Review Reports - Buddhism, Frontier and Nation-Building: The 1955 Visit of the “Indian Xuanzang” to China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In general, the paper “Buddhism, National Community, and Frontier: The 1955 Visit of the “Indian Xuanzang” to China” is a necessary contribution to studies comprising the connection between politics and culture, based not only on international relations between nations, but also between different religious and cultural matrices. The paper succinctly and effectively combines ideological guidelines with biographical details about Raghu Vira, clarifying not only Vira’s cultural background but also the historical context of dialogue or tension with the political leaders of India and China of his time.

However, the current review believes that some points need to be developed towards what might be called irrefutability, regarding the inner nature of this same overall argumentation:

In line 13, page 1, the authorship writes: “Adopting a micro-historical approach,” ... what authorial reference is most immediate (Carlo Ginzburg? Giovanni Levi? Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie? Natalie Zemon Davis? Any authorship outside of the most renowned ones?), or at least illustrative, in the application of the approach...???? Is the expression “micro-historical approach” freely used, without attaching itself to its most prominent scholars? It should be clarified in the paper so as not to confuse the reader…

A greater, more frequent dialogue with sources that prove the categorical statements of the article itself in item 4 is suggested, as they seem to be scarce to corroborate the authorship's assertions...

In lines 485-488, on page 10, the authorship states: “Doctrines such as the cyclical perception of time derived from the Hindu concept of reincarnation [...] are inherently at odds with the values of Christianity and Islam.”, as well as in lines 550-552, on page 12, i.e. “Buddhism thus emerges as a dynamic alternative: its attributes as a civilizational symbol serve internal identity consolidation, while its utility as a geopolitical instrument facilitates frontier and external governance.”: a priori, Buddhism may emerge as a “dynamic alternative” as a hypothesis speculated in theory, but not as a guarantee of empirical political reality in the power of a nation, as attested by current experiences in Myanmar and Sri Lanka... it is worthwhile to reconsider these statements in the text...

By citing only the political-cultural phenomenon of modern Hindu nationalism in the name of apparently laudatory perspectives of Buddhism as a possible horizon of political-cultural amalgamation of the modern Indian nation (Bhārat Gaṇarājya), the author simultaneously takes only two political-cultural expressions from the immense universe of Hindu traditions (Sanātana Dharma), i.e. Hindutva and Hindū Rāṣṭra, as a means of supposedly criticizing these traditions as a whole, without considering concrete initiatives of reciprocity in the inter-religious field of Hindu, Vedic origin, namely:

Ram Mohan Roy positioned himself “between Christianity and Hinduism” by promoting a universal, maybe monotheistic spiritual path rooted in Jesus of Nazareth’s ethical teachings while rejecting Christian strict dogma and Hindu orthodox rituals. He admired Jesus as a moral reference and supported the idea of a universal religion based on reason and the pursuit of human fulfillment. Roy’s reformist efforts through the Brahmo Samaj – influenced by Islam and Christianity –, being distinct from them though, sought to purify Hinduism by denouncing polytheism, image worship, and the caste system, emphasizing universal monotheism and social reform...
Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa viewed Jesus of Nazareth as a divinely enlightened soul and an Incarnation of God who suffered for humanity. It is said that he had a spiritual vision when he supposedly encountered Jesus, who merged into his body according to some, somehow similar to his experiences with Hindu deities. This experience meant to Rāmakṛṣṇa that all religions, including Christianity, offer a valid path to God-realization...
It is widely known that Mohandas K. Gandhi saw all major religions as diverse paths to the same divine destination, valuing their core messages of truth and love.

Gandhi engaged in a significant dialogue with Christianity by accepting Jesus as a profound spiritual teacher and embracing the Sermon on the Mount as a universal ethic, while rejecting the idea of Christian exclusivity and the concept of Jesus’s unique incarnation, integrating Christian hymns and scriptures into his ashram worship alongside his Hindu faith. An important aspect of “Gandhian Christology” in the context of religious dialogue is to see Jesus of Nazareth as a true adept of ahiṃsā, a perfect satyāgrahī, who should be imitated and identified as the manifestation of the truth underlying the spiritual unity of all humanity.

Gandhi also engaged in a lifelong dialogue with Islam by highlighting shared ethical concepts like benevolence and trust in God, which met his principles of nonviolence and peace. He respected Islam as a religion of peace, finding no textual basis in the Qur’an for force or conversion, and aimed to promote unity between Hindu and Muslim communities in India, though he acknowledged that the socio-empirical reality of religious practice sometimes deviated from its aims.

