How a jobs crisis helped Tibet become the centre of the Buddhist world

[00:00:00]Cockrow Janata Party protests continue across India drawing a membership of young people with three certificates zero callbacks to use their own words.

[00:00:08]Too many credentials, too few seats, and not enough jobs home or overseas. The BJP's grievances strangely mirror those of India's best regarded medieval specialists, multilingual Buddhist translators. Once in demand as far away as Japan over the course of the 10th and 11th centuries, Indian Buddhist translators found both international and domestic opportunities drying up. The rising monasteries of Tibet, which capitalized on the opportunity, would go on to dominate the global Buddhist imagination for the better part of a millennium. In the early medieval Indian subcontinent from around 600 to 1100 CE, Buddhist translators were specialists.

[00:00:45]They were the medieval equivalent of those who have several degrees before going to search for a career today.

[00:00:50]Think of them as more akin to PhD holders than your average graduate. As I argued in earlier column on the decline of Nalanda, the North Indian mega monastery, even getting admitted for a course of scriptural study there required a literacy and mobility which are out of reach for most. It required you to get past literal gatekeepers whose job, as historian R.K. Mukerji put it, was to be expert religious controversialists asking questions from both Brahmanical and Buddhist materials and poking holes in candidates' answers.

[00:01:19]Even if you were accepted into a coveted Nalanda Guru-shishya parampara or a teacher-student lineage, those credentials didn't get you very far in the bureaucracy of the subcontinent's own courts, which by the 11th century preferred Brahmin administrators and ritual experts. But what an elite Buddhist parampara did get you though was international demand. Tansen Sen, the distinguished historian of India-China relations, studied this in his paper The Revival and Failure of Buddhist translations during the Song Dynasty. From the early centuries CE onwards, various Asian kingdoms had actively sought experts to render Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into other languages. In fact, in northern India, in contrast to the south and the island of Lanka, Buddhist sects wrote in Sanskrit rather than in Pali. The early wave of translators in China tended to be Central Asians with either direct or indirect ties to India. Translations were ordered for political, ritual, and religious ends. An entire genre, the hugo or state protection texts, existed to ward off war, famine, and disease on a kingdom's behalf. In the 690 CE, the Indian monk Bodhiruci and the Khotanese monk Siksananda each interpolated passages into Buddhist sutras to help legitimize Empress Wu Zetian's seizure of the throne, making her the only woman to ever rule China in her own right.

[00:02:36]Now, Seen and other historians have argued that after the initial wave of Sanskrit translations, Chinese language Buddhist doctrine quickly took center stage. Here's an example from an earlier column. The South Indian monk Vajrabodhi of Nalanda pedigree arrived in China in the 8th century by way of Sri Lanka and Java, making rain fall and trees blossom on command.

[00:02:55]His successor, Amoghavajra, who was the son of a Central Asian mother and Indian father, built a royal cult around the Bodhisattva Manjusri at Mount Wutai in China. With his own extensive Chinese ritual apparatus, this Manjusri then became famous, drawing pilgrims from as far away as the Gangetic plains in the 9th century. In the late 10th century, with the accession of a new Chinese imperial dynasty, the Song, calls went out again for Indian translators. Two Brahmins from the Himalayan foothills, known in Chinese sources as Tiansicai or Dharmabhadra and Shihu or Danapala, were ready and waiting. Historian Jan Yunhua studied them in Buddhist relations between India and Song China, offering an insight into the translators' curriculum. So, one of these Brahmins, the Kashmiri Dharmabhadra, studied Shabdavidya, which is literally the knowledge of sounds, in a monastery at the age of 12. His cousin Danapala, at age 15, had learned, and I'm quoting here, learned the regular and running hand styles of the scripts prevailing in the five regions of India and quote from a Buddhist Acharya around present-day Jalandhar. Dhanapala also knew and I quote the writings of Sinhalese, Khotanese, and those of Srivijaya and Java, and quote. This kind of education would have ensured opportunities across much of monsoon Asia. Since at this time Buddhist texts in multiple languages and scripts were circulating, these young men could work confidently in practically any court or monastery.

