Nonton film seven arhat sub indo

SECOND EDITION

Asian Cultural Traditions

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SECOND EDITION

Asian Cultural Traditions

Carolyn Brown Heinz California State University, Chico

Jeremy A. Murray California State University, San Bernardino

WAVELAND

PRESS, INC. Long Grove, Illinois

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To Chloe, Bella, Emily, and Zoe,

and to all of our students

For information about this book, contact: Waveland Press, Inc. 4180 IL Route 83, Suite 101 Long Grove, IL 60047-9580 (847) 634-0081 info@waveland.com www.waveland.com

Cover image: “Back Home” by Vietnamese artist Do Xuan Doan

Copyright © 2019, 1999 by Waveland Press, Inc.

10-digit ISBN 1-4786-3620-3 13-digit ISBN 978-1-4786-3620-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Preface xi

PART I Land and Language 1

1 Asia as Cultured Space 11 “The Great Collision” and Asian Landforms 13

Rivers 19 The Outer Ring of Islands 23

Monsoon Asia and Rice Adaptations 27 Rice, Dry and Wet 28 Origins of Rice Cultivation 29 Two Rice Cultures 30 Rice and the Green Revolution 32

Early Asians 34 ■ REFERENCES CITED 37

2 Tongues, Texts, and Scripts 39 Voices from the Past 42

Making Family Connections: The Indo-Europeans 42 East Asian Homelands 47 Austroasiatic 49 Austro-Tai 49 Sino-Tibetan 51

Texts 57 “You Are Hurting My Language” 57 The Search for Sacred Texts 59

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Scripts 64 South Asian Scripts 64 Written Chinese 67 Korean and Japanese 71

■ REFERENCES CITED 73

PART II Outsiders 75

3 Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Tibet 81 The Silk Roads 85

Silk and Steeds 86 Travelers 87 Religions along the Silk Road 90

Barbarians 91 Women on the Steppe 93 The Xiongnu and the Mongols 94 Genghis Khan (Chinggis Qa’an) and

the Mongol Empire 95

Xinjiang and Tibet 100 “New Dominion” 100 “Western Treasure-House” 102

■ REFERENCES CITED 104

4 Tribal People 105 Self-Governing People and Expansionary States 107 Ethnic Identity 111 The Colonial Theory of Ethnicity 112 Hmong: A Case Study 115

Who Are the Miao? 117 Hmong in Thailand 120 The Transitory Community 121 Adaptation and Response: Opium 123 Fathers and Sons 126 “Silver Celebrates the Worth of Women” 131 Spirits, Domestic and Wild 133

■ REFERENCES CITED 138

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PART III South Asia 141

5 India 147 A Forgotten Past 149

Puzzles of Indian Origins: The First Civilizations 151 Indus Valley Civilization (2500–1500 B.C.E.) 153

Brief Outline of Indian History 157 The Vedic Age (1500–450 B.C.E.) 157 The Mauryan-Guptan Empires (323 B.C.E.–550 C.E.) 164 Medieval Period (550–1210 C.E.) 167 The Indo-Islamic Period (Twelfth to

Nineteenth Centuries) 168 British Colonial Period (Eighteenth to

Twentieth Centuries) 171 Era of Independence 172

The Caste System 172 Ancient Sources on the Caste System 173 Economics of Caste: The Jajmani System 175 Case Study: Two Hundred Years of Caste in

a North Indian Village 177 Social Justice: Reservations for Scheduled Castes

and Scheduled Tribes 178

The Dharma of Women 179 Patriarchy 181 A Woman’s Life Cycle 182 Two Social Problems 186

■ REFERENCES CITED 188

6 Religions of South Asia 191 Early Core Ideas 194

New Ideas Emerge: Upanishadic Thought 194 The Proliferating Gods 196

The Hindu-Buddhist Traditions 197 Life in Society: Clean and Unclean in Caste Society 198 Life In and Out of Society: Having It Both Ways 200 Temple Worship and Bhakti 202 Pilgrimage to Buddhist India 207 The “Three Jewels” of Buddhism 209 The Four Periods of Buddhism 213

