The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  In India itself, consumption habits, particularly of rich Indians, were radically influenced a couple of thousand years ago by innovations made in China. Kauṭilya’s Sanskrit treatise on economics and politics, Arthaśāstra, first written in the fourth century BCE though revised and finalized 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’. There are references in the ancient epic the Mahābhārata to Chinese fabric or silk (cīnaṃśuka) being given as gifts, and there are similar references also in the ancient Laws of Manu.5

  The exotic nature of Chinese products was captured in many literary works in the early part of the first millennium. In a critical moment in the great fifth-century play Śakuntalā by Kālidāsa (perhaps the greatest poet and dramatist in classical Sanskrit literature), when King Duṣyanta sees, in the middle of a hunting expedition, the stunning hermit-girl Śakuntalā, and is altogether stricken by her beauty, the lovesick king explains the state of his transfixation by comparing himself with 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 Harṣacarita by Bāṇa, written in the seventh century, the celebrated wedding of the beautiful Rājyaśrī is made particularly resplendent by her decision to be clothed in elegant Chinese silk. There are also plentiful references in the Sanskrit literature in this period to many Chinese products other than silk that made their way into India, varying from camphor (cīnaka), fennel (cīnāka), vermilion (cīnapiṣṭa) and high-quality leather (cīnasi) to pear (cīnarājaputra) and peach (cīnani).6

  If China was enriching the material world of India two thousand years ago, India was busy, it appears, exporting Buddhism to China. That often-recollected process is certainly a part of history, and this straightforward story requires acknowledgement first, before more complex correlates of those relations are examined. The first firm record of the arrival of Indian monks in China goes back to the first century CE, when Dharmaraksa and Kāśyapa Mātaṅga came at the invitation of Emperor Mingdi of the Han dynasty. According to legend, the emperor had seen Gautama Buddha in his dream (there must have been some knowledge already of Buddhism in China for the central character in the royal dream to be recognized as Gautama), and he dispatched a search team to fetch Buddhist experts from India. Dharmarakṣa and Mātaṅga, the two Indian monks, arrived with masses of texts and relics on a white horse, whereupon the Chinese built for them the ‘White Horse Monastery’, Baima si, where the two apparently spent the rest of their lives.

  From then on, Indian scholars and monks kept coming to China in an unbroken stream, and this went on until the eleventh century. There are records of the lives and works of hundreds of such scholars and translators, who produced Chinese versions of thousands of Sanskrit documents. Even as the flow came to an end in the eleventh century (no further arrivals are recorded in the Chinese chronicles after 1036), the translations were going on with astonishing rapidity (we learn that 201 further Sanskrit volumes were translated between 982 and 1011). But by then Buddhism was in long-term decline in China with the growing dominance of Neo-Confucianism. It had also, by this time, declined in the country of its origin (the last Buddhist dynasty in India, the Pālas of Bengal, petered out in the twelfth century).7

  There was a similar – though somewhat smaller – flow in the opposite direction, from China to India. The reports that the Chinese visitors wrote about India covered its intellectual pursuits as well as religious practices, living styles and social systems. Yi Jing, quoted earlier, went to India in 675, on the sea route via Śrīvijaya, a flourishing coastal city in seventh-century Sumatra, which had strong Indian influences (and was where Yi Jing acquired his Sanskrit). He studied at the institute of higher learning, at Nālandā, located close to Pāṭaliputra (now Patna), the ancient capital of Maurya India (the first all-India state, established in the fourth century BCE). Yi Jing wrote a detailed account, completed in 691, on what he saw and assimilated in his decade in India.8 His investigation of what to learn from India concentrated, as one would expect, on Buddhist philosophy and practice in particular, but it also included other fields of study such as procedures of health care and medicine – a subject of special interest to him, to which Yi Jing devoted three chapters of his book. I shall return later to Yi Jing’s observations on this subject.

