rather than in the diversity and richness of
Arab history. In India too, there are frequent attempts to portray
the broad civilization of India as "Hindu civilization"-to use the
phrase favored both by theorists like Samuel Huntington and by Hindu
political activists.
Second, there is an odd and distracting contrast between the ways in
which Western and non-Western ideas and scholarship are currently
understood. In interpreting non-Western works, many commentators
tend to ascribe a much greater importance to religion than is
merited, neglecting the works' secular interests. Few assume that,
say, Isaac Newton's scientific work must be understood as primarily
Christian (even though he did have Christian beliefs); nor do most
of us take it for granted that his contributions to scientific
knowledge must somehow be interpreted in the light of his deep
interest in mysticism (important as mystical speculations were to
him, perhaps even motivating some of his scientific work). In
contrast, when it comes to non-Western cultures, religious
reductionism tends to be a powerful influence. Scholars often
presume that none of the broadly conceived intellectual work of
Buddhist scholars, or of followers of Tantric practices, could
be "properly understood" except in the special light of their
religious beliefs and customs.
2.
As it happens, relations between China and India almost certainly
began with trade, not with Buddhism. Some two thousand years ago the
consumption habits of Indians, particularly of rich Indians, were
radically influenced by innovations from China. A treatise on
economics and politics by the great Sanskrit scholar Kautilya, first
written in the fourth century BCE, though revised a few centuries
later, gives a special place to "silk and silk-cloth from the land
of China" among "precious articles" and "objects of value." <b>In the
ancient epic Mahabharata there are references to Chinese fabric or
silk (cinamsuka) being given as presents,</b> and there are similar
references in the ancient Laws of Manu.
The exotic nature of Chinese products was captured in many Sanskrit
literary works in the early part of the first millennium, as in the
fifth-century play Sakuntala by Kalidasa (perhaps the greatest poet
and dramatist in classical Sanskrit literature). When King Dusyanta
sees, in the middle of a hunting expedition, the stunning hermit-
girl Sakuntala and is overwhelmed by her beauty, he explains his
passion by comparing himself to the way a banner made of Chinese
silk flutters in the wind: "My body goes forward,/But my reluctant
mind runs back/Like Chinese silk on a banner/Trembling against the
wind." In the play Harsacarita by Bana, written in the seventh
century, the beautiful Rajyasri is portrayed at her wedding as
gorgeously dressed in elegant Chinese silk. During the same period
there are also plentiful references in the Sanskrit literature to
other Chinese products that made their way into India, among them
camphor (cinaka), vermilion (cinapista), and high-quality leather
(cinasi), as well as delicious pears (cinarajaputra) and peaches
(cinani).
While China was enriching the material world of India two thousand
years ago, India was exporting Buddhism to China at least since the
first century AD, when two Indian monks, Dharmaraksa and Kasyapa
Matanga, arrived in China at the invitation of Emperor Mingdi of the
Han dynasty. From then on until the eleventh century, more and more
Indian scholars and monks came to China. Hundreds of scholars and
translators produced Chinese versions of thousands of Sanskrit
documents, most of them Buddhist works. Translations were going on
with astonishing rapidity. Although the flow of translated work came
to an end in the eleventh century, more than two hundred further
Sanskrit volumes were translated between 982 and 1011 AD.
The first Chinese scholar to write an elaborate account of his visit
to India was Faxian, a Buddhist scholar from western China who went
in search of Sanskrit texts, intending to make them available in
Chinese. After an arduous journey through the northern route to
India via Khotan (which had a strong Buddhist presence), he reached
India in 401 CE. Ten years later, Faxian returned by sea, sailing
from the mouth of the Ganges (not far from present-day Calcutta),
and going on to visit Buddhist Sri Lanka and to see Hindu Java.
Faxian spent his time in India traveling widely and collecting
documents (which he would later translate into Chinese). His Record
of Buddhist Kingdoms is a highly illuminating account of India and
Sri Lanka. Faxian's years in Pataliputra (or Patna) were devoted to
studying Sanskrit language and literature in addition to religious
texts, but, as will be seen, he was also greatly interested in
contemporary Indian arrangements for health care.