[00:04:16]Dharmabhadra, we're told, declared that and I quote all the sages and saints of the past considered the translation of Sanskrit canons into Chinese as the means to preach Buddhism, and quote.

[00:04:26]Unfortunately, this lofty sentiment soon crashed into reality. The 7th century Tang dynasty of China once controlled the overland routes to and fro India, but the 10th century Song dynasty did not. So, when the cousins traveled overland, they were detained for months by the ruler of Dunhuang, the great oasis town on the border of China proper. Being forced to cast aside their staffs, water jars, and other things, they finally reached the Song capital in 980 CE. Another Indian translator, a North Indian Kshatriya known in China as Fa Xian, had set out after graduating from Nalanda with his brother and two monks from Western and Southern India respectively. Unfortunately, only the brothers survived the journey. These men became the founding staff of the Song dynasty's new institute for the transmission of the Dharma. The elite among the Indian elite were able to take up this lucrative international position thanks to luck and determination as much as privilege. At the institute, though, they had finally arrived. This spectacular establishment had a translation hall, a stylus hall, a philological assistance hall, and a convoluted process to ensure perfect conditions from Sanskrit into Chinese.

[00:05:32]Thanks to Professor Sen's work, we actually know the details of this process. Translations at the institute began with establishing a mandala in the middle of an altar with one Indian monk at each side. After 7 days and nights of continuous chanting and ritual propitiations of sages and saints, the actual work began. Each text required an exhaustive workflow running from the chief translator through the philological assistant, a text appraiser, a transcriber, a scribe, a composer, a proofreader, an editor, and a stylist, which was >> [laughter] >> an extremely labor and capital-intensive process, as I'm sure you can imagine.

[00:06:05]But, the fact is that the institute was only ever able to attract a small trickle of Indian experts. Fa Hu or Dharmapala, who is a Kashmiri Brahmin, possibly trained in the Vikramashila mega monastery in Bengal, arrived in 1004 CE and worked on several projects over the decades. Yet, as Professor Sen writes, and I quote, "Of the more than 50 monks who reached China between 985 and 1085, only three served in the Buddhist translation projects at the institute." As Jan Nattier points out, "Of the 183 Chinese pilgrims who returned after pilgrimage to India, only one seems to have worked at the institution." End quote. Overland travel to China was increasingly difficult in the 10th and 11th centuries, and attempts to recruit in China largely failed. Archive letters suggest that the institute and the emperors were both aware of the problem. Ambition and funding weren't lacking. It was the supply of Indian Buddhist Sanskritists, who were a vanishing elite. They were increasingly disconnected even from medieval Indian labor networks, let alone able to navigate upheavals in Central Asia to take up a punishing if lucrative job. In 1078, with the death of the last monk sufficiently fluent in Sanskrit, the Chinese emperor issued an edict ordering the institute to wait until the arrival of Indian monks who were versed in the Buddhist teachings.

[00:07:18]It does not seem that any ever came. So, China's centralized translation bureaucracy failed with its multiple tests, cross-checks, validations, and certifications, but a decentralized setup in neighboring Tibet actually succeeded. New centers in 11th century Tibet drew equally qualified Indian candidates like Atisha Dipankara, a graduate of the mega monasteries at Odantapuri and Vikramashila, who had obtained his final certification in Sumatra. Scholar Roberta Ryan in the Buddhist translation histories of ancient China and Tibet counted over 700 translators, both Indian and Tibetan, active in medieval Tibet compared to less than 200 in China. The Tibetan Buddhist corpus comprises over 4,500 translated manuscripts compared to China's roughly 2,200. Chinese Buddhist travelers were required to pass entrance exams and navigate a contorted bureaucracy before even setting out for India. In comparison, Tibetan monks were relatively free to travel to India, study Sanskrit, and then return. They then worked usually in partnership with an Indian expert rather than heading to a single national institute subject to bureaucratic standards and political whimsy. When elite Indian and Chinese institutions faltered under centuries of geopolitical pressure, it would be the younger, vigorous, and decentralized contender that would go on to dominate Asian Buddhism. If you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear them. Follow us everywhere on social media. You can find me on Instagram at anandabodha and on Twitter at akhanesati. We'll see you next week.

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