  The first Chinese scholar to leave a serious account of his visit to India was Faxian, a Buddhist scholar from western China who wanted to go to India to seek some Sanskrit texts (such as Vinaya) and to make them available in China. He arrived in India almost three hundred years before Yi Jing, in 401. He undertook an arduous journey through the northern route via Khotan (which had a strong Buddhist presence), having started off from China in 399. After ten active years in India, Faxian returned by sea, sailing from the mouth of the Ganges or Hooghly (not far from present-day Calcutta), via Buddhist Sri Lanka, and finally Hindu Java. Faxian spent his time in India travelling widely, visiting major cities and Buddhist sites, collecting documents (which he would later translate into Chinese), and talking – it would appear – with everyone around him. He wrote a highly illuminating account of India and Sri Lanka, A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.9 Faxian’s years in Pāṭaliputra were devoted to studying language and literature, in addition to religious texts. However, with a somewhat similar interest in public health as Yi Jing would display later, Faxian also paid particular attention to the Indian arrangements for health care, and to this, too, I shall return.

  The most famous visitor from China, Xuanzang, came in the seventh century under the later Tang dynasty. Xuanzang, who was a formidable scholar, collected a great many Sanskrit texts (again, he would translate many of them after his return to China), and travelled throughout India for sixteen years, including the years he spent (like Yi Jing who would follow him there) in the distinguished educational establishment at Nālandā. There Xuanzang studied medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics, astronomy and grammar, in addition to Buddhism.10 Xuanzang also met the Buddhist emperor of north India, King Harṣa, and had conversations with him on Sino-Indian relations.11

  Xuanzang’s visit was well remembered for many centuries, both in India and China. A Buddhist visitor to India from Japan in the ninth century noted with much interest the fact that, in a large number of Buddhist temples in ‘middle India’, Xuanzang was represented in paintings with his ‘hemp shoes, spoon and chop-sticks mounted on multicoloured clouds’.12 In China there were a great many legends about Xuanzang, which became quite popular by the tenth century and were frequently performed as plays on the Chinese stage later on. The best known and most popular of these semi-fictional accounts is a sixteenth-century allegorical novel, Xi You Ji (‘The Journey to the West’, also translated as Monkey), by Wu Cheng’en.13

  Insularity and Openness

  Despite the respect in which the India-returned Chinese scholars were viewed in their own country, including the royal patronage they often received, it is important not to overlook the resistance to Indian – particularly Buddhist – influence that was also widespread in China. The resistance to Buddhism in various periods of Chinese history contained, among other elements, a strong belief in China’s sense of intellectual invulnerability, and in particular the persuasion that ideas generated outside China could not really be very important. Han Yu, an anti-Buddhist intellectual in the ninth century, who would be much championed later on by Confucians, put the issue starkly in his ‘Memorial on Buddhism’ written in 819:

  The Buddha was of barbarian origin. His language differed from Chinese speech; his clothes were of a different cut; his mouth did not pronounce the prescribed words of the Former Kings; his body was not clad in garments prescribed by the Former Kings. He did not recognize the relationship between prince and subject, nor the sentiments of father and son.

  Han Yu even offered an illustrative proof of the wrongness of Buddhi
st ways:

  [Emperor Wu of the Liang] dedicated himself to the service of the Buddha. He refused to use animals in the sacrifices in his own ancestral temple. His single meal a day was limited to fruits and vegetables. In the end he was driven out and died of hunger. His dynasty likewise came to an untimely end. In serving the Buddha he was seeking good fortune, but the disaster that overtook him was only the greater. Viewed in the light of this, it is obvious that the Buddha is not worth serving.