Furthermore, the paper fails to take into account the diffuse dynamics of Hindu traditions, without irrevocably and unequivocally postulating a universally peaceful point, a common denominator, of absolute orthodox or orthopraxic agreement of all traditions, known in Sanskrit as saṃpradāyas, in which ritualistic knowledge, speculative reflections, exhortations on ethical conviviality in the family and social spheres, as well as the various devotional cults to specific Hindu deities – especially Viṣṇu, Śiva, and Devī, in addition, of course, to Smarta Vedism – are systematized and consecrated by use, by established custom, and transmitted through uninterrupted series of regular intergenerational succession (paraṃparās) from master (guru) to disciple (śiṣya).

It is worth mentioning that the terms "Hinduism" and "Hindu" began to be used by the Muslims inhabiting the Persian region as religious designations to differentiate Muslims southwards the Indus River (in Sanskrit, sindhu, lit. "sea," "ocean") from the non-Muslims living beyond it. After the Muslims established sovereignty over much of the Indian subcontinent, the British, from the 18th century onward, appropriated these terms as common denominators to refer to various distinct religious segments then present in the region, contributing to their widespread dissemination and use (cf. RODRIGUES, Hillary. Introducing Hinduism. New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 4). Hinduism could be understood as a set of singular cultural expressions that tend to adapt to the regional, historical, individual and community diversities originating from the Indian subcontinent, according to a plurality of traditions with their communities of practitioners, their systems of acts, their sets of doctrines and their processes of sedimentation of experiences, revealing a flexibility and an openness accustomed to the coexistence of opposites in the ritualistic, gnostic and mystical spheres.

In both his book Essentials of Hindutva (1922) and his essay Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1923), Vināyak Dāmodar Sāvarkar artificially sought to shape Hindu identity and militancy based on the conception of one land, one religion, and one nation. For him, Hindus were an ethnically compact people who not only inhabited a common territory but also shared religious and cultural roots found in common sacred texts. Besides ignoring the philosophical and confessional diversity of Hindu traditions, not to mention the social dynamics constantly reshaping Vedic-Hindu cultural patterns, he failed to envision the practicing ethnic plurality of Hindu traditions, whose doctrinal and orthopraxic initiatives are centrifugal in relation to the broader pan-Indian cultural landscape... moreover, there is no proof or evidence of the theoretical success or internal coherence of Hindutva, nor of Hindu Rāṣṭra. In this sense, the recent rise of the Bhāratīya Janata Party – in the persons of Draupadī Murmū and Narendra Dāmodardās Modī – to the political summit of the Republic of India may suggest a univocal monolithic supremacist scenario of Hindu traditions as a whole, mainly due to the close connection with the Rāṣṭrīya Svayamsevaka Saṅgha and its emphasis on an Indian nationalism of a Hindu fundamentalist nature based on Hindutva and Hindu Rāṣṭra, which is not true either due to the political opposition that voices originating from Sanātana Dharma itself defend, or due to the internal dynamics of the Vedic/Hindu traditions as a whole.

For the reasons aforementioned, it is recommended to RECONSIDER AFTER MAJOR REVISION the paper entitled “Buddhism, National Community, and Frontier: The 1955 Visit of the “Indian Xuanzang” to China”.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article offers a fascinating glimpse of an under-researched period, one that has had and will continue to have a far-reaching impact. But the author(s) seem content to narrate the account without providing enough context to unpack the really important and complicated implications. It’s worth remembering, for example, that brahmanism, the predecessor to Hinduism, was Buddhism’s mortal adversary for more than a thousand years. Over centuries, there was an intense ideological competition with periodic persecutions, most of Buddhists. This article seems absolutely oblivious to that fact. Work by Johannes Bronkhorst, Giovanni Verardi, and a host of other scholars has gone a long way toward correcting the mistaken idea, perpetuated by British scholars and their brahmin informants, that Buddhism in India died a natural death and was quietly reabsorbed into the Great Tradition of the Vedas and the brahmins.

For this reason, it’s extraordinary to read that Vera eventually finds a home in what would become the BJP, with its authoritarian hindutva ideology. In fact, Ambedkar had a much better understanding of Buddhism’s role in Indian history, and in the light of Ambedkar’s work, Vera’s interest in Buddhism looks even stranger and harder to explain than it does in this account.

It seems to me absolutely essential that the author (s) do more to reflect on the significance of Vera and his cultural project. He must have known about Ambedkar, who helped to write the Indian Constitution, and he might have know about Ambedkar’s criticism of Hinduism, which eventually led him to endorse a new “Navayana” Buddhism as the best possible path to freedom for the Dalit masses and others.

