Buddhism Across Boundaries

274 Pages·2011·5.09 MB·English

SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS

Number 222 March, 2012

Buddhism Across Boundaries:
The Interplay of Indian, Chinese,
and Central Asian Source Materials

edited by
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier

Victor H. Mair, Editor
Sino-Platonic Papers
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA
[email protected]
www.sino-platonic.org
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B A B
uddhism cross oundAries
The Interplay of Indian, Chinese, and Central Asian Source Materials
Edited by
John R. McRae
and
Jan Nattier
Fo Guang Shan Foundation for Buddhist and Culture Education
Taipei, Taiwan
and
Sino-Platonic Papers
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism Across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 222 (March, 2012)
Contents

iv Foreword

v Preface

viii Contributors

1 Buddhism Across Boundaries: The Foreign Input
Erik Zürcher

26 Early Prakrit and Sanskrit Manuscripts from Xinjiang (Second to Fifth/Sixth
Centuries C.E.): Paleography, Literary Evidence, and Their Relation to Buddhist
Schools
Lore Sander

50 Buddhist Sanskrit Texts from Northern Turkestan and Their Relation to the
Chinese Tripiṭaka
Jens-Uwe Hartmann

63 The Oldest Buddhist Incantation in Chinese? A Preliminary Study of the Chinese
Transcriptions of the Mantra in the Druma-kinnara-rāja-paripṛcchā-sūtra
Paul Harrison and W. South Coblin

86 Aśvaghoṣa in Central Asia: Some Comments on the Recensional History of His
Works in Light of Recent Manuscript Discoveries
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism Across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 222 (March, 2012)
Richard Salomon

106 Khotan, an Early Center of Buddhism in Chinese Turkestan
Prods Oktor Skjærvø

142 Textual Sources for Buddhism in Khotan
Hiroshi Kumamoto

150 The Khotanese Antecedents of The Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish (Xianyu jing)
Victor H. Mair

179 Aršak, Parthian Buddhists, and “Iranian” Buddhism
David A. Utz

192 The “Sūtra of Complete Enlightenment” in Old Turkish Buddhism
Peter Zieme

212 Rituals, Religious Communities, and Buddhist Sūtras in India and China
Nancy J. Barnes

226 The Movement of Buddhist Texts from India to China and the Construction of
the Chinese Buddhist Canon
Lewis Lancaster