  Daoist (or Taoist) opposition to Buddhism also had a strong element of Chinese intellectual nationalism and a sense of superiority of Chinese ways. As it happens, Buddhism and Daoism have many similarities, but that only made the battle even harder, and the issue of temporal priority, too, figured in this conflict. For example, in the early fourth century a Daoist activist, named Wang Fu, wrote a book called Laozi Hua Hu Jing (‘The Classic about Lao-tzu’s Civilizing the Barbarians’). In this account, Laozi (or Lao-tzu, to use the old but perhaps more familiar spelling), the founder of Daoism (who is normally placed in the third century BCE), was put on an imagined civilizing mission to India, especially to influence Gautama Buddha (who, as it happens, had died a few centuries before Laozi’s alleged arrival). Charles Hucker has pithily described this intensely polemical work and the rather bizarre controversy it generated:

  [Wang Fu’s] basic thesis is that Lao-tzu, on departing China, traveled across Central Asia into India and there either (1) magically transformed an accompanying disciple into the historic Buddha, (2) converted Buddha to Taoism, or (3) became Buddha himself, depending on which version of the text one reads. Buddhists fought this Taoist attack primarily by moving the life of the Buddha back to earlier and earlier times, and Taoists responded in kind by reassigning dates to Lao-tzu.14

  As Leon Hurvitz and Tsai Heng-Ting have discussed, the question, ‘Why should a Chinese allow himself to be influenced by Indian ways?’ was, in fact, ‘one of the objections most frequently raised by Confucians and Daoists once Buddhism had acquired a foothold on Chinese soil’.15 The loss of the central position of China in the order of things in the world was among the concerns. The Buddhist response took varying forms, but helped to open up some issues of universalist ethics at least in some of the responses to anti-Buddhist polemic. Mouzi, a vigorous defender of Buddhism and of the compatibility of the Buddhist outlook with being a good Chinese, even asked the question in his combative Lihao lun (‘Disposing of Error’) whether the Chinese should claim to be uniquely central in the world, and articulated a strong claim in favour of Buddhist universalism:

  The commentary says, ‘The north polar star is in the center of Heaven and to the north of man.’ From this one can see that the land of China is not necessarily situated under the center of Heaven. According to the Buddhist scriptures, above, below, and all around, all beings containing blood belong to the Buddha-clan.16

  One of the positive contributions Buddhist connections produced in China is the general sense that even the Chinese must, to some extent, look outwards. Indeed, not only did Buddhism suggest that there were sources of wisdom well outside China, but it also led to the tendency of many Chinese intellectuals to go abroad, in particular to India, in search of enlightenment and understanding. Furthermore, since these visitors to India came back with tales of wonderful things they had seen in India, it was difficult to take an entirely Sino-centric view of world civilization. There were also other admirable sites and achievements they could see on the way to India. For example, Xuanzang in the seventh century marvelled at the gigantic Bamiyan statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, which he saw as he approached India from the West (on the circuitous route he had taken via Khotan).*

  In fact, some Chinese commentators felt threatened not only by the dilution of China’s centrality, but – worse – by the tendency of some Buddhists to take India to be actually more central than China.17 Even though India was commonly referred to, at that time, as ‘the Western kingdom’ (giving China a more central position), the Buddhist perspective tended to favour placing India at the centre of things. For example, Faxian’s fifth-century book on his travels described India as ‘the Middle kingdom’, with China as a frontier country.18

  While all this was intensely irritating for believers in China’s centrality, such heterodoxy did bring in a challenge to what would otherwise have been China’s monolithic self-centredness. This was certainly a moderating influence on China’s insularity, and might even have made an indirect contribution to the interest and enthusiasm with which Chinese mathematicians and astronomers greeted Indian works in these fields (to be discussed presently).

  On the other side, Buddhist connections also helped to moderate Indian self-centredness and sense of civilizational exclusiveness. Suspicion of foreigners has been a continuing factor in parts of Indian thinking. Even as late as the eleventh century, Alberuni, the remarkable Iranian visitor, in his book Ta’rikh al-hind (‘The History of India’), complained about the Indian attitude towards foreigners:

  On the whole, there is very little disputing about theological topics among themselves…. On the contrary all their fanaticism is directed against those who do not belong to them – against all foreigners. They call them mleccha, i.e., impure, and forbid having any connection with them, be it by intermarriage or any other kind of relationship, or by sitting, eating, and drinking with them.19

  That attitude did receive a challenge from Buddhist universalism and from the fact that Indians became, for many centuries, closely linked to other people through the common bond of a shared religion.

  As it happens, despite the spread of Buddhism beyond the borders of India, locally confined Indian Buddhists did not always recognize what a world religion Buddhism was becoming. In the early fifth century, Faxian noted that when he met some Buddhist monks at the Jetavana monastery in India, he was surprised by their sense of uniqueness. The account, in third person, recounts the experience of Faxian and Dao Jing, who had accompanied Faxian:

  The crowd of monks came out, and asked them from what kingdom they were come. ‘We are come,’ they replied, ‘from the land of Han.’ ‘Strange,’ said the monks with a sigh, ‘that men of a border country should be able to come here in search of our Law!’ Then they said to one another, ‘During all the time that we, preceptors and monks, have succeeded to one another, we have never seen men of Han, followers of our system, arrive here.’20

  The reach of Buddhism and the presence of Chinese Buddhists in India would have done something to challenge the tendency to see the world in narrowly Indian terms.

  Buddhist educational institutions, particularly that at Nālandā in east India, with many distinguished Chinese and other foreign students, provided a good basis for overcoming that mistrust. The conflicting attitudes came out very sharply at the point of Xuanzang’s departure from Nālandā, in the seventh century. The Nālandā establishment greatly admired Xuanzang and wanted him to stay on, and they had offered him a leading position in the academic staff there. Xuanzang’s disciple Hui Li reports the attempt by the Nālandā academic staff to give a plethora of reasons to persuade Xuanzang to make India his home:

  The monks of Nālandā, when they heard of it [Xuanzang’s plan to return to China], begged him to remain, saying: ‘India is the land of Buddha’s birth, and though he has left the world, there are many traces of him…. Why then do you wish to leave having come so far? Moreover, China is a country of mlecchas, of unimportant barbarians, who despise the religious and the Faith. That is why Buddha was not born there. The mind of the people is narrow, and their coarseness profound, hence neither saints nor sages go there. The climate is cold and the country rugged – you must think again.21

  To this Xuanzang replied with two counterarguments. The first disputed the syllogism by invoking Buddhist universalism without questioning the empirical premise: ‘Buddha established his doctrine so that it might be diffused to all lands. Who would wish to enjoy it alone, and to forget those who are not yet enlightened?’ Xuanzang�
��s second argument disputed the empirical premise about China, in a spirit of national pride, without contradicting his own universalist outlook:

  Besides, in my country the magistrates are clothed with dignity, and the laws are everywhere respected. The emperor is virtuous and the subjects loyal, parents are loving and sons obedient, humanity and justice are highly esteemed, and old men and sages are held in honour…. How then can you say that Buddha did not go to my country because of its insignificance?

  Xuanzang returned to China in 645, but continued his communications with India. A few years afterwards he received a letter from his old friend, Prajñadeva, from Nālandā, who sent his regards along with those of other Indian friends of Xuanzang, and added:

  The Upāsakas [students and trainees] always continue to offer their salutations to you. We are sending you a pair of white cloths to show that we are not forgetful. The road is long. So do not mind the smallness of the present. We wish you may accept it. As regards the Sūtras and the Śāstras [Sanskrit texts] which you may require, please send us a list. We will copy them and send them to you.

  Xuanzang replied by first noting that he had heard the sad news of the death of one of his teachers in Nālandā, and then by taking up Prajñadeva’s offer to help in sending useful documents from India:

  I learnt from an ambassador who recently came back from India that the great teacher Śīlabhadra was no more. This news overwhelmed me with grief that knows no bounds…. I should let you know that while crossing the Indus I had lost a load of sacred texts. I now send you a list of the texts annexed to this letter. I request you to send them to me if you get a chance. I am sending some small articles as presents. Please accept them.