The most famous visitor to India from China was Xuanzang, who
traveled there in the seventh century. A formidable scholar, he
collected Sanskrit texts (translating many of them after his return
to China), and traveled throughout India for sixteen years,
including the years he spent in Nalanda, a famous institution of
higher education not far from Patna. At Nalanda, in addition to
Buddhism, Xuanzang studied medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics,
astronomy, and grammar. On his return to China he was greeted by the
emperor with much pomp.[2] Yi Jing, who came to India shortly after
Xuanzang's visit, also studied in Nalanda, combining his work on
Buddhism with studies of medicine and public health care.
3.
Yi Jing's translation of Buddhist works included texts by
practitioners of Tantrism, whose esoteric traditions placed a strong
emphasis on meditation. Tantrism became a major force in China in
the seventh and eighth centuries, and since many Tantric scholars
had a strong interest in mathematics (perhaps connected, at least
initially, with the Tantric fascination with numbers), Tantric
mathematicians influenced Chinese mathematics as well.
Joseph Needham notes that "the most important Tantrist" was Yi Xing
(672 to 717), "the greatest Chinese astronomer and mathematician of
his time."[3] Yi Xing, who was fluent in Sanskrit and was familiar
with the Indian literature on mathematics, was also a Buddhist monk,
but it would be a mistake to assume that his mathematical work was
somehow specifically religious. As a mathematician who happened to
be also a Tantrist, Yi Xing dealt with a variety of analytical and
computational problems, many of which had no particular connection
with Tantrism at all. He tackled such classic problems
as "calculating the total number of possible situations in chess."
He was particularly concerned with calendrical calculations, and
even constructed, on the emperor's orders, a new calendar for China.
Indian astronomers who were living in China in the eighth century
were particularly occupied with calendrical studies, and made use of
developments in trigonometry that had already emerged in India (and
that went far beyond the original Greek roots of Indian
trigonometry). This was also around the time when Indian astronomy
and mathematics, including trig-onometry, were influencing the
mathematics and the sciences of the Arab world, through the
translation into Arabic of Aryabhata, Varahamihira, and Brahmagupta,
among others.[4]
Chinese records show that several Indian astronomers and
mathematicians held high positions in the Astronomical Bureau at the
Chinese capital during this period. Not only did one of them,
Gautama, became president of the Board of Astronomy in China, he
also produced the great Chinese compendium of astronomy, Kaiyvan
Zhanjing, an eighth-century scientific classic. He adapted a number
of Indian astronomical works for publication in Chinese, among them
the Jiuzhi li, which draws on a particular planetary calendar in
India and is clearly based on a classical Sanskrit text, produced
around 550 CE by the mathematician Varahamihira. This work is mainly
an algorithmic guide to computation, estimating, for example, the
duration of eclipses based on the diameter of the moon and other
relevant parameters. The techniques involved drew on methods
established by Aryabhata in the late fifth century, and then further
developed by his followers in India, including Varahamihira and
Brahmagupta.
Yang Jingfeng, an eighth-century Chinese astronomer, described the
mixed background of official Chinese astronomy:
Those who wish to know the positions of the five planets adopt
Indian calendrical methods.... So we have the three clans of Indian
calendar experts, Chiayeh [Kasyapa], Chh?[Gautama], and Ch?Kuma
ra], all of whom hold office at the Bureau of Astronomy. But
now most use is made of the calendrical methods of Master Chh?
together with his "Great Art," in the work which is carried out for
the government.[5]
The Indian astronomers, such as Gautama or Kasyapa or Kumara, would
not have gone to China except for the connections that were made
possible by Buddhism, but their work can hardly be seen primarily as
contributions to Buddhism.
4.
