The first challenge I faced when I began formulating ideas for my senior thesis at the start of this semester was deciding on a project that could involve both my major fields of study. Classics and East Asian studies do not often overlap, and both departments’ differing thesis requirements made it initially difficult to find a project that would satisfy both. My initial plan had been to focus on a case of translation where an Indian Buddhist monk named Prajna and a Syriac Christian bishop named Adam had translated Buddhist scriptures together, in 8th-century Tang China. (I had come across this niche incident in the course of prior research about Syriac Christian missions from Central Asia to China). While this case study fell nicely within the domain of East Asian studies, it did not fall under the scope of a Classics thesis – a thesis within the Classics department need not explicitly be set within the time period or geographical range of classical Greece and Rome, but needs to deal to some extent with the languages and culture of those periods.
A photo of weathered books on a bookshelf, Photo Credit: Harini2101 on Wikimedia Commons
It was while procrastinating, actually, that I came across a way forward. I think it was in the library, when I was meant to be doing some other reading, that I was scrolling down the webpage of the Loeb Classical Library (this is how classicists waste time). I saw the title of a work I’d heard of before, but never really investigated. It was called the Barlaam and Josaphat, and when I clicked the link to it and read the translator’s introduction, I was pleasantly surprised. The Barlaam and Josaphat, a hagiography of two legendary saints that became widely read throughout medieval Europe, has, since the 19th century, been seen by most scholars as a Christianized version of the life of the Buddha. Both the Buddha and Josaphat are Indian princes; both are walled in by their fathers to keep them from the outside world; both eventually pursue lives of asceticism. From these parallels, as well as from historic and linguistic trails, scholars argue for a connection between the two narratives. It seemed providential that I had found, completely unawares, a case study that – like the Adam-Prajna collaboration – engaged questions of Christian and Buddhist contact, while also involving Greek and Latin.
Now things seemed simple, and exciting. My thesis would address two case studies, Adam and Prajna’s collaborative translation in 8th-century China and the translation into Latin of the Greek Barlaam in 11th-century Constantinople. I knew a topic of debate was whether the text Adam and Prajna had translated together bore signs of doctrinal influence from Christianity on Buddhism, and I proposed that the same methods that had allowed scholars to so clearly discern Buddhist origins in the Barlaam narrative could be applied to analyze religious cross-pollination in the text Adam and Prajna had translated. The thesis would be a clear-cut case of textual analysis, and that would be all.
This initial clarity faded as I got into the weeds of researching each case study. For the Chinese case study, I quickly found myself in a corner. One of my secondary source scholars claimed that the Satparamita Sutra, the text Adam and Prajna translated, no longer existed, which left me stuck for sources. Some weeks later I found another scholar claiming that the sutra did survive, but only citing a catalogue that was outdated. Even if I found the text, I would need it in translation – I unfortunately have as yet been unable to study classical Chinese. Meanwhile, regarding the Barlaam text, I found myself almost in the opposite scenario, facing a relative abundance of secondary scholarship that covered an incredibly broad geographic and linguistic span. Again, language was a barrier: facing discussions of earlier Barlaam versions in Arabic, Syriac, Pehlevi, and Sanskrit, stretching back to a source narrative that might not even have been textual but oral, I was left clambering for a foothold. My difficulties finding solid ground in both cases naturally compounded the additional challenge, present from the start, of finding a connection between such disparate incidents.
I wish I could say that the ensuing process of pruning, bringing my topic down to something coherent that I could address with my current skillset, was a smooth one. Instead, it was a process that was often frustrating and not initially rewarding. The regular deadlines of my other classes overshadowed the self-directed work I needed to do, reading and researching and picking away at theoretical and historical tangles. When I did sit down to tackle these questions, it was often spurred along by the intensifying demands of my thesis research seminars in both departments, which were asking for ever more detailed proposals, and arguments with a degree of cogency that I knew I did not yet have. By the middle of the semester, I was left uncertain which direction to take with this project – whether to take a historical route, stick to textual analysis, or perhaps to drop the comparative scope altogether.
I think what got me through this process and into a relative clarity was the enjoyment I found, not so much in completing assignments, as in tackling the materials I was interested in. When I did sit down with the texts and scholarship on both cases, seeing connections everywhere, I was reminded of the initial motive that impelled my research – a real interest in these cases, a passion for religious dialogue and textual analysis and the question of “traveling stories,” narratives making their way across complex cultural geographies into completely new contexts. And it was thinking on this higher level, and leaning into my original passions, that helped me reformulate my project into something more manageable.
What tipped me off, or at least assured me I was on the right track, was hearing a lecture at Columbia’s newly revived Center for World Philology about the field of “contact philology.” Learning that there does exist a field of study dedicated to precisely the sort of work that interests me boosted my confidence in formulating my project on a broader, more theoretical level. I decided – and this is how my project currently stands – that, though there was always room for discovering more texts and learning new languages, I could, for now, make a statement about translation itself, and about its history. Specifically, based on the textual evidence I did have – for the Barlaam, the first Latin translation from the Greek, with a prologue from the translator; for the Adam-Prajna collaboration, a historical catalogue recording the event, and some other texts by Adam reflecting Buddhist contact – I could discuss “translatory culture” in two very different premodern cities – 8th-century Chang’an and 11th-century Constantinople – and more broadly about the notions of “influence” or “genealogy” in any historical and textual study. The similarities and disparities in each case have not lost their intrinsic interest, but I now have a way to formulate them within a coherent framework that will allow me to build on this thesis for future work. And that result is something I am grateful for.
A photo of weathered books on a shelf, Photo Credit: Harimi2101 on Wikimedia Commons