Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [104]
India remained the fabulous source of exotic products for the Greeks and beyond them the Romans. In fact, the truest elements of Sanskrit lore that they ever absorbed were the names of some of their favourite substances: canvas (Greek karpasos, ‘cotton’, from karpāsa), ginger (Greek zingiber from śngavera, named after a town on the Ganges), pepper (Greek peperi from pippali, ‘berry’), sugar (Greek sakkharon from śarkarā, ‘grit’)— originally characterised by Alexander’s admiral Nearchus as honey coming from reeds without the aid of bees.15
Megasthenes’ work, which came to form Europe’s knowledge of India up until the Renaissance, was in some ways lacking in understanding, and never offered any appreciation of philosophy, language or literature. In one case, a sage joked that since the conversation took place through three interpreters, they were as likely to get a clear idea of the philosophy being expounded as to purify water by running it through mud.16
But this did not mean that the Greeks who lived closer in were similarly lacking. One Greek king of the Panjab, Menander (second century BC), in fact became immortalised for his penetrating interest in Buddhism in the form of the Pali classic Milinda-pañha, or ‘Questions of King Milinda’: ‘Many were the arts and sciences he knew—holy tradition and secular law; the Sākhya, Yoga, Nyāya and Vaiśeika systems of philosophy; arithmetic, music; medicine; the four Vedas, the Purānas and the Itihāsas; astronomy, magic, causation and spells; the art of war; poetry; and property-conveyancing—in a word, the full nineteen.’17
And another Indo-Greek of the same period, announcing himself as Heliodorus, Greek ambassador (yonadūta) from King Antialkidas, left an inscription in perfect Prakrit on a column still standing at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh. It ends with the spiritual precept:
trīni amutapādāni...suanuhitāni
neyati svagam dame cāga apramāda
Three steps to immortality, when correctly followed,
lead to heaven: control, generosity, attention.
THE CHINESE
By contrast with Greek writers, who were in India largely as traders, conquerors or representatives of power, the Chinese came as serious students of India’s culture, and particularly Buddhism: some evidently learnt Sanskrit (with Pali and Magadhi Prakrit) in depth during their stay. Their descriptions, therefore, have an authority and penetration that far exceed the Greek testimony; in many cases, they provide the best evidence we have for the details of Indian life at this time, the Indians themselves having always been remarkably unconcerned to set down straightforward descriptions of their own daily life.
The Chinese testimony comes from four pilgrims in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures, most of whom struggled past the Taklamakan desert and across the Hindu Kush to enter India through this northern route. They came at intervals of about a century. Each of them, besides bringing home quantities of Buddhist manuscripts which they then set about translating, went on to write a memoir after their return to China.
Fa-Xian (), the first whose tale has survived, travelled to India via the Hindu Kush from AD 400 to 414, returning by sea. For three of these years he was at Pataliputra, ‘learning to read the books in Sanskrit* and to converse in that language, and in copying the precepts’.18 (His comrade Do-Zhing was so impressed with the holy life of the Indian śramanas that he decided not to go home.) Fa-Xian then moved down the Ganges to another major city, Champa (near modern Bhagalpur), where he spent two more years, principally seeking to acquire Buddhist texts,19 before an extremely eventful voyage home via ‘Ye-po-ti’ or Yava-dv