The Buddhist Maritime Silk Road

Author:
Lewis R. Lancaster  

Publisher:

Foguang 佛光  

Publication date:
2022/06/03

Abstract:
The Buddhist Maritime Silk Road recounts the magnificent history of the world of Maritime Buddhism from a diverse range of aspects—the various Buddhist traditions, pilgrims and monks, causes and conditions, norms and rituals, cross-cultural relations between East and West, as well as the intricacies of navigation technology, and migrations of the Austronesian peoples—all remarkable and crucial elements of the transmission of Buddhism brought to new heights of importance.
 

In this book, Dr. Lewis R. Lancaster innovatively shifts the focus to documenting the dynamic networks and systems of interchange in Eurasia, instead of the common approach of historical, event-structured analysis. The fascinating history of the spread of Buddhism begins in the early years of the Common Era, when animal caravans began treading across the inland routes between India and China, evolving as sea routes flourished over centuries. It emerges that Buddhism flowed and thrived along with the beating pulse of the trading networks. The northern overland and southern maritime trading routes converged, conjuring forth an iconic cycle described by Lancaster as “The Great Circle of Buddhism.”

Table of Contents:
• Introduction
• Origin and Spread of Buddhism
• The Great Circle of Buddhism and Its Rim
• Buddhism along the Sea Routes
• Conclusion

The Buddha’s Footprint: An environmental history of Asia

Author:
Johan Elverskog

Publication year:
2020

Publisher:
University of Pennsylvania Press

Abstract:
In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources.

Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment.

Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.

Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Part I. What the Buddha Taught
1. The Buddha
2. Buddhism(s)
3. Buddhists
4. Wealth
5. Consumption
Part II. What Buddhists Did
6. The Spread of Buddhism
7. The Commodity Frontier
8. Agricultural Expansion
9. Urbanization
10. The Buddhist Landscape
Conclusion

[Dissertation] Tang Taizong's Playbook: Jin Shu and How to Use Standard Histories

Author:
Kobzeva, Maria. 

School:
The University of Wisconsin - Madison 

Year:

2019

Abstract:

The dissertation explores what the content and structure of the Jin shu 晉書 (History of Western and Eastern Jin Dynasties, 265–420) compilation revealed about political choices and self-representation of Tang Taizong (r. 626–649), the second emperor of the Tang dynasty (618–907). Emperor Taizong, himself of non-Chinese origins, was concerned with the question of legitimacy and future of his rule. By scrutinizing and closely interacting with the textual tradition, Taizong had sought to justify his right to rule and project an idealized image of himself as a righteous ruler. He standardized the methodical history writing and initiated a massive compilation project of the earlier dynastic histories. For one of them, the Jin shu, he personally wrote critical evaluations in the end of several chapters. Imperial participation in a scholarly compilation implied the importance and specific purpose attached to the work and the role of historiography in the political establishment.

The newly-established regimes, Jin and Tang, shared a number of similarities: a violent power takeover, unification of the empire, difficulties with the neighboring non-Han population, and problematic choice of an heir. The Jin shu provided the emperor with an advantageous, comparative framework between the two regimes in dealing with identical sensitive issues; where the mistakes of the Jin government led to its fall, Taizong’s decisions, albeit problematic, resulted in a peaceful reign. The Jin shu narrative of imperial failure corroborated the Tang emperor’s self-attribution as a perfect ruler who chose the right course of action for the sake of the country’s stability. The dissertation discusses how the similarities reflected main issues of concern of a newly founded Tang dynasty and revealed inconsistencies in Tang’s rhetoric of rationalization that challenged the uniformity of a purported portrait of Taizong and his reign. I argue that Tang Taizong’s continuous efforts to represent the idealized picture of his own rule and defend his choices essentially reflected his insecurities about his political legitimacy and self-identity.

Garden of Eloquence / Shuoyuan 說苑

Author:

Liu Xiang

Translator:

Eric Henry

Publication date:

January 2022

Publisher:

University of Washington Press

Abstract:

In 17 BCE the Han dynasty archivist Liu Xiang presented to the throne a collection of some seven hundred items of varying length, mostly quasi-historical anecdotes and narratives, that he deemed essential reading for wise leadership. Garden of Eloquence (Shuoyuan), divided into twenty books grouped by theme, follows a tradition of narrative writing on historical and philosophical themes that began seven centuries earlier. Long popular in China as a source of allusions and quotations, it preserves late Western Han views concerning history, politics, and ethics. Many of its anecdotes are attributed to Confucius’s speeches and teachings that do not appear in earlier texts, demonstrating that long after Confucius’s death in 479 BCE it was still possible for new “historical” narratives to be created.
Garden of Eloquence is valuable as a repository of items that originally appeared in other early collections that are no longer extant, and it provides detail on topics as various as astronomy and astrology, yin-yang theory, and quasi-geographical and mystical categories. Eric Henry’s unabridged translation with facing Chinese text and extensive annotation will make this important primary source available for the first time to Anglophone world historians.

In the Forest of the Blind： The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms

Author:

Matthew W. King

Publisher:

Columbia University Press

Publication date:

March 2022

Abstract:

The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a classic travelogue that records the Chinese monk Faxian’s journey in the early fifth century CE to Buddhist sites in Central and South Asia in search of sacred texts. In the nineteenth century, it traveled west to France, becoming in translation the first scholarly book about “Buddhist Asia,” a recent invention of Europe. This text fascinated European academic Orientalists and was avidly studied by Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The book went on to make a return journey east: it was reintroduced to Inner Asia in an 1850s translation into Mongolian, after which it was rendered into Tibetan in 1917. Amid decades of upheaval, the text was read and reinterpreted by Siberian, Mongolian, and Tibetan scholars and Buddhist monks.

Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the transnational literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian’s Record. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of the European academy and the Inner Asian monastery. King shows how the text provided Inner Asian readers with new historical resources to make sense of their histories as well as their own times, in the process developing an Asian historiography independently of Western influence. Reconstructing this circulatory history and featuring annotated translations, In the Forest of the Blind models decolonizing methods and approaches for Buddhist studies and Asian humanities.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. Chang’an to India

2. Beijing to Paris

3. Buddhist Asia to Jambudvīpa

4. Jambudvīpa to Science

5. Science to History of the Dharma

Conclusion

Appendix. The Inner Asian Record