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Islam 220 Sufis, Saints, and Shahs 221 Sunnis and Shias in Colonial India 223 The Umma and the Independence Movement 226

Sikhism 227 ■ REFERENCES CITED 231

PART IV East Asia 233

7 China 239 The Beginnings: Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Qin 245

“The Ruins of Yin” 246 The Uses of Bronze 248 Communicating with Heaven 249 Idealized Zhou Feudalism 250 Two Sages: Confucius and Laozi (Lao Tsu) 254 The First Emperor and the Unification of China 260

Emergence of the Confucian Elite (Shenshi) 263 The Buddhist Challenge to Confucian Civilization 267 Neo-Confucianism 273

The Confucian Model for Kinship and Gender 276 Ancestor Worship 278 Wealth, Power, and Morality in the Large Lineage 280 The Family in the Twentieth Century 284 Women in Confucian China 288

■ REFERENCES CITED 294

8 Japan 297 The Yamato State 300

Chinese and Early Japanese Sources 301 Shinto, Folk and Imperial 304

The China Connection: Asuka, Nara, and Heian Periods 313

Buddhism Comes to Japan 314 The Failure of the Centralized State 318 Romance at Court 320

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Warrior Culture in Feudal Japan 325 The Shogunate 327 The Samurai Class 328 Zen Buddhism and Samurai Culture 335 The Practice of Zen 337 Zen Buddhism’s Institutions 339 Zen Culture: Zen and the Arts 340

■ REFERENCES CITED 342

9 Korea 343 Religion, Ritual, and Korean Culture 347

Myths of Origin 347 Korean Shamanism 348

Three Kingdoms Period (378 B.C.E.–935 C.E.) 353 Koryo Dynasty (918–1392) 357 Neo-Confucianism in Choson Dynasty (1392–1897) 359

Neo-Confucianism and Scholar-Officials 359 Writing the Korean Language 361 Turmoil in Late Choson: The Tonghak Movement 362

Korea as Japanese Colony 364 Challenges of Modern Korea 366 ■ REFERENCES CITED 368

PART V Southeast Asia 369

10 Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia 375 Four Stages of Southeast Asian History 377

The Prehistoric Period 2500–150 B.C.E. 379 Period of Indian Cultural Influence 100 C.E.–1300 C.E. 382 The Period of Chinese and Islamic Influence, 1300–1750 389

Theravada Buddhism and the Thai State 394 The Buddhist Ramayana 398

Buddhism and Popular Religion 400 The Soul and Other Spirit Entities 403 The Monkhood 404 Women in Theravada Buddhism 407

■ REFERENCES CITED 408

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11 Insular Southeast Asia 411 Borneo 413

Haddon in Borneo 413 Death in Borneo 418

Head-Hunting in the Philippines 422 Romanticized Bali 423

Trance and Dance in Bali 423 The Balinese Cockfight 429

■ REFERENCES CITED 430

PART VI European Empires in Asia 433

12 The Colonial Period 437 Trade in the Precolonial Period 441 European Empires in Asia 443

Portuguese Port Cities and Priests 443 English and Dutch Merchant Companies 446 Britain’s Indian Empire 447 China: Opium Wars and the Treaty Century 452 “Below the Winds”—Colonizing the Islands 458 Burma and Thailand 461 Vietnam 463 Cambodia 464

The Meiji Era 466 ■ REFERENCES CITED 468

Index 469

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PREFACE

It has been almost twenty years since the first edition of Asian Cultural Tra- ditions was published in 1999. In many ways, changes have been rapid and almost bewildering to the student of Asia, with economies and geopolitics shifting considerably. But the cultural traditions of the region have continued to shape the lives of billions of people who live in the region, even while those cul- tures are adapted and transformed for changing times. We aimed to capture both the changes and continuities of the histories and cultures of the region in this revised and updated edition.

