Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

3.2
There are several interpretations of this account. For example, the famous Chinese
scholar T’ang Yung-t’ung does not dismiss the possibility of this version reflecting
historical fact. By contrast, H. Maspero considered this version to be a piece of fiction,
a story of propaganda, full of anachronisms. which he believed originated in the 3rd
century AD and which was further elaborated on in the 4th–5th centuries AD.
In the second version, in accordance with a tradition that developed in the early
3rd century AD, a Chinese envoy to the Yuezhi court, a student of the imperial
academy called Ching Lu (there are different spellings of his name), was taught the
Buddhist sutras by a Yuezhi crown-prince in the 2 BC. This story first appears in
a very distorted passage about India from the account known as Hsi-jung chuan in
the Wei-lüeh, which was compiled around the middle of the 3rd century AD. The
completed passage reads as follows:
‘Anciently, under the Han emperor Ai, in the first year of the period Yüan-shou
(2 BC), the student at the imperial academy Ching Lu received from I-ts’un, the
envoy of the king of the Great Yüeh-chih, oral instruction in (a) Buddhist sūtra(s).’
E. Zürcher believes that most likely Ching Lu received this instruction from a
Yuezhi envoy in the Chinese capital. E. Chavannes has suggested a correction to the
text of this passage based on two later parallel versions of the story:
‘…the student of the imperial academy Ching Lu obtained a mission to the
Great Yüeh-chih. The (Yüeh-chih) king ordered the crown-prince to instruct him
orally in the Buddhist sūtras’, i.e. as E. Zürcher pointed out, E. Chavannes’ version
completely reinterprets the passage from the Wei-lüeh, by suggesting instead that
Ching Lu did not learn the Buddhist sutras in China at the court of the emperor from
I-ts’un, the Yuezhi envoy, but instead that Ching Lu was sent as an envoy from the
Chinese emperor to the Great Yuezhi, and that he learned the sutras from the Yuezhi
crown prince in the land of Yuezhi. It is worth noting, that these versions of how the
Chinese first became acquainted with sacred Buddhist texts have not been presented
in Russian scholarship with any great precision.
There is also debate about the historical evaluation of the second version, some
scholars considering it unreliable, others believing it to be historically accurate.
Е. Zürcher pointed out there is no evidence to support this version in the official
chronicles of the Han dynasty, the Han Shu, which provides no information either
about a Chinese envoy being sent to the Yuezhi in 2 BC, nor about a Yuezhi envoy
sent to China in the same year. In fact, information about this embassy does not appear
until the 3rd century AD when this tradition ‘after more than two centuries of silence
turns up in some seven versions, which are partly unintelligible and in which neither
the name of the Chinese scholar nor the function of the Yüeh-chih nor the place
of action appears to be fixed’. Zürcher therefore concludes that it cannot be used as
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