Some Linguistic Evidence for Early Cultural Exchange between China and India
by Zhu Qingzhi
[introduction]
The cultural exchange between ancient China and India is one of the most important areas in Asian Studies. About this topic, everyone knows well the so-called "Buddhist conquest of China"[l] or "Indianized China"[2] which, according to the Chinese tradition, started around the beginnmg of our era. Then what about before the Buddhist conquest? Was there any contact between China and India before Buddhism officially came? Unfortunately, both Chinese and Indian historical works fail to provide us any definite evidence, and archeologists cannot yet find enough materials to give us a relatively clear picture about this issue. Even so, is there anybody who believes that the coming of Buddhism was just the beginning of the exchange between these two cultures? No, absolutely not. It is not only because these two countries are so close in geography (they are close neighbors now, but even in ancient times, they were not far from each other). Furthermore, long before our era, the people of China and India had the material conditions necessary to come into contact mutually.
Let us look at the great Shang-Zhou 商周 civilization, which occurred in China during the period 1500-1000 BCE, and the great contemporaneous Vedic civilization in India. Both were among the highly developed cultures of the world. During the 6th century BCE, the birth of Confucius, the founder of Confucianism, took place m China and that of Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, took place in India. Let us also look at what we find in Central Asia, or Serindia, where thousands of Indo-European immigrants lived 4,000 years ago. In brief: there is no doubt that the Indian Buddhist conquest is only the biggest, but not the earliest, evidence for the cultural exchange between the two countries. The question is how we can prove this.
As a part of the effort by which we may try to prove it, my article will show some linguistic evidence. There arefive loan translations in Chinese or Sanskrit which appeared before the Common Era. I must preface my remarks by telling you that, although I believe these words are loan translations in Chinese or Sanskrit, I am not totally sure in almost all cases which is the original and which is the target.