239 Bibliography
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism Across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 222 (March, 2012)
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 207 (September, 2010)
Foreword
As the world moves into the information age, modernization of Buddhism seems more and
more important. With the focus on the wonders of computers and the Internet, people may
lose sight of innate goodness and humanity. The new era holds some very sticky moral and
ethical issues, which people will puzzle over the rest of the 90’s. You’ll also find that problems
i
which deal with divorce, AIDS, abuse of alcohol and drugs, step-parenting, and job loss are
dragging on everywhere. The 90’s have been the most volatile of decades.
To keep up with society’s demand for stabilization, purifying the human mind is a
basic way to reduce crime. People may learn discipline through religious practice. Far from
being out of touch with the world, Buddhism, above all other religions, is in close contact with
the mundane realities of our lives.
Buddhism sprang from India and flourished in China. From roughly the fourth cen-
tury onwards Buddhism began to spread over all sections of China. It highlights the intimate
connection with Chinese culture. It has had an impact on our country for several decades.
Buddhism has withstood the test of time after twenty centuries. Not only is it overwhelming
in China, but also in other countries such as Japan, Korea, Europe, the United States, and so
on.
Since its establishment more than thirty years ago Fo Guang Shan, founded in 1967,
has been devoted to the propagation of Buddhist teachings through monastic and secular
education, cultural activities, Buddhist practice, and charity on every continent. The book
Buddhism Across Boundaries was the outcome of the presentation of the conference held in
January 1993 at Hsi Lai Temple. All invited speakers were known for their specialities. The
main focus was on the relation between Chinese Buddhism and the western regions, placing
special emphasis on the culture and language of Buddhism indicated in the early texts and
translations. Among the topics discussed in detail were the various attempts to explore an-
other new field in Buddhist research.
i
A series of conferences, creating an atmosphere where Buddhism thrives, was our goal.
We hoped to break down barriers and get an opportunity to set a new wave of discussion over
related aspects in Buddhism. We also hailed the conference as a major breakthrough for re-
search. Buddhist thought could reach a new peak, and all efforts we have made would enhance
academic developments.
Xing Yun
Fo Guang Shan
April 19, 1999
icv
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism Across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 222 (March, 2012)
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 207 (September, 2010)
Preface
This volume is the product of a conference held in January 1993 at Hsi Lai Temple in Ha-
cienda Heights, California, under the sponsorship of the Fo Guang Shan Foundation for
Buddhist Culture Education and Hsi Lai University. The original goal of the conference,
as designed by the editors (primarily by Nattier, with assistance from McRae), was to bring
together scholars from around the world who were most knowledgeable in the languages rel-
evant to the study of early Chinese Buddhism, i.e., the languages of India and Central Asia,
as well as Chinese.
As an intellectual and scholarly event the conference far exceeded our greatest
expectations. First, we believe that we did manage to assemble some of the very best scholars
in the world in their respective fields. To be sure, there were many others who we could not
invite, or who could not attend, but we are very honored to have been able to assemble such a
gathering of brilliant and eminent scholars. Second, although many of the participants knew of
each other through publications prior to the conference, and more than a few were already close
collaborators and friends, all who attended pointed out that the conference strategy of bringing
together representatives of these various fields was unprecedented. Given the specialization
that is endemic to the scholarly community—and, indeed, the linguistic fields represented
include some of the most technically difficult and arcane in all of Buddhist studies—no one
had ever had the resources or taken the initiative to assemble such a cast of researchers. Third,
although it may seem mundane to point this out, everyone got along tremendously well at the
conference, both during the formal sessions and the unstructured conversations afterwards.
There were disagreements and debates, to be sure, but the participants always managed to
undertake these in a spirit of friendly intellectual discussion and collaboration, and there was
a genuinely shared atmosphere of gratitude and mutual appreciation.
In addition to the contributors to this volume, the following invited participants (some
of whose papers had already been, or have since been, published elsewhere) also took part in
the conference: Robert E. Buswell, Jr. of UCLA; chou Po-kan 周伯戡 of the Department
of History at National Taiwan University in Taipei; Richard N. Frye, Professor Emeritus of
the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University; Lin
Meicun 林梅存 of the China Institute of Cultural Relics in Beijing; Gregory Schopen, then
of the Center for Asian Studies at The University of Texas; Werner Sundermann, of the
Turfanforschung at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin;
and Xu Wenkan 徐文堪 of the Editorial Committee of the Hanyu Da Cidian 漢語大辭典 in
Shanghai; and YuYAmA Akira 湯山明, then of the International Institute for Buddhist Studies,
Tokyo. The following individuals attended and made useful contributions to our discussions:
dv
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism Across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 222 (March, 2012)
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 207 (September, 2010)
Peter Lee, of the Department of East Asian Languages, University of California, Los Angeles;
Janice Leoshko, then of the Department of Indian and Southeast Asian Art, Los Angeles
County Museum of Art; and Richard K. Payne of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley.
In addition to working to achieve the greatest possible intellectual quality for both
the conference and volume, the editors’ task lay primarily in ensuring consistency of style
and expression throughout the volume. Following the conference most of the contributors