The literature of cultures and civilizations includes much
discussion of China's alleged insularity and its suspicion of ideas
that have come from elsewhere. This view has also been invoked in
recent years to try to explain Chinese resistance to democratic
politics. Such simple interpretations, however, cannot explain why
China so readily embraced the market economy at home and abroad
following the economic reforms of 1979, while its leaders firmly
resisted political democracy. But it is also true that China has
not, in fact, been as intellectually insular as is frequently
assumed.
Here China's relations with India are of particular importance. As
it happens, India is the only country in the outside world to which
scholars from ancient China went for their education and training;
we have records of more than two hundred distinguished Chinese
scholars who spent extensive periods of time in India in the second
half of the first millennium. The Chinese primarily sought a
knowledge of Sanskrit and of Buddhist literature, but they were
interested in much else as well. Some Indian influences are evident,
as with the use of key terms and concepts from Sanskrit such as
ch'an or zen derived from dhyana, or meditation, as well as the
themes of Chinese operas that drew on Sanskrit stories (such as The
Heavenly Girl Scattering Flowers).[6] As the American scholar John
Kieschnick has shown, the Chinese construction of temples and
bridges was much influenced by ideas that came from India through
Buddhism.[7]
The movement of knowledge between China and India went, of course,
in both directions. Joseph Needham attempted to provide a list of
mathematical ideas that "radiated from China," particularly to
India, and he has argued that many more ideas went from China to
India than moved in the opposite direction: "India was the more
receptive of the two cultures."[8] In the absence of direct evidence
of the movement of a particular idea in either direction between
India and China, Needham assumed that an idea moved from the country
where the first record of its use had been found. This procedure has
been strongly criticized by other historians of science and
mathematics, such as Jean-Claude Martzloff.[9] It seems clear that
an earlier record of use would have been much more likely to have
been lost in India than in China.[10] What is really important is
that plenty of ideas in mathematics and science, as well as in other
nonreligious subjects, moved in both directions.
5.
The transfer of ideas and skills in mathematics and science remains
central to the contemporary commercial world whether for the
development of information technology or of modern industrial
methods. What may perhaps be less clear is how nations learn from
one another both in enlarging the scope of public communication and
in improving public health care. As it happens, both were important
in the intellectual relations between China and India in the first
millennium and remain central even today.
As a religion, Buddhism began with at least two specific
characteristics that were quite unusual, its agnosticism and its
commitment to broad discussion of public issues. Some of the
earliest open public meetings on record, aimed specifically at
settling disputes over religious beliefs as well as other matters,
took place in India in elaborately organized Buddhist "councils," in
which adherents of different points of view argued their
differences. The first of these large councils was held in Rajagriha
shortly after Gautama Buddha's death 2,500 years ago. The largest of
the councils, the third, was held in the capital city of Patna,
under the patronage of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE.
Ashoka also tried to codify and circulate what must have been among
the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion-a kind of
ancient version of Robert's Rules of Order. He demanded, for
example, "restraint in regard to speech, so that there should be no
extolling of one's own sect or disparaging of other sects on
inappropriate occasions, and it should be moderate even in
appropriate occasions." Even when engaged in arguing, "other sects
should be duly honored in every way on all occasions."
Insofar as reasoned public discussion is central to democracy (as
John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and J?Habermas, among many
others, have argued), the origins of democracy can indeed be traced
in part to the tradition of public discussion that received much
encouragement from the emphasis on dialogue in Buddhism in both
India and China (and also in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere). It is
also significant that nearly every attempt at early printing in
China, Korea, and Japan was undertaken by Buddhists.[11] The first
printed book in the world (or rather, the first printed book that is
actually dated) was the Chinese translation of an Indian Sanskrit
treatise, the so-called Diamond Sutra, which was printed in China in
868 AD. While the Diamond Sutra is almost entirely a religious
document, the boldly inscribed dedication of this ninth-century
book, "for universal free distribution," announces a commitment to
public education.
