The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  Through the normal sorrows and tragedies of human life, the borderless engagement in pursuing a common understanding continued. But the foreign contacts generated through Buddhism had, at least temporarily, shamed the self-centred arrogance of some of the leading Indian intellectuals of the time.

  The broadening effects of Buddhist connections on the self-centredness of both Chinese and Indian intellectuals are among the significant secular consequences of these linkages. They added a psychological and perceptual dimension to the other – more palpable – secular consequences of Buddhist connections, over such diverse fields as mathematics, astronomy, literature, linguistics, music, fine arts, medicine and public health, which I take up now.

  Transmission of Ideas: A Methodological Difficulty

  Interactions between Indian and Chinese intellectuals in the first millennium were particularly strong in mathematics and science (especially astronomy). Before assessing these interactions, it would be useful to consider a serious methodological difficulty related to the procedure for diagnosing the movement of ideas from one country to another. Even though plausible connections are easy to point out, direct evidence of movement of ideas is often hard to find. ‘In works on the Chinese sciences,’ Jean-Claude Martzloff has noted in his history of Chinese mathematics, ‘no question has been touched on more often than that of the circulation of ideas,’ and yet ‘we still know very little about the subject.’22

  Joseph Needham has 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 came in the opposite direction: ‘India was the more receptive of the two cultures.’23 Martzloff criticizes Needham’s procedure ‘because of its chronological and methodological imprecision’, and goes on to provide some serious counterarguments to Needham’s substantive conclusions.24 In the absence of direct evidence of the movement of an idea, Needham presumes that the idea in question actually did move from the country where its known use is earlier to the country where the evidence of its first recorded use is at a later date. The procedure is, thus, essentially speculative, and can be faulted, among other problems, for ignoring the possible loss of an earlier record of use which could affect chronological priority, and not acknowledging the possibility of an independent discovery.

  The investigation of the movement of mathematical or scientific ideas between China and India is also seriously hampered by the fact that there is a substantial informational asymmetry between the preserved records in the two countries. The Chinese records are much more extensive and much better preserved than their Indian counterparts. It has become increasingly common to claim in recent Indian discussions that the Hindu and Buddhist records from the first millennium were substantially destroyed during and after the Muslim conquests in the following centuries. That did occur to some extent, particularly in north India, but, no less importantly, the general lack of enthusiasm in chronicling events and incidents in ancient India does contrast with Chinese meticulousness in wanting to produce – and keep – detailed records. John Kieschnick has drawn attention to another possible explanation of the paucity of Indian early documents: ‘With the inscriptions on metal, clay, or stone, most writings in ancient India were inscribed on pieces of birch bark or palm leaves, which were then bound together. Few such manuscripts survive from ancient and medieval India, owing perhaps more to the ephemerality of palm leaves and birch bark than to disinterest in the medium.’25

  Whatever the causes of this asymmetry of records (and we do not have to settle that larger issue here), it clearly has very substantial effects – as it happens in ‘opposite’ directions – on the methods that have been used, that is, the traditional reliance on direct evidence of movement, and Needham’s technique of relying on chronological priority of records to presume a geographical transfer. As far as the reliance on direct evidence is concerned, the informational asymmetry makes it a lot easier to show that ideas moved from India to China, rather than the opposite, since the Chinese records of derivation from India are much fuller and much better preserved than the corresponding Indian records of Chinese influence. This tends to exaggerate China’s receptivity, compared with India’s. On the other hand, Needham’s presumptive method of comparing the dates of first known use in each country tends to tilt the diagnoses in favour of movements from China to India, rather than the opposite, since Chinese records of early use of particular ideas are much fuller and much better kept than the corresponding Indian records. Indeed, given the asymmetry of records, there would seem to be no obvious way of avoiding bias in one direction or the other.

  It is indeed hard to settle Needham’s enquiry into what can be called the ‘balance of trade’ in the movement of new ideas between India and China. But we don’t really have to resolve that rather esoteric issue. What is important to note here is that ideas in mathematics and science, and also in other non-religious subjects, moved plentifully in both directions. Both countries can to a considerable extent be absolved from the charge of abiding intellectual insularity.

  Mathematics and Science

  One of the connections on which evidence of intellectual connections is plentiful is the impact of Buddhists in general, and of adherents of Tantric Buddhism in particular, on Chinese mathematics and astronomy in the seventh and eighth centuries, in the Tang period. Yi Jing, with whose rhetorical question this essay began, was one of many translators of Tantric texts from Sanskrit into Chinese. He was in India in the last quarter of the seventh century, at a time when Tantrism was beginning to generate a lot of interest in China. Tantrism became a major force in China in the seventh and eighth centuries, and had followers among Chinese intellectuals of the highest standing. Since many Tantric scholars had a deep interest in mathematics (perhaps connected, at least initially, with the Tantric fascination with numbers), Tantric mathematicians had a significant influence on Chinese mathematics as well.

