A CHINESE WHO HELPED INDIA FIND IT’S LOST PAST

Indians take history for granted since perhaps they have a surfeit of it. New Delhi, started as a showpiece of the British Empire, is itself nearing a century. A trip to Delhi University inevitably takes one past the Old Fort and the Red Fort, both hundreds of years old. But rarely does one stop to think about their builders or the role that they played in making the past that brought us where we are now. The sceptic asks, how does the ‘dead past’ matter now? If Shahjahan built the Red Fort, in the 17^th century, what of it? Today’s builders (who are in trouble these days due to a slump in realty) are much more relevant to us because we buy and live in the houses that they build. 

My response to those asking this question is: why is Hitler’s holocaust kept alive to this day though more than 70 years have passed since it happened? None of the people who committed the atrocities are alive any more so why not forget and forgive? The Vietnamese say that while they have forgiven they have not forgotten and they keep alive in museums memories of their sufferings of decades ago when they became victims in a clash of ideologies during the Cold War. Why is the anniversary of Second World War, the most destructive war in history is observed every year though a good 70 years have passed since it came to an end? The simple answer is that these events help us to locate ourselves in the present. A quarter of a century has passed has gone by under the looming shadow of economic liberalization and phenomenal growth in India. For those it has touched but slightly it sometimes looks like a curse. But can we understand what’s happening without knowing that the Cold War was a barrier to globalization? And going back a little, can we explain the Cold War without knowing about the Second World War. The single-word answer is ‘NO’.

THE CHINESE PUZZLE

To return to the mystery of the Chinese and India’s lost past, let me begin by saying that much of India’s ‘historical’ as against ‘mythological’ past was discovered and recorded in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. As civilizations became literate, greater authenticity was attached to written records rather than to oral traditions, a category to which mythology belonged. And Indian mythology embodied in the ‘Puranas’ (or stories of times past) had nothing relating to Lord Buddha and Buddhism though it was later found that he belonged to the sub-continent and his followers occupied a prominent place in Indian culture for more than a 1000 years before mysteriously disappearing from the collective memory. Two men were instrumental in reviving that memory – a seventh century Chinese religious tourist Huen Tsang (Xuanzang according to modern phonetics) and many hundred years later by General Alexander Cunningham, a British army man with an interest in archaeology.

How did this happen? To start with how do we know that the Buddha was a virtually forgotten figure in India? Well, there is a painting of the Mahabodhi Temple made by a British official in 1799 with the caption ‘East View of Hindu Temple at Bode Gya’. The painting shows a dilapidated temple with some stone idols with some Hindu worshippers of Lord Vishnu (the preserver) and the Brahma Pipal that devotees believed had been planted by Brahma (the creator). This has been mentioned by a modern Chinese scholar Sun Shuyun in her book ‘Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud – An epic journey – One woman’s search for her roots’ published in 2003. It is Sun’s account of her 1999 travel in which retraced the 25000-km journey of Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) who travelled through China, central Asia and India over an 18-year period. It is interesting to note that the name of the town mentioned in the caption of the painting was Bodh Gaya, an obvious reference to the Buddha though well before this he had been installed in the Hindu pantheon as an incarnation of Vishnu.

However, doubts arose in the minds of a number of people including the British who had gathered from accounts of many people from countries where Buddhism was a major religion that the birthplace, enlightenment and death of the Buddha was in the Indian subcontinent. The crucial turning point came around the middle of the 19^th century when travelogues of the Chinese pilgrims became available in the English language. Cunningham for example took the help of the record of Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) whose writings went under the title ‘Record of the Western Regions.” From the descriptions of Xuanzang the British archaeologist could conclude that the Brahm Pipal tree at Bodh Gaya was the one under which the Buddha attained enlightenment while the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya was not a Vishnu temple but was the one built by a king called Ashok to commemorate that event about three centuries later.  

KASHIPUR

A view of the remains of the Panchayatna temple, Kashipur

Here I must reveal that what led me to Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) and Cunningham was a recent visit to Kashipur in the foothills of the Himalayas near Corbett Park. Kashipur is a typical small town whose claim to fame is of recent origin. For one thing a little more than a decade back it was earmarked as an industrial zone by the newly formed state of Uttarakhand and for the other it has become the site of an Indian Institute of Management (IIM) which was started in 2013. But I found that Kashipur had an even older reason for being famous (much older in fact than even when it acquired its current name) and this was that it was one of the places where Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) stopped during his travel in India. The name of the place (which today is Kashipur) has been given as Govisana in the ‘Record of the Western Regions’. Cunningham zeroed in on the place by following the directions given by the Chinese traveler and even found a mound described by him. Excavation of the mound was carried out well after the death of Cunningham, revealing the remains a 7^th century temple complex built during the reign of Harshavardhan whose capital was Kannauj. This complex, known as a Panchayatna temple, is maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India but its existence is not very well known even in Kashipur itself.

However, to conclude, we must thank history for our proud present since two important symbols of our nation – the national flag and the official emblem – contain symbols that originate in Buddhism. They are the wheel in the white strip of the flag which is the Buddhist dhamma chakra and the four sided lion capital of Emperor Ashok which is known as the Ashok pillar and is the official seal of India. And all this thanks to a 7^th century Chinese traveler and a 19^th century Scotsman.