7 - “Central India Is What Is Called the Middle Kingdom”

Summary

I come into the discussion on the intersection of history, culture and heritage and its ecological and environmental connections from a position that may seem to be a non-specialist one: I am not an art historian, nor an archaeologist, nor a specialist of environmental or social studies. However, what I most certainly am is someone who has been working for some forty years now in the field of Chinese intellectual history (this is the title of my Chair at Collège de France in Paris), and who has been since long developing a growing interest in intercultural studies, more specifically between India and China. I therefore feel tremendously privileged to have been given the opportunity to come to Nâlandâ as a pilgrim, right in the heart of a land which has witnessed not only crosscultural exchanges between India and China but also a space that is redolent with the memory of the historic endeavour of members of the Chinese elites to leave behind their heritage in their quest for something other than what had so far constituted the civilizational centrality and self-proclaimed superiority.

This historic movement outwards is even more critical to recall in the present day: a time when China's official discourse is entirely geared towards the Chinese rise to power and recovery of its imperial centrality in the East Asian region. To my mind, more than ever, it is timely and salutary to remind ourselves of the periods in the past when the Chinese themselves did not necessarily perceive themselves as the centre of the world (the “Middle Kingdom”, zhongguo), or even more simply as the world (“all under Heaven”, tianxia).

My starting point will be a sentence which sounds rather intriguing to me, as it has done so far for a good number of scholars, from Faxian 's Foguo ji (Notes on the Country of the Buddha), which was first translated about two centuries ago into a European language, namely French, by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832). This self-taught Sinologist was elected to the very first Chair dedicated to Chinese Studies ever created in Europe in 1814 at the Collège de France (then called the Collège Royal) in Paris.