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in this field. Take Sanskrit, which I am familiar with, for example. Germany has more
than 30 universities with teaching posts for Sanskrit courses available to
undergraduate students, even though their teaching posts for Indian Studies have
decreased. In China, however, only Peking University has courses of Sanskrit. We
have few researchers who can conduct research on Sanskrit documents.
Nevertheless, great achievements have been made with such few researchers. For
example, the team led by Prof. Huang Baosheng has completed the Chinese
translation of the great epic of India Mahabharata. Unfortunately we have not
compiled a Sanskrit-Chinese dictionary yet. The only Sanskrit-Chinese-Japanese
dictionary was completed by Japanese at the beginning of last century.
Meanwhile, the School of Foreign Languages of Peking University does not have
teaching posts for ancient Greek and Latin, which are necessary for the study of
western philosophy. Japan, however, can match the West in the study of western
philosophy. They have conducted systematic translation of western philosophy
works, while we are not as systematic in our study of western philosophy as they do
due to language problems. One more example. As for the Syriac language which
concerns the history of Christian development, nearly none in China understands it.
There used to be 24 languages and 17 kinds of writing along the Silk Road. Although
China has some scholars who understand several of them, it has no representative
scholars conducting research on many others.
China Reading Weekly: What are the other topics for the panel session on linguistics
concerning the ancient language studies?
Duan Qing: We have another important topic on the Beijing Forum this year, namely,
the research on Buddhist Chinese in the context of Sanskrit-Chinese comparison,
which was proposed jointly by us and the Department of Chinese. Ancient China
witnessed many Chinese versions of Buddhist sutras, mainly translated from
Sanskrit. The translated Buddhist sutras are unique in its language, which should
enjoy an important status in the history of the development of Chinese, because on
the one hand Buddhist literature of Chinese accounts for a high percentage in
ancient Chinese literature, and on the other hand, those literature were products of
direct contact with another language and collision against another civilization,
therefore it provides precious and rich raw materials for academic researches. There
are few people in the world who are able to conduct comparative study between
Sanskrit and Chinese, for both of them are very hard to learn. The abstract Buddhist
terminology makes this study even more difficult, thus few people in the world devote
themselves to the study in this field. However, in recent years some scholars have
made outstanding contributions to this field despite the great hardship, such as Prof.
Seishi Karashima from the International Research Institute for Advanced
Buddhology at Soka University in Tokyo, a graduate of Peking University who also
has studied in several European countries, and Prof. Jan Nattier from Canada and
the promising Italian scholar Zacchetti
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