  Indeed, as Needham notes, ‘the most important Tantrist was I-Hsing (+672 to +717), the greatest Chinese astronomer and mathematician of his time’. Needham goes on to remark that ‘this fact alone should give us pause, since it offers a clue to the possible significance of this form of Buddhism for all kinds of observational and experimental sciences’.26 Though Tantrism is of Indian origin, the influences, as Needham points out, went in both directions.27 Indeed, ‘Cīnācāra’ (or Chinese practice) figures prominently in parts of the Indian Tantric literature, as do Indian texts in Chinese Tantric writings.28

  Yi Xing (or I-Hsing, to use Needham’s spelling) was fluent in Sanskrit. As a Buddhist monk, he was familiar with Indian religious literature, but he had acquired a great expertise also on Indian writings on mathematics and astronomy. Despite his own religious connection, it would be a mistake to assume that Yi Xing’s mathematical or scientific work must have been motivated by religious concerns. As a general 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 or Buddhism at all. The combinatorial problems tackled by Yi Xing included such classic ones as ‘calculating the total number of possible situations in chess’. Yi Xing was particularly concerned with calendrical calculations, and even constructed, on imperial order, a new calendar for China.

  Calendrical studies, in which Indian astronomers located in China in the eighth century, along with Yi Xing, were particularly involved, made good use of the progress of trigonometry that had already occurred in India by then (going much beyond the original Greek roots of Indian trigonometry). The movement east of Indian trigonometry to China was part of a global exchange of ideas that also went west around that time. Indeed, this was also about the time when Indian trigonometry was having a major impact on the Arab world (with widely used Arabic translations of the works of Āryabhaṭa, Varāhamihira, Brahmagupta and others), which would later influence European mathematics as well, through the Arabs. Some verbal si
gnposts to the global movement of ideas can be readily traced. A good example is the transformation of Āryabhaṭa’s Sanskrit term jya for what we now call sine: jya was translated, through proximity of sound, into Arabic jiba (a meaningless word in Arabic) and later transformed into jaib (a bay or a cove in Arabic), and ultimately into the Latin word sinus (meaning a bay or a cove), from which the modern term ‘sine’ is derived. Āryabhaṭa’s jya was translated in Chinese as ming and was used in such tables as yue jianliang ming, literally ‘sine of lunar intervals’.29

  There are detailed Chinese records of the fact that several Indian astronomers and mathematicians were employed in high positions in the Astronomical Bureau at the Chinese capital in this period. As was mentioned earlier, one of them, Gautama (Qutan Xida), became President of the Board of Astronomy in China. He produced the great Chinese compendium of astronomy Kaiyvan Zhanjing – an eighth-century scientific classic.30 He was also engaged in adapting a number of Indian astronomical works into Chinese. For example, Jiuzhi li, which draws on a particular planetary calendar in India (‘Navagraha’ calendar), is clearly based on the classical Pañcasiddhāntika, produced around 550 CE by Varāhamihira. It is mainly an algorithmic guide to computation, estimating such things as the duration of eclipses based on the diameter of the moon and other relevant parameters. The techniques involved drew on methods that were established by Āryabhaṭa and then further developed by his followers in India such as Varāhamihira and Brahmagupta.

  Yang Jingfeng, an eighth-century Chinese astronomer, described the mixed background of official Chinese astronomy thus:

  Those who wish to know the positions of the five planets adopt Indian calendrical methods…. So we have three clans of Indian calendar experts, Chiayeb (Kāśyapa), Chhüthan (Gautama), and Chümolo (Kumāra), all of whom hold office at the Bureau of Astronomy. But now most use is made of the calendrical methods of Master Chhüthan [Qutan], together with his ‘Great Art’, in the work which is carried out for the government.31

  In scrutinizing these Sino-Indian connections in science, which were evidently important, we have to assess the role of Buddhism as a catalyst. Even though the Indian astronomers, such as Gautama, or Kāśyapa or Kumāra, would not have been in China but for the relations generated by Buddhism, their work can hardly be seen primarily as contributions to Buddhism.

  Creative Arts, Literature and Language

  Turning from science and mathematics to the broader field of culture, the consequences of Buddhist connections on China and India were also extensive. The Chinese produced some of the finest Buddhist monuments, temples and monasteries, and among the greatest Buddhist sculpture and paintings in the world. While these must, at one level, be seen as religious achievements, one would have to be quite boorish to see in these works of art nothing other than graphic religiosity. And even though, as Kieschnick has illuminatingly argued, bridge-building has special connections with Buddhist ideas and theories,32 the art and engineering of bridge-building, which received much encouragement from the spread of Buddhism, must be seen to be of considerable secular relevance, no matter what the initial religious inspiration might have been.

  The same can be said of music, though the influences here are less immediate than in the visual arts and material construction. Buddhist chants as well as Indian music in various forms (such as Tianzhu music) penetrated into China in the Tang period, and the interactions continued over the centuries. In 1404 Emperor Chengzu, also known as the Yongluo emperor, of the Ming dynasty, is supposed to have compiled and edited ‘Songs of Buddha’, which had been popular in China from the Tang to Yuan dynasties (618 to 1368) and various versions of this song book can be found even today in China as well as in south-east Asia, for example in Vietnam and Burma.