John Kieschnick has noted that "one of the reasons for the important
place of books in the Chinese Buddhist tradition is the belief that
one can gain merit by copying or printing Buddhist scriptures," and
he has argued that "the origins of this belief can be traced to
India."[12] There is some ground for that view; there is also surely
a connection here with the emphasis on communication with a broad
public by such Buddhist leaders as Ashoka, who erected throughout
India large stone tablets bearing inscriptions describing the
qualities of good public behavior (including the rules on how to
conduct an argument).
The development of printing, of course, had a powerful effect on the
development of democracy, but even in the short run, it opened new
possibilities for public communication and had enormous consequences
for social and political life in China. Among other things, it also
influenced neo-Confucian education, and as Theodore de Bary has
noted, "women's education achieved a new level of importance with
the rise of...learning [during the Song dynasty] and its neo-
Confucian extensions in the Ming, marked by the great spread of
printing, literacy, and schooling."[13]
<b>-Continued</b>
Here is an interesting article about the intellectutal links between China and India.
<b>The New York Review of Books: Passage to China</b>
Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004
<b>Passage to China
By Amartya Sen</b>
1.
The intellectual links between China and India, stretching over two
thousand years, have had far-reaching effects on the history of both
countries, yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice
they get tends to come from writers interested in religious history,
particularly the history of Buddhism, which began its spread from
India to China in the first century. In China Buddhism became a
powerful force until it was largely displaced by Confucianism and
Taoism approximately a thousand years later. But religion is only
one part of the much bigger story of Sino-Indian connections during
the first millennium. A broader understanding of these relations is
greatly needed, not only for us to appreciate more fully the history
of a third of the world's population, but also because the
connections between the two countries are important for political
and social issues today.
Certainly religion has been a major source of contact between China
and India, and Buddhism was central to the movement of people and
ideas between the two countries. But the wider influence of Buddhism
was not confined to religion. Its secular impact stretched into
science, mathematics, literature, linguistics, architecture,
medicine, and music. We know from the elaborate accounts left by a
number of Chinese visitors to India, such as Faxian in the fifth
century and Xuanzang and Yi Jing in the seventh,[1] that their
interest was by no means restricted to religious theory and
practices. Similarly, the Indian scholars who went to China,
especially in the seventh and eighth centuries, included not only
religious experts but also other professionals such as astronomers
and mathematicians. In the eighth century an Indian astronomer named
Gautama Siddhartha became the president of the Board of Astronomy in
China.
The richness and variety of early intellectual relations between
China and India have long been obscured. This neglect is now
reinforced by the contemporary tendency to classify the world's
population into distinct "civilizations" defined largely by religion
(for example Samuel Huntington's partitioning of the world into such
categories as "Western civilization," "Islamic civilization,"
and "Hindu civilization"). There is, as a result, a widespread
inclination to understand people mainly through their religious
beliefs, even if this misses much that is important about them. The
limitations of this perspective have already done significant harm
to our understanding of other aspects of the global history of
ideas. Many are now predisposed to see the history of Muslims as
quintessentially Islamic history, ignoring the flowering of science,
mathematics, and literature that was made possible by Muslim
intellectuals, particularly between the eighth and the thirteenth
centuries. One result of such a narrow emphasis on religion is that
a disaffected Arab activist today is encouraged to take pride only
in the purity of Islam, rather than in the diversity and richness of
Arab history. In India too, there are frequent attempts to portray
the broad civilization of India as "Hindu civilization"-to use the
phrase favored both by theorists like Samuel Huntington and by Hindu
political activists.
Second, there is an odd and distracting contrast between the ways in
which Western and non-Western ideas and scholarship are currently
understood. In interpreting non-Western works, many commentators
tend to ascribe a much greater importance to religion than is
merited, neglecting the works' secular interests. Few assume that,
say, Isaac Newton's scientific work must be understood as primarily
Christian (even though he did have Christian beliefs); nor do most
of us take it for granted that his contributions to scientific
knowledge must somehow be interpreted in the light of his deep
interest in mysticism (important as mystical speculations were to
him, perhaps even motivating some of his scientific work). In
contrast, when it comes to non-Western cultures, religious
reductionism tends to be a powerful influence. Scholars often
presume that none of the broadly conceived intellectual work of
Buddhist scholars, or of followers of Tantric practices, could
be "properly understood" except in the special light of their
religious beliefs and customs.
