《印度与中国》英文读后感
印度泰戈尔国际大学的中国学院，师觉月教授的学校。
Notes, India and China: A Thousand Years of Cultural Relations
Prabodh Chandra Bagchi
Translated by Jiang Jingkui et. al
The late Prof. Prabodh Chandra Bagchi’s India and China: A Thousand Years of Cultural Relations provides a welcome introduction to and survey of the history of intercultural interactions between the two ancient nations of India and China. Written in the 1950s, during the honeymoon period between the newly born Republic of India and People’s Republic of China, the book was written with the intention of increasing public awareness in India of the long historical relationship between the two Asian giants. A brief overview of the life of the author would review that Prof. Bagchi was among the most qualified authors of his time to undertake such a project.
A Sinologist of renown, Prof. Bagchi received his early education in Calcutta, where he obtained a Master of Arts in history from the University of Calcutta. It was in Calcutta where he first developed an interest in Chinese history and philology. There, in his attempt to study ancient Indian history and religious thought, Bagchi discovered that due to the paucity in ancient India of what scholars today would regard as historical narratives, the bulk of pre-Islamic Indian history had to be pieced together from contemporary non-Indian historical sources, especially Chinese historical sources (Islamic scholarship would provide the bulk of historical scholarship in the centuries following the advent of Islam in India). Finding China a fascinating civilization and Sino-Indian relationship a scholarly subject of interest, Bagchi studied Sinology and Orientalism in France, eventually obtaining a doctorat d’etatfrom the Sorbonne. Upon his return to Asia, he taught primarily in India, while spending a stint as Professor of Philosophy at the Peking University in the late 1940s. In the early 1950s, Prof. Bagchi served as dean of the Institute of Advanced Study and later vice-chancellor of the Visva-Bharati University, which was and remains a center of Chinese studies in India.
The book itself follows a rigorous logical structure. Prof. Bagchi started the book by describing the routes that connect the two ancient civilizations and early trading activities between the two peoples, which started as early as the B.C. period. While historical accounts from the B.C. period remain extremely scarce, Prof. Bagchi seemed to believe that these trading routes served not only commercial but also cultural exchange purposes. It was also in the first chapter where Prof. Bagchi singled out Buddhism as a moving force of Sino-Indian exchange, noting the evangelistic character of early Buddhism under the Buddhist emperor Ashoka. In subsequent chapters, Bagchi focused on the activities of Indian Buddhist missionaries in China and Chinese monks who sought to study Buddhism first hand in Medieval India. The leading characters from this period include the celebrated Kumarajiva (who translated the Diamond Sutra) and Xuan Zang (who provided a more literal Chinese rendition of the Diamond Sutra together with translations of many other Buddhist canons). Much of Bagchi’s description of the activities of these early Buddhist personages were based on his review of Chinese literature from the period. After describing the lives and deeds of these early missionaries and monks, Bagchi turned to the development of Buddhism in China. This part of the book read more like a survey of the history of Buddhism in China. In the subsequent chapter, Bagchi discussed the preservation and canonization of Buddhist religious texts in China. Amazing as this may sound, most of the Mahayana canons would have been lost forever had they not been preserved by the Chinese. While the Sanskrit versions of these texts may have been lost, scholars like Bagchi were and are able to reconstruct the Sanskrit text based upon the existing Chinese translations that were hand down to the present by Chinese monks from the Medievalperiod. Finally, Bagchi concluded the book by discussing the “melding” of Indian and Chinese thought and philosophy in China and attempted to track (any) influence the Chinese may have on Indian thought and lifestyle. The main text of the book was followed by an index of names that contain brief biographies of major Indian Buddhist personages from the Medieval period who had contributed to the cultural interaction between the Indian and Chinese civilizations.
Several thought came to mind. First, India and China represented one of the last attempt by a scholar to study Sino-Indian relationship from an Orientalist perspective, where culture, religion, commerce, literature and biographies were studied side-by-side in the same pot, as opposed to a more “modern”, more narrowly defined, disciplinary perspective such as international relations, regional studies or comparative politics, religion or literature. This was likely the consequence of Prof. Bagchi’s early training as an Orientalist in Paris, the capital of Orientalism. Second, while Prof. Bagchi spent the bulk of the book describing the impact of Indian Buddhism on Chinese culture, one would hope that he would spend more space attempting to explain why the reverse had not been true, i.e., why there had not been as much impact on Indian culture by Chinese culture. Prof. Bagchi made an extremely important start toward the end of his book, where he described what could have been impact by Daoism in China on Hindu philosophy. However, perhaps due to the paucity of evidence, Prof. Bagchidid not dwell as much there as one would have hoped. What Prof. Bagchi could have done more is to attempt to explain why there is so little Chinese influence in Indian thought and culture. Lastly, Prof. Bagchi could perhaps have spent some time on why it was Buddhism as opposed to any school of Hinduism that had been spread and had taken root in China. It is common knowledge that like early Buddhism, revivalist Hinduism was an evangelical religion, spreading its influence in corners as far away from India as Cambodia and Sumatra. However, unlike Cambodia or Sumatra, there was no evidence that Hinduism ever reached China, even though some Hindu texts had been translated into Chinese as early as during the T’ang Dynasty. The reason behind this was worth exploring, given the grave historical implications here. Had it not been Buddhism’s proliferation in China, it would never have developed into the world religion it is today, and had Hinduism taken root in China, it would have been regarded as a truly world religion instead of the national or regional faith (limited to India, Nepal and parts of Sri Lanka) that it is today despite the vast number of its adherents.