Paper long abstract:

Few examples of Buddhist literature have circulated more widely in East Asia than The Travels of Faxian (Ch.法顯行傳, Faxian xingzhuan), known more commonly as The Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (Ch. 佛國記, Foguoji). This is a 5th century CE autobiographical adventure tale authored by a Chinese Buddhist monk named Faxian (法顯, 337-422 CE), one of pre-modern Asia's most ambitious travelers. Motivated by the need for authoritative Indian works to supplement the embryonic monastic world in which he lived, the already elderly Faxian departed from Chang'an across the mosaic of Turkic, Sogdian, Persian, Greek, and South Asian communities dotting what we now call the Silk Road. For fifteen centuries thereafter, The Record was read voraciously in East Asia as an early witness to the golden age of classical Indian Buddhism and as a grand statement about the place of China in relation to the wellspring of Buddhism and the western regions. This paper begins in the 19th century, not in East Asia but in the nascent Orientalist academy in Europe with Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat's translation of the Foguoji into French in 1836. This paper then follows the French translation of the Foguoji along its previously unstudied circulatory route into late-and post imperial Inner Asian intellectual and Buddhist scholastic communities. For example, the Buryat ethnologist Dorji Banzarov (1822-1855) first produced a Mongolian translation from the French at mid-century and the Khalkha monk Lobsangdamdin (1867-1937) produced a Tibetan translation in 1917. I show how in each translation, the Foguoji was heavily supplemented with all current knowledge about classical Indian Buddhism and the Silk Road, which in each case helped legitimate newly emerging social sites of knowledge about Asia: for example, research chairs in Sinology in Europe, Siberian ethnology, and Khalkha scholasticism. Thinking about these sites together, this paper aims to trouble the territorial fixities that continue to dominate Asian humanities (between, most egregiously, the "West" and "Asia," but also between "religion" and "science," or "tradition" and "the modern"). This paper thus explores overlapping conceptual fields that include Western Europe and Inner Asia, that implicate the earliest expressions of an academic study of Asia and Buddhism with the last expressions of monastic scholarship in the dawn of socialist state repression, and which finds seeds for competing modernities in the singular story of an antiquarian Chinese monk walking across Asia in pursuit of the Dharma.