2.
As it happens, relations between China and India almost certainly
began with trade, not with Buddhism. Some two thousand years ago the
consumption habits of Indians, particularly of rich Indians, were
radically influenced by innovations from China. A treatise on
economics and politics by the great Sanskrit scholar Kautilya, first
written in the fourth century BCE, though revised a few centuries
later, gives a special place to "silk and silk-cloth from the land
of China" among "precious articles" and "objects of value." <b>In the
ancient epic Mahabharata there are references to Chinese fabric or
silk (cinamsuka) being given as presents,</b> and there are similar
references in the ancient Laws of Manu.
The exotic nature of Chinese products was captured in many Sanskrit
literary works in the early part of the first millennium, as in the
fifth-century play Sakuntala by Kalidasa (perhaps the greatest poet
and dramatist in classical Sanskrit literature). When King Dusyanta
sees, in the middle of a hunting expedition, the stunning hermit-
girl Sakuntala and is overwhelmed by her beauty, he explains his
passion by comparing himself to the way a banner made of Chinese
silk flutters in the wind: "My body goes forward,/But my reluctant
mind runs back/Like Chinese silk on a banner/Trembling against the
wind." In the play Harsacarita by Bana, written in the seventh
century, the beautiful Rajyasri is portrayed at her wedding as
gorgeously dressed in elegant Chinese silk. During the same period
there are also plentiful references in the Sanskrit literature to
other Chinese products that made their way into India, among them
camphor (cinaka), vermilion (cinapista), and high-quality leather
(cinasi), as well as delicious pears (cinarajaputra) and peaches
(cinani).
While China was enriching the material world of India two thousand
years ago, India was exporting Buddhism to China at least since the
first century AD, when two Indian monks, Dharmaraksa and Kasyapa
Matanga, arrived in China at the invitation of Emperor Mingdi of the
Han dynasty. From then on until the eleventh century, more and more
Indian scholars and monks came to China. Hundreds of scholars and
translators produced Chinese versions of thousands of Sanskrit
documents, most of them Buddhist works. Translations were going on
with astonishing rapidity. Although the flow of translated work came
to an end in the eleventh century, more than two hundred further
Sanskrit volumes were translated between 982 and 1011 AD.
The first Chinese scholar to write an elaborate account of his visit
to India was Faxian, a Buddhist scholar from western China who went
in search of Sanskrit texts, intending to make them available in
Chinese. After an arduous journey through the northern route to
India via Khotan (which had a strong Buddhist presence), he reached
India in 401 CE. Ten years later, Faxian returned by sea, sailing
from the mouth of the Ganges (not far from present-day Calcutta),
and going on to visit Buddhist Sri Lanka and to see Hindu Java.
Faxian spent his time in India traveling widely and collecting
documents (which he would later translate into Chinese). His Record
of Buddhist Kingdoms is a highly illuminating account of India and
Sri Lanka. Faxian's years in Pataliputra (or Patna) were devoted to
studying Sanskrit language and literature in addition to religious
texts, but, as will be seen, he was also greatly interested in
contemporary Indian arrangements for health care.
The most famous visitor to India from China was Xuanzang, who
traveled there in the seventh century. A formidable scholar, he
collected Sanskrit texts (translating many of them after his return
to China), and traveled throughout India for sixteen years,
including the years he spent in Nalanda, a famous institution of
higher education not far from Patna. At Nalanda, in addition to
Buddhism, Xuanzang studied medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics,
astronomy, and grammar. On his return to China he was greeted by the
emperor with much pomp.[2] Yi Jing, who came to India shortly after
Xuanzang's visit, also studied in Nalanda, combining his work on
Buddhism with studies of medicine and public health care.
3.
