Anne Cheng - India-China: Intersecting Universalities

This collection of articles is partly the result of an international conference organised by the Chair of Chinese Intellectual History at the Collge de France in June 2017, which has benefited from the scientific collaboration of Mr. Sanchit Kumar, the technical contribution of Mr. Jean-Michel Roynard, and the financial support of the Fondation Hugot du Collge de France. The conference, entitled India-China: Intersecting Universalities, came after a first one, held two years earlier and entitled Intellectual Encounters between India and France, 17th-19th centuries. The 2017 session brought together scholars from Asia, America and Europe, who have been interested in one aspect or other of the cultural interactions between India and China. For various reasons, some presentations made at the conference have not been turned into written papers, while some articles integrated in this volume have not been presented at the conference. However, the diversity of the topics treated both in oral and written forms testifies to the lively interest raised by the intersection of two heavyweights of area and cultural studies. China and India have already been explored in depth by major scholars whose works are cited and referred to throughout this volume .

One may wonder, however, why a chair dedicated to Chinese studies should have been tempted to look towards India, which is to say the least another huge field of research. At a time when China is widely (and wildly) assumed to be on the rise and looms large, not to say threatening, in the global picture, it has been our firm and long-standing conviction that it is more than ever necessary to stop considering it as a self-contained and self-sufficient entity, and to place it within a regional context by taking into account its historical relationships with its equally influential neighbours, be it Japan, South-East Asia or India.

What makes the relationship between China and India so remarkably interesting is that one can hardly imagine two civilisational worlds as radically different from each other, which yet managed somehow to come into contact and interact. One should naturally be aware from the very start that both China and India are problematic denominations at any point in time before their modern transformation into nation-states. These terms are here used to designate two vast areas of civilisation on either side of the Himalayas, the contours of which kept fluctuating over the centuries but between which there has been a constant circulation of people and ideas. The first and foremost case that readily springs to mind is the vast overhaul of Buddhism from India to China over the first millennium of the Common Era, which implied a massive and unprecedented effort of translation of Buddhist scriptures and literature into Chinese. However spectacular and grandiose as this process might appear in retrospect, it would certainly be naive to believe in the simplistic and reductive narrative of two great and ancient civilisations coming either into direct contact or just through a single defining moment.

The aim of the present volume is to look at various aspects of the cultural interactions between India and China at different points of history which may be roughly distributed into two large periods: first, the period running from the early centuries of the Christian era, when Indian Buddhism started seeping into the Chinese soil, down to early Tang times (7 th -8 th centuries), when Buddhism can be said to be transferred from India to China. The second period takes the story into much later times, from the late 17 th to the early 20 th centuries, when India came under British rule while China came under Manchu rule. The volume therefore does not claim to cover the whole ground, nor does it claim to break new grounds, the main purpose being to envisage China as integrated in a larger vista and landscape.