submitted emended versions of their papers, which we then turned over to Daniel Boucher,
who was also an active participant in conference discussions. The task assigned to Boucher,
then a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and now Associate Professor at
Cornell University, was to query both the substantive and methodological concerns of the
papers, in response to which the editors suggested additional modifications from the authors.
The authors then submitted their final versions, which then went through the usual (and
labor-intensive) sequence of computer input, proofreading, and correction. All files were
submitted on disk and converted to WordPerfect 3.5 for the Macintosh, using Urs App’s
Appeal as the basic font for English and diacritically marked Sanskrit, plus IPAKielSeven and
IPAExtras from Linguist’s Software for the many special characters required. The Symbol,
Apple LiSung Light, and HonMincho fonts were used for Greek, Chinese, and Japanese,
respectively; additional accents and characters which did not appear in the Chinese Big5
code (and thus in Apple LiSung Light) were created using Fontographer. Certain special
symbols (as in Lore Sander’s article) were submitted by the authors in the form of drawings
and scanned in as graphical images. All this computer-related work was done by McRae,
with proofreading and correction assistance from Nattier. We are grateful to Lisa Berkson of
Bloomington, Indiana, for supervising the very difficult job of typesetting the original 1999
edition, which appeared under rather anonymous title, Collection of Essays 1993. The editors
names were omitted, apparently due to the constraints of the Fo Guang Publishers series in
question, and the subtitle that appeared on the volume’s cover—Buddhism Across Boundaries,
Chinese Buddhism and the Western Regions— was only rarely sighted in bibliographic records.
Happily, the Fo Guang Shan Foundation for Buddhist and Culture Education has
agreed to the republication of this collection of articles in a more accessible form, as part
of the Sino-Platonic Papers. For this reissued version several of the contributors submitted
updated versions of their papers; the camera-ready copy was prepared using Adobe InDesign
by McRae (who would like to thank iYAnAgA Nobumi 弥永信美 for a technical observation that
made possible the use of the Appeal font within Macintosh OS X). We would like to thank
editor Victor Mair (also a conference participant and paper contributor) for accepting this
book into the Sino-Platonic Papers series.
On behalf of all of the participants, the editors would like to thank Master Xing Yun
vei
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism Across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 222 (March, 2012)
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 207 (September, 2010)
星雲大師, founder and spiritual guide of Fo Guang Shan, for providing the religious leader-
ship that made this conference possible. Special thanks are due to Ven. Ci Hui 慈惠法師,
Director of the Fo Guang Shan Foundation for Buddhist and Culture Education that was
the primary sponsor of the conference, and which has made possible the publication of this
volume. Many of the conference participants have also asked us to make special mention of
the monastic community of Hsi Lai Temple, a group of very warm and dedicated nuns from
Taiwan and elsewhere around Asia and the world, who provided the day-to-day logistical sup-
port for the conference.
August 21, 2011
John R. McRae
Jan Nattier
Hua Hin, Thailand
vfii
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism Across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 222 (March, 2012)
John R. McRae and Jan Nattier, eds., “Buddhism across Boundaries,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 207 (September, 2010)
Contributors
Nancy J. Barnes received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her publications deal
with the s¨tra texts and history of early Mahåyåna Buddhism in India and China, as well as
with women in Buddhist literature and in Buddhist communities. She is presently studying
the history of the nuns’ order in ancient and modern Asia, and she is also engaged in an ex-
amination of the early Buddhist community at Sanchi in India.
W. South Coblin is Professor of Chinese at the University of Iowa, where he teaches courses in
Chinese language and linguistics. He has a special interest in Chinese Buddhist transcriptions
of the Han and medieval periods and has published several articles in these areas.
Paul Harrison is Professor in the Department of Religion, Stanford University. His research
interests include the history of Buddhism, the study of Mahåyåna s¨tra-literature (especially
in Chinese and Tibetan translation), and the history of the Tibetan canon. He has published
several critical editions and translations of Buddhist texts, as well as a number of articles on
doctrinal themes.
Jens-Uwe Hartmann received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich. From 1981 to 1984
he was employed by the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, working on a Sanskrit dictionary
of Buddhist texts from Turfan; from 1984 to 1995 he held various positions at the Institute for
Indian and Buddhist Studies at the University of Göttingen. From April 1995 he was Profes-
sor of Tibetology at Humboldt University in Berlin, and more recently he has moved to the
Institut für Indologie und Iranistik at the University of Munich, where he specializes in Bud-
dhist canonical literature in Sanskrit and in Tibetan and Chinese translations.
Hiroshi Kumamoto studied linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Tokyo (MA in
Linguistics 1976) and Iranian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. 1982). His main
interest is in Khotanese, a Middle Iranian language from the Khotan area and Dunhuang.
He has been working especially on secular documents in Khotanese, including the recently
published and still unpublished material in St. Petersburg. He is also preparing an edition of
15 Khotanese documents in the Pelliot and Stein collections as Saka Documents Text Volume
Two, where a new edition of his dissertation will be included. He has been teaching linguistics
at the University of Tokyo since 1989.
Lewis Lancaster is now Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Buddhist Studies,
University of California, Berkeley. His work on the study of the Buddhist canon has included
the volume The Korean Buddhist Canon, plus a number of articles such as “The Editing of
vgiii