Yi Jing's translation of Buddhist works included texts by
practitioners of Tantrism, whose esoteric traditions placed a strong
emphasis on meditation. Tantrism became a major force in China in
the seventh and eighth centuries, and since many Tantric scholars
had a strong interest in mathematics (perhaps connected, at least
initially, with the Tantric fascination with numbers), Tantric
mathematicians influenced Chinese mathematics as well.
Joseph Needham notes that "the most important Tantrist" was Yi Xing
(672 to 717), "the greatest Chinese astronomer and mathematician of
his time."[3] Yi Xing, who was fluent in Sanskrit and was familiar
with the Indian literature on mathematics, was also a Buddhist monk,
but it would be a mistake to assume that his mathematical work was
somehow specifically religious. As a mathematician who happened to
be also a Tantrist, Yi Xing dealt with a variety of analytical and
computational problems, many of which had no particular connection
with Tantrism at all. He tackled such classic problems
as "calculating the total number of possible situations in chess."
He was particularly concerned with calendrical calculations, and
even constructed, on the emperor's orders, a new calendar for China.
Indian astronomers who were living in China in the eighth century
were particularly occupied with calendrical studies, and made use of
developments in trigonometry that had already emerged in India (and
that went far beyond the original Greek roots of Indian
trigonometry). This was also around the time when Indian astronomy
and mathematics, including trig-onometry, were influencing the
mathematics and the sciences of the Arab world, through the
translation into Arabic of Aryabhata, Varahamihira, and Brahmagupta,
among others.[4]
Chinese records show that several Indian astronomers and
mathematicians held high positions in the Astronomical Bureau at the
Chinese capital during this period. Not only did one of them,
Gautama, became president of the Board of Astronomy in China, he
also produced the great Chinese compendium of astronomy, Kaiyvan
Zhanjing, an eighth-century scientific classic. He adapted a number
of Indian astronomical works for publication in Chinese, among them
the Jiuzhi li, which draws on a particular planetary calendar in
India and is clearly based on a classical Sanskrit text, produced
around 550 CE by the mathematician Varahamihira. This work is mainly
an algorithmic guide to computation, estimating, for example, the
duration of eclipses based on the diameter of the moon and other
relevant parameters. The techniques involved drew on methods
established by Aryabhata in the late fifth century, and then further
developed by his followers in India, including Varahamihira and
Brahmagupta.
Yang Jingfeng, an eighth-century Chinese astronomer, described the
mixed background of official Chinese astronomy:
Those who wish to know the positions of the five planets adopt
Indian calendrical methods.... So we have the three clans of Indian
calendar experts, Chiayeh [Kasyapa], Chh?[Gautama], and Ch?Kuma
ra], all of whom hold office at the Bureau of Astronomy. But
now most use is made of the calendrical methods of Master Chh?
together with his "Great Art," in the work which is carried out for
the government.[5]
The Indian astronomers, such as Gautama or Kasyapa or Kumara, would
not have gone to China except for the connections that were made
possible by Buddhism, but their work can hardly be seen primarily as
contributions to Buddhism.
4.
The literature of cultures and civilizations includes much
discussion of China's alleged insularity and its suspicion of ideas
that have come from elsewhere. This view has also been invoked in
recent years to try to explain Chinese resistance to democratic
politics. Such simple interpretations, however, cannot explain why
China so readily embraced the market economy at home and abroad
following the economic reforms of 1979, while its leaders firmly
resisted political democracy. But it is also true that China has
not, in fact, been as intellectually insular as is frequently
assumed.