  That Buddhism had an impact on Chinese literature cannot come as a surprise. The use of religious and mythological themes for poetry, fiction and drama is standard practice around the world, and any new source of intellectual stimulation cannot but have its impact on what is written and read and enjoyed. There is also nothing astonishing in the fact that over time what began as a purely religious theme can become sufficiently detached – and ‘secularized’ – to be enjoyed irrespective of one’s own religious persuasion. A Chinese audience enjoying Peking operas based on ‘The Heavenly Girl Scattering Flowers’ and ‘Maudgyayana Saving His Mother’ does not need expertise on the Indian Buddhist tradition to make sense of what is going on, and the same applies to the appreciation of the large volume of Chinese poetry and prose that was influenced by Buddhist ideas and its rich treasury of anecdotes.

  What is more striking is the indication that thousands of new words and idioms were introduced into the Chinese language through translations from Sanskrit. While some of these Sanskrit words had religious connections, such as dhyana (meditation), which became ch’an in Chinese (and then zen), others did not. Indeed, even the word ‘Mandarin’ derives from the Sanskrit word Mantrī (an adviser or a minister: the Prime Minister of India is still the country’s ‘Pradhān Mantrī’), though that came much later – evidently via Malaya. Sanskrit, like classical Chinese, does have a rich vocabulary, and the immense volume of Sanskrit texts that were translated into Chinese provided the occasion for adding to China’s already rich lexicon.

  Another general area of considerable interaction was linguistics and grammar, on which Pāṇini, the Sanskritist, had made a major breakthrough in the fourth century BCE. In the seventh century, Xuanzang discusses the contributions of Pāṇini and his disciples. Within decades of that, Yi Jing separates out this field as one in which India and China had both made significant contributions to scholarly understanding in the whole world. ‘How much more then’, mused this India-returned Chinese scholar, ‘should people of the Divine Land (China), as well as the Celestial Store House (India), teach the real rules of language!’33 How deep these contributions were and how much the two cultures benefited from their interactions remain to be assessed, but this area too, like others already identified, demands investigation from the perspective of broader consequences of Buddhist connections.

  Public Communication and Arguments

  The movement of ideas and skills in mathematics and science remains particularly relevant in the contemporary world, and creativity based on give and take has immediate implications for global commerce and enterprise (involving, for example, the use and development of information technology or modern industrial methods). What may be perhaps less immediately obvious is the importance of learning from each other in the commitment to public communication and in the art of public health care. These were important in the intellectual relations between China and India in the first millennium and remain quite central even today.

  Though Buddhism is a religion like any other, it began with at least two specific characteristics that were quite unusual, to wit, its foundational agnosticism and its commitment to public communication and discussion. The latter was responsible for the fact that some of the earliest open public meetings in the world, aimed specifically at settling disputes between different views, took place in India in elaborately organized Buddhist ‘councils’, where adherents of different points of view tried to argue out their differences, particularly on public practices as well as religious beliefs. As was discussed in Essay 1 above, these councils are of great importance for the history of public arguments. The host of the largest of these councils (the third), Ashoka, even tried to establish, in the third century BCE, good rules for productive debating to be followed by all, with ‘restraint in regard to speech’ and with the points of view of all being ‘duly honoured in every way on all occasions’.

  In so far as public reasoning is central to democracy (as political philosophers like John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and Juergen Habermas have argued), parts of the global roots of democracy can indeed be traced to the tradition of public discussion that received much encouragement in both India and China (and also in Japan, Korea and elsewhere), from the dialogic commitment of
Buddhist organization. It is also significant that nearly every attempt at early printing in China, Korea and Japan was undertaken by Buddhist technologists.* As was mentioned in Essay 4, the first printed book in the world with a date (corresponding to 868 CE), which was the Chinese translation of a Sanskrit treatise, the so-called ‘Diamond Sutra’ (Kumārajīva had translated it in 402 CE), carried the remarkable motivational explanation: ‘for universal free distribution’.†

  John Kieschnick has noted that ‘one of the reasons for the important place for 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’.34 There is some ground for that diagnosis, but aside from any belief in the merit of reproduction, there is surely a connection here also with the importance of public communication, emphasized by such Buddhist leaders as Ashoka, who covered India with stone tablets bearing inscriptions on good public behaviour, including rules on how to conduct an argument.

  The development of printing was, of course, important in the long run for democracy as we know it, but even in the short run, it transformed the possibilities of public communication in general, with enormously important 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 the Song [dynasty] learning and its neo-Confucian extensions in the Ming, marked by the great spread of printing, literacy and schooling’.35

  Health Care and Medicine

  Aside from public communication, the inter-country connections in public health care are also of importance, and the two do interrelate with each other (this linkage will be presently discussed). As was mentioned earlier, Faxian, who arrived in India in 401 CE, took considerable interest in contemporary health arrangements in India. He was particularly impressed by the civic facilities for medical care in fifth-century Pāṭaliputra: