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The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a classic travelogue that records the Chinese monk Faxian’s journey in the early fifth century CE to Buddhist sites in Central and South Asia in search of sacred texts. In the nineteenth century, it traveled west to France, becoming in translation the first scholarly book about “Buddhist Asia,” a recent invention of Europe. This text fascinated European academic Orientalists and was avidly studied by Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The book went on to make a return journey east: it was reintroduced to Inner Asia in an 1850s translation into Mongolian, after which it was rendered into Tibetan in 1917. Amid decades of upheaval, the text was read and reinterpreted by Siberian, Mongolian, and Tibetan scholars and Buddhist monks.
Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the transnational literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian’s Record. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of the European academy and the Inner Asian monastery. King shows how the text provided Inner Asian readers with new historical resources to make sense of their histories as well as their own times, in the process developing an Asian historiography independently of Western influence. Reconstructing this circulatory history and featuring annotated translations, In the Forest of the Blind models decolonizing methods and approaches for Buddhist studies and Asian humanities.
The questions King asks demand complex answers, but raising them in the first place is what makes this book unique. It's a very significant contribution to Buddhist studies, and shines a whole new light on how we look at texts such as Faxian's.
— John Butler
This is a fascinating study by a considerable scholar.
— T.H. Barrett
Starting with Faxian's remarkable memoir of his trip from China to India in the fifth century CE to gather Buddhist teachings, this book takes the reader on a journey of journeys. Matthew King's ingenious 'circular' historiography tracks the travel of a Chinese Buddhist monk to the Buddha's birthplace; the journey of the memoir of that travel to European scholars in the nineteenth century; and then how the Orientalist scholarship that the memoir inspired made its way back to Siberia, Inner Asian scholars, and finally displaced Tibetan refugee scholars in northern India: all in service of delivering Buddhist Asia into the realm of knowledge. Replete with an expert English translation of the Tibetan translation of the Mongolian translation of the French translation of the original Chinese memoir (you get the idea), this masterfully conceived book will captivate Asianists and historians of knowledge alike.
— Janet Gyatso, author of Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet
This beautifully written 'travelogue' of Faxian's Record takes us on the text's journeys from Chang'an to Paris, thence from the French into Buriyati Mongol and into the Tibetan lands. Matthew King, who is as learned a polyglot as the writers he discusses, discloses the different cosmic pasts 'made anew from a history.'
— Prasenjit Duara, author of The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future
In the Forest of the Blind, another excellent and interesting book by Matthew W. King, calls for new interpretative frameworks from those that dominated social and intellectual history in Western academia. King's idea to trace and follow the reception of Faxian's fifth-century classic, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s interpretation, and its reception in Inner Asia is innovative and fascinating.
— Vesna Wallace, author of The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual
King succeeds in not only offering a fascinating insight into Fǎxiǎn’s Record but also forces the reader to acknowledge how they are privy to and even part of the ongoing debate on how Western and non-Western epistemologies should be interpreted.
A significant contribution to the fields of Buddhist studies, translation studies, and intellectual history, offering a rich perspective on Buddhist history and textual transmission.
Acknowledgments
Conventions
Introduction
1. Chang’an to India
2. Beijing to Paris
3. Buddhist Asia to Jambudvīpa
4. Jambudvīpa to Science
5. Science to History of the Dharma
Conclusion
Appendix. The Inner Asian Record
Notes
Bibliography
Index