Reading Indian Literature in Fourth-Century China: Gleanings from a Newly Available Commentary to the Oldest Chinese Translation of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa

Abstract

This article introduces new evidence concerning how the very earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist texts were read in early medieval China: a Turfan manuscript first made public in 2005 of an otherwise unknown interlinear commentary to the oldest Chinese translation of the Vimalakīrti Sutra. I show that the earliest (pre- ca. 350 CE) translations of Indian Buddhist texts, well known for their problematic literary forms that frequently make them very difficult to understand, sometimes circulated with interlinear commentaries that explained how to manipulate their often tortuous syntax into a more normal Chinese idiom. The earliest readers of Indian Buddhist literature in China did not always approach these texts as purely “Chinese” documents, as it has sometimes been thought. Even though few such readers were themselves learned in Indian languages, the linguistic alterity of Indian Buddhist literature was nevertheless available to them to some degree.