College and university instructors have used this book as an introductory companion to courses on Asian cultures across several disciplines since its pub- lication. An impetus to begin work on a revised and updated edition of the book has come from the constructive comments of instructors who have used the book in their classes, and from written reviews from sixty students in Prof. Murray’s classes. We have considerably updated and revised the text to reflect new developments in scholarship as well as changes in the region and the world. We have also added chapters on Central Asia, Korea, and Southeast Asia, included new images and maps, and added a section of color plates.

This second edition is a collaboration between an anthropologist specializ- ing in India and a historian specializing in China, and this pairing has been lively and rewarding. We hope that the reader benefits from our enjoyment in working together, and that this volume carries on the interdisciplinary spirit of the first edition.

We are grateful to Waveland Press for the hard work of its production team, and especially Jeni Ogilvie, in tracking down artwork, snaring infelicities and errors in the manuscript, and making better writers of both of us. Tom Cur- tin, senior editor at Waveland, has supported this project since the launch of the first edition with encouragement and sage advice; he also has a remarkably good eye and we thank him for making the book beautiful, inside and out.

We are grateful to several readers of chapters, including Morris Rossabi and Cheehyung Harrison Kim. Sinwoo Lee clarified the puzzle of romaniza-

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tion of Korean, and we have followed his advice. Above all, we are grateful to the hundreds of students who have read the book over the years and shared with us their likes and dislikes; we have rewritten it with these opinions in mind and hope that future students will continue to let their opinions be known. We are listening.

Carolyn Brown Heinz California State University, Chico

Jeremy A. Murray California State University, San Bernardino

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Part I

Land and Language

1 ASIA AS CULTURED SPACE

2 TONGUES, TEXTS, AND SCRIPTS

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The Study of Asia If ever there was a time when Asia could be ignored, that time is not the

present. At the end of the twentieth century—a century plagued by war, domi- nated in its first half by the great European colonial empires in their heyday and in the second half by the “Cold War” between the US and the USSR—most of the old certainties had slipped away. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, economic and political weight is shifting eastward, to Asia.

An argument could be made that the last 400 years, the centuries of Euro- pean dominance, have been the aberrant ones. Prior to this period, the great civilizations of Eurasia—China, India, the Middle East, and Europe—main- tained a balance of power for many centuries. There were occasional interrup- tions in this balance by ambitious empires of conquest. The European one from 1700 to 1950 is only the most recent; before that, the Mongols in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries went thundering in every direction from their Central Asian homeland, conquering China, Iran, Afghanistan, and India, and threatening Europe. But these civilizations absorbed the blows, civilized the invaders, and carried on, enriched by the new cultural strands contributed by the foreigners.

Asia is in such a period of recuperation now, in which great and ancient civ- ilizations, after enduring humiliation and defeat at the hands of colonizing European powers, are absorbing the cultural contributions of the invaders and recasting their civilizations. Meanwhile, the old balance is being restored. Once again there are European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese cultural spheres.

By “Asia” we mean, in this book, only “monsoon Asia”—the geopolitical regions of South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia (see Map I.1). Our focus is not nationalist, but cultural. We do not take as given or eternal the nation- states that have emerged in the postcolonial world, enduring as those may prove to be. Hard at work as they are at proving ancient natural rights to pres- ent borders, none of the current outlines of Asian nation-states, with the single exception of Japan, have a time depth of even a century.

Our subject here is rather more amorphous; it is those old civilizations themselves. Not, of course, “Asian civilization,” for there is not and never has been such a thing. Like “the Orient” and “the East,” “Asia” has always been something of a fiction created by Europeans whose capacities to truly engage with a culture stopped at the eastern edges of the Greek world. Beyond lay “Asia,” the “East.” In fact, the word Asia appears to come from the Assyrian word for east, asu. In recent times the simple dichotomy between “the West” and “the East” has contrasted European civilization with all the rest of Eur- asia, lumped as “the East.” However, we tend to think, more subtly, of the

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West as a plural place, but the Japanese playwright, Masakazu Yamazaki (Yamazaki 1996), looking at the history of European civilization, marveled at its early cultural—if not political—unity. Founded on ideas and institutions originating in Greece and Rome, the dominant unifying force of Western civili- zation from Constantine through the eighth century was Christianity, a fusion of Judaic and Hellenic traditions that gave a common cultural overlay to an ethnically diverse array of peoples in the far west of Eurasia. Even as this unity began to erode at the end of the eighth century, English, Germans, French, Italians, and others continued to think of themselves as sharing in Western civ- ilization even though no single nation could claim to be the heartland of this pluralized civilization.

Nothing like this cultural unity ever existed in Asia. Despite the fact that nearly all rulers claimed to be monarchs of the whole world, no ruler ever con- quered it all—though of all peoples, the Mongols came closest to doing so (see chapter 3). Nor is there any one religion that provided a unifying creed for Asia as Christianity did for Europe. One might be tempted to speak of a “Buddhist civilization” in the same vein as one speaks of “Christian civilization” in the West, except for the fact that India, which gave birth to Buddhism, after a dozen centuries repudiated it, and even in China, to which it spread, it never triumphed against Confucianism.

Map I.1 Geopolitical regions of Asia.

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Guangzhou

Manila

New Delhi

Teheran Tokyo Beijing

Moscow

R U S S I A N F E D E R A T I O N

C H I N A

I N D I A

AUSTRALIA

TURKEY

PHILIPPINES

IRAN

MONGOLIA

EAST ASIA

I n d i a n

O c e a n

Arctic

EUROPE

U ra

l M tn

s

WEST ASIA

NORTH ASIA

SOUTH ASIA

INDONESIA

SOUTHEAST ASIA

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Far more, even than Europe, the regions of Asia we focus on in this book are places of extraordinary and perplexing diversity. The peoples of this vast region have no common political system, no common language, no common history, religion, culture, geography, climate, or economy. To study Asia is to study its diversity. In fact, accounting for that diversity is part of the subject matter of this book. We explore this diversity in several ways. First, we exam- ine it as it exists spatially. The cultures of Asia are distributed across a geograph- ically complex expanse whose features partially account for the extraordinary differences we find in human communities. The Himalayas present a barrier between South and East Asia, which ensured that they developed along differ- ent lines largely in isolation over 4,000 years. Though they knew about each other in vague ways, there was never an Indian conquest of China or a Chinese conquest of India or any war between them of any great significance (a brief border war occurred in 1962). Yet there were periodic interconnections of pro- found importance. The Chinese sent emissaries to India to bring back knowl- edge of Buddhism. The Japanese sent shiploads of courtiers and students to bring civilization from China. Small rulers in Southeast Asia similarly sought ideas of statecraft and kingship from India, and traders from India who settled in Southeast Asia brought along family priests who brought Sanskrit culture, sacred texts, and the art of writing to emerging kingdoms in the valleys and islands there.

The second way of exploring Asia’s diversity is in terms of cultural evolution. Early states emerged by 2300 B.C.E. in the Indus valley and by 1700 B.C.E. in China, but nonstate cultures have persisted throughout Asia and present prob- lems of integration into modern nations that have, in a way, “captured” peoples who would prefer to remain independent (see chapter 4). Before the period of nation-states defined by boundaries drawn on maps, there were extensive fron- tier regions between powerful states where small-scale (“tribal”) societies lived unmolested or with only cursory acknowledgment of some distant centralized power. The luxury of independence is now lost to these peoples.

A third form of diversity in Asia is linguistic (see chapter 2). When Wil- liam Jones went to India in 1784 and began studying Sanskrit, he made a dis- covery that would change the way the world thinks about language. The Sanskrit language, he wrote, bore resemblances to both Greek and Latin more far-reaching than possibly could have occurred by chance; they must have all sprung from some common source. His discovery of a great family of lan- guages that spread from England to North India enthralled Europe and was the late-eighteenth century’s version of moon rocks; he lectured on the “Indo- European language family” to audiences of over a thousand on his return to England. Tracing the complex family tree of this language family was one of the preoccupations and accomplishments of nineteenth-century linguistics. Only now are equivalent breakthroughs beginning to be made in another great language family, Sino-Tibetan.

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The search for sacred texts, which occupied Chinese, Japanese, and South- east Asian intellectuals for better than half a millennium—India was the source for most of them—involved difficulties of translating mutually unknown lan- guages and deciphering each other’s exotic texts. India had one script, China another. Those who came in search of civilizing texts—Japan to China, South- east Asia to India—had the problem of fitting scripts meant for one language to their own very different ones. Japan, with its polysyllabic language, could have had a better neighbor than China to borrow a script from; India’s would have suited much better. Southeast Asia’s Sino-Tibetan languages would have done well with China’s logographic script, meant for monosyllabic languages, but the texts they were borrowing were Indian. Thus it went.

India and China are the two foundational civilizations of Asia. These two civilizations were creating their characteristic profiles during the pivotal first millennium B.C.E. Over a thousand year period, both China and India were developing concepts of social order and institutions of civil society that have characterized them into the present. During this period, the Indian caste sys- tem was taking form. The Chinese centralized state had its earliest instance under the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, who became one model of the author- itarian emperor ruling under the Mandate of Heaven. In India, Emperor Ashoka embodied the ideal ruler, the dharmaraja (“righteous king”) responsible for moral order in the state. The Upanishadic philosophers, Buddha, and Con- fucius lived and taught during the middle centuries of the first millennium B.C.E., and their philosophies became as foundational for their civilizations as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were for Europe. All these thinkers lived within a few centuries of each other during a period sometimes called “the axial age” because it was a kind of axis or pivotal point in history. Both civilizations were decisively configured during this epoch in ways that civilizations in later centu- ries expanded, elaborated, and reformed.

Southeast Asia and Japan came under influence from India and China, respectively, in the following millennium (the first millennium C.E.), so that the earliest forms of the state and court culture in those hinterlands resembled the more advanced cultures from which they borrowed. The early states of South- east Asia borrowed, along with sacred texts and scripts from India, concepts of the sacred kingship, the devaraja or “god-king.” They accepted first Hinduism and, later, Buddhism. Japan borrowed everything it possibly could from China: books, script, urban planning, Confucianism, Buddhism, and the imperial sys- tem—but without the undesirable feature of the Mandate of Heaven that could be withdrawn by Heaven in the case of a successful rebellion. The imperial dynasty founded during the period of borrowing from China, but subsequently projected backward in time to the Sun Goddess, has survived into the present; Emperor Akihito is the 125th emperor of Japan. Of course, both Southeast Asia and Japan made these cultural borrowings their own in unique ways, but their affinities to India and China remain clearly visible even in the present.

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Culture Areas of Asia The terms we have been using—South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast

Asia—are fairly recent geopolitical terms that began during World War II and have come into increasing use in the postcolonial period as modern Asian nations have formed regional associations for trade and military security rea- sons (see map I.1). Such maps represent current political alignments, more than long-term cultural affinities, and lay on desks at the US State Department.

Anthropologists more typically use the concept of “culture area.” Behind the culture area concept is the assumption of a geographical region with some degree of environmental unity within which local societies have made similar cultural adaptations. For instance, humid lowland riverine regions of Southeast Asia have been cultivated by wet-rice methods that have supported a number of small states. By contrast, the cooler uplands support much smaller populations of slash and burn tribal cultivators.

Societies within a single culture area, it is assumed, will share similar polit- ical, economic, and religious institutions. Thus, in the Indian cultural sphere we find small, unstable kingdoms where the king models himself after Shiva or Vishnu, his capital is a replica of Heaven, and the Brahman supports the state with appropriate sacrifices and interpretation of sacred texts. Society is hierar- chically organized in a moral order based on elaborate codes of rank and honor. The state in the Indian cultural sphere often looked like sacred theatre, as Clifford Geertz describes in a famous study of one of the more byzantine Indic states, the Balinese:

It was a theatre-state in which the kings and princes were impresarios, the priests, the directors, the peasantry, the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. The stupendous cremations, teeth-filings, temple dedications, the pilgrimages and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds, even thousands of people and great quantities of wealth, were not means to political ends, they were ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Court ceremonialism was the driving force of state politics. Mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state; the state was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. To govern was not so much to choose as to perform. Ceremony was not form but substance. Power served pomp, not pomp power. (Geertz 1980:13)

In the Chinese cultural sphere, by contrast, we find a striving toward per- fect centralization and the realization of Confucian norms of the state-as-fam- ily. There is a secular quality to the state not seen in the Indian cultural sphere. The state is a problem in management, and bureaucratic machinery has been elaborated to facilitate its effective operation. Scholarship was similarly practi- cal, unlike in India, where books explored metaphysics, the nature of the soul, the doings of the gods, the conduct of rituals, but rarely applied itself to practi- cal matters of governing. You search in vain in India for a historical textual account of the day-to-day workings of a given king; in China, such state

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archives are absolutely overwhelming. The minute directives from one minister to a subordinate scholar-official in his local office are preserved in meticulous detail. The Chinese literally invented bureaucracy and created a system for recruitment into that bureaucracy that set generation after generation of young men studying for years to pass the examinations that would open the doors of government to them. Nothing like this ever emerged in India.

These cultural traditions led to the China and India of the present— together almost half the world’s people. Jay Taylor, writing in 1987 about the two “Big Sisters” of Asia, contrasted them thus: India has a chaotic but viable democracy, while China has a command politics of the elite. China has been obsessed with uniformity and the doctrinaire, while India has been tolerant of all heresies. Art and literature are more viable and alive in India than in China, even though literacy is high in China and low in India. The Chinese emerge from their ancient classics as sober and down-to-earth, the Indians as mystic and sensual; China is a political society, while India is a spiritual one. These are broad strokes for comparing two very complicated nations, but they cap- ture the “Dragon” (China) and the “Wild Goose” (India) with some clarity.

China and India, of course, are not the sum total of Asia’s cultural diver- sity. In the “lands below the winds,” the islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, live speakers of Austronesian languages, a vast language family distributed from Madagascar (off the coast of Africa) to Easter Island (off the coast of South America). This vast ethnolinguistic category contains folk at every level of social complexity, from hunter-gatherer bands of Semai in Malaysia to small-scale tribal societies like the Iban, Dayak, Tana Toraja, Ilon- got, and Ifugao, to state societies like those of Java and Bali.

Organization of the Book The diversity can be overwhelming, and no single book can bring order to

all of it. In this one we have tried simply to sketch the more significant and enduring profiles. We have divided the book into six parts, each with a brief introduction. After this brief introduction, part I looks at the natural environ- ment of monsoon Asia, a region of mountains, rivers, lowland valleys, islands, and volcanoes that limit and shape what is humanly possible. The next chapter takes on the complicated matter of languages, texts, and scripts, focusing on the major language families whose speakers are by no means able to speak to one another, but whose linguistic histories suggest common origins in the ancient past.

In part II we turn to peoples who have remained on the peripheries of the great states—for most of the time. These are the “invasion and aversion” cul- tures, which seemed to have an approach-avoidance relationship to the settled societies that were growing in power and with which they had complicated trade and political relations. In Central Asia, nomadic groups like the Turks and Mongols herded sheep, goats, and yaks, used camels and horses for trans-

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port, but needed to trade with settled agricultural peoples for grain and other goods. But as we see in chapter 3, the Turks and Mongols (and also Tibetans) were fierce warriors capable of thundering across grasslands and mountains to conquer the rich states on their peripheries. Other, smaller groups wanted only to keep out of the way, willing to adapt to rugged environments in order to maintain their independence from grasping states short on labor (chapter 4). None of these groups escaped the drawing of borders, but numerous ones are in politically vulnerable positions straddling borders and practicing subtle forms of resistance sometimes referred to as “the weapons of the weak” (Scott 1987).

Part III is devoted to South Asia, part IV to East Asia, and part V to South- east Asia. The introductions to each section are brief explanations of the approaches taken, different in each case. Finally, part VI summarizes the mod- ern era of colonialism and postcolonialism.

REFERENCES CITED Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton:

Princeton University Press. Scott, James. 1987. Weapons of the Weak, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Taylor, Jay. 1987. The Dragon and the Wild Goose; China and India. Westport, CT: Green-

wood Press. Yamazaki, Masakazu. 1996. Asia, a Civilization in the Making. Foreign Affairs (July/

August): 106–118.

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1 ASIA AS

CULTURED SPACE

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n the fourteenth century, a Japanese scholar named Chikafusa summa- rized the knowledge of Asian landforms that had come to Japan from ancient times: four great continents float in four great oceans. There is a

tree called Jambu, 1,200 miles high, and it stands on the shore of a lake at the top of Mt. Anavatapta in the center of a continent named Jambu, after the tree. Just south of Mt. Anavatapta are the Himalayas, and south of them lies India, in the true heart of Jambu. To the northwest of India is Persia (now Iran), and to the northeast is China. Because this was not an age when the Japanese deferred to China, Chikafusa added with a sniff: “China is thought to be a large country, but compared to India it is a remote and small land on the periphery of Jambu” (Varley 1980:54-55). Japan, on the other hand, was the “central land” in the ocean between Jambu and the eastern continent, a land apart ruled by a line of sovereigns descended from gods.

Asia’s landscape has everywhere been overlaid with cultural meanings, both sacred and political. The Ganges River, sacred from source to mouth, comes tumbling out of Heaven and is caught in Shiva’s matted locks to release the waters slowly from his Himalayan abode on Mt. Kailash, thus preventing destruction of the earth by floods. Asian rulers sought to build their capitals at the central axis where Heaven and earth connect, a fitting and authoritative location for a king. Throughout Southeast Asia, the Himalayan “pillar of the universe,” Mount Meru (known to Chikafusa as Mount Anavatapta and to Hindus and Tibetan Buddhists as Mount Kailash), was reconstructed in capital after capital to assert the divinity of the god-king who resided there.

As the above examples show, India plays a central role in most Asian mythogeographies. What is surprising is that India plays a central role in mod- ern geophysics as well.

“The Great Collision” and Asian Landforms In China, when the earth shook, it was taken as an ominous sign of

Heaven’s displeasure with earthly regimes; and when a regime toppled, a heav- enly sign was later interpreted as a forewarning. In 1556 an earthquake near Xi’an (Xian) (then the capital Chang’an [Changan]) killed 830,000 people; 70 years later, when another earthquake shook the new capital, Beijing (Peking), the court astrologer said ominously: “The reason why the earth growls is that throughout the empire troops arise to attack one another, and palace women and eunuchs have brought about great disorder” (Lach 1965). The omen was fulfilled 15 years later when China was conquered by the Manchus.

I

Chapter opener photo: Padi cultivation.

