Boni in Chinese Sources - Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre - iseas

Kurz: Boni in Chinese Sources NSC Working Paper No. 4coming from the incense burner inside the main hall of the temple. 38 Zhao does not sayanything about the roof and its construction.It may thus not be completely wrong to accept that Boni had her own local religion withmany elements of Buddhism. This coincides with the explanation Schafer gives for theadmiration of pearls in Tang China, where the pearl was a symbol of the Buddha and theBuddhist law. For Daoists, pearls were an important ingredient in life‐prolonging drugs, butfor that purpose, they were grinded into powder. Apart from that, pearls served asdecorations of dresses and furniture. 39 Thus Nicholl’s conclusion is not very convincing afterall.Nicholl also makes much of the “more than hundred boats” that were the guard of the king,and sailed and controlled the coasts of northwestern Borneo. 40 The Chinese term for thevessel is too vague to warrant a translation as a sailing ship, and the “more than hundred”maybe just an exaggeration to refer to many such boats.Boni 勃 泥 in the Institutions of the Song (Song huiyao 宋 會 要 )The works quoted above that are dealing with Boni in such detail as the diplomatic missionsto China and the social and administrative conditions can be regarded as one group of texts,while a second group of texts can be discerned that deal with the missions exclusively as apart of the foreign policy of the Song. These texts are merely interested in listing the dateswhen the missions arrived and their composition, and therefore, deliver not so muchinformation on Boni itself.The Song huiyao 宋 会 要 may be recognized as the first of these works. Work on the Songhuiyao (“Institutions and documents of the Song”) started with the reign of emperorRenzong 仁 宗 (1023‐1063) and it is based on sources no longer available today, such as the38 Schipper, Taoist Body, 21.39 For the status of pearls in Tang China see Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study ofT'ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 242‐245.40 Nicholl, “An Age of Vicissitude”, 8.12