It would seem that Indian cultural nationalists like Vera wanted to use Buddhism to give Indian civilization a global cachet while also silencing or suppressing Buddhism’s counterhegemonic aspects. One could argue that Vera had to do this because Hinduism didn’t travel well. It certainly tried to put down roots in places like Cambodia, Thailand, and Java, and even there Buddhism was its ideological competitor. But in Cambodia and Thailand, at least, Buddhism won out over Brahminism, while Hinduism and Buddhism were both displaced by Islam in Sumatra and Java.

The upshot is that Vera wasn’t really the India Xuanzang, because Xuanzang wanted to bring to China a foreign religion that challenged the project of national consolidation under the Confucianists. Even though Buddhism was eventually Sinicized after centuries, it has always had uneasy relations with Confucianism and even Taoism. By contrast, it appears that Vera wanted to use Buddhism in the opposite way—as a tool of hegemony, a task for which it has never been very well suited.

What didn’t happen in India when Vera returned was a coming to terms with the extirpation of Buddhism in its homeland. I know, of course, that acknowledging that Buddhism posed a challenge to brahminism would have been a heavy lift for anyone at a moment when India was trying to throw off the yoke of British colonization and refute the British view that India had no history worth attending to. But all of this should be discussed.

I would argue that Buddhism continues to occupy an ambiguous position in Indian culture, at once a source of pride when India looks outward and a dangerous alternative when India looks inward.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In general, the paper “Buddhism, Frontier and Nation-Building: The 1955 Visit of the “Indian Xuanzang” to China” is a necessary contribution to studies comprising the connection between politics and culture, based not only on international relations between countries, but also between different religious and cultural matrices. The paper succinctly and effectively keeps combining ideological guidelines with biographical details about Raghu Vira, making not only Vira’s cultural background clear but also the historical context of dialogue or tension with the political leaders of India and China of his time, not to mention the contradictions within Vira’s thoughts and scheduled measures towards the dichotomy Hinduism-Buddhism as a political-cultural horizon for the recently independent India and its nation project.

I would like to thank the authorship for the comments sent to me. It is always a great opportunity for authorship and reviewers to learn with each other, when the quality of academic production is at stake.

Some comments that I believe could be a useful contribution to the textual review of the paper:

- on page 2, line 49, it is advisable (according to the text’s standard concerning diacritics) to register “Rājya Sabhā” instead of “Rajya Sabha”;

- on page 4, line 171, it seems that it is “colourful photographs” instead of “colour photographs”;

- on page 5, line 199, it is advisable (according to the text’s standard concerning diacritics) to register “stone sūtras” instead of “stone sutras”;

- on page 6, line 278, do register “(Vira 1969, 165). However, ” instead of “(Vira 1969, 165) However,”;

- on page 9, line 396, it seems that it must be “he had to take” instead of “he must take” according to the reported speech pattern of the sentence;

- on page 11, line 492, it is advisable (according to the text’s standard concerning diacritics) to register “Sūtra-translation” instead of “Sutra-translation”.

It is noteworthy here that words like “Hindi”, “Sanskrit”, “Bharatiya Janata Party”, “Bharatiya Janata Sangh”, among others, are already assimilated within Latin alphabet patterns without demanding diacritics…

For the reasons aforementioned, it is recommended to ACCEPT AFTER MINOR REVISION the paper entitled “Buddhism, Frontier and Nation-Building: The 1955 Visit of the “Indian Xuanzang” to China”.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

As an English teacher for nineteen years with a Cambridge CAE certificate, besides TKT certificates as well, I recognize the good level of English language used in this essay.

Author Response

I wish to express my sincere thanks for your detailed suggestion. I have carefully revised the manuscript to correct the textual errors as you suggested. Additionally, my recent reading on Ambedkarite Buddhism inspired a minor but, I believe, significant addition to the conclusion, hoping it adds valuable perspective.

Your review was crucial to the improvement of this work, and I could not have refined it to its current state without your guidance. Thank you again.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This new version is vastly improved! Without reservation I recommend publication. I'm convinced that this article now makes an important and even indispensable contribution to the scholarship on thus crucial period. Very exciting!

There are a few grammatical issues here and there, like this sentence, where the comma should be a colon or period:

It argues that Buddhism occupies an ambiguous position in modern India’s nation-building process, while it serves as a proud historical legacy in India’s engagement with the outside world, it may also be perceived as a potential internal risk when viewed from within.

Author Response