Relations Between India and East Asia in Light of Buddhism

This chapter will examine historical relations between India and the East Asian countries of China and Japan in light of some of the major interactions that have occurred between Buddhists from these cultures. Our investigation is organized into four parts. Part I will provide introduction to the main doctrinal and practical teachings of the Buddhist tradition, as it arose and developed in India in the last half of the final millennium before the Common Era. Special attention will be given to those aspects that made it of universal human appeal, prepared to be transmissible to cultures beyond the borders of its land of origins. Next, we will turn to the remarkable story of Buddhism’s exportation from India, as well as from adjacent regions under strong Indian influence, first into China over the course of the first millennium of the Common Era, and eventually from China to Japan, where Japanese Buddhists too came to regard India as a land of sacred origins, with which they sought meaningful connections. This story will be told in three segments. The first segment, Part II of this chapter, will cover the activities of the missionary-minded Buddhist monks of Indian heritage who migrated to China in the earliest centuries CE and engineered the extraordinarily complex, detailed, and challenging work of establishing their religion on foreign soil, primarily by organizing and engaging in the translation of the massive body of Indian Buddhist texts into the Chinese language. The segment will also examine the extraordinary circumstances that led to the creation of a women’s monastic order in China, initiated by a cohort of nuns from South Asia. The second segment, Part III of this chapter, will treat the equally impressive endeavors of the dedicated, intrepid Chinese Buddhist monks who, in the centuries following the successful initial implantation of the religion in their own country, journeyed as pilgrims on their own mission to India, to learn and document even more about their chosen spiritual path, as it continued to live and thrive in what they regarded as the sacred terrain of its roots. Finally, in the third segment, Part IV of this chapter, we will investigate the most salient and interesting modern development in the history of interactions between East Asian and South Asian Buddhists. Due to the declining fates of Buddhism in both India and China, not much of historical relevance took place between ancient and modern times. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, key figures in the Buddhist culture of Japan, where Buddhism had been received from China and Korea 1200 years before and thrived ever since, traveled to India and Sri Lanka, in order to fulfill ambitions quite similar to those of their counterpart Chinese pilgrims from a much earlier era.