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14 Part I: Land and Language

Mongolia

India

China

Hu ang

he

Yangzi

A m

u D arya

Brahma put

ra

Syr Darya

Ganges

Ind us

Irraw addy

Tarim

Aral Sea

M ekong

M ekong

M ekong

Salw een

Salw een

Salw een

Gobi Desert

Red

Legend

Brahmaputra

Rivers Borders

Pakistan

Deserts Mountains

Taklamakan Desert

TIBETAN PLATEAU

H I

M A L A Y A S

Hindu Kush

Xi

Chao Phraya Chao Phraya Chao Phraya

Bay of

Bengal

Arabian Sea

South China Sea

KARAKORAM RANGE K U N L U N S H A N

A L T U

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Map 1.1 Physical map of Asia.

Box 1.1 The Highest Mountains in the World

The highest mountains in the world are in the ranges created by the collision of India and Eurasia: the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, Pamir, Kunlun Shan, and Tien Shan.

Country Elevation in feet

Everest China-Nepal 29,029 K2 China-Pakistan 28,251 Kanchenjunga India-Nepal 28,207 Dhaulagiri Nepal 26,811 Annapurna Nepal 26,503 Muztag China 25,338 Tirich Mir Pakistan 25,230 Pik Kommuniza Tajikistan 24,590 Pobeda Peak China-Kyrgystan 24,406

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Modern science interprets those disasters differently. All the great earth- quakes of India, China, Mongolia, and Tibet are caused by one colossal event: the slow-motion “collision” of India with the Eurasian continent that has been going on for 10 million years without interruption (Molnar and Tapponnier 1977). Riding on its own tectonic plate, India broke off East Africa and drifted north-eastward, traveling 5,000 kilometers before beginning its collision with Eurasia. Isolated in the Indian Ocean during the emergence of mammals in the Eocene, it was only after the beginning of the collision 10 million years ago that mammals from Mongolia swarmed down into the subcontinent.

The collision radically altered Asia’s landforms, compressing and distort- ing the earth’s crust from the Himalayas to Siberia, and from Afghanistan to the China coast. Where Tibet and North India are now, there was once a low coast and a submerged continental shelf. Colliding with such force that India slid under the Eurasian crust and lifted up the Tibetan Plateau, the continent continued to shove northward another 1,200 miles, and continues its north- ward push at the rate of two inches a year, or nearly six feet per century. This slide is not a smooth one; India regularly gets stuck, but when the obstruction gives way, there’s a lurch of several feet causing earthquakes and rockslides.

It is unclear exactly where the “suture” of the two continents lies, but sev- eral features of the geology of the Tibetan Plateau are becoming clearer. Five major fault lines similar to the San Andreas Fault of California rim the plateau in an east-west direction, clearly visible in satellite photographs and traceable across more than 1,500 miles. The southern block is moving eastward and the northern block is moving westward. This continuing slow-motion collision makes the Himalayas among the most unstable regions of the planet. Frequent earthquakes and landslides cause death and destruction; an earthquake in Nepal in 2015 leveled thousands of buildings and killed over 8,500 people. An even worse earthquake in 2008 in Sichuan Province of China killed more than 70,000 people (see map 1.2 and box 1.2).

Portions of the former ocean floor were lifted high and dry in central Tibet, a high plateau drained by no rivers and containing only brackish lakes that are the remnant of the ancient Tethys Sea. The mountains south of the Tibetan Pla- teau—the Himalayas—are the old northern portion of India, stacked up slice upon slice, the highest mountains in the world. The Tibetan Plateau was squeezed like an accordion and stretched eastward, creating deep east-west gashes that became rivers draining the Himalayas across China and down into Southeast Asia. The plateau isolates India from Siberia’s cold, winter winds and isolates central Asia from the moderating influences of the southern oceans.

North of the Tibetan Plateau, stretching from the Karakorum Pass into India to the famous Gansu (Kansu) corridor into China proper, lies a region of arid grasslands, dry hills, and sheerest desert. The Gobi Desert is the best known section of this harsh land, too dry for wheat cultivation, where sheep herding is the best option for survival. The Gobi is a graben, a sunken region where crustal blocks are being stretched and pulled apart by the pressures of

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