Here China's relations with India are of particular importance. As
it happens, India is the only country in the outside world to which
scholars from ancient China went for their education and training;
we have records of more than two hundred distinguished Chinese
scholars who spent extensive periods of time in India in the second
half of the first millennium. The Chinese primarily sought a
knowledge of Sanskrit and of Buddhist literature, but they were
interested in much else as well. Some Indian influences are evident,
as with the use of key terms and concepts from Sanskrit such as
ch'an or zen derived from dhyana, or meditation, as well as the
themes of Chinese operas that drew on Sanskrit stories (such as The
Heavenly Girl Scattering Flowers).[6] As the American scholar John
Kieschnick has shown, the Chinese construction of temples and
bridges was much influenced by ideas that came from India through
Buddhism.[7]
The movement of knowledge between China and India went, of course,
in both directions. Joseph Needham attempted to provide a list of
mathematical ideas that "radiated from China," particularly to
India, and he has argued that many more ideas went from China to
India than moved in the opposite direction: "India was the more
receptive of the two cultures."[8] In the absence of direct evidence
of the movement of a particular idea in either direction between
India and China, Needham assumed that an idea moved from the country
where the first record of its use had been found. This procedure has
been strongly criticized by other historians of science and
mathematics, such as Jean-Claude Martzloff.[9] It seems clear that
an earlier record of use would have been much more likely to have
been lost in India than in China.[10] What is really important is
that plenty of ideas in mathematics and science, as well as in other
nonreligious subjects, moved in both directions.
5.
The transfer of ideas and skills in mathematics and science remains
central to the contemporary commercial world whether for the
development of information technology or of modern industrial
methods. What may perhaps be less clear is how nations learn from
one another both in enlarging the scope of public communication and
in improving public health care. As it happens, both were important
in the intellectual relations between China and India in the first
millennium and remain central even today.
As a religion, Buddhism began with at least two specific
characteristics that were quite unusual, its agnosticism and its
commitment to broad discussion of public issues. Some of the
earliest open public meetings on record, aimed specifically at
settling disputes over religious beliefs as well as other matters,
took place in India in elaborately organized Buddhist "councils," in
which adherents of different points of view argued their
differences. The first of these large councils was held in Rajagriha
shortly after Gautama Buddha's death 2,500 years ago. The largest of
the councils, the third, was held in the capital city of Patna,
under the patronage of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE.
Ashoka also tried to codify and circulate what must have been among
the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion-a kind of
ancient version of Robert's Rules of Order. He demanded, for
example, "restraint in regard to speech, so that there should be no
extolling of one's own sect or disparaging of other sects on
inappropriate occasions, and it should be moderate even in
appropriate occasions." Even when engaged in arguing, "other sects
should be duly honored in every way on all occasions."
Insofar as reasoned public discussion is central to democracy (as
John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and J?Habermas, among many
others, have argued), the origins of democracy can indeed be traced
in part to the tradition of public discussion that received much
encouragement from the emphasis on dialogue in Buddhism in both
India and China (and also in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere). It is
also significant that nearly every attempt at early printing in
China, Korea, and Japan was undertaken by Buddhists.[11] The first
printed book in the world (or rather, the first printed book that is
actually dated) was the Chinese translation of an Indian Sanskrit
treatise, the so-called Diamond Sutra, which was printed in China in
868 AD. While the Diamond Sutra is almost entirely a religious
document, the boldly inscribed dedication of this ninth-century
book, "for universal free distribution," announces a commitment to
public education.
John Kieschnick has noted that "one of the reasons for the important
place of books in the Chinese Buddhist tradition is the belief that
one can gain merit by copying or printing Buddhist scriptures," and
he has argued that "the origins of this belief can be traced to
India."[12] There is some ground for that view; there is also surely
a connection here with the emphasis on communication with a broad
public by such Buddhist leaders as Ashoka, who erected throughout
India large stone tablets bearing inscriptions describing the
qualities of good public behavior (including the rules on how to
conduct an argument).
The development of printing, of course, had a powerful effect on the
development of democracy, but even in the short run, it opened new
possibilities for public communication and had enormous consequences
for social and political life in China. Among other things, it also
influenced neo-Confucian education, and as Theodore de Bary has
noted, "women's education achieved a new level of importance with
the rise of...learning [during the Song dynasty] and its neo-
Confucian extensions in the Ming, marked by the great spread of
printing, literacy, and schooling."[13]
<b>-Continued</b>